— "This is just how it always starts, don't it? Every inch you give them, they take miles. It's the same obvious type of bullshit that the people who push these ideas through never think about. Around these parts, we take care of our own — at least, that's the way it ought to be. Last thing we need is more shitstirrers coming in here to mess with the closest thing we've carved out to something decent. Hell, we barely had ourselves sorted out before whoever-on-top opened up their cages on us." He spits. "Bunch of fucking assholes."

Grad is fine. Rest should go. The mod log is making me more depressed by the day.

Ngl I don't want to defed.

I really enjoy seeing what your instance has to say to some dumb shit I read. I think that opens eyes more than anything. When I saw calm and collected fact gathering (and fuckitt chaos from Lemmy.world) I was brought over onto the dark side.

federating with SJW was an obvious mistake and I really don't see why it was re-litigated.

I have been compulsively arguing in a way I haven’t in years. It’s extremely unhealthy and has effected everything from my sleep to my mood to my concentration. Please do something about all these ignorant cissies. Hexbear was fully of cis ally’s who were not only good on the issues but knew how to hang and not make shit weird.

I'm glad some of y'all are having fun but I like the website a lot less since federation

Okay I actually have it all figured out, a solution that will make everyone else, but most importantly, me, happy.

Hexbear dederates from everyone but lemmygrad. A new instance spins up, called Chapo.chat, and federates far and wide. Hexbear federates with Chapo.chat. Hexbear users can come out into the post trenches at will but also cycle back for some lib free r&r. And I get to finally be free of being called a fuckint Hexbear.

How much is it to host one of these bad boys I'll cover it.

I'm generally pro-federation but I absolutely agree with defederating with SJW. My reason for voting to federate was that I felt that picking up a few comrades is worth dealing with all the libs. But now I can confidently say there are no comrades on SJW. I haven't seen a single cool person on there. Plus even the admins have gone off about "anti-white racism" while defending the racist Xi image. They're all shit.

The other instances have the occasional cool person which imo makes it worthwhile imo and we've been gradually moving towards some sort of understanding, like about what summons the horde. Bringing in a new set of libs sent us right back to square 1 and washed away any progress. Defederating with them would go a long way to improving things while losing absolutely nothing of value. But lemmy.ml and lemm.ee are not nearly as bad imo.

They are already voting to defederate from us with almost everybody voting yes, so your wish is about to come true anyways.

Your point about how liberals refuse to read all of the well cited responses and posts is so true. They don't engage at all, just troll and act smarmy about it while not learning a thing.

On one hand, I'm loathe to let those shitheads think they've won, on the other hand we defedded blahaj zone for a lot less, idk I think maybe we do need to defed them for like the amount of reddit shit they have on their instance

Personally I enjoy the federation but I'm not the one who got bs in their inbox. You made a lot of good points about the site filling a safe space niche and I can empathize with that.

Is there currently no way to let users block instances like mastodon does?

Sorry comrade

me just realizing SJW is referring to sh.itjust.works

Jesus Christ

I think things chilled out a bit with everyone we federate with honestly. The new addition kicked the hornets nest again of course, but I think keeping federation is generally a good idea. We're exposing other's to new thoughts and views, and pushing back against people's default liberal ideology. Shit Just Works is probably going to defed soon anyway. Though we could always defed them first if needed.

I had a dude in my private messages going on about how I was both mutilating myself and other children. Many more people on hexbear have had similar experiences, with these worthless ignorant scum popping in to deliver the political equivalent of a giant shit.

Fuck these ignorant adult babies, I'm sick of seeing their shit, I'm sick of hearing about their shit.

The first week was funny, now it's annoying. The current sorting algo doesn't help either.

Nice being federated with lemmygrad tho

I had a dude in my private messages going on about how I was both mutilating myself and other children.

This is fucked. We should defed whichever instance this came from immediately

The one thing positive I will say is that this is the lowest level of infighting I’ve seen among Hexbears in years.

Yeah, sincerely been wanting to defed from libb.ee, the sh.itworks, and brogramming.dev since the get-go. I don't even get why anyone thought they were a good idea to federate with in advance. It's been awful the entire time and the only good thing was what, getting to angrypost at shitheads? If I wanted that, I'd have stayed on Reddit.

I've seen so few good posters from these places that I could count them on one hand, most of the rest of their cool people have switched over here or to the 'grad already. The rest are always welcome to join us. Other than that it's been a constant flow of the worst dreck I've seen in years. Literally the exact reason I've entirely left all social media except for Hexbear, and now we chose to enshittify ourselves and become a warzone? Nah, this fucking sucks.

