Hey folks
I have been receiving a lot of messages every single day about federation with hexbear. Some of our users are vehemently against it, others are in full support. The conversation does not seem to be dying down, rather, the volume of messages I receive about it seems to be increasing, so I am opening this public space where we can openly discuss the topic.
I am going to write a wall of text about my own thoughts on the situation, I’m sorry, but no tl;dr this time, and I ask anybody participating in this thread to first read through this post before commenting.
Before I go any further, I want to be clear that for anybody who participates here, it is required to focus on the quality of your posts. That means:
- Be kind to each other, even if you disagree
- Use arguments rather than calling people names
- Realize that this is a divisive topic, so your comments should be even more thoughtful than usual
With that out of the way, there are a few things I want to cover.
On defederation in general
First of all, I am a firm believer that defederation must be reserved only for cases where all other methods have failed. If defederation is used liberally, then a small group of malicious users can effectively completely shut down the federated network, by simply creating the type of drama between instances which would inevitably result in defederation. In my view, federation is the biggest strength of Lemmy compared to any centralized discussion forum, so naturally I think maintaining federation by default is an important goal in general.
I am also a believer in the value of deplatforming hateful content, but I think defederation is not the best way to do this. Banning individual users, banning communities and establishing a culture of mutual support between mods and admins of different instances should be the first line of defense against such content. There are some further steps that can be taken before defederation as well, but these are not really documented anywhere (in order to prevent circumvention). The point is: for myself, defederation is the absolute last resort, only to be used when it is completely clear that other methods are ineffective.
Finally, I am wary of creating a false expectation among lemm.ee users that lemm.ee admins endorse all users and communities and content on instances we are federated with. Here at lemm.ee, we use a blocklist for federation, which means our default apporach is to federate with all new instances. We do not have the resources (manpower, skills and knowledge) necessary to pass judgement on all instances which exist out there, as a result, users on lemm.ee are expected to curate their own content to quite a high degree. In addition to downvoting and/or reporting as necessary, individual lemm.ee users are also able to block specific users and communities, and the ability to block entire instances is coming very soon as well.
Having said all that, in a situation where all other methods do indeed fail, defederation is not out of the question. Making such a call is up to the discretion of lemm.ee admins, and doing it as a last resort is completely in line with our federation policy.
Regarding hexbear
Hexbear is an established Lemmy instance, focused on many flavors of leftism. They have quite a large userbase who are very active on Lemmy (often so active that they leave the impression brigading all popular Lemmy posts). One important thing to note is that while some forms of bigotry seem to be quite accepted by many hexbear users (but seemingly not by mods - more on that below), they at least are very protective of LGBT rights (and yes, I am quite certain that they are not just pretending to do this, as many users seem to believe). Additionally, while I have noticed quite high quality posts from hexbear users, there are also several users there who seem to really enjoy trolling and baiting (very reminiscent of 4chan-type “for the lulz” posting), and it’s important to note that this kind of posting is in general allowed on hexbear itself.
The reason this whole topic is important to so many people right now (despite hexbear being a relatively old instance), is that hexbear only recently enabled federation. A combination of their volume of posts, their strong convictions, the excitement about federation, and the aforementioned trolling has made them very visible to almost all Lemmy users, and this has sparked discussions about the value of federation with hexbear on a lot of Lemmy instances.
My own experience with hexbear
I want to write down my own experience with interacting with hexbear users, mods, and admins over the past few days. I believe this experience will highlight why I am hesitant to advocate for immediate full defederation from hexbear at this point in time, and am for now still more in favor of taking action on a more individual user basis. Please read and see how you feel about the situation afterwards.
Background
My first real contact with hexbear users was in the comments section of a post in this meta community requesting defederation from hexbear by @glimpythegoblin@lemm.ee. That post is now locked, because several hexbear users very quickly started doing the aforementioned “for the lulz” type spamming of meme images in the comments (these are actually just emojis, but they are rendered as full-size images on all instances other than the source instance, due to a current Lemmy bug).
I did not want to take further actions in that thread in general (for archival purposes), but I did take one action, which in retrospect was a mistake: I removed a comment which contained the hammer and sickle symbol. I ignorantly associated this symbolism with Kremlin propaganda, and the atrocities my own people suffered at the hands of the soviet union during the previous century. 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. I am grateful for users who pointed this out to me without resorting to personal attacks.
