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Is it me or is everyone in hexbear insane?
(lemmy.ml)
something something specter something Lemmyverse 
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this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2024
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the_dunk_tank
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It's the dunk tank.
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.
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oh hell yeah. happy to see grad is still spooky to them too. as an aside, are midwest.social posters aware that grad is basically the same has hexbear (other than having less shitposting and what not) but is blocked for some reason?
History lesson!
Midwest blocked lemmygrad probably three years ago, long before hexbear had federation at all. I'm kind of surprised it's still blocked, but the admins probably see unblocking it as kicking a hornets nest, it would definitely turn into a discussion about hexbear as well.
I understand why they blocked it, there's some history there.
Lemmygrad was the second lemmy instance, started as communism.lemmy.ml, I think there were a bunch of other instances already by the time they moved to the lemmygrad domain. I'm pretty sure midwest started early enough that they predate the move to lemmygrad, I think they're old enough that they were set up even before chapo.chat (now hexbear). I was never on the cth subreddit, but I was already on communism lemmy/lemmygrad before the sub was banned, and I found out about this site when it started from being on lemmy. I actually liked communism lemmy a good bit better than chapo.chat for a while. The community was awesome, I visited daily, I learned a lot of shit and it really shaped my current worldview in a lot of ways. Chapo.chat had more shitposting but there was honestly a good bit more infighting than there is today and I found that somewhat tiring.
When genzedong got banned from reddit, a ton of their users fled to lemmygrad (already on their own domain at this point). It became a different community and the toxicity just went through the roof overnight. I hated it. The federated lemmy instances (chapo.chat was not) stopped coexisting without drama (edit: not totally accurate, wolfballs did not coexist peacefully with any of the others, rest in piss) and a lot of instances started having discussion after discussion about defederating from lemmygrad. Any defederation from lemmygrad but not from hexbear was almost certainly a reaction to that.
I started using lemmygrad less and less and started using my hexbear (I think? Maybe chapo.chat still back then) account much more. I think by that point the culture here had settled in more with less infighting than there had been at the start.
There was one extremely prolific poster that arrived at lemmygrad after the genzedong ban that was just arguing with fucking everyone on so many posts on every federated instance and it really grated on me that the lemmygrad community was rallying around her all the time. I saw her name join hexbear a couple years back and blocked immediately. I looked a couple months ago (blocklists came up in a thread and I looked and that was the only account on mine) and apparently she was banned from hexbear after only nine months of using hexbear with like 5000 comments or something just completely absurd.
Maybe midwest sucks now I don't really know, but they were cool with lemmygrad up until it went through its hostility phase. The lemmygrad culture has changed since then, but pre-genzedong ban lemmygrad was probably my favorite online community I've been a part of, so I'm still a little sad about the whole thing.
interesting history thanks for this writeup, I knew about some of the history but never seen any true retrospectives on it, I only ever knew about lemmygrad and lemmy as a whole after the genzedong quarantine but even then I didnt make my first account until last year. Still, there are way more hexbear users than there ever were on grad even post reddit migration and many are just as if not more aggressive than genzedong posters especially when federation first began and hexbear still didnt get defederated so I dont quite understand why still.
I dont wanna start an argument but i know who you're talking about and I do like her but I get that her posting style probably would be annoying if you were used to a much calmer community. honestly there are a lot of people on hexbear who are just as if not more aggressive and terminally online imo but I guess you probably just block them too
Because it's not the same as suddenly introducing a radical change to the way your community behaves as a whole. Even though the instances somewhat had their own cultures, the federation was really tight-knit at the time and the overarching feel was more or less not combatative in any way shape or form (with obvious exceptions for new users who are about to be banned for the shit they're spewing). When one user joins and they start a lot of arguments with genuine anger, it's really easy to not engage if that's how your community already is. That person will assimilate or figure out that they don't belong. But when they join with an assortment of others to back them up each confrontation, it's harder to keep the same coherence.
but it would be the same for midwest.social, the chaos of the reddit migration happened, things calmed down and then hexbear rejoined the federation causing another huge blowup
Totally disagree on this point. You're right that it wouldn't make sense if that were true.
from my memory stuff had relatively calmed down on the fediverse before hexbear rejoined especially since midwest.social had already defederated from grad, a ton of the drama and craziness was between grad and like .world and the other new instances at least from my perspective as a grad user. what account were you browsing the fediverse around the time all that went down?
