this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2025
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My first time experience here had been very politically charged and I asked about it in askLemmy and I was told to immediately block you people in the options I was given

I had the opportunity to browse around and found out that you folk were decent and weren't as awful as told in that post I made

How do you view .world and by extension other instances that defederate (and view negatively) towards you?

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[–] [email protected] 51 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Lemmy World defederated from Hexbear for political reasons. They didn't like explicitly socialist content. They are incapable of accepting its existence. They did this in tandem with banning leftists that were vocal and active on their platform at the time.

This is extremely obvious because at the time this occurred the reasong they claimed for the defederation was because that Hexbear does hate speech. This is blatantly bullshit to anyone that spends even the slightest amount of time here, Hexbear is probably the LEAST tolerant of reactionary behaviour and views of every lemmy that exists.

That however does not agree with the turbo neoliberals who run lemmyworld, who can not tolerate any views to the left of their own.

How do you view .world

Dot world has trended rightwards ever since the defederation of Hexbear and banning of leftists on it. They will continue to trend rightwards. If you remove left wing voices from your space the result is a right wing space that increasingly alienates everyone as it becomes more and more reactionary, with more and more people leaving because they can not tolerate how obnoxious the right is, and leadership increasingly will pander to the right when left with the choice of doing so or dying as a site as those are the only users they will still have.


I personally wanted to remain federated with lemmyworld in order to continue to engage liberals, educate them, and pull those that I could leftwards. The truth is that lemmyworld defederated because they knew I and others would have been successful in doing that. The majority of Hexbear would probably oppose federation now.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Well put and it's a pleasure to have you back comrade.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 2 days ago

I'm gonna be honest, I don't browse any of the Lemmy instances defedded from Hexbear, so the only time I hear (and think) about them is when there's some drama sufficiently inane that it's spread over here (.world's recent policy changes, cis Lemmy users throwing a fit over neopronouns on the other trans instance .blahaj.zone).

This has probably given me a bit of a skewed view of, like, the more bigoted and intellectually incurious side to the instances. There are no doubt very nice people over there, but no one ever gossips about how nice another person is, so all I hear about is the creeps.

That said, I do think they have a really strange view of Hexbear over there that's partly the result of the all the arguments that broke out when Hexbear first moved over to the mainline Lemmy fork and began federating, but also partly because how Hexbear's been hyped up as some sort of evil, communist gestalt over there.

Take this comment from one of the threads in your recent post for example:

Hexbear was never federated with .world, from what I've seen browsing through the commenters account they've never made an account on any instance other than .world. This isn't the first time I've seen someone say something like this, whenever this inter-instance drama comes up again, you get comments like this from instances that never federated. It's like people have fixated on an idealised version of us to the point at which they have some sort of collective false memories of a much more aggressive Hexbear than the one that really exists.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 day ago

.world is like the "reddit default subs" of lemmy. The #1 suggestion for new reddit users had always been to unsubscribe from the defaults in order to improve their experience, so being defederated from world isn't much of a loss.

A part of me kind of wishes we were still federated with some of the radlib instances so we could have more active reading groups and movie nights.

[–] [email protected] 59 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I feel like the rest of the fediverse thinks about us a lot more than we think about them. We were here for years before most of the big Reddit-clone instances started up, and had already developed a significant site culture and norms. Many of us were ambivalent about federation in the first place, and .world and others defederating from us as a "preemptive last resort" was pretty much just funny. The hysterical propaganda about how insane and abusive we are is also funny; this is one of the friendliest and most supportive places on the internet as long as you're not a fascist. We're happy over here doing our thing away from all the Redditors.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I think a lot of the reddit clones really can't conceive that anyone was here before they were and therefore thinks it must be bots or people using multiple accounts or Putin's personal bodyguards

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago

This is why all the accusations of us "brigading" or whatever here are amusing. We were here first, nerds.

[–] [email protected] 82 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (10 children)

The biggest divide between Hexbear and the instances hostile towards Hexbear (not all instances are hostile to Hexbear, despite what many try to claim) is analysis of Imperialism. Hexbear largely agrees with Lenin when he analyzed how Capitalism eventually evolves into a form of international exploitation in the book Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. Not everyone here is a Marxist, many are Anarchists, Syndicalists, or other forms of Leftist, but this central critique of Imperialism forms the basis of Hexbear's overall foreign policy. There are other divides, of course, such as Hexbear's (correct) unapologetic support for trans rights, veganism, opposition of the settler-colonial genocide in Palestine, and more, but the Imperialist critique is the biggest divide.

