All this federation/defederation drama is nothing but bad faith. Our emotes are too big, bRiGadInG, wishing death to the people of NATO, blah blah blah. Let me ask a question. Why do all these instances that had already defed from lemmygrad chose, for a time, to federate with us despite us being far more active with giant emotes and so on?

It has nothing to do with giant emotes and everything to do with ideology. Lemmygrad's explicit ideology is ML, meaning there's little harm in an instance that doesn't subscribe to ML defedding the instance. "We are X while they are Y, so we are defedding from them due to ideological differences." But Hexbear's party line is left unity, meaning there's a place here for everyone who professes a form of leftism with the caveat that they aren't patsocs or anarcho-Bidenists. They can't openly defed from us due to ideological differences because as liberals, they fancy themselves as part of the left, meaning it would be strange if a so-called progressive instance would defed from a left unity instance due to ideological differences. This is open admittance that they are not actually part of the left. We know that libs are not and will never be part of the left, and they cannot cope with that.

So what happens? They federate with Hexbear for a time, fishing for a nonideological reason to defed from us. This is where the crying about giant emotes comes from. Do you think they would actually care about those giant emotes, a technical issue that would be eventually solved, if we had the same exact ideology as them? Do you think they would actually care about brigading^TM^ if we were just some quirky instance that mostly talks about fish and other sea animals?

This is the same exact energy as a supervisor who writes you up because you were 5 seconds late. If you're cool with your supervisor, you could be half an hour late. If you're not cool with your supervisor, you would be written up even if you were already in the office before your shift but your ass isn't in your assigned seat at your exact shift.