Stating that my people (and other Baltic nations) are subhuman

As a member of Hexbear for 3+ years I just want to say that this isn’t acceptable over here and would land people with a very serious reprimand or a permaban if they don’t admit to being in the wrong for this. The use of “subhuman” in particular is fascist behaviour and I’d assume it is wreckers rather than longstanding members, it’s not language that socialists are fond of.

The only other thing I will say is that I genuinely appreciate that you’re building this community with your userbase and having these conversations, it’s the correct way to create a unique community culture and have people care about the space.

I’d like to stay federated with hexbear. They bring important information to conversation that people are otherwise not exposed to. American school-taught history is NOT the gold standard in truth.

I feel a little sorry for the Lemm.ee users here that came to make measured, personal posts specific to the annoucement. There’s a fair amount of long off-topic arguements happening in bits of the thread now and that probably makes it harder to read and manage.

This is something that’s often been pointed to as a pure result of Hexbear users or federation with Hexbear and given rise to accusations of ‘brigading here and in the past’. While I don’t think every segue into debate has been useful here, and have also told comrades that I didn’t think this was the place for specific comments (which they removed) I also think there’s some important context to point out - and I hope it helps lemm.ee users wondering about all this traffic not to fall into the trap of assuming the worst based on a couple of comments:

• Hexbear is a very big and very active instance. A very small proportion of users posting in a thread (especially one explicitly about them) can seem like a lot to a lot of instances.
• Hexbear doesn’t have downvotes and Hexbear users do not have the ability to downvote posts or comments on other instances. This creates a culture where if people disagree, they tend to reply, not downvote instead. Another reason we’re very active.
• This thread has constantly been at the top of people’s feeds on Hexbear. if they’re not only set to ‘local’.
• Finally - and I say this fully acknowledging and appriciating the many ordinary, good faith, pleasant lemm.ee commenters that I’ve enjoyed reading and talking too even when I totally disagreed with them - a lot of these off-topic arguements and more heated comments do not come from nowhere. While not at all the majority, I do see a pretty shocking amount of actively hostile, hateful, and insulting behaviour here. Sadly, quite a bit of it would be banned under Hexbear’s moderation policy against things like slurs and hate speech too.

So try to keep in mind if you see salty Hexbear users replying to people that, just in reading through this thread myself, I’ve the following instances of abuse or smears against my comrades (and they continue popping up). So I absolutely support them defending themselves (as long as they stay within the rules here):

• Dimissal as the pejorative “tankie” - 4 times (although we actually think this one is pretty funny usually)
• Users stating that Hexbear users are propagandists - 8 times
• Stating that people from Hexbear are specifically paid Russian/Chinese bots/propagandists - 10 times
• Direct equivalences of Hexbear posters to Nazis or just straight up calling us Nazis/fascists - 7 times
• Insults regarding mental health or IQ that would be classed as ablism on Hexbear - 8 times
• Dismissing users as children - 2 times
• Claiming Hexbear users are using vote-manipulation (impossible, as explained above) - 4 times
• Accusations of deliberate brigading rather than just commenting, being active - 11 times

I’ve tried not to count repeated instances from the same users. But sadly that’s not all. Just a handful of the following are comments that have been made against Hexbear users in this thread, without any kind of equal hostility. As far as I can tell they all still remain:

• “You guys are like cancer”
• “Braindead fucking tankies”
• “Get fucked”
• “Asshole” (multiple)
• That our beliefs are “moralistic bullshut”
• That some of our beliefs are “a criminal ideology”
• A comment that simply states “No Russians”
• That we’re “evil” (multiple times)
• An elaborate comparison to us “vandalising a Jewish graveyard” and other Nazi equivalences
• And of course a comment that explictly minimised the Nazi death toll with glee, seeming to imply they should have killed more. On the subject of disagreeing with equating the hammer and sickle to the swastika (hidden with spoiler tag, for those who don’t want to see it repeated)…

There’s also been numerious instances of users misgendering Hexbear users. I’m not going to put all of these down to malice, but at Hexbear we display our pronouns for a reason - we love our trans comrades! You don’t have to, but could you please at least respect them and not misgender them?

Again, this isn’t the majority, but it’s honestly disappointing and worth keeping in mind amongst some of the louder, minority yells of ‘brigading’ etc.