Let me be clear here: while I do not have anything against leftism or communist ideas in general (in fact in today’s world, I think discussion of such ideas is quite necessary), Kremlin propaganda has no place on lemm.ee. Any dehumanizing talking points of the Kremlin on lemm.ee are treated as any other bigotry, and if communist symbolism is used in context of Kremlin propaganda (that is the context in which I have been exposed to it throughout my whole life), then it will still be removed. But there is no blanket ban on communist symbolism in general on lemm.ee, and discussing and advocating for leftist and communist topics (as distinct from the imperialist and dehumanizing policies of the Kremlin) is certainly allowed on lemm.ee.
Hexbear user response
Coming back to the events of the past few days: soon after my removal of the comment containing the symbol from the meta thread, two posts popped up on hexbear. One was focused on insulting and spreading lies about me personally. Another was focused on diminishing the horrors of the soviet occupation in my country. In the comments under both of these posts (and in a few other threads on hexbear), I noticed some seriously disturbing bigotry against my people. There were comments which reflected the anti-Estonian propaganda of the current Russian state, things like:
- Suggesting that my people has no right to exist
- Stating that my people (and other Baltic nations) are subhuman
- Claiming that anybody critical of both nazi and soviet occupations is themselves a nazi and a holocaust denier
I expect to hear such statements from the Russian state - here in Estonia, we are subjected to this and other kinds of bigotry constantly from Russian media - but to see it spread openly in non-Russian channels is extremely disturbing. Such bigotry is completely against lemm.ee rules in general. Additionally, my identity is public information, because I feel it’s important for the integrity of lemm.ee that I don’t hide behind anonymity. Considering this, I’m sure you can understand why I am very worried about my own safety when people leave comments in many unrelated threads (where my original posts are not even visible), baselessly calling me a nazi and a holocaust denier.
Note that the goal of this post is not to start a new debate in the comments about the the repressions of the soviet union in Estonia or other occupied territories, but if the topic interests any users, I can recommend the 2006 documentary The Singing Revolution (imdb). The trailer is a bit cheesy, but the actual film contains lots of historical footage from the soviet occupation, and also many interviews with people who experienced it, who share stories which are deeply familiar to all Estonians. If anybody is interested in further discussion, then I suggest making a post about it in the Estonian community here: !eesti@lemm.ee.
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:
- They immediately removed the personal attacks and dehumanizing comments containing Kremlin propaganda from Hexbear, and assured me that such content is always handled by mods
- They told me that while there are all kinds of leftists on hexbear, Russian disinformation is generally either refuted in comments or removed by mods
- They implemented some additional rules on hexbear to try and reduce the trolling experienced by many other instances, including ours: https://hexbear.net/post/352119
My personal take-aways
Let me play the devil’s advocate here and employ some “self-whataboutism”: among all users that have been banned on lemm.ee for bigotry, the majority were actually not users from other instances, and in fact people with lemm.ee accounts. If we judge any larger instance only by bigoted posts that some of its users make, then we might as well declare all instances as cesspools and close down Lemmy completely. I believe it’s far more useful to judge instances based on moderation in response to such content. Just as we remove bigoted content from lemm.ee, I have also witnessed bigoted content being removed from hexbear.
At the same time, I am aware of some internal conflict between hexbear users over the more strict moderation they are now starting to employ, and I am definitely keeping an eye on that situation and how admins handle it.
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.
Where thing stand right now
I am not convinced that we are currently at a point where the “last resort” of defederation is necessary. This is based on the presumption that our moderation workload at lemm.ee will not get out of hand just due to users from that particular instance. My current expectation is that as the excitement of federation calms down (and as new rules on hexbear go into effect), the currently relatively high volume of low effort trolling will be replaced by more thoughtful posts. If this is not the case then we will certainly need to re-evaluate things.
Additionally, nothing is changing about our own rules regarding bigotry. Especially relevant in the context of Kremlin propaganda, I want to say that dehumanizing anybody is not allowed on lemm.ee (hopefully I do not have to spell it out, but this of course includes Ukrainians, LGBT folks, and others that the Kremlin despises), and action will be taken against any users who do this, regardless of what instance they are posting from.
Finally, I am very interested to hear thoughts and responses from our own users. I am super grateful to anybody who actually took the time to read through this massive dump of my own thoughts, and I am very interested to get a proper understanding of how our users feel about what I’ve written here. Please share any thoughts in the comments.
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! 😆
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.
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.
This is a bizarre and perhaps manipulative comparison. What is the Jewish graveyard in this context? Because the vandalizing a Jewish graveyard part does a lot to provide context to the action in your hypothetical where you provide no such context for the hammer and sickle’s use.
