A summary of what happened between Blahaj.Zone and Hexbear.Net

I've had two major issues with these guys. While not necessarily worth defederating everyone, I really don't want to deal with hexbear because:

1. ALL of their content is political. When they first showed up on my feed, I watched what posts/communities came up and how their users interacted on non hexbear posts. I've done my best to remove all politics from my social media. These guys only talked about politics and would go to other communities to turn a normal conversation political.
2. Everything was extreme and obnoxious. I don't understand why everyone keeps calling them polite. There was a constant "you're with us or you're against us"/"my beliefs are always right" behavior that was really annoying, especially in a public space that wasn't polarized before they got there. It reminded me of this one girl from middle school who would walk into a room and loudly talk about whatever she wanted until all the other conversations petered out.

They're more than welcome to behave like that in their home, but they can't go to a public space and expect everyone to cater to their beliefs.

Haha.... They can deal out the punishment but they can't take it themselves... Thought so. Never in my life have I been called a slavery apologist, but 10 mins in hexbear was all I needed.

Well, look at that. The trash took itself out.
Indeed, fuck tankies.

Fuckin tankies, man...

reminder:

left-unity means authoritarian entryism

tolerance must function as a social contract, or not at all.

reject auth apologists.

Reminds me of the often-told story of the punk bar bartender and nazis

based on @iamragesparkle;s tweets

I was at a shitty crustpunk bar once getting an after-work beer. One of those shitholes where the bartenders clearly hate you. So the bartender and I were ignoring one another when someone sits next to me and he immediately says, “no. get out.”

And the dude next to me says, “hey i’m not doing anything, i’m a paying customer.” and the bartender reaches under the counter for a bat or something and says, “out. now.” and the dude leaves, kind of yelling. And he was dressed in a punk uniform, I noticed

Anyway, I asked what that was about and the bartender was like, “you didn’t see his vest but it was all nazi shit. Iron crosses and stuff. You get to recognize them.”

And i was like, oh,ok and he continues.

"you have to nip it in the bud immediately. These guys come in and it’s always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don’t want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after awhile they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too.

And then THEY bring friends and the friends bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now. And it’s too late because they’re entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down.

And i was like, ‘oh damn.’ and he said “yeah, you have to ignore their reasonable arguments because their end goal is to be terrible, awful people.”

And then he went back to ignoring me. But I haven’t forgotten that at all.

I have been so glad that Sync allows instance blocking at a client level. I tried to give them the benefit of the doubt, but after seeing 4 posts from their instance that were just in bad faith "but it's a joke". I went ahead and filtered them and luckily haven't had to see it.

ok il note to add fuck tankies to the sign on of a social home instance

Fuck hexbear. I don't know if they just didn't try to federate with pawb.social or if they got preemptively blocked (or maybe they went, "ew furries" and nothing of value was lost), but I'm very glad they aren't federated here. It means I only get exposed to them via comments, and the ones I tend to see don't shine a good light on the community, especially when they brigade instance meta posts.

Drama is so exhausting.

I ended up filtering the whole instance. The users there are just so obnoxious

My best wishes to the Admins, the whole thing must have been exhausting and depressing. I purposefully stayed out of the entire discussion since I'm not a member of Blahaj. I think it's for the better, because I have read a lot in hexbear and the people there are absolute toxic and unhinged. The mentioned Lemm.ee thread was absolutely swarmed with people from hexbear. Like, 3/4 of the comments must have been them. Anyway, wish you all the best.

"you can't fire me, I quit!"

I made an account on blahaj zone a while back. seeing hexbear posts on the all feed (coming from lemmy.world, they're nowhere) with a load of troll and straight up unhinged commenters was really off putting :/

I like hexbear, but i suppose it comes down to a rather ... "abnormal" type of "liking".

There is definitely a pattern of asshole behavior from hexbear users, but they're fun to verbally spar with and they make Lemmy feel lively.

In the same way that capsaicin causes spicy food to be spicy by stimulating nerves that are intended to warn us of pain and injury while in fact it's actually harmless, I find hexbear's vociferous users to be endearingly abrasive.

Because turnabout is fair play, they're fair game to be rude to. By choosing to interact in a hostile nature, they are consenting to receive hostility. It's only fair. If they can't handle it, then they shouldn't be dishing it out. However, the exchange must be proportional and bigotry can not be allowed.

"Tankie" is not a slur any more than "Lib" is. If they honestly believe that it's socially acceptable to use "Lib" as an insult, then it's sheer hypocrisy to object to "Tankie". But all other known slurs, ableist slurs, sexist slurs, racial and ethnic slurs, are out of bounds and should be reported, and offenders ignored.

If they don't like this arrangement, then they have no business acting like they do outside of their instance and defederation may in fact be necessary.

Makes me happy to be on beehaw where we never had to deal with hexbear in the first place.

I actually left lemm.ee because the sentiment there was anti-defederation. I don't regret it, my experience here has been far better without them.

It didn’t help that the initial user thread about defederation, opened by someone who didn’t like their communities showing up in the All feed as if that is anything but expected, compared them to The_Donald right off the bat (and then remained one of the most vocal and prolific posters on this subject ever since). Prior to that opening salvo, their involvement here had been about 0% and primed the fuse for escalation.

But yeah, poor us.

I don’t even particularly like them, but the response over here had plenty of bad faith “she turned me into a newt!” vibes that were pretty uncool, especially from a few flame-stokers including that initial poster, and another who posted the same screenshot a half dozen times to represent what all of “them” think. It’s interesting to watch in real time how easy it is to decide who “they” are and what “they” think versus what “we” think, especially from a real-life community that often suffers gross generalization about what “they” are like when any individual member acts badly in larger society.

This is a great summary, thanks for writing it up!

So people who get offended being called "lib" fought with people who get offended being called "tankie"?

And now there's... less meaningful discourse between libs and tankies than before? Somehow?

I do not have an opinion on the overall issue more complicated than defederation only makes sense in the most extreme of cases, but I take issue with your claim that there was a "demand" to remove the word tankie from the banner. I saw the message that was sent and it was not a demand, it was a polite request. Once again, I do not care at all about the overall issue, but if you're going to provide a summary, be accurate at least.

I see this as an absolute win for Blahaj

Congratulations, we're more welcoming of TERFs that go mask off after being called out than our fellow trans people.

Hope y'all are proud.

This user is still not banned despite multiple reports on many of their comments.

That's a terrible take, no one wanted to defederate, just the redditors that we all left reddit to get away from and now they're here causing drama again.

What is the r-word now ? rigger ? runt ? ruck ? can we just, simply, not ban words ?

I wish I could understand such a simple message in its entirety without having to decrypt obfuscated language

Hexbear is what happens when you wake up and discover you're in a world where everyone is keffals

To be fair the behavior of c/196's modteam is very disgusting. They perm banned me after I called out someone quoting Keffals (it was recently revealed that they're a literal pedophile (they literally called themselves one)) with the ban message "touch grass" and the modlog is just chock of the mods being openly abusive to people over what amounts to political disagreements. (All anticommunism is always profascism)

I was actually considering writing your admins after I found out about Keffals being a self-admitted pedo but I never got around to doing it. Being banned from a comm for a disagreement is one thing, but it stings a lot more when you were just doing the bare minimum of human decency and being punished for it. What do the admins of Blahaj have to say about the conduct discussed here?

so basically hexbear is the keffals of the fediverse

Hex = 4chan on lemmy.