How do I view Lemmy.world? Fairly negatively. The Admins have admitted open hostility towards Marxism, and censor comments and posts that point to the Democrats being complicit in the genocide of Palestine. In addition, many users have been guilty of bigotry, and open transphobia I report seems to stay up as long as it's directed towards Leftists.

Overall, if you're chill, you'll be fine here. Really, despite the fearmongering on other instances, my time on Hexbear is the most enjoyable. The News thread is informative, the general thread is fun to chill out in, the gaming comm is great for talking about Fallout: New Vegas (my hyperfixation, lol), and more. The people here are the friendliest on the Fediverse if you're a Leftist, and the scariest if you're a bigot.

Hope that about does it!

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[–] [email protected] 50 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

I’ve had mostly bad experiences with world users. Lots of blue MAGA liberal types, who think any criticism of democrats is a vote for trump (and now look what’s going on with the Gaza ceasefire…). I got banned over sharing the fact that democrat senator joe Lieberman single handedly tanked the public option of obamacare. And they really don’t like it when you support Luigi.

Honestly they’re “centrists” but leave racist and anti semitic (not anti Zionist, straight up anti semitic) content up while removing leftist content.

I’m over at the anarchist instance dbzer0 after my original account hosted on world got banned.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 2 days ago

.world is just Reddit except with fewer users, that includes all the transphobia and racism that's allowed to run rampant, especially now that their admins have that bullshit ”you have to allow some dissenting opinions in your comms” rule. A vegan community, for example, should be allowed to get rid of carnists posting ”protein tho, B12 tho, lions tho, what if you were on a desert island tho?” garbage.

[–] [email protected] 39 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

I don't think about them at all

[–] [email protected] 77 points 2 days ago (4 children)

I'm shocked at how often people there claim that all our Communism and Trans posting is some sort of front and that we are actually secret right-wingers.

[–] [email protected] 70 points 2 days ago (3 children)

I have never been able to get a straight answer when I ask why a group of supposed right wingers would make a largely isolated instance to talk about theory, shitpost, support trans rights, foster a welcoming community, and create mutual aid comms to raise money for community members and Palestinians, but all ironically of course.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 2 days ago (2 children)

We literally did the Long March on a hopelessly incompatible fork of Lemmy years before the Reddit Exodus took place

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[–] [email protected] 39 points 2 days ago (4 children)

As we all know, right-wingers are notorious for hating capitalism

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 2 days ago

Asking for evidence of Uyghur human right abuses from 2021 onwards will get you banned from most communities for "genocide denial", saying that "Israel has a right to defend itself" is frowned upon and downvoted but accepted discourse. According to them, Putin is "le evil RuZZian war criminal" [fair enough, he's oppressing women and minorities within Russia], whereas Biden is just a poor old guy who tried his best to stop a genocide in Palestine but the US position in the middle east is nuanced.

Basically they only move within the allowable western (mostly USian) Overton Window, and thus their flavour of "leftism" (most are self-declared leftists or liberals) leads them to parroting most US state department propaganda, especially when it comes to non-western countries because of racism

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 day ago

Every once in a while, I would use a lemmy.ml alt to browse /c/linux, and lemmy.world is truly the dreg of the fediverse. Completely worthless that offer nothing of value. And this isn't even getting to their reactionary politics.

[–] [email protected] 64 points 2 days ago (2 children)

I don't think much about them at all unless they're brought up. I do find the fact that they need to lie about us in order to make us look bad very telling though.

[–] [email protected] 48 points 2 days ago (2 children)

it's not just lie; they tag every prolific leftist poster has tankies and share lists among themselves to help poison the well.

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[–] [email protected] 42 points 2 days ago

Thank you, I agree, it's difficult to view a truthful look into hexbear unless you are a part of an instance that is not defederating them or intentionally go onto the hexbear instance to check for yourself!

I'm honestly shocked with how much they would rather say just because of ideological differences .~.

[–] [email protected] 53 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I just want to thank you for being open minded enough to give us a chance after how they talked shit about us

[–] [email protected] 40 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Yeah and honestly the first comment OP left here got a lot of somewhat hostile responses that weren't warranted. I commend their open-mindedness.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 2 days ago (1 children)

they suck and they're cowards

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 2 days ago

The way they talk you'd think Internet comments cause them physical suffering. They act like disagreement and emoji spam is tantamount to slapping someone in the face. They're so genuinely bizarre about norms and manners.

