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submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by squirrel@lemmy.blahaj.zone to c/main@lemmy.blahaj.zone

Lots of people who are seeing top-level postings about Hexbear. Net are probably confused about what has been going on and I want to give an SRD-style overview of the whole thing.
Note: As a user of Blahaj.Zone, I am not a neutral party in this and I do not pretend to be. This is how the whole thing has played out from my perspective.

Hexbear. Net is another Lemmy instance that had relatively recently started to federate with Blahaj.Zone and other Lemmy instances. It had previously been known as Chapo.Chat because it began as an instance for fans of the podcast ChapoTrapHouse.
Recently users from Blahaj.Zone (as well as other Lemmy instances) began to complain about the behavior of Hexbear users. The complaints were about rude, obnoxious behavior: Hexbear users calling people "libs" as an insult, denying crimes of Russia and China, denying the crimes of Stalin,...
Such behavior was not necessarily forbidden on Blahaj.Zone, but certain sub-Lemmys had their own rules on these subjects.
One of the threads about Hexbear: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/1854795?scrollToComments=true

After an ever increasing number of users calling for defederating from Hexbear. Net, Ada (admin of Blahaj.Zone) opened a thread to talk about it. The thread was quickly inundated with Hexbear users, complaining in turn about being called out in this way. Though many of their comments exploited a current bug in the Lemmy code which resulted in emoji's being embedded as pictures which results in lots of image spam.
Ada responded by removing top-level comments in the thread which were not from Blahaj.Zone's users, because she wanted to get the feedback of her own community, not from anybody else.
This happened originally in this thread: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/1959801

The discussion on Blahaj.Zone was a back and forth: Lots of people calling for "leftist and queer unity", others complaining about getting harassed by Hexbear users.

Meanwhile, elsewhere: Lemm.ee, a Lemmy instance operated and managed by someone from Estonia, also opened a discussion about Hexbear - at least partially motivated by the admin's increasing unease of the rampant denial of soviet atrocities and the occupation of Estonia by the Soviet Union. Russian propaganda in regards to the war in Ukraine was also an issue.
Lemm.ee was largely encountering similar problems as Blahaj.Zone, though the Lemme.ee admin admitted that the Hexbear admin was generally responsive to reports and complaints.
The thread on Lemm.ee: https://lemm.ee/post/4543536

The thread was also flooded with comments from Hexbear users. The admin of Lemm.ee also responded by hiding most of the comments from Hexbear.
https://mastodon.social/@brooklynman/110911292961470110

Back on Blahaj.Zone, a tangent opens up: A Hexbear user complains about c/196, the new home of Reddit's r/196 which had relocated to Blahaj.Zone and has been its biggest community ever since. The Hexbear user complains about their comments being removed, comments that called out the use of the r-word and other call-outs. The user posts pictures of the removal notices.
Blahaj.Zone's admin Ada steps in and intervenes on behalf of the Hexbear user, having a stern word with the c/196 mod responsible for the removal of the comments.
https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/2136643

A Hexbear admin also gets involved and sends a message to the mods of c/196 demanding the removal of the sub-Lemmy's banner, because it contains "fuck tankies²", arguing that tankies is a slur. The c/196 mod refuses and publishes their message.
[²"Tankies" is a pejorative term for authoritarian socialists in the vein of Stalin and/or Mao.]
https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/1961004

While the discussion if Blahaj.Zone should defederate from Hexbear is still ongoing, the Hexbear admins defederated from Blahaj.Zone without warning from their side, because of...

unaddressed ableist removals from the /c/196 moderators, defense of chasers, no-quarter rules regarding our users, leakage of good-faith DMs from our admin team, and a general lack of initiative to punish these behavior

In her a response to these events, Ada points out in a comment that she never had the chance to adress the ableist incident (she was in bed) while other issues had happened in the past and had been adressed at the time. Thus she could not react before Hexbear defederated.
https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/2135406

TL;dr: Blahaj.Zone's users complain about ill behavior of users on Hexbear. Net. A discussion about defederation begins on Blahaj.Zone. Meanwhile Hexbear users complain about Blahaj.Zone in turn and Hexbear. Net defederates instantly and without warning.

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[-] nan@lemmy.blahaj.zone 19 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

It didn’t help that the initial user thread about defederation, opened by someone who didn’t like their communities showing up in the All feed as if that is anything but expected, compared them to The_Donald right off the bat (and then remained one of the most vocal and prolific posters on this subject ever since). Prior to that opening salvo, their involvement here had been about 0% and primed the fuse for escalation.

But yeah, poor us.

I don’t even particularly like them, but the response over here had plenty of bad faith “she turned me into a newt!” vibes that were pretty uncool, especially from a few flame-stokers including that initial poster, and another who posted the same screenshot a half dozen times to represent what all of “them” think. It’s interesting to watch in real time how easy it is to decide who “they” are and what “they” think versus what “we” think, especially from a real-life community that often suffers gross generalization about what “they” are like when any individual member acts badly in larger society.

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[-] GnothiSeauton@lemmy.world 18 points 10 months ago

This is a great summary, thanks for writing it up!

[-] ZombiFrancis@sh.itjust.works 15 points 10 months ago

So people who get offended being called "lib" fought with people who get offended being called "tankie"?

And now there's... less meaningful discourse between libs and tankies than before? Somehow?

[-] starlinguk@kbin.social 14 points 10 months ago

I mean, technically, calling them tankies is wrong. They're not tankies, they're right wing as fuck.

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[-] kn100@sh.itjust.works 13 points 10 months ago

I do not have an opinion on the overall issue more complicated than defederation only makes sense in the most extreme of cases, but I take issue with your claim that there was a "demand" to remove the word tankie from the banner. I saw the message that was sent and it was not a demand, it was a polite request. Once again, I do not care at all about the overall issue, but if you're going to provide a summary, be accurate at least.

[-] Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de 11 points 10 months ago

I see this as an absolute win for Blahaj

[-] good_girl@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Congratulations, we're more welcoming of TERFs that go mask off after being called out than our fellow trans people.

Hope y'all are proud. image

This user is still not banned despite multiple reports on many of their comments.

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[-] YaaAsantewaa@lemmy.blahaj.zone 9 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

That's a terrible take, no one wanted to defederate, just the redditors that we all left reddit to get away from and now they're here causing drama again.

[-] good_girl@lemmy.blahaj.zone 16 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

I was absolutely against defederating and am only poking my head in every once in a while now.

The redditors that I left that site for are still here and they're concentrated in 196. I'm disgusted that we're okay with cis people telling trans people what is and isn't transphobic, I'm sick of chasers being normalized, I'm done with people having bad faith interpretations of my arguments and claiming I can't be from poverty or a POC just because I want real change in my country and for smaller countries around the world. (Which is the dumbest fucking possible interpretation)

On that last point: image

Fuck the stupid ass respectability politics people play here, the next time some cumbrained fuck goes out of his way to let me or another trans person know he won't fuck us because of our genitals (Genital preferences exist and are valid yes, but I don't give a shit I will never fuck a cis man that trips over himself to let trans people know he doesn't want to have sex with them at any opportunity) I will say whatever I need to even if it gets me banned.

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this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2023
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