I’m not sure what’s going on over there, but half the time I see a post from there or go into a comment section and it’s just…bad. Like old reddit the_donald bad. Constant trolling, etc. You TS just really bad vibes. I’ve been blocking the communities as they come up, but I’m not sure what else I can do.
I’m hoping it won’t have to come to defederation. If the users are too disruptive that’s understandable. Perhaps they’ll chill out in other instances following this backlash and federation will be viable.
I had never heard of that instance before opening this thread and ooh boy do I wish I hadn’t. I have known these kinds of people for a long time, I’ve been these kinds of people (for a thankfully brief period). Just in this thread there are hexbear users doing the usual tank schtick of goading people into political discussions and calling them neolibs. I can see why some might view them as a neutral or even positive place to have around given their apparent progressivism towards queer people and their mod team being largely trans, but I really don’t think that really makes any difference. You can slap some pride flags on it all but ultimately if you drill down deep enough into the beliefs of any group that proudly calls themselves Marxist Leninist you’re going to find some truly ugly shit. And it’s not just the obvious stuff like having to hear how progressive Cuba is, the stances they take on oppressive regimes always leads to some kind of war crimes/genocide/ethnic cleansing denial, and where they’re self aware enough to not outright deny they will deflect. I can see why from the perspective of queer western people this might all seem a bit esoteric because a lot of them will attempt to dance around the issues but they are there and a lot of people with familial connections to this stuff that do see it for what it is. And before any of their users get excited I’m not going to engage with your shit, I’ve seen you, I’ve been you, I know your shit and I don’t fuck with it. If you just scroll through here you can see the neolib name-calling and tankie memeing/totally ironic (probably) propaganda, they have zero self control. The blue and pink ain’t fooling me.
this is a very vague post, and frankly i strongly doubt you were ever a communist given your basic lack of understanding of marxist principles, there is zero reason to lie about such things.
also im trans and am a czech communist so… it is incorrect to assume that everyone from formerly communist countries hate communism. and i obviously have strong ‘familial connections’ to communism, many of my relatives were partisans that directly killed nazis that invaded our home. it is my experience, at least in czechia, that the communists are the most likely to be LGBT friendly out of any political grouping, and i strongly believe that eastern europe would not be the homophobic cesspit it is now if it remained communist.
Gotta second that, I have similar ‘familial connections’ to partisans in Greece, the UK/US directly helped the monarchofascists back into power after the war. I often wonder what it would have been like for LGBT people in Greece if tens of thousands of communists hadn’t been killed on desert islands thanks to US foreign policy.
the blind support of US imperialism and colonialism and anti-left sentiment from users of my instance in this thread is really disappointing to see, i expected better.
Personally I’ve filtered the instance in Sync, but that doesn’t work for comments. I hope there is a feature for it soon, for I don’t care for Lemmy enough to bother with these morons.
I thought this was a bit overkill, because they seemed well behaved for the most part, although a bit annoying every now and then. But this comment section shows exactly why we probably should. They’re so combative and seem to completely dominate the discussion.
If anything the amount of comments are proving how many trans people are on hexbear, and splitting the trans community for arbitrary reasons is just a bad idea
There being many trans people says nothing about how good or bad it is. While we should ideally stand together, the behaviour of quite some hexbear users is honestly incredibly annoying. Us defederating would be a consequence of their actions. These are not “arbitrary reasons”. They’re brigading a lot of threads, constantly derailing the discussions with all kinds of whatabouttisms and overwhelming all other voices.
This very thread should’ve been a honest conversation with other blahaj users, instead hexbear has taken over everywhere and is leaving no room for opposition. Before this thread I honestly wasn’t against them, but today I’ve been noticing them derailing threads everywhere.
I gotta tell you, I don’t care about blahaj or hexbear as much as I care about trans people being able to talk about stuff. These are just means to an end, and why I value hexbear is because they get rid of transphobic and problematic comments the fastest so its easier to have nice conversations with other trans people. If you don’t like particular people, just block them. They aren’t saying anything transphobic/queerphobic if they’re from hexbear because theyll be banned instantly, so its just personal taste / you disagree on politics at that point.
Idk if youre trans or not, but I feel like most trans people would understand this sentiment. Plus you know, we are engaging / creating content on this platform in other ways, its immaterial whether or not someone is a user here or there.
Yeah, I came into this thread expecting to defend letting blahaj be federated with hexbear, but I’m left seeing a comment section being armwrestled by hexbear users, when this post should really be predominantly blahaj users weighing in on the pros and cons, and the impact of hexbear onto our instance.
Hexbear has a reputation for brigading. They do this intentionally to deny everyone else a platform and shut down any real discussion. They aren’t here to talk in good faith.
