I doubt he cares whether you federate or defederate. He’s pointing out that OP is misrepresenting the interactions. If OP posted “I don’t like the opinions that hexbears tend to hold, and I think we should defederate” it wouldn’t be a problem—that’s stating a valid preference, and doesn’t involve defaming an entire community.

Also, are you aware you can block instances and users? I’ve used that recently with the .world instance and its users, as .ml is federated with them, and while they post somewhat interesting articles, they are completely unpleasant to interact with in good faith—anything they don’t agree with means you’re a Russian propagandist and they threaten you with stupid flags and reports. The mods aren’t so bad, but I just got tired of forgetting what the instance was and finding out it was another person who has no intention discussing anything. My solution was to just… block the instance. They don’t want to interact with diverse opinions, and I don’t want to interact with them, win-win.

It won’t keep Hexbear users out of your comment sections, but honestly good luck either way in that, as I’m guessing most people have multiple accounts depending on their interests. I was a Hexbear user first ages ago, but got this .ml account when I moved to lemmy proper during one of the many Reddit exodus waves a while back before Hexbear was federated.