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chapotraphouse @hexbear.net
Catradora_Stalinism [she/her, comrade/them] @hexbear.net

Defederate Now

These bigoted, ignorant scum will never listen to anything. They are politically illiterate infants with an allergic reaction to reading.

They have ruined a safe space cultivated and cared for, they have turned this place into a new reddit.

I had a dude in my private messages going on about how I was both mutilating myself and other children. Many more people on hexbear have had similar experiences, with these worthless ignorant scum popping in to deliver the political equivalent of a giant shit.

As your friends, comrades, and people you say you defend get slurred at, dehumanized, and harassed please ask yourself:

Is it worth it?

I have the answer, I know you know it as well:

No its not

I used to think otherwise

I was a fool

its not worth a few laughs

even if you dunk all you want, that doesn't take away the knife those people put in our backs.

These bigots, fascists, and NATO liberals are as worthless offline as they are here, why should we give them any attention. They are worth less than the dirt beneath our fingernails. Why should we poison ourselves with their influence? We don't make any room for them offline, why should we not online?

And really

How many essays have your written?

How many sources have you combed through?

How many times have you explained the most basic facts of reality?

How many attempts at good faith?

Only for them to dismiss it in their stupidity. They don't read it, they just crumble and divert back to the programming these little shits trust in more than God.

For every time there is a good faith user, there are a dozen scumbag fascists. And most of the time, the "good faith one" just reverts back to their old shit.

Do you really think losing any member of the hexbear or lemmygrad community, longtime members or not, is worth a few good dunks?

I don't believe a small chance of gaining a new user is worth alienating an entire section of the community. The vast majority of those idiots are lost causes. If they are interested, the can just make an account and ask in good faith.

Is posting a meme to "own the liberals" worth your comrades getting more trauma from bigots harassing them?

No its not.

you've had your laugh, but it should end

Ban them all, SJW, lemm.ee, lemmy, the programmer nazi edglords. Keep Lemmygrad.

Defederate from those communities. We shouldn't sacrifice our own for more clicks. For having to subject ourselves to the opinions of people thoroughly brainwashed? We aren't reddit. We came here to get away from that. I'm sick of this. We are sick of this.

End it now

376 comments

  • I had a dude in my private messages going on about how I was both mutilating myself and other children. Many more people on hexbear have had similar experiences, with these worthless ignorant scum popping in to deliver the political equivalent of a giant shit.

    Fuck these ignorant adult babies, I'm sick of seeing their shit, I'm sick of hearing about their shit.

    • I'd like to go back to stupid but neat struggle sessions over things like "are washing machines racist","what does china mean by this", or literally anything. Now we have to struggle about the right of trans people to exist in society. I'm done arguing with reactionaries. They have nothing to offer, and don't seem capable of ever being able to do so.

      It isn't worth the laughs to hear these people

  • The first week was funny, now it's annoying. The current sorting algo doesn't help either.

    Nice being federated with lemmygrad tho

    I had a dude in my private messages going on about how I was both mutilating myself and other children.

    This is fucked. We should defed whichever instance this came from immediately

  • Yeah, sincerely been wanting to defed from libb.ee, the sh.itworks, and brogramming.dev since the get-go. I don't even get why anyone thought they were a good idea to federate with in advance. It's been awful the entire time and the only good thing was what, getting to angrypost at shitheads? If I wanted that, I'd have stayed on Reddit.

    I've seen so few good posters from these places that I could count them on one hand, most of the rest of their cool people have switched over here or to the 'grad already. The rest are always welcome to join us. Other than that it's been a constant flow of the worst dreck I've seen in years. Literally the exact reason I've entirely left all social media except for Hexbear, and now we chose to enshittify ourselves and become a warzone? Nah, this fucking sucks.

  • On the dilemma of interacting with Reactionary views as Zoo Animals:

    On reddit, during the r/chapotraphouse era, the culture there had developed into not just a general shitposting forum but an alternative and assertive socialist/leftist voice against liberal answers for socioeconomic and political issues, as well as a venue to harass and identify reactionary users and communities. As Hexbear's @Civility hypothesized three years ago, the CIA shut down r/chapotraphouse for these reasons.

