Hexbear existed pre-federation as its own little isolated forum that developed a relatively-active userbase with relatively shared ideals. When federation came around, Hexbear was different enough that we couldn't enable it right away and it took much effort from the dev team here to "unfork" us. When federation was finally enabled, our culture clashed with other instances in several major ways:

1. emojis were bugged and were enormous when viewed on any other instance
2. our high activity and commonality of opinion made other instances think we were constantly botting or "brigading" (its legacy has been preserved in emoji form: ), when in reality it was simply our users posting as they always have
3. we have a whitelist of instances, and the mod team demands compliance with certain standards. Of particular note due to the current internet culture, for an instance to remain federated with us, they must not be willing to tolerate transphobia by their own userbase. This is a bar that most instances fail to pass.
4. we really hate Biden, Harris, and the democrats more broadly for various valid reasons (currently the hot button topic is them carrying out a genocide in occupied Palestine), and libs really hate to hear how the "good guys" are themselves monsters, or seeing "Death to America" regularly.

of the main communist instances hexbear is the most active, has no downvotes, and has a culture of dunking
so when someone from another instance has an awful reactionary take, they tend to get mostly clowned on by a metric shitload of hexbears
this leads to wildly exaggerated and made up accusations because "i said something horrible and people yelled at me for it :(" doesn't really inspire sympathy

Half of it is transphobia and queerphobia and half of it is liberals seething about us being further left than them

It's mostly just liberals and fascists and their natural hatred for socialists.

I will say that the anti-Ukraine thing is kind of real. Nobody here thinks Russia is secretly communist or anything, but Ukraine was overthrown in 2014 by a neo-nazi aligned, US backed coup. They then spent the better part of a decade persecuting ethnic minorities in Eastern Ukraine, which overwhelmingly supported the overthrown government. The stuff they were doing would have gotten a non-US aligned government branded as cultural genocidaire, but they kept escalating and eventually were firing artillery at civilian centers regularly and sending neo-nazi death squads into the East to harass and murder civilians.

Nobody here wants the war there to keep going and causing all this suffering, but the idea that this is a black and white conflict and Russia invaded for no reason at all, or because he just wants to expand Russia, is not common here.

I haven't been here as long as many but it seriously is like an oasis of kindness for a queer leftist compared to any other online group I've seen. People here aren't kind to Nazis or nazi-adjacent posters though, as it should be.

People who complain about hexbear on other instances are nearly always liberal or further right trolls who come and post some obvious bullshit, get berated for sharing reactionary propaganda, then often get banned because they get mad and show their true racist or transphobic colors and start using slurs or generally become toxic.

Pretty much anyone I've ever seen come and argue in good faith, with a real misunderstanding or false info, or just something that they disagree with here will be met with reasonable clarification.

Jealous of the emoji game

Hexbear is explicitly anti-capitalist and anti-liberal. We're a bunch of Marxists and anarchists, and we aren't apologetic about it. That's the crux of the matter, really, those who oppose communism tend to oppose Hexbear.

A lot of the hate against Hexbear relies on deliberate misinterpretation, but a lot of it is as simple as the anti-Hexbear crowd being right-wing. There's also the "leftists" that oppose Hexbear because of a lack of correct understanding of theory and leftist history. There are also the people that don't vibe with Hexbear's more shitposty vibes.

Lemmy.world's admins and many moderators are anti-Marxist, so that's why they defederated here and Lemmygrad.

If you consider yourself a Marxist or an anarchist, there's a good chance you'll fit in! If not, and you're interested in learning about Marxism or anarchism, then you'll also fit in! Welcome!

I think the thing that makes other comms the angriest is that hexbear generally views Russia's actions in Ukraine as anti-imperialist and therefore worthy of support.

Other things that make them mad include full-throated support for modern-day China and Cuba, skepticism of the western narrative about North Korea and Venezuela, and support of the historical USSR, GDR, Yugoslavia, etc.

they hate us for our freedom (to say that slaveowners deserved to die)

You have to keep in mind that many of those users haven't interacted with Hexbear at all, especially not the ones on lemmy.world since they defederated pre-emptively as a last resort, so what they know about us is some second hand purple monkey dishwasher bullshit. I've seen some truly baffling takes like that we're just pretending to be inclusive to trans people.

It's a concerted effort to poison the well before you have a chance to drink and see for yourself.

The userbase of all the large instances are anti-leftist (despite claiming otherwise) and take actions to thwart users away from joining.

The people of .world, for example, curated and distributed tagged lists of prolific and well spoken "tankies" to distribute to newbies with the intention of setting them up with a pre-baked block list; that's why their main pages and largest communities have a skewed definition of tankies prominently displayed on their front pages from time to time.

we have an ideology which is incompatible with and hostile to liberalism, and their socialization on the internet has left them unable to deal with that fact in a healthy way. they usually love dunking on ideological opponents, often by pretending to have conversations with news headlines in an aloof and dismissive tone. (you'll notice Reddit has a surprisingly frequent number of front page stories where the headline simply a quote or declaration from an adversary like Putin, usually abridged or summarized in such a way to suggest weakness, hypocrisy, or frustration). unfortunately, they're out of their depth when it comes beyond flat earthers, creationists, and anti-vax. On reddit, they manage to fill the gap with moderation power and downvotes. here, they just seethe. it's hard to believe, but these people have such poor coping skills, I literally see them routinely invent quotes that don't exist in the source or imagine historical events on the spot which they will then assert happened without investigation.

