Posting because the last request for this appears to be from 3 years ago before federation was a thing.

I would like to request to create and get mod privileges for a community parallel to /r/goldenswastika, which is a Buddhist subreddit/Discord with a purposefully transgressive name consisting of broadly ‘Asian’ posters tired of their religion being called into question by secular American teenagers. The subreddit and the community is/would be staunchly against Western appropriation of Buddhist ideas and aggressively moderates “dude im so high its like im enlightened” and “your beliefs are all cultural baggage” content that took over /r/Buddhism. Considering the political slant of Hexbear, the rules against bigotry and imperialism, and the intended goal of giving Buddhists a place to congregate without being questioned by folks whose only exposure to Buddhism is through Sam Harris, Hexbear seems the perfect instance to host a similar kind of community, even if I’m to assume a large percentage of users are atheists.

Content would have to be non-sectarian and the space would be open to all Buddhists (and non-Buddhists), but moderation would be tighter or posts disallowed about groups ran by known abusers (Shambala), those that so significantly deviate from traditional Buddhist ideas to the point they’re debatably Buddhist at all (SGI), or secular dismissal of traditional Buddhist ideas without good faith attempts to produce substantial arguments and to understand cultural context.

The other Buddhism communities outside of Hexbear are inactive, with single moderators that post infrequently or have disappeared, and are likely to be less heavily moderated when it comes to psychonaut content or comments dismissive of traditional Buddhist ideas in favor of secular mischaracterization. It is probable they would face the same problems as /r/Buddhism just by nature of being on a large general purpose instance, even if someone more active were to take them over.

As to how this relates to the socialist nature of the instance, I’m inclined toward the idea that it’s our responsibility to create an artificial Buddhist pure land in our human realms by establishing a society that is based on mutual aid. This would alleviate several kinds of suffering that come from living in poor economic conditions, freeing people to pursue meditation, textual study, or generating good karma by helping their fellow humans, which then leads to the more traditional form of Buddhist enlightenment.

In other words, communism/socialism/marxism and Buddhism are compatible, despite historical and current disagreements between Buddhist groups and some world governments. We can have some nice discussions about the Dalai Lama and the Kalmyk deportations of 1943.

In case you need some sort of mod credentials, I’d be happy to DM to discuss. I was a previous mod on /r/Buddha, which is a fairly niche subreddit dedicated to vegan/vegetarian posts related to Buddhism. Outside of that, I have no mod experience, but have spent significant time studying Buddhism as a practitioner and in academic contexts. I would also be looking to recruit mods either from those existing communities on other sites, or from the Hexbear userbase, if anyone was interested.