Jesus, I didn’t realize that meant solarpunk. That’s not exactly a healthy sign, and neither is the fact I feel significantly less want to defed reading that version of the thread than this one.
Hexbear is more trans friendly than the majority of trans places, honestly. The reason for this is the mods defer to trans users on what counts as transphobia, half the mod team itself is trans, and offensive posts are removed quickly before they can affect other people. I’d say its more trans positive than here, based off what I’ve seen. There are chaser comments that are left up even in response to moderators and admins on blahaj, these would be rapidly removed on hexbear. Plenty of trans places, this one included, also are not very good at weeding out people that are being sneaky about their transphobia and chaser habits, which can poison the well. And not only do the moderators of hexbear do good work, the dev team specifically goes out of their way to program ways to make trans users feel more comfortable (e.g. the universal pronoun tag system).
As a trans woman that is also a survivor of abuse, jokes are made all over the internet about sexual violence and its very hard for me to avoid upsetting my PTSD. Hexbear actively removes these sorts of posts rapidly, too, and even removes borderline cases like bringing up SV out of context and without content warnings. For these reasons hexbear is the main site I visit, no other site or community really comes close.
That’s fine, as a person in nearly the same demographic group, it seems there are 20 people willing to spam a thread with pictures of pigs, concerning imagery with fascist roots and be generally disruptive to the site as a whole, for every level headed person.
I like the way hexbear moderates, but the people affiliated with the instance are growing more and more toxic as time goes on. Is an instance responsible for its user’s behavior? No, I suppose not. But I’ve had to block 50 or so accounts on lemmy to be able to navigate politics and news without constant image spam, and they all come from hexbear.
? what is this exactly. ive been on hexbear since it was founded and havent seen anything like that. the emojis are much smaller on hexbear itself, there is some sort of bug where that doesnt transfer to other instances, many users have been made aware and we now try to spoiler tag the emojis.
the only thing i can think of were the cute little ghost pictures that the falange in spain created, but the lgbt community in spain and hexbear adopted as a ‘fuck you’ to the fascists. its like taking back the word queer.
Unfortunately, I don’t know how to find a list of users I’ve blocked to unblock and take screenshots, but the ones that made me wash my hands of the instance were clearly anti-semitic.
There’s no situation where someone like that sits at the metaphorical table, and I don’t move tables.
idk what an antisemitic emoji would even be, i’ve never seen one used ever. we have emojis that have flags burning that are typically used whenever a country’s government does something racist. someone proposed one for israel but we decided against it iirc because it had a star of david on it. and i doubt youre saying anything in good faith at this point, your account is 12 hours old and has only posted in this thread.
I’ve got the same user across a few instances after the piracy ban on .world. But yeah, I’m a lurker mostly. My point is, there’s a particular vibe that’s presented even within this threads discussion that is pervasivly toxic.
Emoji spam, constant whataboutism, etc. I’m not saying the instance is inherently bad. But the user base is pretty toxic, in my experience so far.
i dont think its right that cishet hexbear users are posting in this thread personally, i know some of them commented here for certain. i think its very fair for our LGBT users to post here against defederation, given it would split lemmy’s largest lgbt groups. and acting like that is brigading is silly, you cant brigade your own real life community. i would say thats the majority of the people who are responding to this thread from hexbear, based on what i know of the lgbt community there.
Not gonna lie, hexbear is probably the most trans friendly place on the internet that I’ve found and taken part in. I’ve had some tough episodes of dysphoria lessened in severity partly in thanks to the community. They’re frankly quite wonderful. Or at least to me I suppose.
That being said, I was kinda excited to see that we were federating with this instance. Finding and being part of other trans inclusive spaces is quite nice, especially since I don’t do a lot of internet crawling for the good of my psyche. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to be around as of late due to my taking care of my girlfriend after a recent surgery. So I missed the time of having been federated.
It’s a shame that it’s coming to this, but what can I do at the end of the day? Perhaps I’ll make an account here. Maybe. Hopefully we can coexist in some fashion.
Ffs I was a long time /r/chapotraphouse user and even tried to use the website after the sub got banned (nothing against it even, just didn’t really have enough of my interests to really keep me) But y’all gotta admit this is pretty fucking embarrassing. Like this is a instance meta post on a pretty small, very explicitly pro trans leftist instance, do ANY of you think you would have actually been defederated in the first place? Like genuinely, do you not think you would’ve just had people like me say “naw they’re chill”. But instead you put an odd couple hundred comments on this thread when the biggest in the little bit, has about 40? And get this, it’s also a thread a defedding from an instance, but actually deserved it, and our admin had already been on the case? Embarrassing.
Big time edit: This was the comment I had originally typed out, and while I still believe quite a bit of it, I’m kinda disgusted by the amount of Russia apologia and pro war sentiment generally. But let me guess, I must be pro nato?