Furthermore, it’s a bizarre comparison because most of us are white or Hispanic rather than Indian (being a mostly American website), which means that we generally have no connection to the swastika in its original use but some connection to the Nazi use, whereas the uses of the hammer and sickle by other parties in Europe, Latin America, tbe US, and elsewhere are ones that we could plausibly have actual connections to.
Mind you, I disagree with the equating of the hammer and sickle to the swastika to start with, I think it’s a disgusting “both sides”-ing that Nazi sympathizers love to promote. I just also dislike faulty arguments.
here is your context. your comrades advocating for class war and killing people for crime of having more money than you
i have no idea how you had arrived to this conclusion or why you think it is relevant
i live in a country that was under both nazi and russian occupation. people were killed in the name of swastika. and later people were killed in the name hammer and sickle. they were shot on the borders for the crime of attempting to leave the communist paradise and there kids wouldn’t be allowed to school for not having correct political profile.
so trust me, we have quite strong “actual connection” here. just because you are uneducated american, doesn’t mean that everyone else is.
you are right, it is nor really fair to nazis, who killed measly 17 million people, compared to impressive 100 million killed by communists.
you are on my blocklist now, so don’t bother with another pile of your communist bullshit, i am not interested.
Using the same methods of counting excess deaths, the British empire killed 1.8 billion. https://mronline.org/2019/01/15/britain-robbed-india-of-45-trillion-thence-1-8-billion-indians-died-from-deprivation/
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What’s your source for this? Where did the other 500 million people die due to communism outside of the USSR and China? Did Fidel Castro kill every person in Cuba 50 times?
bro we got new numbers omg
are we actually going to achieve a trillion one day?
“Some random Indian guy” is literally a doctorate economist (I know, but still you should eat that up since I’m assuming you love capitalism and “free markets”)
fucking westoid chauvinist
lol @ ”Warrior of Ukraine”, bravely posting on lemmy instead of being torn to pieces by Russian artillery.
You what mate?
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1066922/population-india-historical/ https://www.google.com/search?q=victims+of+british+occupation+of+india
Sounds absolutely deranged, no? That’s the same methodology the Black Book of Communism uses, and why we are laughing at the 100 million number.
one of the numbers surpasses the total population of the country and the other one is not, so no, they are not the same.
The black book of communism counts babies that were never conceived as deaths by communism.
bro the deaths attributed to china and the ussr would have permanently crippled their population
It’s the same methodology man.
Your post is a pretty good example of what I don’t like about Hexbear (and also Lemmygrad because they do the same shit). Clearly the other person has a misconception. It’s a chance to educate people on what the class conflict between proletariat and bourgeoisie actually is (spoiler, it’s not about money). And what do you do instead? Antagonizing trolling to completely shut the door on having any constructive discussion, while also misrepresenting class conflict thus perpetuating the same original misconception. I literally cannot think of a worse response than the one you gave. You’ve done an absolute disservice to the very ideology you follow.
I’m genuinely curious as to why you think this is trolling? A serious point is being made.
She concisely made a very important point that is absolutely the central underpinning of class relations: “How do rich people get their money?”. And to continue the constructive discussion, the original poster only need answer the question “how did they get that money”. Finding the answer to that question alone is justification for class war. She also put in some cute goose emojis which are just cool.
It is a serious point, presented as two antagonistic questions and some “cute goose emojis”. So you really think the presentation of that point was correct? We’re making a serious point that we then litter with duck emojis and instead of explaining the point we, in a roundabout way, say to figure it out yourself.
How dare you respond to that person calling you a baby killer with anything but sober dry rhetoric. How dare you try to have any fun. I want a divorce.
First a troll then a gaslighting defender. No point was made, but there were direct insults.
Your point is well taken, but some of us are more directly impacted by the state of the system. It’s not difficult to find posts from unhoused members, it wasn’t difficult on reddit even… Some of us no longer have the luxury of civility.
Some not having the luxury of civility doesn’t justify allowing them disrupt civil discourse. In the end it’s your community and those people represent that community. It should be your community’s responsibility to moderate this lack of civility instead of trying to justify it to others, because that justification simply ends up stating that your community is uncivil and you’re okay with it. It shouldn’t come as a surprise then if other communities decide they don’t want to deal with this lack of civility.
Glass motherfucking houses
You specifically acting haughty about morality and discourse is nauseating. An instance of nothing but crybullies finding themselves in a minority for the first time.
What do you want? Just to harass me?