Scratched liberals who side with fascists got mad that hexbear is correct on like everything we say.

I think a part of it is bc our culture was founded on being Merry Tricksters who spam pics of a pig whose shit landed on his balls when someone has a bad take that doesn’t deserve the dignity of an actual response, while the rest of lemmy is comprised of hardcore Reddit fundamentalists who expect everyone to take everything seriously at all times (unless they’re sharing a meme from like 9 yrs ago)

Wanting people to have housing, healthcare, and food is a pathway to many philosophies some consider to be... unnatural.

A lot of people from the internet that live in Western Europe or especially the US are told a lot of lies about China, North Korea, Cuba, the USSR, etc. The gist of the lying is that they are told these countries are authoritarian, and that makes them more fascist than the US.

They are also told that modern Russia is the same as the USSR and they are still Communists. (Read: authoritarian, fascist)

Since hexbear is pro China, pro USSR, when I bring up the fact that I browse hexbear to real people in real life they say, "that's a dangerous place, it's filled with Russian government propaganda trolls" with a straight face.

If they believe China/NK/USSR are more fascist than the United States, they can't understand why someone would openly support them, and their only conclusion is to assume it's a propaganda troll employed by a foreign government.

Side note: this also applies internally to things like MAGA. It's a common idea from Democrats in the US to talk about Trump actually being from Russia and an infiltration candidate who is bringing fascism to the United States, not because fascism is inherent to the US political structure, but because Putin told him to.

Anyway, the reason these people hate on hexbear is that they don't understand why they can see an instance "invading" "real" instances with foreign propaganda agents and no one will "fix" it for them.

Liberals hate communists more than they hate fascists

The short answer is that we don't typically buy the western backed narratives about the world, and instead choose to actually look at reality and decide for ourselves how the world is.

This is extremely disruptive to people who just read what the CIA says and go "yeah that's objective truth!" and so rather than live with that discomfort or learn from our more diverse worldview, they would rather block us.

Propaganda is a hell of a drug. Welcome though, I hope you have a nice time here

Liberal im-poster syndrome exasperated by the fact that we have a culture of pushing back with replies due too getting rid of downvoting years ago.

Complaints about hexbear: almost exclusively liberals and reactionaries looking for excuses for why they always lose arguments with us. "Spreading pro-Russia propaganda" is a go-to liberal excuse for left criticism of Ukraine or pushing back on racist liberal criticisms of Russia. Liberals want to believe asiatic hordes mythologies about a revanchist Russia rather than acknowledge history or material conditions before 2022. Mention Minsk II and they start namecalling. Mention NATO and they cannot handle the of NATO being worse than Russia.

Defederation and hexbear: when hexbear has defederated from other instances, to my knowledge it has always been about the admins of another instance tolerating transphobia, including chasers. Other instances defederating from us is always supposedly high-minded liberals having a breakdown when they fail to have an echo chamber for left punching. Or in the case of lemmy.world, preemptively defederating "as a last resort" to entirely avoid having to think about this.

Of course, in all of these cases don't forget that these same people and instances tolerate neo-Nazi posting and reverence, e.g. Azov. They are simply being protective of the worldviews handed down to them by their patron saints (talking heads and Reddit admins). Also keep in mind that site admins have a habit of being thin skinned nerds, so even if their users disagree with their logic (like the lemmy.world defederation post comments), it makes no real difference because site admins are basically petty lords over their sites. Imagine being a person that wants to make or be Reddit 3.0 and whose only real complaint about Reddit is a lack of third party apps.

We're a bunch of sickos

Part of it was Hexbear was forked and was therefore slower to the federation game than the other large instances. So when the prospect of enabling federation was placed on the table there was a hue and cry from people who thought that acknowledging NATO's role in kicking off the Ukraine war or questioning the Western narrative on the Xinjiang was beyond the pale; meanwhile, Hexbear has a pretty bright red line on treating trans people as human beings that some of the other instances seem to have a surprisingly hard time understanding. As far as drama goes, there was plenty of discussion about the various defederation brouhahas that you're welcome to do some archaeology on if you're really that curious, but the TL;DR is that we're too cool for everyone else.

You got a lot of good answers so here's a joke answer that nonetheless is true: we hold an uncomfortable mirror up for the liberals. They do not like what they see.

There's a contingent of power users/mods/admins that range from neoliberals to social Democrats/reformists, and view anyone more radical than the Democratic party/Bernie as red fash.

That does include anarchists if you have any heterodox opinions about Ukraine or refuse to engage in their red scare propaganda. they have been doing a smear campaign about the "tankie troika" of Lemmy servers for a while now.

They even have a snark comm for exactly that.

We killed Henry Kissinger.

they hate us 'cuz they ain't us.

its mostly just right wing noise, the the side of lemmy that mostly includes world is in general very liberal and right wing (in part because of admin moderation and another because most reddit users are libs/right wing) so they really dislike any opposing views, in the case of world we were preemptively defederated because one of the world admins at the time was a neolib that pushed for that.

nowdays its mostly just making strawman to get angry at since we arent federated with most of the big comms anyway and ml and grad arent that big to influence much, which is kinda funny because they have slowly turned against other kinda leftist instances like dbzero and midwestsocial as the next evil radicals

also we defed from blahaj because her admin refused to moderated ableism and transphobia against our users

We refuse Sealioning among other things. It kind of pisses some people of

They hate us because we have the most intelligent, powerful, and beautiful posters. Like you!

Welcome!!