The obsession with "brigading" was one of the worst parts of Reddit

In retrospect, it's funny how the liberals on lemmy.ml were haughtily saying "This may have been a tankie space once, but we will overwhelm them eventually and make it clear that they aren't welcome here" and then Hexbear comes in and they shit themselves.
- they thought the reddit wave would be bigger but it turns out redditors like feeling smug more than actually leaving the corporate walled garden. so they aren't thaaat big and a good % of those who did come here are at least vaguely leftist. That plus hexbear=no more unchallenged "ebil seeseepee" type circlejerks
  
  we have literally spent hours talking about thought terminating cliches, ready to fight them

I AM BRIGADING YOU RIGHT NOW BUCKO. I AM THE ONE MAN BRIGADE
- STAHP MODS PLS

It's extremely weird. Like I'm just commenting on what appears on my all page, how is that brigading? It's literally a feature of the website.
- Counterpoint: I'm a huge baby.
  Didn't think of that one, did ya, pinko!?
- Liberals are used to games with rigged rules ("""International Rules Based Order"""🙄) and when the playing field is level it feels to them like everyone else is suddenly cheating
  
  That's how the most of the internet works. The site admins of whatever community impose hegemonic rules about acceptable discourse and then purge everything outside that. It's how we work, it's just that we got rid of all the bigots and shitheads. In a normal community a landlord runs the instance, bans everyone who wants to shoot landlords, and tolerates bigots as long as they don't literally say the N word too many times in a row. Here the hegemony is flipped on it's head - Any kind of bigotry gets you banned fast, and you can actually name names when talking about why society sucks without having to pretend this isn't a knife fight to the death.

Wait till the realization sinks in that this is just the normal, organic amount of engagement they get from us because we're by far the most active lemmy instance
- People have been saying for years "soon, they will stop soon"
  And I just say See you in 3 more years, let us know what you think
  
  As with all internet spaces, eventually Hexbear will grow old and die. And hopefully like a half a dozen even worse communities will grow from the corpse.

Reddit, the site that's designed to have as many eyes as possible look at as wide a variety of posts as possible to bring about engagement has rules against the wrong people engaging.
- Rule #1: do not be a communist
  
  Pretty much. And don't upvote the wrong things. And definitely don't fuck up their idea of how the algo should work because you post too much.

It seems to me that instance has a very evident and festering
problem, which is incredibly strange for what is supposed to be a pro-trans instance.
They're being tone policed down to
levels, but they're still spreading the same hateful talking points that prevents the free expression that the admin team supposedly desires.
This is my first time seeing it first hand but it's so obvious and transparent that their liberal well intentioned inclusiveness has already backfired horrifically. When hexbear users confront these tone-adjusted fascists and question their hateful anti-left stance (something the mods and admin team should be doing but lack the spine) they cry and demand defed because their views absolutely can not stand up to any sort of serious analysis.
I will say I would not have seen this without federation. It genuinely makes me appreciate the amazing community thats been cultivated here because it's not easy to challenge, and remove, a polite abuser standing next to you.
If anyone is communicating with their admin team, I think they should be told to wake up because it will only get worse before their community is co-opted and they're the ones being "tolerated." I am being constantly reminded of this https://youtu.be/P55t6eryY3g?t=677
The fact that calling it out plays in to the fascists hands is pretty depressing too.

Literally every dog pile I have seen has been some nerd talking shit, a chapo or 2 posting in good faith, the nerd says something extra stupid... nerd gets dog piled.
- you see, when I call you a Chinese bot, or fake Russian names I'm being a very reasonable discussion partner
  when you call me out for being a weird racist it's brigading, trolling, 4chan, and the type of behavior that needs to be defederated from
  
  Death to Russia = non-political
  Death to NATO = I WILL NOT STAND FOR THIS TYPE OF COMMENT
- Usually its 2-3 chapos calling someone a dipshit lib for posting a bad take, and then someone comes along with an nice effortpost an hour or so later.
  Like, i approve of it, people get too used to not being called a dipshit. But newgangs first posters on the scene usually come in hot.

