chat

I don't really think much of them. I'm just here because hexbear is probably one of the only places on the internet that accepts my ramblings on ballistic missiles, geopolitics and working towards a polycentric/multipolar world. I don't use the rest of the site outside of the news megathread much. I'd probably be banned on an instance like Lemmy world because of being "anti west/anti NATO" or something like that, even though I try to make sure my analysis is unbiased. Lots of people on hexbear probably think I'm a "doomer" of sorts because my analysis is not as optimistic as theirs. But they engage constructively with what I post, which is the difference when compared to other instances which would likely ban me for the reasons I listed earlier.

I don't really think about other instances at all, but I do like that there's some kind of inflow from outside Hexbear. I don't want the community to be totally insular, and while obviously I don't believe people should be allowed to come into this space and spread disinformation or just generally be jerks, I do believe it's important to not give up on every random person who might be shown that burning down the planet for the benefit of a handful of the most wealthy and horrible people to be alive isn't actually the best possible way for human society to function, and that there's an alternative.

i sometimes wish they would go back to reddit or move off to bluesky, discord, threads, loops, etc. and it's clear that the latter is looking more and more likely, i just need to be more patient.

i hate that they've engendered this spiteful opinion from me from all the vitriol, brigading, banning, and the "advice" that they gave you in asklemmy and it would have made me abandon lemmy; like i did reddit; were it not for hexbear and the .ml's.

i think that they take offense when you point out the propoganda that they (hopefully) unwittingly repeat or that their support for genocide enablers goes well beyond an election and it also makes me think that i need to have more patience; but FUCK is it hard to do when they poisoned the well before you're even aware that the other people exist.

For your question: I don’t think about them at all.

The rest is just my general feelings on federation and hexbear that you are free to ignore.

I was against federation to begin with. I was even against lemmygrad (still am, much as they are comrades). I browse by local even now.

Hexbear is hexbear. It grew out of r/cth (I voted for the name being chapo.chat and was against it being changed to hexbear). It has its own culture. It’s own social norms. It doesn’t need to be a part of anything bigger. Note: this doesn’t mean it’s users don’t have flaws and that there haven’t been things in its culture that have needed to be changed in the past and in the present.

IMO, there was a time when federation could’ve worked, maybe right after it was created when it was young and still finding its identity. I understand the idea of finding new users especially as the number has dwindled from the peak (which itself was a shadow of cth in the first place).

But attaching itself to lemmy, lib-central, was always a failed endeavour. A better option would’ve been trying to become a leftist hub for Reddit communities in the wake of the cth’s closure and that was tried but it failed due to numerous factors (some were, honestly, this community being too toxic to such things which is what has partially led to the decline in numbers in the first place).

But all that’s the past. We’re a part of Lemmy now for what it’s worth (and not even, as some tried to claim in the beginning, as the big bad posters - I remember that what some here tried to say we would be due to our memberships!). They can all defederate from us and I couldn’t care less. They are all useless libs.

Some positive things to end this on. The reason I was on cth and came to chapo.chat and have stayed on hexbear. This is the most trans positive place I have ever seen (cth wasn’t but I wasn’t trans then either lmao). But now? I dare you to find a safer space on the entire internet.

This is the only space where I can talk to other leftists from around the world to both shitpost and get educated. I learn new things everyday. I also take the memes with a grain of salt. We don’t worship at the altar of Assad. But it feels good to at least be among others who can see the fucking hypocrisy of supposed progressives who care about human rights criticizing Assad and then telling to us to vote for democrats. Go fuck yourself.

Like, this space was created because cth got banned for praising John Brown. Don’t forget that.

This place even now, despite being 99.99% Leninist professes by and maintains ideological neutrality. It is extremely rare to see a leftist space that doesn’t bash either anarchists or MLs (and isn’t instead just social democrats). You wouldn’t know this if you haven’t been here a while I guess, because most people here are MLs but you can be an anarchist here. You can also, btw, criticize china or dprk or Cuba etc. I’ve done so. Just don’t be a lib about it.

So, hexbear to me has become an extremely rare instance of a platform which is not only queer-friendly but also genuinely leftist and accepting of all leftists. It isn’t perfect. I think around a month or so ago (maybe more, maybe less) there was a big issue surrounding misogyny. I think admins/mods worked to resolve that but someone else might know more.

This became much longer than I intended it to be. TLDR: hexbear is a comfortable safe space. I know the people. I know the posts and comments. I know what to expect. Every other social media platform (except TikTok but it too throws the odd curveball) fills me with anger and I have to mentally prepare myself for battle because I know there will be useless libs spouting their regular bullshit. None of that here.

I don't really think about them unless people post their stuff here. While the occasional laugh is nice, exposing myself to a lot of sites raw is probably not something my mental health can handle right now

.world et al are reddit refugees. They simply want reddit 2.0 (or I guess digg 3.0).

They developed their entire worldview within the confines of reddit, which cater to western liberals. The vast, overwhelming majority on Reddit is to toe the line of whatever western oligarchies (and they are oligarchies, don't get it twisted) find acceptable, because all of those spaces explicitly label any dissenting views on geopolitics as trolls, bots or delusional. They simply cannot fathom that rational people living normal lives can be opposed to western hegemony.

