Context
As you probably now, Hexbear is a fairly large leftist instance, whose users are notorious for being very loud in the communities of every instance they federate with. For a long time they blocked all instances, preferring to remain isolated. Recently, however, they have started allowing some large instances into their allow list.
Yesterday they expanded said list by including the popular sh.itjust.works (SJW) instance.
Some Hexbear users immediately jumped on the train by creating posts in [email protected] making sure everyone was aware of their presence and calling out what they thought was bigotry on SJW's side:
- Example 1
- Example 2, the post included in the meme, now removed
Currently, there's people on both sides calling for mutual defederation, as one Hexbear sees the other party as "bigoted" and "politically illiterate infants" while many people on SJW are just tired of the political spam.
Where do we stand in this mess? Comfortably on the sidelines, enjoying the popcorn while it lasts.
As someone who leans left and generally supports socialism, Hexbear is hot fucking garbage. Lemmygrad is only slightly better.
They're slowly killing the fediverse as reasonable people see their authoritarian propaganda and leave.
I don't think the problem with Hexbear is political. Some of their points are questionable, but that's of course up for debate.
What tends to annoy me about their users is how obnoxious they can be. Between the flooding of comments and replies, the weird emojis and the numerous attempts at provocating people from outside of their little cicle (which happens both in their domestic communities as well as the federated ones), it all makes you wonder if they even care about the health of the fediverse
Nah. They rather live in echo chamber than create a healthy community. Same thing happened on Reddit. The history repeats itself.
The SJW admin thinks that their comment floods are a product of downvotes being disabled on their instance.
I'll enable downvoting on mine as long as it doesn't lead to the Reddit situation where users are penalized site-wide for getting too many downvotes.
I'm sure fucking tired of it, it's definitely making my experience here not as worthwhile
I can deal with it by blocking communities and instances. But it's not worth it to most people. I'll never recommend the fediverse to anyone in it's current extremist state.
My block list is getting ludicrously long though.. this can't be sustainable. I also want to recommend Lemmy to friends who are tired of reddit but yeah.. between the furries and kiddy shit and the overwhelming amount of edgelords spewing hate under the guise of being anti hate... yeah. Its not flying with normal folk. I'm not even sure I am staying let alone inviting others. I definitely don't want my friends and coworkers thinking I'm all about most of the content on Lemmy.
Furries? Never had to deal with those thankfully. As for the kiddy shit that's a serious problem but I feel like it mostly concerns us admins, as with the current tools we have to react as soon as we get notice. As a user you hardly see it, from my experience.
But yeah, the platform as a whole tends to be pretty polarized and extremist, which might scare many people away.
Most rational people I know won't go to a website if they think there's any chance of being exposed to that kind of content.
Thanks for your volunteer work though, I used to mod some decent size subreddits and I know that it's not a small amount of work to keep things clean.
Thanks for your good work making this happen. As discouraging as the extremist politics and propaganda is, I really hope community-owned social media is the future.
The good thing about the fediverse is that anyone can start their own instance and defederate from instances that are known to have problems with troublemakers and won't do anything about it.
It's infinitely better that Lemmy is going left rather then right because if it went right, the media would pick it up and then start casting FUD on the entire platform as being a cesspit of white supremacist groupthink and radicalization.
I imagine the Lemmy developers probably run join-lemmy.org and could start removing sites from there, but currently a lot of the general instances are listed there and they seem pretty sane. The only thing I find concerning is when someone claims that Joe Rogan is equivalent to Qanon.
I've seen people say another Lemmy user will "get the wall" two unrelated times. I've had comments correcting disinformation deleted with no explanation on lemmy.ml
On another account Lemmygrad users followed me around and downvoted every post I made. I ended up with -3,000 karma on that account.