I’m not sure what’s going on over there, but half the time I see a post from there or go into a comment section and it’s just…bad. Like old reddit the_donald bad. Constant trolling, etc. You TS just really bad vibes. I’ve been blocking the communities as they come up, but I’m not sure what else I can do.
I am formally asking hexbear users to stop participating in meta posts on other instances.
Hexbear is more trans friendly than the majority of trans places, honestly. The reason for this is the mods defer to trans users on what counts as transphobia, half the mod team itself is trans, and offensive posts are removed quickly before they can affect other people. I’d say its more trans positive than here, based off what I’ve seen. There are chaser comments that are left up even in response to moderators and admins on blahaj, these would be rapidly removed on hexbear. Plenty of trans places, this one included, also are not very good at weeding out people that are being sneaky about their transphobia and chaser habits, which can poison the well. And not only do the moderators of hexbear do good work, the dev team specifically goes out of their way to program ways to make trans users feel more comfortable (e.g. the universal pronoun tag system).
As a trans woman that is also a survivor of abuse, jokes are made all over the internet about sexual violence and its very hard for me to avoid upsetting my PTSD. Hexbear actively removes these sorts of posts rapidly, too, and even removes borderline cases like bringing up SV out of context and without content warnings. For these reasons hexbear is the main site I visit, no other site or community really comes close.
I thought this was a bit overkill, because they seemed well behaved for the most part, although a bit annoying every now and then. But this comment section shows exactly why we probably should. They’re so combative and seem to completely dominate the discussion.
Don’t compare us to the_donald just because we’re not libs. I’m trans, just also a Marxist Leninist.
To be clear, I’m not comparing the politics of what I see. I don’t care about that. I’m actually a leftist as well as trans myself. The vibe is very much the same though. Very edge lord. Like I don’t want to see the word “chud” ever again.
Vibes based politics
Or rather vibes based social media participation? They’re explicitly trying not to make it political
Not gonna lie, hexbear is probably the most trans friendly place on the internet that I’ve found and taken part in. I’ve had some tough episodes of dysphoria lessened in severity partly in thanks to the community. They’re frankly quite wonderful. Or at least to me I suppose.
That being said, I was kinda excited to see that we were federating with this instance. Finding and being part of other trans inclusive spaces is quite nice, especially since I don’t do a lot of internet crawling for the good of my psyche. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to be around as of late due to my taking care of my girlfriend after a recent surgery. So I missed the time of having been federated.
It’s a shame that it’s coming to this, but what can I do at the end of the day? Perhaps I’ll make an account here. Maybe. Hopefully we can coexist in some fashion.
Unless they start brigading heavily or cross a line in terms of the communities they house, we won’t be defederating them.
Their own communities are, quite something, but their admins have told them to be on their best behaviour when engaging in communities outside of their instance, and so far, they seem to be doing that
I think the fact that they’re more active in this thread than the blahaj folks is fairly emblematic of the problem. They can’t seem to help themselves with the brigading and they do seem to be drowning out local opinion with tankie rhetoric and spam.
EDIT: Just pointing out that if this were a blahaj exclusive thread you would get a very different sense of where popular opinion actually stands.
EDIT 2: I was initially pretty excited about federating with hexbear but I think after seeing the effect it has on the overall tone of discussion I’m pretty disappointed.
Not having downvotes does not, by any means, mean you need to post your disagreement. Our instance also does not have downvotes. You ARE drowning out exactly the sort of discussion this community is for. I can guarantee what you would like to say has already been posted and upvoting those posts and moving on IS the appropriate way to handle this issue in a meta community for an instance you are not a part of.
I think the fact that they’re more active in this thread than the blahaj folks is fairly emblematic of the problem.
It’s a thread about us, so . . .
tankie rhetoric
My valiant neoliberal argument. Their insidious tankie rhetoric.
Just pointing out that if this were a blahaj exclusive thread you would get a very different sense of where popular opinion actually stands.
You can see the instance of the poster, can’t you? And it’s not like hexbear people are able to downvote posts,
so our vote is (while still something) relatively weaker.tankie rhetoric
It’s a thread about us, so . . .
It’s actually a community about us, so…
My valiant neoliberal argument. Their insidious tankie rhetoric.
I am a leftist.