“[violence] is the language of the unheard.” I won’t engage further on whether it’s generally ok or not because I understand this thread is for lemm.ee to discuss and decide, and I don’t want to get in the way of that too much. Just wanted to clarify the place some of these comments come from, in that most of us are desperate for change and will sometimes be “uncivil” in our desperation. That’s all.
Our mods and admins are revising our rules to be better lemmyverse netizens. Hope y’all decide to stay federated, but otherwise… Have a good one…? haha idk
If you can’t get over minor shit like this light ribbing then maybe you should enclose yourself in a bubble. And I mean literal bubble wrap.
You LITERALLY can’t think of a worse response. Really.
And then your community wonders why others want to defederate you. No substance beyond trying to antagonize me.
Oh we know why people want to defederate with us. We know better than you do yourselves. And we have absolutely nothing but scorn for you over it.
Getting called out for it infuriates you and drives you to behave like this. And frankly this shit would get you banned in our sub within a month if you kept it up.
You have no right to complain about being antagonized when you act with nothing but smarmy bad faith. After being so fucking dramatic in your acting out that bad faith.
whats it about then
If you’ve read Das Kapital you’d know that Marx doesn’t have an issue with money. If my own labor makes me a billion dollars and I spend that billion on what I need for life then Marx wouldn’t have an issue with that, because the money retains its use value and remains in circulation. The issue lies in capital and Marx goes to great lengths to distinguish capital from just money. I hope I don’t have to explain that difference to you.
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@sunaurus
More calls false nazi accusations and calls for executions from a hexbear user. These are their true colors and their admins were gaslighting you. They support this and certainly won’t be banning this user.
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lmao you’re a black book guy? To think I felt bad and deleted my comment.
Landlords, kulaks, Nazis collaborators etc are not ethnic groups, they are groups of people who have explicitly chosen to do something that is incredibly harmful to others, often thousands or millions of others. Saying that they deserve to die is no different than saying that someone who commits a murder does, it’s just that our society has conditioned you into thinking that the terrible things wrought by capitalists are “normal”.
you are a communist, are you sure you are the one to judge someone? 🤣
The black book of communism is one of the most hokey and widely debunked pieces of sloppy anticommunist propaganda ever made. You would know this if you had ever interrogated your sources even a minuscule amount.
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That rag literally counts Nazis and Nazi collaborators as “victims of communism” because they were killed by the Red Army. It’s laughable
Starting to think your name isn’t a Battlestar reference
how long until we can get him to admit it
This is super duper not the thread to bully someone enough to accomplish a goal like that
That said it would probably slip out in about an hour or so I’d say
No bullying of course, though in my experience it just takes asking them what they think and they narc on themselves
The Black Book lmfao. I’m sorry your reactionary fan fiction has poisoned your mind. This is hilarious
feel free to go back to reading collected works of lenin and other quality literature.
We… will? Was that supposed to be an own or something? I love you guys you are the silliest boys.
Smh, even the libs are telling us to read more theory
we have truly fallen as communists
reported for absolutely disgusting Holocaust minimisation, jesus christ
shut up and go back to north korea, comrade
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Now try going to a poor capitalist country and see how it.
There aren’t any poor capitalist countries.
I don’t know what planet you live on, but it must be nice.
Please tell me this is sarcasm.
it is strange that all these countries always have to protect the border in just one direction. no one wants to break in 😆
https://www.npr.org/2023/07/19/1188656665/travis-king-north-korea-soldier-history
lmao. literally front page news.
Oh, gotcha. Your family deserved it.
The only hammer and sickle I know is the USSR.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hammer_and_sickle#:~:text=The hammer and sickle (Unicode,the%20sickle%20representing%20the%20peasants.
Symbol of the Nazi party, famous for rounding up and systematically exterminating millions of jews, black people, leftists, anarchists, etc and attempting to conquer all of europe is exactly the same as the main symbol of an ideology which advocates for workers collectively owning the means of production?
I understand what you mean but the hammer and sickle is the symbol of communism, not belonging to one country. the hammer and sickle did not originate with what happened in estonia.
Not to defend nazis, but are you really going to ignore the deaths under communism or how communist dictators persecuted people?
every system has had deaths under it. for example, i could say: not to defend nazis, but are you really going to ignore the deaths under capitalism or the bodo league massacre, the vietnam war crimes, agent orange, the laos bombings, the civilian killings in iraq, the drone strikes that killed civilians all across the middle east, slavery, all of the deaths causes by poverty, etc.
