Yyyyyyou have a point.
But at the same time, there are also a lot more people on Lemmy now who came from Reddit and aren't communists, right? So maybe it isn't pushing leftwards so much as it's trying to prevent a push rightwards. Does that sound more correct?
Also, regarding "a material analysis that pig poop balls advances the cause somehow" — basically ever since I first started seeing this sort of stuff coming from Hexbear in the brief time when they federated with Blåhaj Lemmy, I thought of stuff like pig poop balls in kind of the same way as, like, the climate/vegan activists who throw soup cans at paintings or pour milk jugs in stores or trespass F1 races or break fuel pumps or so forth. A lot of people express a lot of anger and frustration and annoyance at these sorts of things and say "How can these activists be so stupid‽ Don't they know that this hurts support for their cause‽", but... ehhhh, being goddamn annoying as all Hell is honestly a more effective form of political action than a lot of people consciously believe it to be. The video essayist Ponderful once said about this,
People criticize actions like milk pours and soup…chucks? Because it “gives the right something to criticize”…but it seems like that's the point! And at the same time, it makes other climate activists look extremely reasonable and "good, actually" in comparison! If pouring some milk on the ground will mean that Daily Mail readers might hear some messages about how messed-up the dairy industry is, and then also maybe even consider old enemies like our Greta as good in comparison, then…yay! Yay, I say! And if it makes the public look kinder upon activists who actually target oil infrastructure, in comparison to what they see as random and annoying publicity stunts, then f*ck!gn ay!
Whether all of this applies in the case of Hexbear is something that people can argue about — it feels like kind of a silly comparison given that Lemmy is just an obscure social media platform, which doesn't exactly seem like the type of place where meaningful praxis can happen... But it's at least a thought that we can keep in mind. Hexbear has certainly succeeded in getting people on Lemmy talking and thinking about them and their beliefs, pushing the Overton window leftwards — especially if other, less annoying leftists look "good in comparison". I'm kind of reminded of my own path towards leftism, honestly: I'd certainly been annoyed by communist interlocutors plenty of times over the years, but I think that without that annoyance, I probably wouldn't agree with those selfsame interlocutors on so much today. That was just one of the many tactics that collectively led me down that path.
I don't think that this is necessarily Hexbear's intentional strategy in the same way as those aforementioned climate/vegan activists, but nevertheless, this is at least my spitball of a material analysis of why Pig Poop Balls actually does advance the cause. This is just a little advocacy for the devil, as it were.
I hadn't heard of that, but you're probably right. It's still mighty coincidental that 3/4 of the admins have Cuban or Soviet historical figures as their profile pictures.
I'm just saying that if one wishes to be defederated from Hexbear, then one should migrate off of lemmy.ml first. The admins of that instance are not going to be open to defederating Hexbear.
You might wish to be aware that your instance's top-level domain was chosen because ML stands for "Marxism-Leninism", and that the main admin of lemmy.ml has a photo of Mao as his profile banner. So you're probably going to have a hard time convincing your instance's admins to defederate from Hexbear and Lemmygrad, all things considered.
The good ending: it was brofists
What's this about people disliking Tumblr due to slurs...? I haven't heard about people particularly disliking Tumblr for any reason, much less usage of slurs. And I don't know what FWR and AHS are, either. The second seems to be American Horror Story, but I'm not familiar with that.
I don't particularly like 196, either. It was the mod endorsement of an ableist slur on 196 that was sort of the impetus for Hexbear defederating from Blåhaj, actually. So I've always wished that 196 would just move to its own instance instead of being basically this parasite on the rest of Blåhaj Lemmy where prejudices are allowed to flourish.
It's only just now occurring to me that when you talk about slurs you might be referring more specifically to a word that alliterates "quest" and rhymes "near", and maybe also a word that alliterates "bid" and rhymes "switch". Are those the words you're thinking of? The first in particular would be a word that an older gay person from a conservative region would probably have a traumatic past with, but that younger people in spaces like Blåhaj Lemmy or Hexbear or Tumblr would use without having that trauma. I could understand taking issue with that if that is your trauma, because that is something that people should be more respectful and aware of, and that younger LGBT+ people in particular could do better about.
I'm sorry to have touched a sore spot.
Hexbear at least has a no-tolerance policy for open slurs, as far as I'm aware. But you're saying with regard to /r/CTH, that it wasn't, like, people reclaiming slurs, or using "slurs" for non-marginalized groups -- that it was actual, proper, undeniably hurtful slurring you saw? And by the way, what is a "dirtbag leftist", anyway?
I can definitely understand being put off by the way that the Hexbears often talk. I have managed to have a lot of constructive conversations with the Hexbears, where they honestly just write normally and almost unfairly politely for my asininity; but when the Hexbears aren't in Serious Mode, which is most of the time, then their comments just look like cryptic emojis and weird slang, right? And I think that's appealing for a certain type of person, but not for others. I don't think it's necessarily bad to be childish or flippant, so it doesn't bother me.
Whether the Hexbear culture is toxic is a different question. I can feel comfortable asking silly questions there or expressing sides of my identity that I might hide in other spaces, but there are also parts of the Hexbear culture that I like less and wish would change. Foremost that they could use a reminder of Hanlon's razor sometimes.
Funny enough, Hexbear actually defederated from my main instance first, due to it not being inclusive enough for their standards. My own experiences with Hexbear as an autistic enby are that Hexbear is actually the most inclusive Lemmy instance out there, by no small margin. The issue with Hexbear is that its users like to "punch up" at non-leftists, pointing out how people propagate or benefit from exploitative systems, and justify these systems to themselves.
Being "dunked on" may annoy and wound the pride of non-leftists, but this is also very much not the same as the actually evil Nazi shit posted to EH, which "punches down". I have for many years understood the difference between being annoyed and having my pride wounded for having a bad opinion, and being actively terrorized and marginalized for being a member of a marginalized group. The world would be better off if more people understood that difference.
Yes, actually! Liftoff for Lemmy is still in early development, but you can get it on iOS, Android, Windows, and Linux, and it provides precisely this feature. There are a lot of features that Liftoff is yet to incorporate, probably most notably moderator tools and support for adding Kbin accounts -- but give it a try regardless, and do what you can to contribute to its further development. Liftoff is an app with a lot of promise and a surprising amount of functionality already this early in its development.
It's worth noting that Liftoff is a fork of the now abandoned project Lemmur, which I believe was the first Lemmy client to support combining feeds.
Boustrophedon (boost-ruh-FEE-d'n, meaning "as the ox turns") is a writing style mainly used in a number of ancient civilizations, where the direction of reading changes with each and every line. So, say, the first line you read left-to-right, and then the second line you read right-to-left, and then the third line is left-to-right again, and so on. This way of writing had several benefits for ancient peoples even though nowadays writing backwards every other line sounds crazy to us.
I don't know how it would actually work to read comic book panels and speech bubbles in a boustrophedon order, so it was really just a dumb joke.
Honestly? Based. I've always thought that the idea of building a car at home sounded kick-ass.