You can see the instance of the poster, can’t you? And it’s not like hexbear people are able to downvote posts, so our vote is (while still something) relatively weaker.
We can’t downvote either, but a quick sampling shows over 3x as many hexbear users commenting as blahaj, so…
It’s kinda brutal, I actually started this night completely on their side.
It’s actually a community about us, so…
It’s an instance that is federated and it’s not like there aren’t people from other federated instances popping in to offer absolute bullshit.
I am a leftist.
Go on . . .
We can’t downvote either, but a quick sampling shows over 3x as many hexbear users commenting as blahaj, so…
See the first sentence, you can see where we come from. An admin isn’t going to mistake hexbear users for blahaj users, as you demonstrated with your sampling. Noted on the voting part.
I just found this thread, and I’m struggling to find discussion from users of my instance about this. It took me scrolling quite a while to see the reply from our own admin about this. It’s not just about the admins being able to see what comments are from blahaj users. I mean, I think comparing y’all to T_D is fucking bullshit. But like many other blahaj users have said by now, I want to defederate purely based off the brigading of this thread.
I’ve told users from other instances to fuck off out of meta discussions of defederation before and I’ll tell you the same thing.
To all the blahaj users, wasn’t it so refreshing that the admins removed top-level comments from other instance users on the kbin.social defederation post? I think that was the perfect balance, because this thread is a complete fucking shitshow. Not blaming the admins for that, they posted that thread so it would have been easier to keep on top of moderating it.
You say “brigading” but I’m just here because the thread was on the front page of Active, and I think most of the other activity from Hexbear users here can be accounted for that way. The only place where there is evidence of “brigading” is the admin’s “People of Nato” comment (which, as an aside, is just an awful take).
no one has linked to this thread and encouraged users to jump in. it’s just at the top of Active.
tankie rhetoric
The largest and most inclusive trans positive space outside of blahaj has “tankie rhetoric”. You might want to think on that.
It’s almost like leftists stand for trans rights because it’s in the best interests of our material conditions
So, we don’t have downvotes and haven’t for years. If I want to disagree with you, I have to respond, and I disagree with you. I’m not intending you harm by my reply, but, we’re on a forum, what am I to do but post?
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We’re one of the oldest instances and have a ton of extremely active users. This post is about our instance and appeared in our feed, why wouldn’t some of us respond to it?
We don’t have downvotes because some asshats were targetting trans posts(those asshats were purged) so we comment when we disagree.
I see this post on my front page. I come in and comment. Many hexbears do the same. We just post a lot. No “brigade” necessary.
I mean, i’d rather have this conversation with their input.
And yes, they have opinions. Opinions with which I often disagree. But recently my largest annoyance on Lemmy has been the “why are you intolerant towards bigots” contingent, not the hexbears.
We just like to post a lot
we just post more than everyone else
you’ve gotta keep up
Tend to agree.
Have you been in the news communities of late? Any time Russia/Ukraine comes up they’re flooding it with Russian apologia and silly emoticons.
No moreso than liberals are flooding it with liberal apologia. Also the vast majority of us aren’t pro russia, we’re anti NATO and Anti the war in Ukraine. Russia is fucked
No moreso than liberals are flooding it with liberal apologia
By sheer numbers we are probably “flooding” it more, though that isn’t to speak one way or the other about the legitimacy of what any of us might say
It’s not Russian apologia. It’s just pointing out that Ukraine is not a smol bean like the saturation by western media and Reddit lackeys have painted it as.
In a thoughtful and respectful dialogue, it would be more constructive to engage with differing ideas on their merits, rather than dismissing them with labels that may or may not apply.
🥰
mErItS
Yeah the “whAt AbOuT UkraInian FASciSm” thing is pushed really hard over there.
Thanks, blahaj.zone is the only real instance I’ve liked on wider fedi because it actually does a decent job of moderating transphobia and homophobia, also I’ve enjoyed posting in the queer comms you have on your instance <3
That’s good to hear! I like getting blahaj posts in my feed
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This aged poorly lol
to be on their best behaviour when engaging in communities outside of their instance
They weren’t in Lemmy.ca, got defederated for shitposting, and being trolls over there.
Based
I stand with and support whatever you choose to do. I just thought I’d bring it up. Thanks for all you do!