Obviously it has happened under communism as well but nowhere near to the scale under capitalism (for the most part, see Pol Pot, the Red Terror, Holodomor)
The fascist whose faction was put in power by the US, that was overthrown by Vietnamese communists? Whose gov’t-in-exile the US supported against the communist People’s Republic of Cambodia until 1993?
That’s some “hitler was a socialist”-level bs
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Not narcing here but Hexbear rules follow you to other instances fyi
Just so you know comrade, there is no academic consensus even among western scholars that the '32 famine was anything more than a disaster, and certainly not a genocide. Mark Tauger has a great debunking of Anne Applebaum on the subject. So we do not, in fact, have to apologize for that.
Well, we either ignore deaths or we don’t. The United States of America ran the largest slave trade in history and nearly wiped out the native population of an entire continent, nuked two cities, overthrew countless democracies, and bankrolled/trained fascist and/or religious fundamentalist militias all over the world. This is all historical fact.
But it also represents one of the strongest cultures in history, as well historical advancements in science, technology, civics, etc. Just like the USSR. Whereas the Nazis only represent industrialized genocide, eugenics and fascist oppression, the Soviet Union and the USA represent both the good and bad of humanity in extreme amounts. Their evils can be denounced just as much as their successes can be celebrated, and more usefully both can and should be studied and not completely discarded on weak ideological grounds. That’s why they’re both admissible in civil discussion.
Hexbear is very into counter-narrative, and I’m guessing a lot of them would disagree with my take here, but I think that if liberals and communists can’t find middle ground in that then liberals are simply not representing themselves honestly.
😤
sowwy
😌
Small caveat: the United States dropped two nuclear weapons to end a fascist dictatorship in Japan that ran a war of oppression against over a billion people. Including countless warcrimes and crimes against humanity that killed millions of people in occupied countries.
I think that point just reinforces your argument.
This is propaganda. I am not claiming you are aware of this or are intentionally spreading it, but it’s propaganda all the same. It was invented to whitewash the mass, unnecessary, indiscriminate killing of Japanese civilians by the U.S.
When you read about Hexbear users getting a little chippy, this is the type of thing they are generally getting chippy about: propaganda that excuses great evils.
Noted commie rag Foreign Policy: The Bomb Didn’t Beat Japan. Stalin Did.
The United States Strategic Bombing Survey:
I couldn’t have said this better myself. All I have to add is shaun_vids’ seriously detailed (and long) compilation of all the information we have regarding the decision of of dropping the nukes. The conclusion is that the Japanese were already trying to establish surrender negotiations but were being entirely ignored, the US didn’t care and instead dropped both bombs despite being well aware the war was already over. They mainly just wanted to be seen as the ‘sole victors’.
Over 200,000 civilians murdered solely for capitalist posturing.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=RCRTgtpC-Go
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Good response, thank you for being civil
🥰
That may be your belief, but that doesn’t make you RIGHT.
JFC. You are smugly self righteous.
I myself have spent considerable time researching WW2 history, have visited the Hiroshima traveling exhibit, and have listened to survivors interviews.
Yes, the bombings were horrific. Yet I still think they lead to less loss off life than a dual amphibious assault on the 4 Japanese mainlands by Russia and the United States.
Japan had a long history of militancy and they were a fascist state. They murdered millions of people and invaded what, 7 countries? They were attempting to occupy and colonize all of East Asia. Australia was on the list. War crimes and crimes against humanity were rampant. Nanking. Unit 703. Bataan Death March. List goes on. Their government did not value life.
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Following the first nuclear bombing, the military leadership also attempted a coup by attempted kidnapping of the emperor. A good chunk of their leadership was betting on the US running out of steam and giving up. Japanese are super fanatical which is something I don’t think westerners understand.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyūjō_incident
This was after TWO nuclear bombings. You think these guys would give up without a fight?
How many times have you been to Japan?
These bombs were at no point necessary. The US murdered these people to show off a new weapon. I’m sorry, but this talking point is a product of how history-- as the general populace knows it–has been shaped by US dominance. It has no actual basis in reality.
This is a perfect example of something that’s come up a few times here in this thread. People are saying ‘Oh, they’re so angry. They’re so angry.’ Well why is that? It’s because beliefs like these are so deeply ingrained within the culture of the US and the broader hegemonic core, and are so completely removed from reality, that it’s utterly tiresome being inundated by them day in and day out.
Even ignoring the fact that the necessity of doing so is still hotly debated to this day, in my opinion that was always a hard argument to defend. We’re talking about upwards to two hundred and fifty thousand civilians.