I posted a comment in the_dunk_tank without noticing where I was. While many people were heated over what I said, it was a misunderstanding due to a lack of specificity and ignorance on my part. After I clarified what I was intending to say, discussion ensued and it was ended on good terms.

The vast majority of users I interact with from hexbear are thoughtful, insightful, kind and genuine individuals that care deeply about humanity and moving forward. The hate that they have is for fascism and actual fascists.

To defederate hexbear would be a disservice to the idea of federated social media.

I am also still quite worried about the amount of distinct users on hexbear who have posted Kremlin propaganda. I so far don’t have reason to believe that these users are employed by the Russian state, but the fact that they are spreading the same hateful content which can be seen on Russian television seems problematic to say the least, and it remains to be seen if moderators can truly keep up with such content.

This was why my eyebrows raised when I saw the Hexbear admin response when they claim that “Russian disinformation is generally either refuted in comments or removed by mods”. Kremlin propaganda is rife in communities like chapotraphouse, and it certainly seems like the mods there let anything slide as long as it is isn’t outright incitement to violence.

I challenged claims made in a couple of different anti-Ukraine posts and despite the fact there were maybe one or two users whose responses were thoughtful, the majority were outright calling me an idiot and a retarded liberal (edit: correction; dumb fuck)

So far, my impression of HB’s userbase is pretty negative because the posts on there that make the front page here tend to be the more shit-posty ones.

That said, I appreciate @sunaurus for the stance he’s taking. There is some positive and thoughtful content on HB - you just have to block the noisier and more idiotic communities so it doesn’t get drowned out.

Thanks for that very thoughtful statement. I am fine with keeping them federated and letting individual users block what they don’t want to see. I find it interesting to see what different communities have to say, even if I find it abhorrent.

I’ve seen the hexbears at work and don’t doubt that they’d class some of my views as woefully liberal but in the main I am enjoying being on a site where the left is so unapologetic, doesn’t go for all this centrist bollocks and is unafraid to call out bullshit.

Having seen the Overton window constantly shifted to a narrower aspect ratio and then shifted rightwards on reddit was a very disheartening experience and I think seeing active hexbears on all threads will be useful in stopping the uptight right when they inevitably decide that that the fediverse needs shifting towards their own Volkish views.

As a Hexbear user and one of the people your mod and OP interacted with in that thread, I find a good chunk of this post concerning and often spurious.

First, personally, I am one of the people who accused him of engaging in behaviour that was tantamount to Holocaust denial. I did so after his repeated, blunt, assertions of false equivalency between the undisputed horrors of Nazi Germany and those - some true, many disputed, some outright refuted - of the Soviet Union. I explained that this practice is known as the ‘Double Genocide Theory’ and even linked to articles by Jewish historians and Holocaust academics that explained the issues with the theory and the history of its official use to whitewash far-right movements, particularly in post-Soviet states. Instead of receiving a modicum of serious engagement he instead deliberately and grossly misrepresented and dismissed not only my point but the work of the Jewish academics I linked before leaving with an insult.

Secondly, what exactly constitutes Kremlin propaganda? This is a usually completely baseless claim that is thrown constantly at Hexbear uses, but also almost any marginally left or anti-war figure on the internet. A small but vocal group of cynical users that cannot and will not tolerate opposing viewpoints use it to shut down debate and to smear people. As your mod/OP stated, Hexbear does both refute and ban clear instances of actual Russian (or other) state propaganda when it’s demonstrably untrue or breaks our very strict rules on bigotry of any kind. But much of what was smeared as Kremlin propaganda was not, because it was not.

Your very own mod/OP engaged in a version of that in the thread on Hexbear and when pushed on what it meant variably either ignored the question or cast the net as wide as anything Russia (state, politicians, or media) have ever said. Several people made the point that a Russian source can say can say something that’s factual, or identify something true and use that as part of a political narrative. Does that objective truth suddenly because false as soon as it’s spoken by Russian lips? These questions were ignored.

Personally, I’d prefer that there isn’t defederation, that the bad feeling that’s undoubtedly been created by members from both instances, is moved on from, and to explore and engage with more of lemm.ee afresh. I also recognise and respect that decision as being lemm.ee’s to make, but felt that users deserve to hear some of the other perspective. Especially when I do not believe your mod/OP is either willing or able to be clear eyed or act in good faith around contentious issues like those highlighted in this thread. Which of course is also to be considered, and decided by, users of Lemm.ee.

