These bigoted, ignorant scum will never listen to anything. They are politically illiterate infants with an allergic reaction to reading.
They have ruined a safe space cultivated and cared for, they have turned this place into a new reddit.
I had a dude in my private messages going on about how I was both mutilating myself and other children. Many more people on hexbear have had similar experiences, with these worthless ignorant scum popping in to deliver the political equivalent of a giant shit.
As your friends, comrades, and people you say you defend get slurred at, dehumanized, and harassed please ask yourself:
Is it worth it?
I have the answer, I know you know it as well:
No its not
I used to think otherwise
I was a fool
its not worth a few laughs
even if you dunk all you want, that doesn't take away the knife those people put in our backs.
These bigots, fascists, and NATO liberals are as worthless offline as they are here, why should we give them any attention. They are worth less than the dirt beneath our fingernails. Why should we poison ourselves with their influence? We don't make any room for them offline, why should we not online?
And really
How many essays have your written?
How many sources have you combed through?
How many times have you explained the most basic facts of reality?
How many attempts at good faith?
Only for them to dismiss it in their stupidity. They don't read it, they just crumble and divert back to the programming these little shits trust in more than God.
For every time there is a good faith user, there are a dozen scumbag fascists. And most of the time, the "good faith one" just reverts back to their old shit.
Do you really think losing any member of the hexbear or lemmygrad community, longtime members or not, is worth a few good dunks?
I don't believe a small chance of gaining a new user is worth alienating an entire section of the community. The vast majority of those idiots are lost causes. If they are interested, the can just make an account and ask in good faith.
Is posting a meme to "own the liberals" worth your comrades getting more trauma from bigots harassing them?
No its not.
you've had your laugh, but it should end
Ban them all, SJW, lemm.ee, lemmy, the programmer nazi edglords. Keep Lemmygrad.
Defederate from those communities. We shouldn't sacrifice our own for more clicks. For having to subject ourselves to the opinions of people thoroughly brainwashed? We aren't reddit. We came here to get away from that. I'm sick of this. We are sick of this.
End it now
Reopening the pipeline is great, and there are many new comrades who've found their way home to Hexbear thanks to federation. We're also probably making the rest of lemmy better by relentlessly mocking libs and chuds to the point they decide to keep their reprehensible takes to themselves. That doesn't work on all of them, but I do imagine it works more often than we'd think.
But all of this is not worth our trans and other marginalized comrades losing a space that was once almost entirely free of this bullshit. Plausibly the only such space on English speaking internet.
However, I do wonder if there are any other effective measures we can take to protect our trans comrades other than outright defederation. It would be a shame to lose the pipeline if it were possible to do something else about this. Perhaps taking away features from users on non Hexbear/Lemmygrad instances? Maybe it's feasible to remove their ability to DM Hexbear users.
Admins could also work on expanding the mod team to loosen the workload and reduce how much of this disgusting crap any one mod sees, thereby reducing mod burnout and also cleaning out the reactionary filth faster. I'm sure there are many known trustworthy Hexbear users who would be happy to join the mod team to accomplish this. Not only that, maybe we could give all users who have been active on this site for years mod-lite powers to temporarily hide potentially reactionary posts and comments made by users of other instances until an actual moderator can review it.
SJW is probably a lost cause and should be defederated anyway, but I've seen a lot of nice lemm.ee users who I would be sad to see go rather than attempting the above measures.
Pipeline to leftism via hexbear seems like we'll gain more reactionaries wrecking and inciting arguments than honest-good-faith liberals seeking answers to the cognitive dissonance of living in the
with declining living standards, witnessing imperial violence third-hand, and seeing domestic suppression first and second hand.
I think effective measures is to de-emphasize the philosophy of treating reactionaries like wild zoo animals and let them marinate and produce hundreds of comments of bad faith arguments and questioning, and more like hostile wreckers meant to annoy and humiliate us as they seek to do through their extant, demonstrative actions.
It seems that way, but I'm not sure how accurate that assessment is. By nature, the reactionaries coming in from other instances are going to be the most disruptive and easily visible downside to federation. But as the days go by, I'm seeing less and less full on chuds and proportionately more garden variety liberals as the chuds quickly get themselves banned. It sucks that anyone has to see their posts and comments in the meantime, but expanding the moderation team if feasible should be able to minimize that. Given some more time, I'm sure we'd settle into a happy equilibrium once the worst of the worst have all been banned.
The good faith libs who are persuaded to join Hexbear mostly do so silently. Eventually they assimilate into the site culture and we forget that they were even pipelined in the first place. That sounds about right given our active user count has been continuously increasing since federation.
Concerning the reactionaries, treating them like zoo animals has actually always been in my mind the most effective way to deal with them in the meantime before they catch their inevitable ban. It doesn't really matter what the reactionaries themselves actually think because we're not trying to convince them of anything. Mocking and dog piling them is more for the sake of persuading the many lurkers who end up reading any given thread. One of the best ways to put down a fascist is by playing Minecraft with them. The next best way is to humiliate them back, mock them, and make them look like complete and pathetic losers to any bystanders listening.
I agree that this kind of approach can definitely go wrong. It sucks when the dog pile fails to form, or when the reactionary drops their friendly liberal facade and starts with the slurs, but again, bringing this down to acceptable levels shouldn't be too hard with more moderators and stricter moderation. And I'm sure there are other ways to salvage federation while also keeping our comrades safe. It'd be great if the lemmy devs could give individual users the ability to block any instance or community from their personal feed. Also the ability to mass block all the users of any instance, disabling their ability to ping or DM the Hexbear user doing the blocking, for example. Features like these would give us all the ability to form a microcosm of federation as a whole, with individual users being able to decide exactly what is on their personal allow list. This way users who dislike federation can simply set their feed to local and never have to deal with non-Hexbear users ever again.
At the very least, I'd like to see attempts at something along those lines before we get too hasty and shut off federation. I don't think Hexbear necessarily needs to be isolated for it to be a safe space, I'm also putting consideration into the fact that Hexbear serves to make the rest of the federated instances better by backing up lemmygrad and introducing libs to actual leftist perspectives that they would have never been able to see when they were on reddit.