My first months on Lemmy were spent on Lemmy.world, which was the biggest instance at the time. I had no experience with Hexbear because .world had defederated that instance. I sometimes saw it being described as a "tankie" instance, but it was nothing specific.

After I moved to .zip, I came across !games@hexbear.net, which seemed to be free from anything overtly political and reminded me of r/Gamingcirclejerk, so I subscribed to it and occasionally made comments related to gaming.

Today I made multiple comments to a post about an article on the STALKER game developers having removed the Soviet symbols and the Russian audio in the remastered edition of the game. I would argue that in the thread, there were no comments from me that could be construed by a reasonable person as defensive of Nazism, fascism, or even hinting at it. For example, in one of the comments, I linked a Ukrainian law that prohibits the use of Nazi symbols, though I highly advise looking through all my ten comments as to avoid any misunderstanding or false impressions.

Conversely, one comment posted by another user dismissed Holodomor as Nazi propaganda, which I reported, but a moderator of that community just ended up calling me out for that and taking no action, followed by them banning me.

The thread containing all of my untouched posts is still available via lemmy.zip. My comments are also available for viewing via my user page. They are not available on hexbear due to the ban.

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[–] Carl@hexbear.net 14 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

This might just be an Americana thing, but minstrel shows are 100% associated with blackface performance. That wasn't all they were I'm sure, but it's definitely the most noteworthy thing about them and presumably the reason why a Hexbear mod would have a problem with them.

They still have big cultural influence in ways that a lot of people might not be aware of. Like the blackface minstrel character always wore white gloves, which are now a staple of American animation due to being used in a lot of animated character designs, including the mouse, bugs, sonic, cuphead...

[–] Damarcusart@hexbear.net 14 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

When I hear "minstrel" as a non-American I do think medieval minstrel, with the bells and tassels and playing a lute. So it took me a second to realise that this person isn't just complaining about inexplicable medieval minstrel hate, but is complaining about people having a problem with racist depictions of black people.

And I never would've made that connection with cartoon characters either! Big gloves are much easier to draw than fiddly little hands, so I (like most people who learn animation) never knew that the original inspiration was something like that.