chat

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".

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

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.

Who?

I'm not a fan of lemmy.world for 2 reasons:

• They are the biggest instance,
  while the fediverse should be spread out,
  to prevent centralization/monopoly over the system.
• They de-federated from instances in the past (e.g. dbzer0), and I don't like sensorship.

However I do not hate them, nor their users,
just not a fan.

I'm not that familiar with Hexbear,
but also haven't ran into any issues with their users either.

.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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

They're the dregs of reddit, they're racist suburban trust fund brats who spend most of their time online roleplaying psychotic fantasies about a new American century or some other white nationalist nonsense

They genuinely make normal Redditors look well-adjusted and politically coherent, unfortunately we're stuck to the hip with these fools cause they happen to use lemmy as their musty incel den

i was against federation from the beginning and remain locals only. i only see non-locals if non bears come to our local places and unfortunately it's usually to shit the place up. grad is ok

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.

I think of myself like a little Nick Mullen character who's doing large scale social experiments by pitting fantasy races against each other while I watch, smug look behind an observation deck on a magical cloud, at the lemmyworlders come up with a creation myth about their society and ours where we are basically the devil. It's amazing.

edit: found the bit cw: fatshaming and homophobia

Well, honestly, although I believe there are some good people from the instances defed'd, I believe the operators of jlai.lu, lemmy.world, sh.itjustworks, beehaw.org, sopuli.xyz, etc. still hold onto the western brainworm that no matter how bad Europe and U.S is, their reaction is "still the best system".

In fact, without resorting to saying things that would get removed from their instances, if I went there, my view is essentially essentially that of the author of Masses, Elites, and Rebels, regarding the western working class, who I would argue, are made passively complicit and thus feel somewhat attached to U.S-Europe hegemony

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.

I don't think about them at all to be honest. HB is my home and apart from the occasional clueless liberal or genuine wrecker/troll who wanders by, I'm content to hang out with my trans, leftist comrades and just post about beans.

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.