Hexbear has been around for three years, all the while dealing with a constant stream of bad faith wreckers and doxxers from 4chan and the like. Ultimately our goal is to foster a broad-tent leftist culture, with primary focus on LGBTQ+ and anti-US-imperialism. Within those two focuses we have a wide range of leftist tendencies, from anarchist (syndicalist, ancom, etc) to Marxist (trotskyist, leftcom, ML, etc). We, I personally, see good-faith disagreement as tremendously valuable and necessary for growth of ideas. We do our best to discourage sectarianism (within the bounds of anti-imperialist, pro-LGBTQ+ leftism) while encouraging discussion.

I really dislike the idea of defederating for difference in political opinions. That kind of thing merely recreats the kind of echo chambers found on corporate social media. I believe Lemmy has potential to be better than that. Differences in philosophy and politics and culture should be moderated at the community and personal level rather than broadly sweeping instance blocks. This leaves the agency up to communities to set rules and define their cultures, banning people as needed at this level rather than simply cutting off entire communities. It also gives users the agency to choose whether to block instances, communities, or users they’d rather not interact with (instance blocking on a user level is coming soon I believe).

The other reasons people give for defederating us (although I believe politics is primary) are spamming and brigading. The former is due to: the oversized emoji bug in Lemmy (we’re sorry for this, on our side the emojis are normal sized so we don’t even realize they’re spamming) as well as the novelty of federation and lack of clear delineation between local and federated posts. The emoji bug will be fixed, and in the mean time we’re on notice to try and avoid using them while on other instances. The novelty will quickly wear off. As for delineation between local and federated, this is a mistake that’s gone both ways: lemm.ee users stumbling upon a hexbear post and not understanding why they’re being responded to differently, as well as hexbear users stumbling upon a lemm.ee post and commenting/meming as if they’re on their home turf. In either case, the rules of the given instance and community should be followed and enforced through bans rather than defederation, and ideally there’d be some CSS to make it obvious when someone’s on another instance to make it easier to follow said rules. Defederating because of this happening would be like a person on Reddit posting their /r/NSFW stuff on /r/awww by mistake, and /r/awww unilaterally blocking all /r/NSFW users, as if there’s no overlapping userbase.

As for brigading, by and large I think people are overreacting because they’re used to the walled garden Reddit has become in its profit-seeking attempts to ban wrongthink. Keep in mind that Hexbear users have no ability to downvote (literally removed from the site for other reasons a while ago), so at most a “brigade” (or most often simply seeing a post on our front page) will be a bunch of (soon-to-be normal-sized) emojis and opinions you may disagree with. If a user is breaking a comm or instance rule they can be banned. If they’re engaging in bad faith or spamming they can be blocked. Hell, even if they’re engaging in good faith they can be blocked if a person simply doesn’t want to see takes they disagree with. But ultimately it seems like a non-issue to me. Allow those of us that want to engage with diverse opinions to do so, and allow the rest to block as they see fit.

I’ve seen more posts complaining about Hexbear than actual objectionable things they’ve done. Maybe that’s a sign of effective moderation, but in general I agree that defederation should always be a very last resort, and it doesn’t feel like we’re even close.

Also, with the ability for users to block instances coming soon, I think everyone will be happy then. At least, users anyway, it will still be down to the admin team to determine if the moderation workload is excessive and act accordingly - but that decision is and should be up to you.

as a lemmy.world user, I can’t tell you all enough about how much our quality of life has improved since we defederated form hexbear.net. far less moderation is necessary and general browsing is far more pleasant not having to constantly be bombarded by those awful stickers and brigades of trolls with their endless baiting and attacks.

why should users and mods be constantly burdened day I and day out with users from an instance whose entire ethos is that of shitposting trolls? if lemm.ee is supposed to be a nice place, why would you intentionally let in a group of people you know have zero intention of comporting to your expected code of conduct and have a well-established pattern of behavior that’s hostile, combative, and toxic towards a large portion of your user base?

yes, defederation is a last-resort option, but what other choices do you have when current user and mod options simply aren’t sufficient? defederation isn’t permanent, and if, by some miracle, hexbear users suddenly become well-behaved, lemm.ee can always re-federate with them. if they weren’t the titanic problem they genuinely are, several other instances wouldn’t also be currently discussing defederation in addition to those which already have.