    After r/chapotraphouse was quarantined and banned, the users dissovled and migrated to the Discord and finally to Chapo.Chat - which became Hexbear - and formed an independent community and identity from r/cth. It became a safe space to vent and share memes, to shitpost, and find emotional (and even, at times, financial) support.

    I think we should preserve this quality of Hexbear. I don't think arguing with liberals insistent on their values of qualifying the validity of our opinions and identities with conditional allegiance to institutions of capitalist hegemony and white supremacy is a valuable endeavor. Nor should we really tolerate their views, or dishonest tactics of discussion. I'd prefer to disengage with them altogether, but I suppose like many of you, I can't help but respond sometimes too.

    It was fun on Reddit to "interact with the Zoo Animal" routine because Reddit is a mass media platform that is capable of propagandizing and sewing seeds of doubt into dominant political and socioeconomic narratives, and to stoke curiosity into alternative narratives, ideologies, lifestyles, and beliefs, with the hopes that those alternatives were not the fascist ones. (But it was reddit.)

    This place, even the lemmy federated instances, is a closed vacuum and developed to be a safe space from bigotry, sexism, transphobia, fascism, and liberal apologia.

    Then federation happened, and the people who want to treat the interaction with reactionaries as a shitposting game to interact with like zoo animals and elevate misanthropic voices back into our minds - for we read their text in our internal voice - is exasperating and humiliating. I don't want to be saturated with it outside of reddit.

    Exposing ourselves and others to bigotry and liberalism is not fun. "Just log off or block them" works in the short term, but in the long term toleration of these things will deform what the community had become beforehand. Bigotry and JAQing off Liberalism isn't amusing. It's offensive.

    (It's always the same defense of liberalism: whatabout Russia and China? History saw what the dissolution of the USSR wrought: millions of Russians dead from social murder. This is liberalism's goal: https://hexbear.net/comment/3734619. For Russia once more, and finally for China. After that, well always a new enemy to destroy! Never a need to reform the US!)

  • i love lemmy grad and the other nice one. FUCKING HATE THE OTHERS. it sucks. and they lurk too. reactionary takes get massively upvoted now and it suuuuuuuck knowing those fuckers are out there. keep lemmy grad though they are nice.

  • Reopening the pipeline is great, and there are many new comrades who've found their way home to Hexbear thanks to federation. We're also probably making the rest of lemmy better by relentlessly mocking libs and chuds to the point they decide to keep their reprehensible takes to themselves. That doesn't work on all of them, but I do imagine it works more often than we'd think.

    But all of this is not worth our trans and other marginalized comrades losing a space that was once almost entirely free of this bullshit. Plausibly the only such space on English speaking internet.

    However, I do wonder if there are any other effective measures we can take to protect our trans comrades other than outright defederation. It would be a shame to lose the pipeline if it were possible to do something else about this. Perhaps taking away features from users on non Hexbear/Lemmygrad instances? Maybe it's feasible to remove their ability to DM Hexbear users.

    Admins could also work on expanding the mod team to loosen the workload and reduce how much of this disgusting crap any one mod sees, thereby reducing mod burnout and also cleaning out the reactionary filth faster. I'm sure there are many known trustworthy Hexbear users who would be happy to join the mod team to accomplish this. Not only that, maybe we could give all users who have been active on this site for years mod-lite powers to temporarily hide potentially reactionary posts and comments made by users of other instances until an actual moderator can review it.

    SJW is probably a lost cause and should be defederated anyway, but I've seen a lot of nice lemm.ee users who I would be sad to see go rather than attempting the above measures.

    • Pipeline to leftism via hexbear seems like we'll gain more reactionaries wrecking and inciting arguments than honest-good-faith liberals seeking answers to the cognitive dissonance of living in the

      with declining living standards, witnessing imperial violence third-hand, and seeing domestic suppression first and second hand.

