I am formally asking hexbear users to stop participating in meta posts on other instances.

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

Hexbear is really queer friendly and polite. It's also one of the few actual leftist spaces on here after the homogenization of lemmy.world and lemmy.ml. The main goal I've interpreted from Blahaj.zone is to be a queer-first and affirming space on Lemmy, so one has to prove that Hexbear is a large enough systemic threat to Blahaj's members to warrant defederating.

It can often get tense with them and I don't agree with some of their takes, but they are definitely a voice to consider seriously and worth arguing (in a polite way) with.

Unlike those conservative right echo chambers, most of them are actually educated, historically literate and smart, and they actually provide sources for their claims instead of hand waiving and using every falacy in the book.

Hexbear is widely old Chapo. They're an odd bunch, but honestly I'd defed Lemmy.world long before Hexbear was in sigh.

It's certainly the most trans friendly place I've encountered bar none, the original CTH helped me realize I was trans

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.

Hexbear leans meme-tankie but on the flipside they’re very supportive of queer people. I don’t agree with them on everything, but I don’t feel unwelcome there either, so I personally disagree with both defederation and the comparison to T_D.

I mean I'll admit my bias as a politically-minded leftist, but I like them. I don't agree with all their takes, but it feels like a positive way to poke some holes in the echo chamber a bit.

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.

I've had only very positive interactions with hexbear users. They definitely have their own vibe within their communities from being unfederated for a while, but I don't see why that is a reason to defederate. If you don't like hexbear comments sections then just... don't open them??? Do you even want to be in the fediverse?

All trans hexbear emotes

almost as bad as the_donald though

Don't compare us to the_donald just because we're not libs. I'm trans, just also a Marxist Leninist.

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.

I defederated my instance.

I thought lemmy.ca's justification pretty compelling. They are self-avowedly more interested in trolling, harassing other users, and crapping on other people’s politics. They don’t even make a secret of it.

It’s unfortunate because they do seem really queer and queer-friendly. But they seem to be totally uninterested in doing anything other than dunking HARD on anyone to the right of Lenin. So… passing on seeing that, personally.

Some of the users takes on the CCP are garbage, but a few garbage opinions doesn't warrant defederating.

Edit: You know what on second thought let's defederate. There are a lot of tankies shilling for countries that hate the lgbtq.