I don't really get it. Really thin skinned and weasely.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Sometimes someone here posts a link to people on lemmy.world freaking out about the existence of hexbear and I go over there to laugh for a bit.

Then I stop thinking about them, come back here, and read dumb jokes about stinky beans.

[–] [email protected] 40 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

The other big instances that were only created as a response to the reddit "exodus" are kind of a joke to us, as we existed for 3 years in our own community before they were even conceived - yet somehow we are consistently derided as the "invaders", "brigaders" or generally othered explicitly due to the range of political opinions expressed here and a site culture of having no respect for civility, decorum or norms when discussing political matters.

.worlders will continuously deny that reasons for their group hatred of hexbear are political, but as a number of posters have pointed out and supplied the link to, .world defederated with hexbear as a "pre-emptive last resort". Therefore, no .worlder has ever been able to see our posts or comments whatsoever, unless they were also registered to another instance. Their announcement post outlining the "pre-emptive last resort" also explicitly outlines the reasoning as political.

On the civility aspect, realistically at the core of it this is also political - I think many here agree that the bounds of "civil discussion" are specifically drawn to entrench the status quo, and also note that an easy tactic to silence dissent is to attack the manner in which words are said when you cannot logically attack or disagree with the substance of the argument (I swear i'm not trying to act like a debate pervert, but I do sound like a dweeb here). This inherently grows from a contradiction though: Why is it civil to be able to debate the validity and existence of marginalised peoples, or justify genocide, or argue for the upkeep of the current hegemony? And why is it not civil to tell those who justify genocide, argue that the current hegemony is inherently superior, or believe that people's existence should be erased to eat shit? This is where many other instances (mostly those established in 2023 and not 2020) refuse to apply thought, leading to a dedicated handful posting everywhere possible that hexbear is "aggressive" or "abusive".

All in all, we have our little corner of the internet and we like it. We dabbled in federation, given Dessalines' vision for lemmy as a platform, and had our ups and downs. But overall, given the process of the "pre-emptive last resort" and the related threads at the time, we probably don't think about lemmy.world often, other than when we bring it up as a joke to laugh at. It's a place where redditors ran to continue to be redditors on lemmy software instead of reddit and feel good about themselves for it. It is administered and moderated like the former "default" subreddits are, with all of the white cishet american male hang-ups that this entails. Many therefore think it is a deeply unserious place, and subsequently pay it the amount of mind it deserves.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 2 days ago (1 children)

On the civility aspect, realistically at the core of it this is also political - I think many here agree that the bounds of "civil discussion" are specifically drawn to entrench the status quo, and also note that an easy tactic to silence dissent is to attack the manner in which words are said when you cannot logically attack or disagree with the substance of the argument (I swear i'm not trying to act like a debate pervert, but I do sound like a dweeb here). This inherently grows from a contradiction though: Whyis it civil to be able to debate the validity and existence of marginalised peoples, or justifygenocide, or argue for the upkeep of the current hegemony? And why is it not civil to tell those who justify genocide, argue that the current hegemony is inherently superior, or believe that people's existence should be erased to eat shit? This is where many other instances (mostly those established in 2023 and not 2020) refuse to apply thought, leading to a dedicated handful posting everywhere possible that hexbear is "aggressive" or "abusive".

I love hexbear for this comment alone.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 2 days ago (1 children)

holy shit, somebody likes my low-tier rambling heart-sickle

(there are like hundreds of more knowledgeable posters than me here, so i'm glad that i was able to be insightful)

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 2 days ago (1 children)

to tack on another thought that was bouncing around while i was talking about "civility"

we may not be outwardly civil (in a way that western liberals define it), but we are respectful to our comrades and to those with a willingness to learn or improve. there is a difference, and as many younger generations and elder leftists likely believe, respect is earned and not freely given.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 2 days ago (2 children)

The main reason people thinks it's not a civil place is because of the ones who come in, shit in the house then complain people get mad at them.

Like no shit people aren't going to be civil when the start is hostile. Then they go and use it as justification for why hexbear.net must be contained.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 day ago (1 children)

A lot of it is this.

I also think that it's because a lot of the time these internet liberals looking for 'civilised debate' only understand it in the most penned-in, theory and evidence free, reddit way imaginable. They're deeply uncomfortable (and sometimes actually incapable) of engaging with arguement from outside that narrow frame.