I’m reminded of an old post I once saw about a bartender who kicks out any Nazi who enters his bar, even if they’re well-mannered and isn’t bothering other patrons. Even though they may be polite and bothering nobody, eventually, they come back with a friend, then another, then then 10 others, and then BOOM, you’e a Nazi bar.

Don’t make lemm.ee a toxic, hostile, troll-filled hexbear bar. keep it nice. keep it safe. ❤️

edit: not even a day later, and I get this pvt message from a lemm.ee user warning me of this scary-ass comment they got with a stalking/death threat they received from a hexbear troll, with a list of users they feel slighted them and other hexbear users.

HEXBEAR USERS ARE DANGEROUS. HEXBEAR USERS ARE TERRORISTS.

names blurred for safety

Banning state propaganda is great, but why limit that ban to Kremlin propaganda? US propaganda is just as, if not more, prevelent and toxic. The narrative surrounding the destruction of the Nord Stream is a good example:

American corporate media and government officials were calling for its destruction and outright threatening to blow it up for months prior to the actual attack. Immediately after its destruction, the corporate news outlets and government officials that had been calling for that very action acted as though they had never done so and presented a unified front that blamed Russia for the attack. Doing some critical thinking and realizing that Russia had neither the opportunity nor the motive to blow up their own pipeline is not Kremlin propaganda. Continuing that critical thinking and realizing that the US had both motive and opportunity, and was a likely culprit because they had repeatedly threatened to blow up the pipeline is not Kremlin propaganda. Shutting down all discussion critical of the US by dismissing it as Russian bots is US propaganda.

update 19/8/2023: i have first heard about hexbear 1 day before this thread, i really didn’t give care about them before

after they did an excellent job to introduce themselves in this thread, i’d like to change my stance to DEFEDERATE NOW! 😆

Many users (including hexbear users) correctly (and politely) pointed out to me in DMs that the symbol has a much broader use than just as the symbol of the USSR, and people elsewhere in the world may not associate it with the USSR at all

imagine i vandalize jewish graveyard, put swastikas all over the place and my defense is “man, swastikas were used all around the word through history, they don’t just belong to nazi germany, you know?” is your reaction going to be “well, you raise some interesting points”?

i doubt that.

“argument” like that is just an asshole trying to obfuscate the facts and delay the consequences of their own action, it is classic propaganda method.

Hexbear admin response After the above events had played out, I reached out to hexbear admins for clarification on their moderation policies and how they handle such cases. I was actually very happy with their response:

do you feel that response is actually going to change something and it is sincere, not just an effort to obfuscate the reality in the line with what i said above?

or is it like this?

the comrade below actually suggests that there is a time and place for such rhetoric, it is just not right here, right now. you have to think politically and wait for our moment, comrade!

i generally agree with your liberal approach to federation, unfortunately sometimes the reality forces you to take some pragmatic steps and i don’t think anyone would blame you if you took the easy solution, you are not obligated to dig through pile of shit.

i am also not a fan of pseudoliberalism in the style of “just let everyone make their own decision”. it is like saying we don’t need police, lets just let everyone to deal with the world themselves. it is obvious nonsense, most people just want to go about their business and they appreciate the fact there is relatively safe environment behind their apartment door.

My view is that this federation of theirs is just sketchy. Their announcement post reads as some barely veiled call to propagandize the Fediverse, and the instance itself seems almost proud in a way to have developed their particular methods in their isolation. Though from what I’ve seen, those methods are mostly just whataboutism and “just asking questions”, not anything particularly novel.

If there was much content or interaction from them that was just neutral, it’d be much easier to swallow, but everything they post or comment always seems be a dog whistle at minimum. And maybe I’m just not noticing all the users not doing that, but the ones I do notice are all over.

All in all, I’d be more in favor of defederation. I’ve seen enough of this from the right already to have an idea of where this is going, and barring a larger effort from the instance to change, would rather it just got nipped in the bud.

i don’t have anything in particular to add, I just want to repeat that clicking on “all” isn’t brigading.