      I think effective measures is to de-emphasize the philosophy of treating reactionaries like wild zoo animals and let them marinate and produce hundreds of comments of bad faith arguments and questioning, and more like hostile wreckers meant to annoy and humiliate us as they seek to do through their extant, demonstrative actions.

      • It seems that way, but I'm not sure how accurate that assessment is. By nature, the reactionaries coming in from other instances are going to be the most disruptive and easily visible downside to federation. But as the days go by, I'm seeing less and less full on chuds and proportionately more garden variety liberals as the chuds quickly get themselves banned. It sucks that anyone has to see their posts and comments in the meantime, but expanding the moderation team if feasible should be able to minimize that. Given some more time, I'm sure we'd settle into a happy equilibrium once the worst of the worst have all been banned.

        The good faith libs who are persuaded to join Hexbear mostly do so silently. Eventually they assimilate into the site culture and we forget that they were even pipelined in the first place. That sounds about right given our active user count has been continuously increasing since federation.

        Concerning the reactionaries, treating them like zoo animals has actually always been in my mind the most effective way to deal with them in the meantime before they catch their inevitable ban. It doesn't really matter what the reactionaries themselves actually think because we're not trying to convince them of anything. Mocking and dog piling them is more for the sake of persuading the many lurkers who end up reading any given thread. One of the best ways to put down a fascist is by playing Minecraft with them. The next best way is to humiliate them back, mock them, and make them look like complete and pathetic losers to any bystanders listening.

        I agree that this kind of approach can definitely go wrong. It sucks when the dog pile fails to form, or when the reactionary drops their friendly liberal facade and starts with the slurs, but again, bringing this down to acceptable levels shouldn't be too hard with more moderators and stricter moderation. And I'm sure there are other ways to salvage federation while also keeping our comrades safe. It'd be great if the lemmy devs could give individual users the ability to block any instance or community from their personal feed. Also the ability to mass block all the users of any instance, disabling their ability to ping or DM the Hexbear user doing the blocking, for example. Features like these would give us all the ability to form a microcosm of federation as a whole, with individual users being able to decide exactly what is on their personal allow list. This way users who dislike federation can simply set their feed to local and never have to deal with non-Hexbear users ever again.

        At the very least, I'd like to see attempts at something along those lines before we get too hasty and shut off federation. I don't think Hexbear necessarily needs to be isolated for it to be a safe space, I'm also putting consideration into the fact that Hexbear serves to make the rest of the federated instances better by backing up lemmygrad and introducing libs to actual leftist perspectives that they would have never been able to see when they were on reddit.

  • Letting people line up outside your house to take a hot steaming shit on the floor on the off-chance you’ll be able to convince one of them not to take a shit

  • I liked pre-federated Hexbear more. It was more fun talking with people who I knew were good faith without having to deal with a ton of dumb hogs. Making fun of libs is fun and all but it's getting old. And to add if there are assholes harassing our users we should defederate.

  • I’ve been on hexbear since the day it started (obviously not from this account) and I’m about to just give it up completely.

    The bad memes alone were almost enough to make the feed unusable, but even when I’m using local only mode I have to read the worst takes imaginable from people off site.

    I left Reddit when we got the boot from there and realized it was good for me, but this just feels like going back and now I can completely understand why it sucked.

    • The biggest lie was the one where we needed liberals. Hexbear and lemmygrad don't need these people.

    • Correct me if I'm reading your comment wrong.

      I don't want to come off as catty or standoffish but blocking the meme comms on other instances made the experience way better. The absolute Facebook boomer tier slop on some them was so bad.

      • blocking the meme comms on other instances made the experience way better

        You’re absolutely right it does and I have. I only bring it up because they’re so truly and utterly unfunny it offends me they share a space with us.

  • Yeah I found it odd we federated with them. I'd not heard anything good about SJW and I gotta admit the name seemed to activate my dogwhistle senses.