Just post a screenshot of the thread on top of your active feed next time someone accuses us of brigading

I think there's probably a good argument for not going easy on liberalism, ever, because if the roles were reversed they would not give us any room to grow and they would not hesitate. I think there's probably a fine line between showing no mercy and coming across as toxic and giving them an excuse to defederate so no idea what the right call is tbh
- "We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror."
  
  [Hexbear is one of the more active instances in the lemmyverse]
  Our turn has finally come comrades!

The thing that annoys me is the widespread misconception among the lib instances that Hexbear users are just out there spamming PPB on every other instance, when in reality it's much more common that someone starts calling us hate speech spewing Russian bots or whatever and people start responding to that. Oh no, the consequences of my actions

Anothe thing that happens frequently is someone posts something well-crafted in good faith and then a lib responds ”I'm not reading that Kremlin/Chinese propaganda, troll!”, so who are the ones actually not interested in arguing here?
- Well yeah, but it's okay when people call us bots because we're genocide denying turbo tankies. When we take offense we are in the wrong. This is called "Civility".
  It's like "Talking back" that adults pull on children. Kids can't figure out what they did wrong because they didn't do anything wrong. Their crime is existing. Our crime is being outside the Overton Window. Nothing we can do will ever be acceptable.
  
  It's like "Talking back" that adults pull on children.
  !!! I had somehow forgotten about this phrase, even though it was my most frequent infraction and has shaped all of my dealings with children. It still baffles and hurts me that so many adults would rather get mad at kids for having feelings, opinions, and questions than talk to them like they're actual people.
- I’ve posted PPB exactly twice. Once when someone was whining about “I wish tbe hexbears werent here” and once again when someone said “tankie says what” in response to a well written reply (from a lemmygrad comrade)

Libs are just pissed about having their precious assumptions challenged and being outnumbered by people while it happens

Collective action is invalid, everyone must act as individual monads.
- As someone who is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors, what's the problem?

I saw so many bad faith trolls saying they'd block this instance. Would love to keep track of them and toss that quote back at them when they're still repeating their shit takes if the feature ever becomes available.
- it already is wit some apps or a ublock rule. most won't do it tho
  
  I know they won't. Some of them genuinely do want to avoid politics and the puppy kisses smothering a shit take gets and it's totally understandable. For the others they thrive on
  posting their feigned offense at being told theyre wrong. It's like dozens of ben shaliros

As usual, liberals just use different words when they like some vs. when they don't. When they don't like it? Brigading! When they do? Just raising concerns, I hate those red fash tankies.
PS they are envious of our knack for a self-organized united front.
- Their culture is so snarky and anti-collaboration, they get pissy with each other nearly as much as they do with us, and they don't engage any differently in either case. I really do feel bad for these people who are trapped in the atomized, all against all social paradigm of the new internet.
  
  So much of the 'brigading' is just comrades pointing out and challenging racism or bigotry and agreeing that a reactionary is racist or bigoted. I think its this kind of collaboration that comes off as so offensive to them sometimes; it's not something that any of us have to argue about, so it might always come off as co-ordinated to those who are used to saying whatever tf they like without consequence. Must be strange to be challenged when it's acceptable to be a a conservative or a 'progressive' and a POS throughout most of the western world.

Brigading is when leftists are the most active posters and the more terminally online they are the more brigading it is.

i press all i press active yep it's brigading time

This post sounds an awful lot like brigading to me!
- Damn you seeing all these hexbear brigading hexbear? I think hexbear should defed from hexbear for hexbears sake.

It implies there are outside agitators coming in to disrupt a community.
But like.
The only "rule" for joining a community is to come inside. As soon as they post, they're not outside anymore.

