Asklemmy

Just lurk there for a while. IMO, biggest misconception is that they're omnicidal lunatics. They have a lot of in-jokes and bits that seem incomprehensible and border on unhinged to an outsider, and sometimes they kinda lean in to the perception. But if you spend enough time there you realise they're very intelligent and deeply empathetic people. The "unlimited genocide on the first world" rhetoric is an expression of frustration rather than actual intent.

Yeah I like some of the hexbear comms and sometimes participate. Vegan Theory Club is an offshoot of Hexbear after the great vegan struggle sessions of 2021 when my account there got banned. We're mainly a two discord servers called Vegan Theory Club and Vegan Home Cooks and we launched the lemmy more recently.

I have some hexbear communities turned off in my feed, but I have subscribed to some also. Lemmy is growing but it’s still a small community. Sometimes, I want to see posts on a niche topic and I’ll take what I can get.

that hexbear supports the entirety of russia. a lot of times i hear stuff like "they don't actually care about queer people since they support russia", which is a gross oversimplification of their views. they hate russia's reactionary politics.

this misconception i think comes from the war in ukraine, in which if ukraine wins, they get to join nato. hexbear considers nato to be an imperialistic organisation that holds power towards a large portion of the world, and therefore, anything that opposes it should receive support, albeit critical.

Yeah, they're chill, idk. If you enjoy arguments and can handle some friction without breaking down, you'll fit right in, I think. The only main difference I've noticed is that they're a bit gayer than folks here, or at least talk about it more, and they don't use obvious American propaganda/party lines as the framework to understand the world.

I had a burner account back years ago before it was federated with the rest of Lemmy.

I'd already well-passed the stage where I was spending more time online than doing actual movement building on the ground so the low-content and causal comms are too chatty for me to even bother. There's also some underlying abusive moderation (at least there was a couple of years ago), but that's something I've seen on everywhere from .world to .ml, this is volunteer work and beggars usually can't be choosers, there's nearly always someone on a staff team who just deletes things they don't like. Purging that behavior is tough without a healthy mod culture and mods who care enough to start a fight.

On the other hand, there's some good comms among the slop and they keep liberals from coming in every minute with dumb questions they could have checked with a single web search or just reading an FAQ, so that's a huge plus (tourists can go to lemmy.ml or lemmygrad.ml with any good-faith questions). Their dev work is commendable. For the place that it is, it's done alright for itself, there's a decent foundation from what I can tell, which is especially hard for a big-tent socialist site to build given the conflicting worldviews and values that arise.

If so, what are some misconceptions or seldom known facts?

It's pretty hilarious how many of them seem repulsed by /leftypol/. They're remarkably similar cultures, just less PDFs and "read a fucking book" culture, less catgirls and no ironic slurs.

hexbear is just fine. the "problem" with them is that they are leftists. same with lemmygrad or to a lesser extent lemmy.ml

i predict some people will hate a lot on them here, but you should simply just go talk to them and decide for yourself what you think of it.

This account's instance federates with hexbear. Outside of politics and topics du jour, there's little difference between them and you or me.

they're pretty fun and very queer (both strange and rainbow)

They're just fine. Our views don't always align but I've found suspending disbelief is very different from believing.

https://atkinsbookshelf.wordpress.com/2019/05/01/famous-misquotations-it-is-the-mark-of-an-educated-mind/

I do browse. I agree with them on many political issues, and yet I can't seem to get along with any of them. Why does it seem like they are all such assholes?

I have a lemmygrad acct, possibly. but I just browse via this one mostly anyway.

My other account is on an instance that federated with them, this one does not.

I've never had any major problems from them, just bad takes and occasional belligerence from specific users. But I also don't seek out their communities.

I love hexbear, have an account there too. They are nice and I've never had a problem.

I accidentally subscribed to one and it was filled with tankies acting like they were the true and righteous moral bastions of society while espousing blatantly ableist ideas and pure wishful thinking rewrites of history. I left and blocked that community.