It's like describing a rainbow to a dog. There's a language barrier, there's the fact that dogs are largely colorblind, and then there's the fact that they wouldn't know what to do with that information.

They've been told that western liberal democracy is the most important and greatest political system in human history since childhood. They have been told it's the end of history. Anyone that disagrees must be a robot or paid to think that or purposefully trying to enrage them, or whatever new thought terminating cliché they have these days.

I left .world the day they announced it.

Honestly, I never liked it that much. It's very... reddit-y

If you're not local or from the grad and post on hexbear your posts will be treated with higher levels of suspicion and scrutiny. I don't come here to talk to libs, they can kick rocks.

I've come to refer to instances that federate with Hexbear and Lemmygrad as "East Lemmy" and other instances as "West Lemmy", and I do have an account I use to lurk "West Lemmy". There's a handful of good communities on .world: I mainly look at communities for things like anime fanart, but sometimes there's other things there that are worthwhile, too, like news or discussions about topics I care about. It is an unfortunate fact that most people on the English-speaking Internet are not communists, and so a lot of people will end up on instances that don't federate with Hexbear basically because they just don't know any better. And even if those people will oftentimes post a whole lotta cringe, and the administrators of these websites especially tend to be complete jackasses — there's also going to be things that people will post on defederated instances which you'd otherwise miss out on.

So as a whole I'd say that the administration of other instances should be changed, and people who use Lemmy expecting it to just be a new Reddit should either change their expectations or leave, but I accept that as long as these things just aren't going to happen, that it's worthwhile to have accounts on "both sides of the curtain".

Who?

They preemptively defed from hexbear. It is pretty funny how much hexbear is for them despite never having directly interacted.

One of the first posts I saw after I signed up here was "It's so much nicer since I blocked lemmy.world" and I read through the posts on that instance. It looked like it was just normal people (ew), but with an absolute firehose of activity. I blocked it for a while, myself, and found that it was extremely quiet.

Then I unblocked it. Every time I found someone being stubbornly opinionated, it was a .world user. That's just people, and when you get enough of them in one place, you get more of the 'average' person.

I used to connect through hexbear, and it felt like lemmy was dead. Then I checked out .world and none of my favorite people were there. I gave up on lemmy because of that disconnect. Being on THIS instance, however, I get to see ALL the assholes! Even the ones I don't like. I just prune that tree to my own personal preference as I go along, blocking communities and users on a case-by-case.

The trick to enjoying a site like this is to know when to simply NOT respond to people trying to troll you. You can even block them if you want, so it won't happen again. Personally, I enjoy thinking critically about the opinions of those who disagree with me, and if they make a good point, I will concede it. But I don't appreciate low-effort "nuh uh" style responses or people who are only mad because of a failure in reading comprehension.

This instance kind of pissed me off at first because I didn't really understand it, so I get where some people are coming from lol. The politics were foreign. My first encounters with them were on my Lemmy.world Alt, with hexbear seeming to defend Russia in their invasion of Ukraine, Stalin and Fidel pics, just really weird stuff to me. There were multiple thick layers of irony to pull back and they had their own emojis and lingo and such.

Basically what it took to get past the initial step of "wtf?", was that I took the unprecedented step of actually going in here and asking why people in here were doing that, what their thought process was. Someone gave me a couple paragraph explanation explaining their priorities of anti-imperialism, their criticisms of NATO, historical context, etc. How the instance doesn't have down votes so people comment to express opinions. They answered any questions and were actually pretty chill.

I took a look around and saw that they don't uncritically worship Putin and China like I was told they do, they just criticize these other countries from a materialist and historical perspective, rather than based on unfounded propaganda. Also they're not really a hive mind, they have different perspectives on things, based on their different experiences leading to endless "struggle sessions" (intra-instance arguments and debates essentially). So, as it turns out hexbear was just humans. (Although we all tend to be socialist, pro-trans rights, pro-Palestine, and anti-US's foreign policy because of the anti-imperialism.)

So ya, if you don't go into hexbear yourself and see how cool they are, just like I did and you did now, then I could see it being pretty weird from someone in the bubble of Western media. It's actually a pretty good metaphor to how people in the West uncritically consume propaganda about many foreign, third world countries as well, and it often takes physically going to those places or speaking to those people online or through videos or letters, to get past that.

And of course there's plenty of things to talk about here besides politics, but as that is the main things that bothered people about hexbear on Lemmy.world, I figured I'd mainly just address that. I like threads on art, games, movies, and other things like that, too, despite world making it look like we just exist in the office of a Russian troll farm to talk about politics every day.

I think it's illustrative of the issues of federation versus decentralization. We still have centralized powers, just a handful to pick from. Having single user instances isn't practical so no one does it, and instead you just have this massive "pick a server" problem that ultimately harms the adoption of the platform. No one wants to have to compare moderation policies, community, features, and which of your friends would be federated before joining a website. This is especially problematic because your choice is "locked in", even if it turns out the site you chose had some issues you weren't aware of before (or if it enshittifies over time).

That's not to say decentralized services would be easy - of particular note, designing something that would still have decent moderation and not allow immoral things like csam is a non trivial problem. The major decentralized platform today is nostr and it definitely suffers from being dominated by right wing libertarians. Hence being here.