I figured since their admin has asked them to stop participating over here it may be worthwhile to get a new discussion going that is primarily blahaj. I'm almost certain they'll still be upvoting so keep that in mind as that may skew things. Worthwhile to check in from instances that have already defederated them. The previous thread definitely left a bad taste in my mouth but what do y'all think?
Old thread can be found here
EDIT: With regards to the post on new federation guidelines here: https://hexbear.net/post/352119
The current top comment is:
Every instance that has talked shit and got dogpiled should be thanking us for breathing some life into their dead and boring ass websites.
This comment has been bothering me for the past two hours. I just don't know how to respond to this perspective which clearly comes from a very different lived experience. Assuming you were a Redditor before, which types of subreddits did you spend time on? I spent most of my time in the past few years on TGCJ, which could be described as the most "anomalous" of the major trans subreddits. I see a lot of the TGCJ spirit in Hexbear, in how anti-respectability-politics and anti-tone-policing it is, and this is probably why I'm so invested in defending Hexbear even as a non-member.
Because I have moderated communities that live and die by the quality of their discussion and I understand that once you slip too far, you will not come back. Rabid circlejerky instances that promote dogpiling do not facilitate discussion and as a whole are bad for the health of the threadiverse. If people can't have a reasonable discussion here they will simply leave. That does not mean that I think hexbear should not exist, but they should probably be contained to their own corner of the broader threadiverse.