My only complaint is the popularity might be crashing our instance lol, but they are cool.
Hexbear has the highest proportion of people with neopronouns in their names that I’ve seen on the entire fediverse, and for that reason alone I would prefer that they stay federated.
But the brigading, harassment, disinformation campaigns, bad faith arguments, and excessive emoji spam aren’t a problem? Those reasons alone are why they need to be defedded. My instance did so yesterday and the site has been all the better for it.
Why are you commenting on this thread when you’re not a member of the server?
Because I know how much of a problem Hexbear is. They’re harmful to every community they flood into with their trolling, brigading and harassment of anyone who disagrees with them. I don’t care if this isn’t my home instance, I want to spread awareness of this problem so that users here can participate in peace without being bothered by Hexbear’s abhorrent behaviour.
Lol try that on the hexbear folks
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Directing conspiracy theories specifically at a bloc of self-identifying trans people that they aren’t trans is a pretty shitty thing to do without strong evidence, let alone the zero evidence you offer.
This is incredibly transphobic, those are our nonbinary friends FIGHT ME
its also DISGUSTING how many votes this comment has, each one should be banned
This was a concern we had when we were discussing how to handle pronouns, and it’s the reason that we decided not to have a custom field option. Instead, our policy is that we’ll add pronouns if someone requests them and they seem to be acting in good faith. We have a couple strange ones like doe/deer, but that’s because a longtime user used them and requested them, and doe never showed any signs that doe was a troll.
What the other user said was part of our reasoning for adopting them. On the cases where we’ve had trolls come in and use them, they tend to go mask off pretty quickly and get banned, and we don’t really care if they think their owning us somehow.
If you mean people use neopronouns to make people who hate neopronouns mad, I mean I don’t know how to distinguish unless you’re a mind reader but honestly who cares. You can use whatever neopronouns you want for whatever reason you want, unless it’s mocking trans people.
Honestly, if I were in charge, I would’ve had a custom field. I just don’t like the sound of needing to have one’s pronouns approved.
Fair enough, but it’s just a formality and idk of anyone ever being denied. We just do it that way to prevent trolls from putting helicopter jokes in there because we hate when the trolls are boring.
Also just well meaning people using the tags for something else, too. The pronouns are there for addressing people politely, not jokes or statements or symbols.
Wouldn’t the solution then is to just ban the trolls, not moderate pronouns? If there’s going to be trolls, letting them be visible would make them easier to identify and ban, no?
That would also be a reasonable approach, sure. Maybe it’d be better. But our approach hasn’t caused any problems as far as I’m aware, I’ve never seen anyone say that we didn’t have the pronouns they wanted, and I’m confident that if they did the mods would add the option for them, like what happened with doe/deer. We were just concerned about opening up an avenue of misuse, and it’s very rare that someone uses pronouns not on the list so it’s easy for the mods to accommodate when it happens.
Here's the list fyi
none/use name any comrade/them des/pair doe/deer e/em/eir ey/em fae/faer he/him hy/hym it/its love/loves she/her they/them undecided xe/xem xey/xem ze/hirat the time the decision was made, the site hadn’t yet taken a zero tolerance policy about transphobia - this was 3 years ago. so we weren’t sure the bans would actually happen. a few months later, the fact that pronoun tags were mandatory got relitigated so often that trans users started leaving, including one of the admins of the site. they convinced her to stay and had a come to jesus moment and they immediately took a hardline stance against bigotry. the decision not to put in an open field was never relitigated because it was such a tumultuous time for the community - for the longest time, no one wanted to reopen those wounds.
I should also say that since then hexbear has become the most trans-supportive space, that’s not exclusively for trans people, that I’ve ever been in. and the fact that pronoun tags makes every reactionary froth at the mouth has been a boon for making sure reactionaries can’t hide amongst the userbase for very long before they out themselves involuntarily.
it’s because of the edgier humor on the site amd the constant influx of right wing trolls. we’d all prefer an open field but it would get abused more often than it would get used for it’s intended purpose. or at least, that was true at the time. banning all the “dae pronouns are bad” reactionaries from the userbase might make it something worth revisiting.
This is the dumbest thing I’ve read today
Maybe you might consider that some queer people actually use neopronouns? They’re not just used by right wing attack helicopter jokers. Perhaps the instance you come from is full of right wingers, but we are not.