Non-nuclear air raids in Japan killed as many as 900,000. 1.3 million wounded and 8.5 million homeless.
The war was absolutely horrific but focusing on two an ball nuclear bombs in a condo lift that killed what, 53 million people is in my opinion myopic.
That’s the equivalent population of the entirety of South Korea wiped out.
Good point. They didn’t just test the nuclear bomb on Japanese civilians. They also tested napalm.
The USSR already defeated Japan. They just killed 100s of thousands innocent people to show the world what they would be willing to do.
The soviet invasion of Manchuria which absolutely decimated the fascists army in less than a month is attributed by historians to be the far more likely cause of their surrender.
The soviet combat performance was much less important than the fact that Russia had just broken their alliance with the incredibly war crimin’ Japanese Empire. Not exactly something that I would want to call out if I was on Team Red. Just sayin’.
Liberals will just make up anything
So you support defederation then. Interesting.
Non-aggression pact =/= alliance. It was signed after 7 years of hostilities along the border and in the context of existential threats to both powers being prioritized.
This is literally just shit you can read on Wikipedia, a notoriously anti-communist source. Libs do be wildin’ out here with easily dunked claims.
and swastika did not originate in the nazi germany and yet here we are.
thank you for giving all of us illustration of that very kind of obfuscation of facts i was talking about. now sod off and stay on hexbear.
😠
Yet the hammer and sickle is just as atta hed to the USSR as the swastika is to nazis
wait u a trot
when the heck did we let trots on hexbear
Is hexbear not about left solidarity? I am a Trotskyist, yes. I believe in the permanent revolution, comrade Catradora
Sorry, hexbear didn’t have many trotskyists when I was more active a few months ago
although I disagree with you strongly, solidarity forever comrade blake
Left unity means left unity
Left unity was always achieved after properly excluding elements both parties disagreed on. We are able to stay united on hexbear because we do not discuss some events in history where we weren’t so… united
I don’t have to imagine it. My family was the victim of capitalist genocide, my family did have graves defiled. They were Irish during the famine and had the temerity to continue to be Catholic when they immigrated to America where they still had to be second-class citizens for another hundred years. By your own logic, why should I be civil toward liberal capitalists who defend the same system that tried to explicitly eradicate my family and their culture?
But Castro killed my slaver grandpa and then fucked my grandma.
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I’m not sure if you genuinely didn’t realise, but they already said they were Irish, so they clearly mean the United Kingdom. Which has indeed deliberately inflicted mass starvation and violent oppression on the people of Ireland for centuries, with the implied (and sometimes explicit) goal of killing non-royalists.
i did realize. i was confused by both his absurd exaggeration and irrelevance to the topic.
Absurd exaggeration?
like that part where the agriculture disaster changed into “explicit eradication” of his family
Nice genocide denial there, mate.
Every accusation a confession
And you know that they’d turn around and say that everyone in Eastern Europe who starved under the USSR wasn’t the Soviet Union’s fault
Stalin came with a big spoon and ate up all grain? Antisemitic landlords that only left after they provoked a mass uprising against themselves definitely aren’t part of the story.
I know were all supposed to feel bad for collaborators being treated poorly in the USSR, I’m just more concerned with what my Jewish ancestors dealt with in eastern Europe.
i love the concern trolling, stop pretending you care
Insulting my intelligence isn’t a good way to make your case, especially on a topic which you are so flagrantly ignorant about - everything I have said here has been well-documented, and given your attitude I am disinclined to explain it directly. Instead I invite you to educate yourself on the atrocities committed against my people - even a cursory inspection of the Wikipedia page of the Great famine will show no exaggeration on my part.
Furthermore, you’re shifting the goalposts. Your ideology committed great atrocities against my people. Why should my ideology be treated differently from yours, if that’s the litmus test?
so i was making point about significance of symbols. point of the comment was that if you accompany hate crime with a symbol of criminal ideology, you cannot just pretend the symbol had nothing to do with it just because it may have been also used elsewhere in the history in the different context. whether you have graves in your family has zero relevance to that point.
so you reply with absolutely irrelevant story about history of ireland, you refuse to explain, give me standard “do your own research” that every moron lacking argument gives you. then you accuse me of shifting goalposts while it is you who moved few lightyears from the original topic and i am insulting your intelligence? i say you are doing pretty good job with that yourself.
apart from the fact that the story is irrelevant to the original point (and the question of how much did you or did you not exaggerated) what was your point? so british government acted like an asshole sometime in the history, so what? why do you tankies think that just because someone else is also asshole it somehow justifies the crimes of cummunist wannabes through the history?
you know shit about my ideology, the only thing you know is that i consider internet communists bunch of edgy teenagers, and/or morons and/or pure evil assholes - sorted in descending order of their share in the population - hopefully for most edgy teenagers it is just growing phase.