A .ml account. I did have an account on communism.lemmy.ml too, but I basically only used it pre-federation and when the federation was having issues. Once the federation was reliable I was browsing lemmygrad through .ml entirely.
hm i wonder if you being on .ml where the devs test stuff before they put it out in full release made the chaos seem even worse and seem even longer, but really I remember the tech issues really being mostly fixed by the time hexbear federated, v.0.18.0 came out in june and hexbear didn't begin federation until august. I guess there was the scripting attack saga but that was fixed by the time hexbear federated too
I'm having a lot of trouble parsing what you're saying here, to the point where I'm wondering if we were talking in different directions earlier in this thread without realizing it.
so when I first joined lemmygrad in 2023, it was pre reddit migration and so the site was relatively a ghost town (273 active users per month albeit before upvotes counted as an active user so the number may have been a little higher). grad was I think the 2nd biggest behind .ml, but ultimately federation as a whole was very slow, there maybe were 50 new posts across the entire lemmy federation every day? on grad it was never more than 20 at least and like i said they were the 2nd biggest instance and maybe even most active at the time as far as number of posts and comments goes. then the reddit migration happened as the devs were trying to do a huge update to switch between websockets and http, and that caused the running instances a lot of problems, websockets are very hard to scale compared to http and they were suddenly getting swarmed with users. Additionally, bugs couldn't be quickly fixed because the devs had to scramble to complete the conversion to http. this finally happened in june which helped alleviate a ton of the technical issues admins were having to deal with at the time.
on top of this, there was both the huge clash between redditors and the existing .ml beehaw midwest.social users and also between the redditors and lemmygrad. midwest.social didn't have to deal with much of the 2nd being that they defederated grad before the migration even took place. all this to say, I remember everything had calmed down to the relatively same level of calmness as before the reddit migration minus the huge increase in content available until hexbear federated in august and started up an even bigger shitstorm than grad caused because it is huge and it has even more aggressive users than grad users. all this to say it seemed like to me hexbear caused a similarly huge if not even bigger disruption to the federation than grad did (i mean good god I just looked and a post about hexbear had 600 comments on midwest.social, by far their most commented local post and that was even with it getting locked who knows how big it would have gotten without that) but still didn't get defederated
I'm pretty sure the genzedong ban I'm talking about was around late 2021/early 2022 timeframe, so that had made its mark on the lemmy culture well before the time you had joined.
The federation issues I'm talking about were the inevitable issues going from federation not existing to testing it out for the very first time. Lemmy in 2020 and maybe up to early 2021 was disjoint sites with no federation at all working yet. Not 100% that I've got accurate time for federation beginning (or anything else really), estimating based on getting my account mid 2020 but I know I was lurking for a good while before. I'm generally not enthusiastic registering new accounts anywhere, and no big issues with lurking, so while it might have only been a few months I was lurking, it could have been as much as over a full year before I actually got an account to participate myself.
it was february 2022, they got quarantined because of the war.
regardless, the original point you made was genzedong users flooding grad caused a lot of huge drama that midwest.social admins/users just did not want to deal with which is why the defederated. so it went from relatively calm to chaotic. I'm saying the same thing happened when hexbear refederated but even worse because of how huge the instance is and how active and aggressive many of its posters are, so it went from a relative calm (even if it wasn't as calm as before 2022) to very chaotic with constant drama and fighting. Once again, hexbear users ended up help ballooning a post about them to by far the most comments the instance has ever had in a local community, that is a ton of activity to come out of no where
I think you're really underselling the "wasn't as calm" point here.
maybe, but there were constant posts everywhere about defederating hexbear and massive threads of hexbear users fighting liberals that dwarfed anything grad did when the migration happen. what I am saying it went from what, a 1 to 80 when genzedong happened and from a 50 to 200 when hexbear joined
Yeah, the last line is essentially what I was trying to say about underselling the impact of starting points. Just looking at outcomes the scale makes you think the second should be more drastic, but when you also consider the context of what the community was beforehand it's factor of eighty vs a factor of four.
i mean I might be underselling how much hexbears impact was. like, everytime any thread mentioned hexbear they blew the fuck up, i forgot about this one and found it in the linked thread but lemm.ee had one that got like 1300 comments and like 900+ of them were from people on hexbear