Hexbear existed pre-federation as its own little isolated forum that developed a relatively-active userbase with relatively shared ideals. When federation came around, Hexbear was different enough that we couldn’t enable it right away and it took much effort from the dev team here to “unfork” us. When federation was finally enabled, our culture clashed with other instances in several major ways:

1. emojis were bugged and were enormous when viewed on any other instance
2. our high activity and commonality of opinion made other instances think we were constantly botting or “brigading” (its legacy has been preserved in emoji form: ), when in reality it was simply our users posting as they always have
3. we have a whitelist of instances, and the mod team demands compliance with certain standards. Of particular note due to the current internet culture, for an instance to remain federated with us, they must not be willing to tolerate transphobia by their own userbase. This is a bar that most instances fail to pass.
4. we really hate Biden, Harris, and the democrats more broadly for various valid reasons (currently the hot button topic is them carrying out a genocide in occupied Palestine), and libs really hate to hear how the “good guys” are themselves monsters, or seeing “Death to America” regularly.

Half of it is transphobia and queerphobia and half of it is liberals seething about us being further left than them

It’s mostly just liberals and fascists and their natural hatred for socialists.

I will say that the anti-Ukraine thing is kind of real. Nobody here thinks Russia is secretly communist or anything, but Ukraine was overthrown in 2014 by a neo-nazi aligned, US backed coup. They then spent the better part of a decade persecuting ethnic minorities in Eastern Ukraine, which overwhelmingly supported the overthrown government. The stuff they were doing would have gotten a non-US aligned government branded as cultural genocidaire, but they kept escalating and eventually were firing artillery at civilian centers regularly and sending neo-nazi death squads into the East to harass and murder civilians.

Nobody here wants the war there to keep going and causing all this suffering, but the idea that this is a black and white conflict and Russia invaded for no reason at all, or because he just wants to expand Russia, is not common here.

Jealous of the emoji game

I haven’t been here as long as many but it seriously is like an oasis of kindness for a queer leftist compared to any other online group I’ve seen. People here aren’t kind to Nazis or nazi-adjacent posters though, as it should be.

People who complain about hexbear on other instances are nearly always liberal or further right trolls who come and post some obvious bullshit, get berated for sharing reactionary propaganda, then often get banned because they get mad and show their true racist or transphobic colors and start using slurs or generally become toxic.

Pretty much anyone I’ve ever seen come and argue in good faith, with a real misunderstanding or false info, or just something that they disagree with here will be met with reasonable clarification.

they hate us for our freedom (to say that slaveowners deserved to die)

I think the thing that makes other comms the angriest is that hexbear generally views Russia’s actions in Ukraine as anti-imperialist and therefore worthy of support.

Other things that make them mad include full-throated support for modern-day China and Cuba, skepticism of the western narrative about North Korea and Venezuela, and support of the historical USSR, GDR, Yugoslavia, etc.

Hexbear is explicitly anti-capitalist and anti-liberal. We’re a bunch of Marxists and anarchists, and we aren’t apologetic about it. That’s the crux of the matter, really, those who oppose communism tend to oppose Hexbear.

A lot of the hate against Hexbear relies on deliberate misinterpretation, but a lot of it is as simple as the anti-Hexbear crowd being right-wing. There’s also the “leftists” that oppose Hexbear because of a lack of correct understanding of theory and leftist history. There are also the people that don’t vibe with Hexbear’s more shitposty vibes.

Lemmy.world’s admins and many moderators are anti-Marxist, so that’s why they defederated here and Lemmygrad.

If you consider yourself a Marxist or an anarchist, there’s a good chance you’ll fit in! If not, and you’re interested in learning about Marxism or anarchism, then you’ll also fit in! Welcome!

It’s a concerted effort to poison the well before you have a chance to drink and see for yourself.

The userbase of all the large instances are anti-leftist (despite claiming otherwise) and take actions to thwart users away from joining.

The people of .world, for example, curated and distributed tagged lists of prolific and well spoken “tankies” to distribute to newbies with the intention of setting them up with a pre-baked block list; that’s why their main pages and largest communities have a skewed definition of tankies prominently displayed on their front pages from time to time.