Honestly, I really don’t see how saying you go by Spivak pronouns when you actually prefer he/him even counts as trolling…? It’s like, “Oh wow look at these dingdongs actually referring to me with the word that I told them to refer to me with, I’m such a le epic troll”
This is a blatant and very obvious lie
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you’ll never find another instance as trans friendly as hexbear.
if you need to cut allies off to avoid getting trolled idk man, that seems lame.
We removed downvotes so nobody could downvote trans people. We are the the only instance that has required pronoun tags (we ban people who complain about them). WE LOVE OUR TRANS COMRADES
We never had downvotes to begin with. Rekt
tbh the mods had a big brain idea and documented all the transphobes who were downvoting, then banned them all and removed downvotes
Uphold TC69 Thought!
W
you’ll never find another instance as trans friendly as hexbear.
You mean other than the one I admin right? The one that your users are currently brigading
You mean other than the one I admin right?
With all due respect, you do host a vaushite comm
You mean other than the one I admin right?
I literally had someone from lemm.ee openly being enbyphobic in my replies to one of my posts in 196 and they didn’t even get banned, just had their comment deleted.
[The link was to the picture of the pig shitting on its balls, but I edited the post later to add links to actual sources about the stuff I alluded to]In hexbear they wouldve been banned within about 20 minutes of making the comment after being publicly bullied, blahaj.zone isnt as queer friendly as hexbear because it’s not as unfriendly to bigots.
Blahaj is still my second favourite instance on Lemmy after hexbear because it’s like the second most queer friendly instance and I’ve had a lot of pleasant interactions with it’s users, but still, to say they’re more queer friendly than the instance that was willing to basically rip itself in two and stitch itself back together to remove transphobes seems a bit much
I literally had someone from lemm.ee openly being enbyphobic in my replies to one of my posts in 196 and they didn’t even get banned, just had their comment deleted.
That’s a limitation of the moderation tools in Lemmy. Only one report appears per instance, and if a community mod actions it, the report is cleared, but they lack the ability to instance ban.
And when that happens, the admins who can instance ban never even see the report. That’s as true of hexbear as here.
Either way, that user is banned now that I’m aware they exist. A quick look through my moderation history will show you that queerphobia or gatekeeping of any kind gets you a permanent ban
Ok, I didn’t realise that, sorry for mischaracterising you and your instance. Also in retrospect I was being overly combative, so sorry about that too.
It would be a shame to defed because I like some of the communities here and like these are the two biggest trans instances, so like, hopefully it doesn’t come to that
And you host a community that is behind the current brigade targeting me.
for the record i dont think starlet is a mod for any community on hexbear in particular
You don’t even have pronoun tags for users fam
They’re not my users, they’re our users, comrade.
I’m sorry but I don’t understand how commenting under a post from an instance we’re federated with is considered brigading. It’s not like we’re posting about/linking to a separate space to infiltrate. Our communities are under the same umbrella, so this just shows up in our feed.
Are people from hexbear jumping into a discussion that should maybe primarily be reserved for blahaj? Maybe, but I think people just want to offer our side of things, and we honestly just don’t want the two biggest queer spaces in the fediverse breaking up because we’re often edgy and argumentative/passionate about leftist beliefs.
I also don’t think we’re derailing from anything or preventing you from having a defederation conservation among yourselves just because we leave replies.
I’m sorry but I don’t understand how commenting under a post from an instance we’re federated with is considered brigading
The top two posts on your instance currently are pointing your users at this thread. The second one (https://hexbear.net/post/339116) is specifically pointing your users at me, and is posted in a community that is described as “This is where you come to post big-brained hot takes by chuds, libs, or even fellow leftists, and tear them to itty-bitty pieces with precision dunkstrikes”
I’m calling it a brigade, because that’s what it is.
Unless that changes, unless something is done, defederation seems inevitable. Blahaj Zone and Blahaj Lemmy exist to give trans and gender diverse folk a safe and protected space. Right now, folks from your instance are doing their absolute best to disrupt that space, because of a difference in political ideology.