I fuck around:

I find out:

My favorite thing is when they accuse hexbear of downvote brigading. I've seen it a couple times.
- I honestly forgot the fediverse has downvotes.
- LOL
- Someone in one of the federation threads posted a screenshot of their comments with negative karma as proof that they were downvoted for comments on Hexbear.
  No bro, you could only have downvotes from other federated users, guess your take was that trash.
- I like when they accuse us of calling them specific insults, and then I can't tell what ones because it's blocked by the filter.

posting links is how the world wide web works
http is hypertext transport protocol
what is hypertext?
hypertext is text with hyperlinks to other hypertext.
Got a problem with hyperlinks? Well get off the world wide web and go be a magazine or some shit.
- Or just say "Hey hexbear please don't participate in this post" and we respect that request and don't
  
  no, why should we?

Folks really haven't grasped that federation means it's not "your community" anymore, you're basically a subreddit now, with all the horrors that entails.
- The liberals are welcome to come in here and "brigade" us as well. We won't complain. We'll just dunk.
  And probably get accused of brigading our own threads or something.
- They're really crushing this speed run.
  "Were creating a decentralized space where different opinions and people can all interact with each other to whatever extent the users want"
  "Hey why are there people here saying that Biden isn't the savior of the working class, clearly this is harassment"
  
  It vibes strongly with the "outside agitator" discourse that always shows up during mass protests. "Surely our wonderful posters would never dunk on me, it must be outsiders coming in to persecute me!"

Even the reddit admins themselves tried to back away from this. They eventually realised that people sharing links to reddit posts is not a bad thing, and wanted more of it.
The only reason they continued to crack down on it is that there is a historical cultural legacy that was incorrectly fostered around it on the site.
- Also because of things like r/cth posing a problem to them

Reddit doesn't have issues with brigading anymore, because brigading is when you post on r/ChapoTrapHouse and also post on other subreddits.
I suppose it follows that Lemmy brigading is when you post on Hexagonal Bear dot Net and also post on other lemmy instances.
- when you post on r/ChapoTrapHouse
  Have you been around long enough to remember the obsession with ShitRedditSays?
  
  SRS was so powerful for it's size. Rent free in the heads of every Redditor to this day

Brigading is a bullshit Redditism. For everywhere else, they're called raids and raids are a reality of Internet life. Even Twitter has a daily main character where people dogpile on someone with a particularly shitty take. If you don't want to deal with raids, you can always join the winning team.

And now the mod of /c/196 is shitting all over Carcosa, just rubbing shit all over Carcosa and our collective faces. This is what happens when you try to pander to bad faith liberals. Why must we collectively give rimjobs to these fucking losers?
- 😞
- I agree. It'll suck if the two instances with the largest trans communities on lemmy defederate, but there seems to be irreconcilable political differences here that will make continued federation impossible.
  From what I see, most users on blahaj, especially the 196 community specifically, have swallowed the state department party line hook, line, and sinker. If you literally believe in all of the CIA atrocity propaganda, then you also believe "tankies" are fascists pretending to be leftists. This disagreement is fundamental, and it can not be fixed by any degree of increased civility or politeness.
  And from the looks of their discussion thread on continued federation with Hexbear, it's their admin more than anyone else delaying the inevitable defederation, their users are mostly cheering to cut us off. They've given us one week to see how it goes, but I don't feel confident things will change.
  When they do end up defederating, I hope the new c/the_dunk_tank rules can be repealed because it seems they've been put in place nearly entirely to appease blahaj.
  
  To me, it's no longer just ideology but how their administrative team is completely slimey. Why would the admin bother to have this sham poll when it's really obvious a supermajority of people would instantly vote to defed from us? It goes back to my comment about people acting in bad faith. She already knows the userbase wants to defed from us and she probably wants to defed from us too, but she doesn't want to own up to being the person to pull the plug of the great trans federation, so she's going to have this sham poll, wait for the very predictable result, and say, "Sorry, I wanted the federation to work, but the userbase wants to defed and I place the needs of my userbase first," in effect pushing responsibility away from herself. This is extremely transparent in what she's trying to do, extremely obvious to people who weren't born yesterday.
  