To be clear, I’m not comparing the politics of what I see. I don’t care about that. I’m actually a leftist as well as trans myself. The vibe is very much the same though. Very edge lord. Like I don’t want to see the word “chud” ever again.
Other instances (including mine) have defederated from them. Apparently a tonne of people from Exploding Heads just commandeered the instance one day. Hexbear admins are also inactive.
Why would a ton of conservatives commandeer an explicitly leftist instance, and why would a ton of conservatives have a bunch of pronouns in their bios + trans emotes
You can filter out instances with Ublock Origin for desktop and Sync for mobile. This will remove any posts and comments from users from that instance. It’s a lot easier than trying to get your instance admin to defederate a major instance or setting up your own while still getting rid of hexbear for you
Thanks for mentioning Sync can do this. I have been wondering about this since I first joined for the various nsfw instances (didn’t want to blanket block NSFW posts)
I literally had someone from lemm.ee openly being enbyphobic in my replies to one of my posts in 196 and they didn’t even get banned, just had their comment deleted. https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/a085d11c-6c12-418c-983c-97b163ea90da.png[The link was to the picture of the pig shitting on its balls, but I edited the post later to add links to actual sources about the stuff I alluded to]
In hexbear they wouldve been banned within about 20 minutes of making the comment after being publicly bullied, blahaj.zone isnt as queer friendly as hexbear because it’s not as unfriendly to bigots.
Blahaj is still my second favourite instance on Lemmy after hexbear because it’s like the second most queer friendly instance and I’ve had a lot of pleasant interactions with it’s users, but still, to say they’re more queer friendly than the instance that was willing to basically rip itself in two and stitch itself back together to remove transphobes seems a bit much
I literally had someone from lemm.ee openly being enbyphobic in my replies to one of my posts in 196 and they didn’t even get banned, just had their comment deleted.
That’s a limitation of the moderation tools in Lemmy. Only one report appears per instance, and if a community mod actions it, the report is cleared, but they lack the ability to instance ban.
And when that happens, the admins who can instance ban never even see the report. That’s as true of hexbear as here.
Either way, that user is banned now that I’m aware they exist. A quick look through my moderation history will show you that queerphobia or gatekeeping of any kind gets you a permanent ban
Ok, I didn’t realise that, sorry for mischaracterising you and your instance. Also in retrospect I was being overly combative, so sorry about that too.
It would be a shame to defed because I like some of the communities here and like these are the two biggest trans instances, so like, hopefully it doesn’t come to that
I’m sorry but I don’t understand how commenting under a post from an instance we’re federated with is considered brigading. It’s not like we’re posting about/linking to a separate space to infiltrate. Our communities are under the same umbrella, so this just shows up in our feed.
Are people from hexbear jumping into a discussion that should maybe primarily be reserved for blahaj? Maybe, but I think people just want to offer our side of things, and we honestly just don’t want the two biggest queer spaces in the fediverse breaking up because we’re often edgy and argumentative/passionate about leftist beliefs.
I also don’t think we’re derailing from anything or preventing you from having a defederation conservation among yourselves just because we leave replies.
I’m sorry but I don’t understand how commenting under a post from an instance we’re federated with is considered brigading
The top two posts on your instance currently are pointing your users at this thread. The second one (hexbear.net/post/339116) is specifically pointing your users at me, and is posted in a community that is described as “This is where you come to post big-brained hot takes by chuds, libs, or even fellow leftists, and tear them to itty-bitty pieces with precision dunkstrikes”
I’m calling it a brigade, because that’s what it is.
Unless that changes, unless something is done, defederation seems inevitable. Blahaj Zone and Blahaj Lemmy exist to give trans and gender diverse folk a safe and protected space. Right now, folks from your instance are doing their absolute best to disrupt that space, because of a difference in political ideology.
Here, in this in this space, for me as an admin, political ideology takes a back seat to protecting trans folk and their spaces. That goal is why I wanted to federate with you even though lemmygrad got dropped. You, like us, are through and through protective of gender diverse folk. But somehow, that’s not enough for you. We don’t agree on politics and we never will, but we both do agree that queer and gender diverse rights are under threat around the world, and instead of finding solidarity in that, you’re turning on your peers, whilst patting yourself on the back for being inclusive.
Ok I didn’t see that thread because I tend to look over some posts. I still think drawing attention to a post isn’t fully the same when we’re all one giant community of communities. I feel like you’re being a little over reactive to some terminally online people being argumentative and annoying you a bit. Maybe it is sort of a brigade tho.
you’re turning on your peers, whilst patting yourself on the back for being inclusive
Respectfully I feel like you’re doing this right now, wanting to separate from other trans folks just because the vocality of their beliefs is annoying you and a few of the people in this thread were rude. Unfortunately stuff like this is gonna happen if someone makes a post specifically about us, but in no other cases have we gone around dominating blahaj posts. I also don’t see how we’re “disrupting a safe and inclusive space” by giving our takes.
