I didn't come to hexbear, I went to chapo.chat and they switcherooed it for a hexbear right out from under me.

What brought me here:

Arguing with NAFO soying over the Ghost of Kiev on Reddit eventually took a toll on me. I eventually found more like minded people.

What made me stay:

Those like minded people haven't gone away.

I showed up when reddit banned 3rd party apps. Initially joined .world cuz large means good. Heard about the specter of hexbear and checked it out and found out its a pretty based place.

Now I'm just kinda here vibing, usually only commenting on stuff pertaining to my preferred treats but otherwise lurking the good community that exists here

I lurked on the subreddit, I lurked on the discord lifeboat (and left it as soon as the site went up) and then started posting occasionally. went through a few accounts with a dozen or so comments on each and then stuck with this one just in time for the Ukraine War to start

my upbringing in relative poverty primed me to accept genuinely left-wing ideas but remained in the liberal bubble until Corbyn and the movement that brought him to power came around and exposed me to the concept that ideas left of Obama existed. I was still kind of in that I'm-a-very-smart-and-respectable-and-civil-politics-understander zone but all it would take is a push, and that push came from the subreddit. I didn't really have any background or knowledge of anarchism nor possessed any particular drive to distrust authority as a general concept so I slid pretty easily into Marxism-Leninism (though I do definitely like and respect anarchists and don't really have any reason or background to be sectarian against them, so this website's non-sectarianism fit me quite well).

I think the biggest part that attracted me was that people actually gave a shit about politics, there was actual passionate energy there, after years of lukewarm boring shit about how we just need to gradually introduce ranked-choice voting and shift taxes around and we'd create the perfect society. The only people I'd heard yelling about politics before was people yelling in support of reactionary policies, or sort of just yelling into the void about how they wished things could be better but offering no solution, but hearing people yell in support of policies that would help people was this big moment where my latent frustrations felt validated. Hearing somebody say something like "LET'S JUST GIVE HOMELESS PEOPLE HOUSES!" instead of liberals going "Hm, well, first we need to introduce a means-tested system of soup kitchens that utilize tax breaks to attract social workers..." was just one of those moments where you realize that problems can actually have (relatively) simple solutions and not everything has to be this stupid fucking 53-stage system which inevitably fails at stage 11 when a new president takes over and the parliamentarian says that there isn't enough money or whatever.

also, I hate to say that the chapo podcast was a big part of my left-wing turn as much as the subreddit was, but it kinda was, so I'll always have a spot in my heart for Felix and Matt even though I've outgrown them politically and don't listen to it anymore. It did kinda Americanize me but I made up for it by becoming the Ultimate Geopolitics Understander Who Knows Something About Most Countries later on once the Ukraine War started.

Every other political philosophy is dogshit dogwater bullshit. Communism will win. Free Palestine.

And somebody has to be the funniest person here. I don't know what you'd do without me.

Used to post on the old sub. Came over here after the ban. Stayed because this place keeps me sane.

I was in my open-source arc and I found lemmy, joined lemmy.world because "default instance" and then they did their whole preemptive defederation thingy. they basically said "this is a tight knit online community of communists who hate NATO" and I was like, "hell yea." I stayed because you all challenged my worldview and taught me new things about the world I didn't know before.

What brought me here: looking for a leftist, queer-friendly alternative to Reddit.

I first left Reddit due to the API controversy, came back a bit later after I first left, and while using it, I just started feeling even more sour about the other aspects of the site as well. Even Reddit spaces that were supposed to be "good" had a lot of bad in them. For instance, mainstream trans subreddits had heavily-upvoted enbyphobia and transmedicalism slide by on multiple occasions.

I then began seeking out Reddit alternatives, and Lemmy was at the forefront of them. In trying to figure out what instance I wanted to belong to, I used Blåhaj Zone at first, but I wasn't digging the vibe tbh. I then looked back at join-lemmy.org and sorted by LGBTQ+ instances once again, and Hexbear caught my attention because of its explicit admission of being a leftist space.

What makes me stay:

• Leftist/Queer/ND/etc. solidarity: I'm far more understood here than other spaces
• Organizing and theory resources: Hexbear has been useful for providing resources about organizing, good theory to read, and other forms of media like videos and leftist music.
• Making the place less mayo: I want to be a prominent empoc user on Hexbear so that I can sniff out colonial bullshit that the vast sea of cracKKKers on this site might miss. Also, I don't want any other empoc who come along, are already here, or have been here way before me to feel like they're alone in not being a honKKKy on Hexbear.
• To share my interests: Prog metal, vegan cooking, goofy memes, you name it.
• Mutual aid: I can't stress enough how much this site has helped me survive and have basic needs met during this very rough time of looking for stable employment as a black androgyne in Florida.

Being able to freely complain about England and my style of humour

I came because I was done with Reddit. I stayed because it's fun to feed the owls.

🫱🏻 🫘 🦉

Love posting

Hate capitalism

Simple as

I heard all of the libs were congregating so I decided to check it out.

Regular of r/cth until :cool-zone: :jb-shining: :cool-zone: that bounced me here. Recurring enshittification of :reddit-logo: and The Website Formally Known As Twitter drove me here further.

I stay because I need somewhere to shitpost Baudrillard and Zizek theory into digestible memes.

r/CTH got shuttered and I kept getting 3-day bans. I even got handed a 3-day ban immediately after I came off a 3-Day ban, both for interacting with "violent" content. So was completely unusable and all the Weird Facebook groups I was part of had really fallen off after 2019, so I was looking for an alternative and I can't even remember how I found out about this place, but I did and I'm here now.