  Its the June 4th Tiannemen thing that gets me. The 1932 famine is complicated. There's plenty of room to just say "look all these reputable historians say terror famine! You can just ignore the tankie historians who say it was complicated. But there's nothing complicated about June 4th. What they think happen didn't happen, it's widely agreed that it didn't happen. I don't even know who is still spreadying this bullshit.
- Yeah, that shit sucked. Bummed me out.

no more half measures walter
- no more half measured water

Brigading shitheads is a duty.
A key part of Reddit being shit is allowing
to think they represent the "silent majority"
- Wait...this is what the other instances mean by pig shit?? Its a cartoon!?!? This is my first time seeing it, but some of the defed posts are acting like it's being spammed or something.
  
  The original version is
  but the cartoon one is particularly gigantic on other instances due to a bug that shows all emojis at their actual size outside of hexbear.
  
  Huh? Yeah, there's a couple of PPBs
  original recipe,
  carton edition, and the link I don't ahve on me right now.
  
  There’s two versions.
  We also have the original picture as an emote
  
  To be more fair than they deserve, this is a bigger issue when posting on other instances due to a Lemmy bug that enlarges the emotes into full size pictures. However, I’m sure they’ll keep complaining about it once it’s fixed.

Another part that adds to this notion is that libs generally only encounter crudeness from literal children or right wingers.
They think the real world politics is some West Wing-ian paradise of polite discussions and good faith arguments. Only MAGAs resort to ad hominem, ofc, Donald Trump is bad partly because of bad policies but mainly because he's crude! Good Republicans are polite and also want what's good for the country, they just disagree on methods!
This probably stems from anti-civil rights movements saying the blacks are impolite or crude when demanding basic human decency.
Also historically untrue, on at least one occasion, Abe Lincoln bullied an opponent to tears with ad hominem attacks.
Either way, they fully buy into the scam that politeness and taking the high road will win the day except the part where liberalism has been in decay for decades due to what basically amounts to stomping your feet at conservatives every time they slide into fascism.
And they keep doing it, Sisyphus with the rock, Charlie Brown with the ball, libs with politeness. Guess what? Not disrupting evil in any meaningful way means they get to continue to make things worse and get away with it.
- This probably stems from anti-civil rights movements saying the blacks are impolite or crude when demanding basic human decency.
  Likely, and even before that. Using clothes, language, hairstyles, accent, pronunciation to separate the "good" people from teh "bad" people goes back to forever. That's a big part of how Hexbear even happened; Verbal vulgarity and insults and cruelty that was appropriate to the lies, deception, and normalization of horror coming from the Democrats. "We're going to talk to you with the level of consideration and politeness you deserve, which is none you fucking monsters".
- on at least one occasion, Abe Lincoln bullied an opponent to tears with ad hominem attacks.
  This might sound a little
  but in highschool my history class had a facebook group for discussing the politics that came up from the readings and discussions for us to turn into essay bits and junk. We had a conservative weenie in there and while I was very far from being a raging communist or even a socialist the both of us got into it about healthcare laws and other bullshit which eventually just turned into me berating him for just straight up lying about the laws and policies, the fact that he read the entire obamacare law (LOL). Everyone fucking hated all of his shit I got so much praise from everyone in that group, including my future girlfriend. The only time debate was ever tangibly good for me.
  
  That brings back memories of how one of my poli-sci classes back in college usually ended up with me shouting down some reactionary while the professor just did nothing. And I was just a tepid sucdem who read Matt Taibi's tripe back then too lmao.

Everyone knows that any form of dissent is actually brigading, and the more dissent there is, the more you're being brigaded.
The brigading claims get extremely annoying when it's made by someone who just posted something extremely wrong and is now getting corrected by a bunch of people with more knowledge of the facts.