I don't know which users I mean! The way I interact with hexbear is I see a rotating cast of usernames that are almost completely indistinguishable, there's users who just joined and are about to get banned, there's me, and then there's Dirt Owl who talks about piss.

I'm not really sure any single public figure warrants uncritical support

Excuse me, I am posting publicly right now.

I think you're really underselling the "wasn't as calm" point here.

A user with that mindset has decided to put faith that the moderation team will make good decisions on what they should read. Okay, sure, fine. You want your users to have that faith. But now you are turning comments that annoy you into "why was this comment folded?" discussions. If you fold a comment that people agree with, you're inviting the community to vent about moderation, which I guess you could sensibly handle by just folding those comments too. Problem solved, everyone's happy.

The whole point seems to be that you're desperately searching for some compromise where the moderator can dictate the discussion while avoiding accusations of stifling free speech. But if your comment is the one getting folded, you might not see your free speech as being respected. Why is there a barrier to people seeing my thoughts, but no barrier for others? It's a dream of reducing visibility of opinions you don't like while still being a heroic free speech warrior.

People on forums understand that moderators exist and there are things they cand say that will be censored and removed immediately. So you're working with everyone knowimg speech is not free and we need to trust moderation will not overstep. A modlog for transparency helps with that. Visibly seeing that mods are managing opinions that don't cross the line is not helpful.

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.

I'm here all the time but am too old to be licensed for anything more advanced than emoticons :/ I do think the emojis are often cool when used in moderation (the extreme is I few times I've seen comments that are just one emoji that work perfectly), but there are a few users who use them as punctuation and when you start to get a longer comment written in that style it borders on unreadable to me and I give up very quickly.

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.

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.

things calmed down

Totally disagree on this point. You're right that it wouldn't make sense if that were true.

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.

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.

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.

I'm actually going to open the modlog right now because I'm not confident this is a joke, but in my defense I'm logged on to hexbear.

reporting back: it actually is in the modlog, but I'm not really any less confident that this is a joke