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.
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.