It's a combination of tankies and some more level headed leftists. They do have a decent proportion of OK users and the occasional decent meme, but the frequent genocide denialism and too many tankies have resulted in a lot of blocks and bans.
The "Just Kidding, but maybe not" kind of memes are both common in the tankie group as well in the right-wing group, which makes me thing it's just the same people with different costumes, also known as a reskinned model.
Sounds like political compass shit, left or right, but primarily in the "authoritarian" top half
They were founded after being kicked off reddit, then self isolated from the fediverse for years, creating the echoiest of echo chambers. It's like those Appalachian families that were so isolated they basically developed their own culture, language and all. They've spent too long "struggle sessioning" together and driven out any of the more reasonable users with their purity tests. They think they're the "true" Lemmy users and only refederated to "spread the word" and antagonize all the "liberals" (read: anyone that's not 100% with them). The one thing I dislike about my server is that they haven't defederated from that place.
It's like those Appalachian families that were so isolated they basically developed their own culture, language and all.
Very apt description. You forgot the inbreeding part; very much relevant for Hexbear.
One note, "liberal" to them is synonymous with "nazi," and they do actually, openly, want to kill you for being one (from this comment alone lol, and me too, and everyone else they label liberal). They're losers who will never succeed in revolution, and most of them won't do anything beyond cry online, but they should still be considered dangerous and untrustworthy as one of them is liable to pull some dumb shit in the name of their religion and their god Marx (yes it is a religion if they treat it like one.)
All responsible server admins have them defederated. Hate speech and genocide denial, that is almost certainly against the law in Canada, Germany, and other places. We defederated lemmygrad for the same reason.
What had me block the instance was how the majority of Hexbear posts and users I was encountering initially was how annoyingly spammy they were. Acting like Lemmy was Twitch chat, spamming giant ugly reaction stickers everywhere, literally behaving like 12 year olds.
Then I also started to notice the far-right authoritarian simping buried under all that chaos.
Yes! The fucking stickers are so annoying.
My understanding of the stickers is that on their instance they aren't massive. So it's some disconnect between their UI and others. But I might be misremembering.
If I see a comment with 12 replies, all from the same instance, all just the same emoji over and over, I don't care that it's small, that's spam to me. They have their culture, so let them have fun. But I'm not part of it, so leave me out, it's annoying. I think both of these are fair takes.
Thankfully those of us on world have not had to deal with them for the better part of a year. There's so much wrong there it's kind of hard to know where to begin.
All I will really say for now is that they are perfect anti advocates for the things at the surface level they advocate for.
You would think having a healthy discourse and talking to each other, exchanging ideas would be better to proliferate a certain ideology.
All they do is try to insult or demand one is an all knowing being. Some read my comment and assume I’m from us and have to know every agency there is.
If they want to bring their ideologies out there they should stop trying to be destructive. All they accomplish is a negative image of their movement.
It’s like a 14 yo has learned about communism and is now super edgy towards everybody because he thinks he’s hacked the system.
They existed on their own Lemmy instance for years before federating at some point last year.
So, they likely had their own way of interacting, commenting, moderating etc that worked for them, that they had used/built/developed themselves (I mean systems & rules, not software) for years.
And they federated shortly after the Reddit API exodus.
So an echo chamber of extreme left wing users suddenly getting to interact with a whole bunch of new people, and an inrush of more mainstream users. It made for an interesting 6 or so months.
I haven't had any bad interactions with them directly, however I have seen and disagreed with a lot of their behaviour.
Not sure if I have their instance blocked, or if my instance has defederated them.
Demented illogical people. Also angry and bloodthirsty. Best to not interact. Waste of time.
Hexbear isn't being paid for anything, they are largely made up of Anarchists and Marxist-Leninists. Hexbear has been unafilliated with Lemmy for years before integrating with Lemmy a year ago.
You might be seeing their zero tolerance policy for liberalism in action, but if you genuinely want to know what their users are about, just visit it. Just hop on over to Hexbear.net and scroll the news megathread and whatnot, try to understand what's going on.
Finally, I want to question why you believe anyone would be paid to mess with Lemmy, moreover when the lead developers are aligned fairly closely on ideological lines. If they were here to "cause chaos," why would the devs support them ideologically? To ruin their own network? That narrative is just a wild hypothesis.
The fringes of the political “wings” (left and right) seem similar to me, not so much in policy but in the rabid, simplistic attitudes and outright derision constantly sputtered.
Nope, just good ol' fashioned communists! Beware the red scare!
They have a zero-tolerance policy for political viewpoints that differ from their own. That becomes a breeding ground for an extremely toxic echo chamber.
I have been doing the "The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love" book club at menby@hexbear.net recently which has been my only real interaction with hexbear. The book club has been great so far and if anyone wants to talk about feminism and masculinity should join.
There are a lot of in-group signaling across their own users which mostly shows up with acronyms, specific phrases and calling everyone comrade. This hasn't been that difficult in the book club which is long form text and discussion and everyone is respectful and nice. That being said I have blocked a few communities at hexbear because I have found them annoying and taking over my feed. So like everything here at Lemmy I had curate my own experience
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