Ok I didn’t see that thread because I tend to look over some posts
Cool, but I told you it was a brigade. I wasn’t making it up. You made the choice to disbelieve me, and then to argue with me about it, despite lacking that information.
Respectfully I feel like you’re doing this right now, wanting to separate from other trans folks just because the vocality of their beliefs is annoying you and a few of the people in this thread were rude.
I don’t want to defederate from you. How much fucking clearer can I make that? I’ve been putting up with hundreds of your users dunking on me here, even more of them on your home instance. I’ve had people posting pig shit emojis, and spamming this thread up so much that it’s impossible to find content from the blahaj users that it was aimed at.
Hell, the whole thing blew up because people misread my meaning. I don’t give a shit if you want to pull down NATO or any other organisation that systemically disempowers folk. What I care about is that you aren’t wishing death on people. Yet, you’re all so hung up on NATO, that my clarification hasn’t changed anything. Even if you disagree and think that some people deserve death, disagreeing with our stance of “don’t wish death on anyone” seems like a pretty fucking strange issue to bring this onslaught of bullshit on.
Yet despite all of that, you’re still federated. This post is still unlocked. I’m still engaging with you.
That is because I do not want to defederate from the strongest trans supportive lemmy instance out there aside from ourselves.
Yet it seems inevitable that we will have to, because this shit isn’t slowing down. Not a single one of you has tried to reign it in. None of you have called for us to have our space to talk about our own instances policies. None of your admins have stepped in and called out the post that breaches your own instances code of conduct (requiring you to be kind to your fellow leftists, remember the human and not insult, demean or harass anyone).
Instead of finding solidarity, you are dogpiling bullshit (and pigshit) on to your peers, and you have become part of the problem. Unless something happens so you stop disrupting communities and discussions designed to protect and support trans folk, unless something happens and you pull your fucking heads in instead of dogpiling trans folk you disagree with, we will have to defederate from you anyway, despite not wanting to, because you have become a source of harm.
Here, in this in this space, for me as an admin, political ideology takes a back seat to protecting trans folk and their spaces. That goal is why I wanted to federate with you even though lemmygrad got dropped. You, like us, are through and through protective of gender diverse folk. But somehow, that’s not enough for you. We don’t agree on politics and we never will, but we both do agree that queer and gender diverse rights are under threat around the world, and instead of finding solidarity in that, you’re turning on your peers, whilst patting yourself on the back for being inclusive.
I think this is what you don’t get. You’re in particularly taking offense at the “Death to NATO” phrase. NATO is a military alliance. It is a part of the greater International infrastructure that devastates many countries and makes the lives of people of color and LGBTQIA unsustainable in these intentionally maldeveloped countries. I am myself, not trans, but my family was forced to give up their family and community to immigrate to the west due to economic conditions created by the West. You like many in the current news cycle are propagating the idea of this walled garden at the expense of the livelihood of your potential allies in the International sphere. This is why you are receiving particularly strong push back. You are in particular attempting drive a hard line between Western Trans people and and everyone else and minimizing the idea of politics, as if this international politics does not have the power to ruin lives. I am not naive to think that we can agree on this politics but drawing the line on simply the phrase “Death to NATO” is pretty exaggerated. NATO exists for the purpose of violence.
You’re in particularly taking offense at the “Death to NATO” phrase.
No, I’m not, and if you’d read up on my posts, instead of assuming that, you’d see I’ve clarified things.
I don’t give the slightest fuck if you want to dismantle organisations, countries, companies or any other source of systemic disempowerment of people, particularly queer folk. In this context, on this instance, when I admin, politics take a back seat to protecting trans and gender diverse communities and spaces, so I am not going to defederate from a group of trans folk over political differences, and I was never going to do that. It was never on the cards.
What I draw the line at is wishing death on people.
And maybe you think there are some people that are so bad, that it’s ok to wish death on them. I don’t agree, but so what? It’s a pretty fringe fucking point of difference to bring this onslaught of bullshit from your users on.
So an instance can go berserk, but as long as they’re trans allies, they can stay? Nah fam, cut out the cancer and they can go elsewhere when they realize they’re cut off. There is no such thing as a saving grace stance when they’re posting total shit. The good people can and should migrate, while the cancer site dies. That’s how this whole concept works.
We removed downvotes so nobody could downvote trans people. We are the the only instance that has required pronoun tags (we ban people who complain about them). WE LOVE OUR TRANS COMRADES
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