You have to keep in mind that many of those users haven’t interacted with Hexbear at all, especially not the ones on lemmy.world since they defederated pre-emptively as a last resort, so what they know about us is some second hand purple monkey dishwasher bullshit. I’ve seen some truly baffling takes like that we’re just pretending to be inclusive to trans people.

Scratched liberals who side with fascists got mad that hexbear is correct on like everything we say.

we have an ideology which is incompatible with and hostile to liberalism, and their socialization on the internet has left them unable to deal with that fact in a healthy way. they usually love dunking on ideological opponents, often by pretending to have conversations with news headlines in an aloof and dismissive tone. (you’ll notice Reddit has a surprisingly frequent number of front page stories where the headline simply a quote or declaration from an adversary like Putin, usually abridged or summarized in such a way to suggest weakness, hypocrisy, or frustration). unfortunately, they’re out of their depth when it comes beyond flat earthers, creationists, and anti-vax. On reddit, they manage to fill the gap with moderation power and downvotes. here, they just seethe. it’s hard to believe, but these people have such poor coping skills, I literally see them routinely invent quotes that don’t exist in the source or imagine historical events on the spot which they will then assert happened without investigation.

A lot of people from the internet that live in Western Europe or especially the US are told a lot of lies about China, North Korea, Cuba, the USSR, etc. The gist of the lying is that they are told these countries are authoritarian, and that makes them more fascist than the US.

They are also told that modern Russia is the same as the USSR and they are still Communists. (Read: authoritarian, fascist)

Since hexbear is pro China, pro USSR, when I bring up the fact that I browse hexbear to real people in real life they say, “that’s a dangerous place, it’s filled with Russian government propaganda trolls” with a straight face.

If they believe China/NK/USSR are more fascist than the United States, they can’t understand why someone would openly support them, and their only conclusion is to assume it’s a propaganda troll employed by a foreign government.

Side note: this also applies internally to things like MAGA. It’s a common idea from Democrats in the US to talk about Trump actually being from Russia and an infiltration candidate who is bringing fascism to the United States, not because fascism is inherent to the US political structure, but because Putin told him to.

Anyway, the reason these people hate on hexbear is that they don’t understand why they can see an instance “invading” “real” instances with foreign propaganda agents and no one will “fix” it for them.

I think a part of it is bc our culture was founded on being Merry Tricksters who spam pics of a pig whose shit landed on his balls when someone has a bad take that doesn’t deserve the dignity of an actual response, while the rest of lemmy is comprised of hardcore Reddit fundamentalists who expect everyone to take everything seriously at all times (unless they’re sharing a meme from like 9 yrs ago)

Complaints about hexbear: almost exclusively liberals and reactionaries looking for excuses for why they always lose arguments with us. “Spreading pro-Russia propaganda” is a go-to liberal excuse for left criticism of Ukraine or pushing back on racist liberal criticisms of Russia. Liberals want to believe asiatic hordes mythologies about a revanchist Russia rather than acknowledge history or material conditions before 2022. Mention Minsk II and they start namecalling. Mention NATO and they cannot handle the of NATO being worse than Russia.

Defederation and hexbear: when hexbear has defederated from other instances, to my knowledge it has always been about the admins of another instance tolerating transphobia, including chasers. Other instances defederating from us is always supposedly high-minded liberals having a breakdown when they fail to have an echo chamber for left punching. Or in the case of lemmy.world, preemptively defederating “as a last resort” to entirely avoid having to think about this.

Of course, in all of these cases don’t forget that these same people and instances tolerate neo-Nazi posting and reverence, e.g. Azov. They are simply being protective of the worldviews handed down to them by their patron saints (talking heads and Reddit admins). Also keep in mind that site admins have a habit of being thin skinned nerds, so even if their users disagree with their logic (like the lemmy.world defederation post comments), it makes no real difference because site admins are basically petty lords over their sites. Imagine being a person that wants to make or be Reddit 3.0 and whose only real complaint about Reddit is a lack of third party apps.