I occassionally meet them on their internet debate style (mostly because other non-Hexbear users do sometimes read these threads when the OP goes back and complains on other instances) like in this recent thread example. And when you do and neutralise their main out by being actively civil at least one of three things usually happens, often in order:

  • They take the presenting of an actually contrary view or arguement (often backed up with evidence) to their own as aggression because emotionally it makes them feel undermined when they're not able to reply with the same degree of confidence or demonstratable examples.
  • They double-down on their own incivility and attacks in order to try and lure you back onto ground they feel more confident on; insult slinging and complaining about that
  • They stop responding.

The fact is that most of the people who barge into our little commie/anarchist bar here demanding "debate" only recognise it as the second-hand snide one-upmanship of American liberals talking about marginly different shades of US party politics downstream of pretty facile liberal US politics media like PodSaveAmerica/Majority Report/CenterCast etc (I made that last one up). Being confronted with actual robust critique from an actually alternative perspective, no matter how civil and Reddit-rules-like it is, is clearly profoundly uncomfortable for them, and they react badly before going back to the likes of Lemmy.World to complain, call us all crazy (or even more ablist assertions) or paid trolls, and feel like they're on familiar ground again.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

god damn, thank you so much for actually explaining what I was trying to identify. elite analysis

[–] [email protected] 28 points 2 days ago (1 children)

tfw they complain that we both organise downvote brigades (when we can't downvote) and simultaneously dogpile comments (because we post our opinions because we can't downvote)

[–] [email protected] 27 points 2 days ago (1 children)

how dare they flood me with comments as I try to debate bro in bad faith!

90% of their complaints. Same for those complaining about ml in the db0 power tripping bastards comm

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[–] [email protected] 51 points 2 days ago

They convinced themselves we are all tankies and now are hiding from us. In reality, we just got the better more consistent arguments and they don't have any recourse against them except to ignore us, make up a strawman of us and lie to themselves.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 2 days ago (5 children)

As others have said, they defederated from us pre-emptively on false pretenses, and so it doesn’t make much sense for me to browse there casually as I can’t interact with users there.

Because of that, the only time I see what’s going on there is when people post the bad stuff they say on /c/Slop, which definitely makes the userbase look a lot worse than it probably is. As in, I think that most users there are most likely fine but there is a ton of really nasty ones that I can only describe as evil.

Unfortunately, I also think that the admins are among the nasty ones as I’ve seen a lot of bigoted comments not being deleted or the ones who wrote them being banned, and of course the things they said during the defed were also very disappointing. catgirl-disgust

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

lemmy.world is often filled with fascists, transphobes, and rejects from all the various left wing groups on the fediverse. world recently had a whole debate about allowing flat earth content on their site, which is very funny considering their website logo is a globe. most of the people complaining about hexbear in that thread were people with downright fascistic takes like supporting the genocide of palestine or complaining about pronouns.

we have our own little queer divebar vibe so if you hint at being xenophobic or homophobic you will be shown the door pretty quickly (in fact, our trans space has the highest degree of moderation of any front facing trans space on the internet with 40 moderators, we frequently ban transphobes within a couple of minutes). also fun fact: 2/3rds of users here are queer or questioning, and about half are trans or questioning.

are we superior? strictly, lol smuglord

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

There are certain toxic behaviors that aren't unique to them but are very common on the internet, so much so that it's easy to take them for granted. The behaviors I'm talking about, which often go hand in hand, are 1. Crybullying, and 2. Making shit up. What makes Hexbear good is that we do not tolerate either of those. What makes .world awful is that those behaviors are extremely common and widespread.

It's very common for a user on .world to get banned from some community for doing something shitty and then lie about why they got banned and go make a post whining about it, and the culture there lets them get away with it, nobody asks them for the receipts or goes looking for them and they instead give them sympathy and the benefit of the doubt, which bad actors take advantage of to spread drama. I have an .ml alt where my profile reads, "If someone claims something happened on the fediverse without providing a link, they are lying," and I have lost count of the number of times I have posted those words and been 100% correct.

That shit does not fly here. That's not to say we don't have drama sometimes, but if you try to pull that shit, we won't just dismiss it until you can show us the evidence of what really happened, we will dig up the evidence ourselves and if it turns out you're full of shit and just trying to stir the pot, we will mock and bully you for our own amusement before bringing down the banhammer, and we don't give a fuck if that makes us look like the bad guys or if you run off to another community to whine about us.