Here, in this in this space, for me as an admin, political ideology takes a back seat to protecting trans folk and their spaces. That goal is why I wanted to federate with you even though lemmygrad got dropped. You, like us, are through and through protective of gender diverse folk. But somehow, that’s not enough for you. We don’t agree on politics and we never will, but we both do agree that queer and gender diverse rights are under threat around the world, and instead of finding solidarity in that, you’re turning on your peers, whilst patting yourself on the back for being inclusive.
You all should be fucking well ashamed.
Here, in this in this space, for me as an admin, political ideology takes a back seat to protecting trans folk and their spaces. That goal is why I wanted to federate with you even though lemmygrad got dropped. You, like us, are through and through protective of gender diverse folk. But somehow, that’s not enough for you. We don’t agree on politics and we never will, but we both do agree that queer and gender diverse rights are under threat around the world, and instead of finding solidarity in that, you’re turning on your peers, whilst patting yourself on the back for being inclusive.
I think this is what you don’t get. You’re in particularly taking offense at the “Death to NATO” phrase. NATO is a military alliance. It is a part of the greater International infrastructure that devastates many countries and makes the lives of people of color and LGBTQIA unsustainable in these intentionally maldeveloped countries. I am myself, not trans, but my family was forced to give up their family and community to immigrate to the west due to economic conditions created by the West. You like many in the current news cycle are propagating the idea of this walled garden at the expense of the livelihood of your potential allies in the International sphere. This is why you are receiving particularly strong push back. You are in particular attempting drive a hard line between Western Trans people and and everyone else and minimizing the idea of politics, as if this international politics does not have the power to ruin lives. I am not naive to think that we can agree on this politics but drawing the line on simply the phrase “Death to NATO” is pretty exaggerated. NATO exists for the purpose of violence.
You’re in particularly taking offense at the “Death to NATO” phrase.
No, I’m not, and if you’d read up on my posts, instead of assuming that, you’d see I’ve clarified things.
I don’t give the slightest fuck if you want to dismantle organisations, countries, companies or any other source of systemic disempowerment of people, particularly queer folk. In this context, on this instance, when I admin, politics take a back seat to protecting trans and gender diverse communities and spaces, so I am not going to defederate from a group of trans folk over political differences, and I was never going to do that. It was never on the cards.
What I draw the line at is wishing death on people.
And maybe you think there are some people that are so bad, that it’s ok to wish death on them. I don’t agree, but so what? It’s a pretty fringe fucking point of difference to bring this onslaught of bullshit from your users on.
I appreciate you ❤️
Ok I didn’t see that thread because I tend to look over some posts. I still think drawing attention to a post isn’t fully the same when we’re all one giant community of communities. I feel like you’re being a little over reactive to some terminally online people being argumentative and annoying you a bit. Maybe it is sort of a brigade tho.
you’re turning on your peers, whilst patting yourself on the back for being inclusive
Respectfully I feel like you’re doing this right now, wanting to separate from other trans folks just because the vocality of their beliefs is annoying you and a few of the people in this thread were rude. Unfortunately stuff like this is gonna happen if someone makes a post specifically about us, but in no other cases have we gone around dominating blahaj posts. I also don’t see how we’re “disrupting a safe and inclusive space” by giving our takes.
Ok I didn’t see that thread because I tend to look over some posts
Cool, but I told you it was a brigade. I wasn’t making it up. You made the choice to disbelieve me, and then to argue with me about it, despite lacking that information.
Respectfully I feel like you’re doing this right now, wanting to separate from other trans folks just because the vocality of their beliefs is annoying you and a few of the people in this thread were rude.
I don’t want to defederate from you. How much fucking clearer can I make that? I’ve been putting up with hundreds of your users dunking on me here, even more of them on your home instance. I’ve had people posting pig shit emojis, and spamming this thread up so much that it’s impossible to find content from the blahaj users that it was aimed at.
Hell, the whole thing blew up because people misread my meaning. I don’t give a shit if you want to pull down NATO or any other organisation that systemically disempowers folk. What I care about is that you aren’t wishing death on people. Yet, you’re all so hung up on NATO, that my clarification hasn’t changed anything. Even if you disagree and think that some people deserve death, disagreeing with our stance of “don’t wish death on anyone” seems like a pretty fucking strange issue to bring this onslaught of bullshit on.
Yet despite all of that, you’re still federated. This post is still unlocked. I’m still engaging with you.