    I enjoyed dunking on them, but if they're going to participate in targeted harassment of individual users, then defederate we must. I'm sorry they did this to you.

    • I was pretty surprised to see that federating with sh.itjust.works was ok the table. One of the first experiences I had when I started using Lemmy was one of the mods from there arguing with me about free speech and trans people in sports

    • yeah, that surprised me too. i voted in the thread against federating with that clogged toilet of reactionaries and assumed it wouldn't get approved.

      i think federation is interesting in the abstract and in the practical, i like when the occasional dipshit lib wanders in lobbing up lib takes and expecting to be congratulated / updooted for parroting some state department talking point only for a dozen true posters to come out doing 360° dunks with all the razzle dazzle. but 1 or 2 of those a day is plenty. i definitely am not interested in seeing some openly fashfuck wipe their ass on the couch. those assholes should be denied any platform to communicate.

  • FWIW, I love y’all and am always delighted to see a hexbear user on the broader lemmyverse. If federation is turning what should be a safe place into a vector for harassment, though…

  • Honestly I stick to local 95% of the time and it's still just frustrating to have some jackass come in and be transphobic and just derail the entire conversation. I generally try to interact in good faith if there's even an inkling, and they either pick a single line to call you out for or they'll ignore it entirely and keep going with their propagandized lines. I've had no actual positive interactions and I've seen very few positive interactions with people outside of Hexbear getting called out for their shit. How is there any room for good faith when they're saying Winnie the Pooh is literally illegal in China, given a photo of Winnie the Pooh at Shanghai Disney and just keep going? They just want to be racist reactionaries and it's making us worse having to even look at it.

    • Yeah, that's a huge part of my problem with federation as well. The reddit blackout has let to many lemmy instances being full of 5 week old accounts only used to reddit style debate pervertry, these people cannot argue anything in good faith and will never assume you're doing that, either.

    • Maybe them calling all of us psy op bots is just projection.

  • I’m sorry those things happened to you.

    I think these issues could be mitigated with better user- and community-level controls. If a user could restrict DMs to only users from their instance, that would have prevented the messages you received. And it would be nice if communities on an instance could opt out of federation, even if the larger instance is federated. That way we could federate @!the_dunk_tank@hexbear.net but not federate @!traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns@hexbear.net if that community is intended to serve as a safe space.

  • Ultimately, I support the Admins and mods decisions, the brunt of the consequences fall on them.

    I’ve only been active around here a month or so, I did lurk a lot before then, so I realize I don’t have the full picture here. That said, I found Hexbear without federation to the lib instances, I found hexbear through Lemmygrad. I enjoy being part of Hexbear and being federated with Lemmygrad, the Star Trek instance, and midwest.social, I do not enjoy being federated with the general instances. One opinion among many, but I must throw mine onto the pile.

    The worst instances all preemptively defed from us, or do it within a couple weeks so it’s sort of the trash taking itself out. Also, I think the Admins and mods have done an excellent job with everything. I’m just here for the good vibes, and that hasn’t gone anywhere as far I can see, and I’m sure that’s due to extra hard work from them! And our posters in the pit engaging the libs so they don’t DM target folks like me.

    • Hey, just chiming in cos I've not been active enough to see much more than a little of the drama and clashes. That said, I was excited to join Midwest.social since that's a) where I am and b) has a self described leftist bent.

      So my reply basically is "hey! midwest.social got mentioned positively!" My observation of the hexbear community has been positive, you all seem pretty chill and I align closer with those views politically than std.lib.

      My muddling through my leftist journey in the past 5-10 years is still in progress, but has brought me to the kind of "ends are the means" anarchist type view. So I can see why some get bent out of shape over the more authoritarian/Stalin-esque views. Though that said if you support western imperialism. Look in the fucking mirror, right?

      Seems like online discussion is always an uphill battle if you're trying to have any kind of productive or respectful discourse. I don't like the idea of defederation on principle, it does get harder to manage the bigger a community gets. Anyway, thanks for reading through my meandering Ted Talk, haha.

376 comments