That might sound harsh, and admittedly there are times when that gets misdirected, but there's plenty of people who come here after hearing all kinds of terrible things about us and don't encounter any of it and wonder what all the fuss is about - because they simply don't do the whole crybully routine. This is a tradition going all the way back to the r/chapotraphouse days, when so many of us found our way to the community by way of hearing all the worst people on Reddit talking about how terrible it was.

That sort of thing is the biggest culture shock I experience when I'm on my alt, the way people will just casually lie, just constantly, to the point that you start to second-guess if they're even conscious of it or if they're just so used to running everything they say through a filter that makes them look better or more like a victim that they aren't even conscious of what they're doing - and the way people just let them do it, never fact-checking, giving them the benefit of the doubt, coming to their defense when they're called out. It's a very different environment that's way more succeptable to bad actors playing the social media game.

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[–] [email protected] 48 points 2 days ago (1 children)

They defederated before I even heard them speak.

[–] [email protected] 41 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (3 children)

Didn't they preemptively defed from us? Damn, they were scared of even the idea of being exposed to us existing. It's so weird.

[–] [email protected] 39 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Pre-emptively, as a last resort. That phrasing is burnt into my fucking brain, it's such a great oxymoron.

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[–] [email protected] 39 points 2 days ago

whenever i'm on my lemmy.ml account and i see something horrifyingly hateful and/or condescending, it's a .world user like 90% of the time

it's gotten to a point where i don't even like to go outside of hexbear anymore because it's just upsetting to see all this reddit-tier shittiness on a platform that used to be so pleasant in its early days. wish it had grown organically instead of having that exodus of reddit's dregs honestly, but at least most of them seem to have congregated on one particular (blockable) instance

[–] [email protected] 43 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I exclusively post on hexbear and have never visited, browsed, or posted on the other lemmy instances because I am exclusively here for the hexbear community.

Whenever I am reminded that .world exists (by someone here posting about them posting some frantic stuff about us), I remember that they "pre-emptively de-federated hexbear as a last resort", which is such a hilarious phrasing to me.

The lemmyverse's general hysteria about hexbear is an ugly little microcosm of how western chauvinism manifests towards foreign others, and in that respect it's extremely pitiful and depressing to watch the same brain-worms at play.

[–] [email protected] 39 points 2 days ago

The lemmyverse's general hysteria about hexbear is an ugly little microcosm of how western chauvinism manifests towards foreign others, and in that respect it's extremely pitiful and depressing to watch the same brain-worms at play.

There is a spectre haunting lemmy hexbear-specter

[–] [email protected] 46 points 2 days ago

Not a hexbear but:

VTC had problems with lemmy.world

Their size and ethos mean that users are very poorly moderated, and basically all users that would come to vtc to stir shit were identified with .world accounts.

The admins are also very hostile to vegans.

[–] [email protected] 40 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I didn't even know there were other places connected to this I came here because it's an extraordinarily welcoming leftist space that is fun to browse.

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[–] [email protected] 38 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

I view .world fairly negatively, but I'm a bit conflicted about it.

The overall ethos is the type of milquetoast liberal (as in capitalist) tech bro that I associated with some of the more annoying and smug parts of Reddit. The politics comm has all the familiar trappings of /r/politics and there is a fair amount of "red scare" type posting, especially if China is involved. The smear campaigns against the .ml and hexbear instances also get under my skin.

It's the instance I would first suspect of becoming a "Nazi bar" in the long run because of their prominence and typical faux "tolerance" (though sh.it.just.works might be worse). Some here would probably argue it already is one. Same as what happened to Reddit over time. Subs like KiA, the Donald, and the general conservative sub just wouldn't have been as big in early Reddit, even as Libertarian as it was.

It also is arguably hostile to Lemmy as a platform. If you subscribe to their Fediverse comm, then you'll see a post at least once a month that exists to harshly criticize the Lemmy developers and the platform as a whole while providing space for every reactionary developer to advertise their competing platform. I find that harmful to Lemmy, which is the most successful Reddit clone to be created by far.

However, it's a big instance, and as much as I like my platforms being full of leftists, I don't mind interacting with more uh everyday people. There are a lot of comms that probably would never exist here. Plus they just bring a lot of activity to the platform as a whole and they aren't all bad.

Pretty much why I made my .ml account my default. I can interact with hexbear, .ml, lemmygrad, .world and the others. Sometimes that's for the worst, but it's mostly been a good experience.

But yeah I'd take hexbear every day over .world if I had to choose. Even with the terminally online struggle sessions.

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