You’re right - I shouldn’t have assumed that was your ideology, but the only people more ardently anticommunist than liberal capitalists are fascists and I wanted to give you the benefit of the doubt. My broader point is that you already are perfectly happy to share a space with “evil” ideologues, who have committed terrible atrocities across the planet. And you’re even willing to stoop to denying genocide in the process of trying to claim that there’s rhetoric that there’s no time or place for. You have no actual argument here, just hypocrisy and anti-communism.
wow the great amount of niceness that hexbear users can’t come close to!
For the record, I think the time and place for such rhetoric would be exclusively within the Hexbear instance, against agitators who are deliberately being hostile towards us. Outside of Hexbear, and with users who are at least trying to engage in good faith, I agree that Hexbear users are often too impulsive with escalating directly to dunks and spamming PPB. In this case, I thought the user was way out of line and I politely told them so. Apparently they agreed and deleted their own comment.
I know Hexbear users can be a bit much, but I think we’re capable of having level-headed conversations with other instances about toning it down whenever we step outside our own hive.
for the record, the time and place for such discussion is never and nowhere. the fact you think that only problem is that it leaked “to the general public” just shows how insane you are.
I understand that users outside of Hexbear might be offended by it, and that’s entirely understandable and I absolutely agree we should behave ourselves outside of our own instance. But respectfully it isn’t your place to tell us how to conduct ourselves within our own instance.
Can @Awoo@hexbear.net or another Hexbear user confirm that the comment referenced above is common and acceptable within Hexbear’s CoC?
Clearly some of you are having a very difficult time with that simple expectation.
I think this view is commonplace here.
There is a problem with Lemmy itself that several of us have been discussing, and it’s that it’s hard to tell when you’re on someone else’s instance sometimes.
This is caused by a few factors, for one other instances look identical to your own instance when viewed via your own instance, no unique customisations tends to lead people to not even realising they’re in a different space.
And the second problem is that if you engage in a different instance, but then respond via your inbox, it’s easy to forget that those inbox messages are a different instance and not your own.
These two problems are longer-term problems in user behaviour that lemmy should look into designing around. I think what we need is something like reddit’s old custom css, allowing communities to feel more unique and giving visual identifiers to users so that they IMMEDIATELY realise they’re in a different space and get the mental prompt to code-switch to the behaviour relevant to that particular community. I don’t behave the same on Hexbear as I behave on some other lgbt spaces for example, I code-switch in those spaces. I’m sure absolutely none of us behave the same way we behave online as we do in the workplace, we code-switch. Finding ways to get people to code-switch better between their home instance and a foreign-federated-instance should be a priority. It will help promote better federation harmony.
I think that the same is true in the opposite direction too though. I think several users complaining about Hexbear behaviour have stepped into Hexbear’s instance, received the full Hexbear experience, and then talk about it as if it wasn’t something that they opted into by coming onto Hexbear. This is again an issue with identifiability of being on Hexbear itself, it works in both directions.
At the end of the day Hexbear users are VERY reasonable if you’re talking to people from Hexbear in good-faith. The key is that term though, real good-faith engagement is rewarded with good-faith behaviour discussion. Sometimes you’ll get someone in a shit mood perhaps, but people are human and understanding that this happens is very important to cultivating the longterm happiness of small communities. People have to learn to let certain things go like when others have had a shit day or whatever and not hold that against an entire instance. This goes for Hexbear users when criticising Lemm.ee too, I’ve seen some unfair characterisations of everyone on lemm.ee as racist and I don’t think that’s true, just that there are some racists and some transphobes and so on who will need to be culled over time as the community develops and matures. Hexbear itself has had years to mature as a community and get rid of those problems, so Hexbear users can be a little uncharitable when it comes to other servers that haven’t had the kind of events that solved these problems for us years ago.
I don’t speak for Hexbear though. I am not an admin, just a long time user with a lot of trust in our team and a lot of love for our userbase.
I hope you understand that I singled you out as you seem to be in conversation with Sun. And this is unfortunate to read.
Sunaurus is standing up for staying federated with Hexbear. That’s about as good faith as it gets. To then be attacked in such a vile and repugnant way is totally inexcusable.
