askchapo

What do you mean by "brigaded"? I think the in the way it's commonly used, that term means: when one community (traditionally a subreddit, but here on lemmy, an instance) goes into another community they normally would not participate in to mass-downvote or comment-spam that second community, usually as an organized effort. If someone were to post something on hexbear, hexbear couldn't brigade that post, by definition.

Do you just mean dogpile? Where a bunch of people all jump on and criticize someone who said something they didn't like? Because that definitely happens here, sometimes for good reason, other times not (which I realize is somewhat subjective). It especially sucks when it is due to something seemingly minor to the person getting dogpiled but the people doing the dogpiling treat it like the infraction was this terrible crime. Or worse, when it is all due to a misunderstanding but the person getting dogpiled feels hounded out of the thread. Hexbear can be really bad about this. It has happened to me and it is one hundred percent the reason I don't post more and it's part of the reason that by default I use rotating alts. Asshole trolls and reactionaries deserve it, that's one thing everyone on hexbear I think agrees, so it has been strongly reinforced in the community here. Also because on the wider internet it's almost always the reactionaries doing the dogpiling and drowning out the reasonable voices, whereas hexbear is more or less a safe pace for more vulnerable groups who are usually the brunt of it. It's no fun to be on the receiving end of a dogpile and I do think that hexbear sometimes gets way too overzealous about it to the detriment of the community and outside participation. If that's what you mean, I think that's a completely valid criticism and one I agree with.

The main reason I point out the distinction between "brigade" and "dogpile" is that when federation was new, hexbear got constantly accused of "brigading" by certain users on other instances just because hexbear is so active and would comment on posts they saw pop up in their feed, which is a good and normal thing to do. That is not brigading. It got very tiresome very quickly for me to be accused of brigading just because I commented in a thread where other hexbears were also commenting. It was used as an excuse by some instances to defederate from us even though it was obvious they only defederated because they didn't want to have to deal with dissenting voices. This was especially galling because we can't downvote, only upvote. This is not a valid criticism of hexbear.

I know this is already an old thread but I still think it's an important difference that should be kept in mind.