The mods of all the major communities there remove comments criticism Hexbear and usually follow it up with a ban. It's absolutely clear what is happening and it shouldn't be allowed to continue.

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[–] 129 points 2 years ago (28 children)

Welcome to federation, where basically every instance is a proxy to all others.

Btw you are also free to block any instance yourself.

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  • [–] 47 points 2 years ago (9 children)

    Btw you are also free to block any instance yourself.

    Not how the instance blocking feature works. it's a common misconception because people don't read the docs and just assume it does what they think it does. From the News Section on Join-Lemmy:

    Users can now block instances. Similar to community blocks, it means that any posts from communities which are hosted on that instance are hidden. However the block doesn’t affect users from the blocked instance, their posts and comments can still be seen normally in other communities.

    It's not an alternative or replacement to defederation, not even close. I'm really surprised this misconception still persists even after widespread adoption of 0.19.x across the Lemmy network.

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  • [–] 96 points 2 years ago (47 children)

    If they weren't such weasels and actually agrued back rather than just ban people like the spineless dimwit twats they are, I'd say the argument that they are easily filtered holds. But given they are just looking to propagate their shilling for Russia, trump (and they definitely do this) etc... fuck em!

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  • [–] 78 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    Even outside of their space, when they "argue" it had generally been posting giant, random images that had little to no context followed by walls of emojis. Which is why my blocklist is mostly Hexbear users.

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    [–] 60 points 2 years ago (73 children)

    I'm all for defederating Hexbear, but lemmy.ml is absolutely huge compared to Hexbear. To motivate the community to do that you'd need quite a bit of proof. Or at least something rather compelling. Do you have any proof of what you're referring to?

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  • [–] 99 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (39 children)

    Asking for proof of what is an open secret on lemmy seems disingenuous.

    I think that instances like hexbear, lemmygrad, and lemmy.ml are very bad advocates for Lemmy and will most likely end up damaging it more than anything else, keeping the "normies" out.

    They argue in Bad faith, say the most radical stuff they can think of, and purge anything bad said about totalitarian regimes they idolize. China, Russia, Iran, all considered victims of the evil west..

    • Uyghur camps > not happening
    • Tiannamen square > Just some peaceful protests
    • invasion of Ukraine > NATO forced Russia to do it
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  • [–] 41 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (3 children)

    Hexbear loves to dogpile as well. I've seen a couple of raiding threads linking to other threads in Lemmy.ml making fun of whoever. But in reality they're just directing people over there to shit on someone. At least, that's what I saw last year, so I'm very distrusting of them.

    That and the Lemmy.ml AMA thread where one admin was all buddy buddy with Hexabear users during their federation.

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  • [–] [S] 37 points 2 years ago (32 children)

    I blacked out irrelevant information.

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  • [–] 40 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (5 children)

    ml and Hexbear definitely don't have the same users. Their comments look very different. Hexbear is far more extreme in every way.

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  • [–] 37 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    Hexbear is mostly just trolls in my experience. They like to brigade any discussion involving Russia, China, Ukraine, etc.

    Lemmy.ml is full of tankies that will also go out of their way to defend Russia and China but they aren't just blatant trolls which is the difference.

    Having controversial opinions isn't the problem, trolling and brigading are

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    [–] 39 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (29 children)

    At some time we have to deal with this.

    Keep in mind that we like Lemmy for being a federated platform.

    I don't think there is enough awareness at this point. And the way we do it here, it has to come from the community. The people and mods have to become aware and make a decision to move their participation and the communities to another instance. I don't see a way around that. This will take some time, patience and effort.

    I've started to do my part and unsubscribed from !Fediverse@lemmy.ml I'm now going through my list of subscriptions and find alternatives to other communities, so I don't contribute to the lemmy.ml communities being the larges ones any more.

    [Edit: Wow. I've replaced 32 communities, some with substantially better alternatives, and I've found a few nice additional ones in the process. I still need recommendations for alternatives to: "Peertube", "Libre Culture", "Crawling the IndieWeb", "datahoarder", "Linux Phones", "postmarketOS", "osu!". I'm glad I did this. I think this is the way to make a change as a simple user. And now I'm not part of the problem anymore. It took me the better part of an hour, though.]

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    [–] 34 points 2 years ago (32 children)

    Moreover, it seems pretty clear to me that .ml intends to keep their finger on the scale as much as possible. Just saying "oh federation solves all the problems just block them" doesn't really fix the issue when there are a bunch of ways they can potentially run malicious versions of the code base to mess with how federation functions and hold onto their influence. For example, they are already refusing to federate their mod logs in some cases, and they've shown themselves to be completely shameless and hypocritical when it comes to banning any and all dissent. They simply cannot be trusted.

    I personally believe that the broader fediverse should seriously consider taking serious steps to cut out .ml before they do something drastic to fuck it all up

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    [–] 32 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Well, the discussion in this thread has convinced me to agree. It's also readily apparent that ml thinks any criticism against them is because they're leftist. They can't fathom that anyone could think they're an asshole or authoritarian apologist.

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    [–] 26 points 2 years ago (28 children)

    Seems like they werent such big fans of your post. It has been removed from their instance and your account was banned. Very interesting 🤔

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