I find your explanation and your excuses about technical limitations to be pretty lame. I seem to be able to go about my online life without telling people that their grandparents deserve(d) their deaths. I don’t need CSS to help me act like a civilized individual.
Sorry what? Vile and repugnant? Attacked? I just wrote out a very long and thought out response on what the issues are with lemmy’s design that are causing this. Nobody was attacked in my response, nor was it vile or repugnant. You are assuming the worst of me here and then trying to make something of it instead of responding to my actual words. I don’t usually make this request because usually people respond to me in good-faith, but if you’re going to respond to me please quote me and respond in-line to my actual words, or don’t respond to me at all. I see this as the only way to get you to speak to my actual words rather than to whatever it is you’re making up in your head about me.
Sorry for the misunderstanding. No, you did not make the attack.
However, it seems that things like “Your kulak grandparents deserved to die” are accepted and supported on Hexbear, as long as it doesn’t draw undue attention. Except your user forget their “time and place” for airing the dirty laundry. This garbage is not a free exchange of ideas; this a few steps away from actually beheading the non-believers. Just as I would support defederating from other extermist hate instances, Hexbear needs to go.
And then to just throw in another comment:
I see absolutely zero value in this “other viewpoint”. There is really no legitimate debate here.
Generally speaking yes. The Kulaks hoarded grain for their profit causing massive famines that killed millions of people. The important thing to understand here is that “Kulak” is not a race, it means wealthy farm owner, they were rich owners of large amounts of farmland that hoarded grain resulting in what was a overly forceful collectivisation process, BUT this process is often defended by socialists because (and I’m speaking generally) that most of the kulaks hoarded grain and were certainly responsible for people starving to death. Not all of them, but most.
It’s a statement that you need to understand quite a lot of different things to properly parse.
I’m not sure what problem you have here. The state says “hand it over” and if the property isn’t handed over willingly then the state uses guns to force it to happen. We already do this, it’s called expropriation. The population of Berlin recently voted to expropriate all property from landlords. What is the problem here?? If the landlords of Berlin do not hand over that property then they will be taken by people with guns. That’s how states work.
I understand that you might not have seen it put in this kind of extremely blunt words before. But that comment is literally just saying “they can hand it over or they can die” which is frankly no different to how states operate currently. If these landlords in Berlin don’t hand it over they will be beaten into a pulp by police, and if they continue to resist they will be killed in the process. This is a blunt and explicitly accurate description of the process of property expropriation.
I think the difference between socialists and liberals here is that we speak of these mechanism in very blunt terms, whereas liberals have normalised hiding the violence of the state behind layers of extrapolation. This makes what socialists describe bluntly sound different to what liberals are used to, even when it is a violent act that liberal states carry out all regularly. We simply don’t shy away from describing these mechanisms accurately, they should be described accurately, the violence of the state should not be hidden, especially because our goal is to eventually eliminate states altogether BECAUSE they commit such terrible violence.
Let me put this another way. What happens when you default on payments for your home? The bank shows up with the cops. You are forced to hand over your property, and if you refuse then the state gets violent with you. Same story except in reverse - in service of capital instead of the collective.
I think you’ve misunderstood the comment you’re replying to. The quote is not a general thing they’ve seen somewhere, it was posted (and has now been deleted) by Hexbear user uralsolo on this thread directed at sunaurus.
A long winded manifesto justifying mass state executions for political enemies.
This also neatly plays into my other reason for defederation: Hexbears seem acutely susceptible to lengthy preaching and insatiable defense of their ideology. Even if such ideology didn’t involve beheading the heretics, it’s unwelcome as an off-topic distraction in almost all situations and communities suffer as a result.
😔
If only, most of the hexbear comments in this thread prove that is not possible.
😤
The problem with the ‘live and let be’ tolerant philosophy on online forums and the argument against moderation is the paradox of tolerance:
(From Wikipedia)
its called sitting in our own little instance making funny jokes to outrage people, you seem to have fallen into that trap.
also comparing the hammer and sickle, a symbol of many anti-colonial and anti imperialist movements that freed and improved the lives of hundreds of millions, as comparable in any way to the nazi swastika, is extremely disingenuous to the point of misrepresentation.
Are you equating the USSR and Nazi Germany? I don’t get your point whatsoever. The symbol of the Sickle and Hammer isn’t a genocidal symbol.
no, i am not equating them, i am saying that communists killed far more people than nazis.
yes, it is. there is no ideology in the history of the world that murdered more people, than the one that flew a banner with sickle and hammer.