On the dilemma of interacting with Reactionary views as Zoo Animals:

On reddit, during the r/chapotraphouse era, the culture there had developed into not just a general shitposting forum but an alternative and assertive socialist/leftist voice against liberal answers for socioeconomic and political issues, as well as a venue to harass and identify reactionary users and communities. As Hexbear's @Civility hypothesized three years ago, the CIA shut down r/chapotraphouse for these reasons.

After r/chapotraphouse was quarantined and banned, the users dissovled and migrated to the Discord and finally to Chapo.Chat - which became Hexbear - and formed an independent community and identity from r/cth. It became a safe space to vent and share memes, to shitpost, and find emotional (and even, at times, financial) support.

I think we should preserve this quality of Hexbear. I don't think arguing with liberals insistent on their values of qualifying the validity of our opinions and identities with conditional allegiance to institutions of capitalist hegemony and white supremacy is a valuable endeavor. Nor should we really tolerate their views, or dishonest tactics of discussion. I'd prefer to disengage with them altogether, but I suppose like many of you, I can't help but respond sometimes too.

It was fun on Reddit to "interact with the Zoo Animal" routine because Reddit is a mass media platform that is capable of propagandizing and sewing seeds of doubt into dominant political and socioeconomic narratives, and to stoke curiosity into alternative narratives, ideologies, lifestyles, and beliefs, with the hopes that those alternatives were not the fascist ones. (But it was reddit.)

This place, even the lemmy federated instances, is a closed vacuum and developed to be a safe space from bigotry, sexism, transphobia, fascism, and liberal apologia.

Then federation happened, and the people who want to treat the interaction with reactionaries as a shitposting game to interact with like zoo animals and elevate misanthropic voices back into our minds - for we read their text in our internal voice - is exasperating and humiliating. I don't want to be saturated with it outside of reddit.

Exposing ourselves and others to bigotry and liberalism is not fun. "Just log off or block them" works in the short term, but in the long term toleration of these things will deform what the community had become beforehand. Bigotry and JAQing off Liberalism isn't amusing. It's offensive.

(It's always the same defense of liberalism: whatabout Russia and China? History saw what the dissolution of the USSR wrought: millions of Russians dead from social murder. This is liberalism's goal: https://hexbear.net/comment/3734619. For Russia once more, and finally for China. After that, well always a new enemy to destroy! Never a need to reform the US!)

I think sjw really needs to be considered for defed. Maybe I'm just reading the room wrong but lemmee and ml seems to have chilled since the first week idk. I've yet to see a good take from programmer one outside of niche focused discussions on non political things (tech support, piracy ect.)

Edit: there is someone from the programmer one being chill and nice in this thread

i love lemmy grad and the other nice one. FUCKING HATE THE OTHERS. it sucks. and they lurk too. reactionary takes get massively upvoted now and it suuuuuuuck knowing those fuckers are out there. keep lemmy grad though they are nice.

Reopening the pipeline is great, and there are many new comrades who've found their way home to Hexbear thanks to federation. We're also probably making the rest of lemmy better by relentlessly mocking libs and chuds to the point they decide to keep their reprehensible takes to themselves. That doesn't work on all of them, but I do imagine it works more often than we'd think.

But all of this is not worth our trans and other marginalized comrades losing a space that was once almost entirely free of this bullshit. Plausibly the only such space on English speaking internet.

However, I do wonder if there are any other effective measures we can take to protect our trans comrades other than outright defederation. It would be a shame to lose the pipeline if it were possible to do something else about this. Perhaps taking away features from users on non Hexbear/Lemmygrad instances? Maybe it's feasible to remove their ability to DM Hexbear users.

Admins could also work on expanding the mod team to loosen the workload and reduce how much of this disgusting crap any one mod sees, thereby reducing mod burnout and also cleaning out the reactionary filth faster. I'm sure there are many known trustworthy Hexbear users who would be happy to join the mod team to accomplish this. Not only that, maybe we could give all users who have been active on this site for years mod-lite powers to temporarily hide potentially reactionary posts and comments made by users of other instances until an actual moderator can review it.

SJW is probably a lost cause and should be defederated anyway, but I've seen a lot of nice lemm.ee users who I would be sad to see go rather than attempting the above measures.

Defed from everything as bad or worse than blajah.zone.

Right now it kind of seems like they had extra scrutiny placed on them compared to other instances, other instances should have the same level of scrutiny

Edit: also it feels necessary to state that there are two competing interests that we should be mindful of. Maintaining hexbear as a chill place for trans people and poc vs dunking. It is obvious which one of these should be more heavily prioritized.

Aside from the big liberal instances, we're federated with some small ones that I don't mind seeing, like Star Trek.website or the Life is Strange-themed instance. I hope we can keep those at least.