That is because I do not want to defederate from the strongest trans supportive lemmy instance out there aside from ourselves.
Yet it seems inevitable that we will have to, because this shit isn’t slowing down. Not a single one of you has tried to reign it in. None of you have called for us to have our space to talk about our own instances policies. None of your admins have stepped in and called out the post that breaches your own instances code of conduct (requiring you to be kind to your fellow leftists, remember the human and not insult, demean or harass anyone).
Instead of finding solidarity, you are dogpiling bullshit (and pigshit) on to your peers, and you have become part of the problem. Unless something happens so you stop disrupting communities and discussions designed to protect and support trans folk, unless something happens and you pull your fucking heads in instead of dogpiling trans folk you disagree with, we will have to defederate from you anyway, despite not wanting to, because you have become a source of harm.
😔
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They did use the word “another instance” on this instance, so there might be some language ambiguity that is being misread.
Edit: also it appears you host vaushites on this instance, so it appears the way you interpreted it seems correct.
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So an instance can go berserk, but as long as they’re trans allies, they can stay? Nah fam, cut out the cancer and they can go elsewhere when they realize they’re cut off. There is no such thing as a saving grace stance when they’re posting total shit. The good people can and should migrate, while the cancer site dies. That’s how this whole concept works.
blahaj federating with hexbear literally does not affect you
All trans hexbear emotes
almost as bad as the_donald though
I had never heard of that instance before opening this thread and ooh boy do I wish I hadn’t. I have known these kinds of people for a long time, I’ve been these kinds of people (for a thankfully brief period). Just in this thread there are hexbear users doing the usual tank schtick of goading people into political discussions and calling them neolibs. I can see why some might view them as a neutral or even positive place to have around given their apparent progressivism towards queer people and their mod team being largely trans, but I really don’t think that really makes any difference. You can slap some pride flags on it all but ultimately if you drill down deep enough into the beliefs of any group that proudly calls themselves Marxist Leninist you’re going to find some truly ugly shit. And it’s not just the obvious stuff like having to hear how progressive Cuba is, the stances they take on oppressive regimes always leads to some kind of war crimes/genocide/ethnic cleansing denial, and where they’re self aware enough to not outright deny they will deflect. I can see why from the perspective of queer western people this might all seem a bit esoteric because a lot of them will attempt to dance around the issues but they are there and a lot of people with familial connections to this stuff that do see it for what it is. And before any of their users get excited I’m not going to engage with your shit, I’ve seen you, I’ve been you, I know your shit and I don’t fuck with it. If you just scroll through here you can see the neolib name-calling and tankie memeing/totally ironic (probably) propaganda, they have zero self control. The blue and pink ain’t fooling me.
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Does being communist mean you don’t believe in personal responsibility or something? I don’t see how that has anything to do with hexbear being shitty in other instances?
Being shitty to bigots is good though
Being shitty to bigots is also Necessary
Absolutely no argument from me there
😠
and by necessary, I mean its the kind and polite thing to do
😌😖🥴
😠
ee
I would honestly miss you all a lot if that happened
On the one hand I am not mad to have different ideologies here but they seem to go out of their way to pick fights which is pretty grating for what is supposed to be a memey, supportive community. Also whenever someone points out a one negative thing about a communist country they seem to counter it by saying a western country did the same/worse, which isn’t wrong but doesn’t address the point? If they could just accept a fault here or there it would go a long way in seeming less aggressive.
Like old reddit the_donald bad
This seems pretty inaccurate?
Ffs I was a long time /r/chapotraphouse user and even tried to use the website after the sub got banned (nothing against it even, just didn’t really have enough of my interests to really keep me) But y’all gotta admit this is pretty fucking embarrassing. Like this is a instance meta post on a pretty small, very explicitly pro trans leftist instance, do ANY of you think you would have actually been defederated in the first place? Like genuinely, do you not think you would’ve just had people like me say “naw they’re chill”. But instead you put an odd couple hundred comments on this thread when the biggest in the little bit, has about 40? And get this, it’s also a thread a defedding from an instance, but actually deserved it, and our admin had already been on the case? Embarrassing.
Big time edit: This was the comment I had originally typed out, and while I still believe quite a bit of it, I’m kinda disgusted by the amount of Russia apologia and pro war sentiment generally. But let me guess, I must be pro nato?