I stay because this place is like a hybrid of the old forums I used to hang out in, the Weird Facebook groups I hung out in more recently, and r/CTH. I've even ditched all other social media (unless Discord counts) because this place fulfills all the same needs, and in a way I feel is healthier. Thanks, Comrades!

Inertia from hanging out on /r/cth all the time and... that same inertia

Used to lurk on r/cth

Someone posted the Discord that sprung up afterwards on Facebook

Then the Discord mentioned Chapo.Chat and I think I jumped in like a couple of weeks after it started

Now I am here, like a proud oak, posting pee-pee and poo-poo

waht the fuck is a chapo

Come: I'm kind of an OG from r/chapotraphouse, I switch up usernames from time to time for opsec.

Stay: One of the few online spaces I feel like I can be myself. I can actually care about things without being called a loser for it. Even in times I disagree with someone the conversation will always stay civil. It's been my main social media site.

r/CTH brought me.

I stay because:

1. I steal takes here and reuse them elsewhere. It's useful.

2. I really really enjoy drama.

3. Some of the funniest people on the internet are here.

I came to the old sub because, while Reddit was full of cynical liberals that believed in nothing, Chapo was a community that clearly had a way to explain what was going on and weren't afraid to call it how they saw it. At the time, I had a grasp of how US imperialism worked because of where I live, but I still had a lot of reactionary attitudes. I stayed around because even though everyone was very aggressive, the empathy behind everything made me feel like y'all could fix me. It's been a good time as of yet

Deprogram subreddit suggested this to me around the time a bunch of subreddits went silent in protest, so I followed here.

Stayed cause reddit just kept getting worse and the in-jokes here are great.

It felt like I had finally found a place that wasn't going to demand I be civil towards Nazis. I wasn't going to be banned for saying "kill all slave owners." I also thought you guys were really funny.

Same,same. It's the only place on the internet where I can say "kill fascists" and I won't be immediately banned/shadow banned for saying that.

I lurked on cth pretty frequently and followed after the ban.

It's comfy here, most of the time. People seem to like my jokes which is nice because I'm not exactly a social butterfly IRL. The trans positivity was pretty instrumental in me finding my identity, and although there were also negative experiences on here regarding that it was a net good. Also helped keep me sane while I was jobless for a year

Back after Bernie 2016 collapsed I started trying to look at the reasons why the Democrats said one thing and seemed to do another (spoilers: it wasn't seeming) and I honed in on what the fuck was up with Trump and found that liberals were fundamentally incapable of articulating why Donald Trump had won. I kept a close eye on the news and believed the bullshit that the walls were closing in because, again, I was ignorant and found no voices that spoke truth.

Then I found a video of the Chapo Trap House guys perfectly stating why liberal humor trying to make fun of Trump was just not fucking funny. They were shitting on liberals and it took me some time to realize that they themselves were not liberals, they were socialists. Or something like socialists. I didn't really understand. Anyway, I listened to them for a long time and it got me interested in politics in a different way, and I kept tabs on the subreddit to see what sort of other perspectives were out there. Kept doing that. Followed the Chapo twitters. Got to know them a bit. Tried to wrap my head around their perspectives and found all the other people they retweeted and who dwelled in their comments, even after the subreddit was killed. Then I found some jerkoff mention chapo.chat in a gloating "they're so unhinged they got banned from reddit" sort of comment which immediately made me think you guys were too cool for reddit so I followed you here.

And continued to lurk for a long time because I was insecure and dealing with a lot of personal issues and just scared of joining yet another online community and making such a gigantic ass of myself I get ostracized or banned. After this place transitioned to Hexbear I finally found the courage to join in and start leaving comments, and eventually start making posts.

The reason I stay here is because it's the only place, the only fucking place on the Internet where discussion of politics does not make me feel like an insane man surrounded by children struggling to pronounce the word "politics" as they cast their team sports mentality on it and don't even think to question things and wonder why the fuck everything sucks so much beyond "it's the brown people's fault." It's a vibrant community of wonderful people with moderators who take absolutely no bullshit and have created -- according to the trans folks here -- one of the most, if not the most trans-accepting and -supporting community online. Every day I come here I find comments that make he laugh or think or just feel like I'm not completely fucking insane when I'm thinking about the fucked state of things.

Coming to this community has given me support and the semblance of a social life when I didn't really have any, and kept me afloat in times of despair. At the very least no matter how shitty things are I can come and laugh at the pissing owl website. It's wonderful. I love you people.

When I saw how much .world libs hate it, I knew Hexbear was the instance for me. That, and it's a safe place for trans people

Was on the chapo reddit way back and then came here.

I stick around cause it's a fun webzone that's got a cozy web 1.0 forum vibe where it's got it's own community and site culture that isn't regurgitation of the same slop across every website and I can be a commie without getting the same arguments I've heard for years in the replies.

i was a r/chapotraphouse user back in the day before the reddit ban. I briefly went on the discord but there were some users who were there saying some pretty spicy things that could have been so i left that and then joined chapo.chat when it started up.

mainly i like the mix of users and i appreciate the environment that isn't too self-serious, and i find that it's made me do a lot of reflection and learning over the years. i rotate usernames a lot, im just some anonymous shitposter that has not been a staple of the community but i've been here the entire time.

Whenever I see or hear a group of insufferable dorklings whisper in hushed tones about some shadowy group of deranged radicals, my instinct is to seek those people out.

• What brought me here:

I was a regular lurker/commenter on r/CTH starting back during the first Sanders campaign, not too long before the sub was locked for a day at 69,420 subs. I jumped ship from the Discord as soon as the ChaCha site went up. What drew me in was finding a community of Extremely Online leftist weirdoes who were an excellent foil to all of the right-wing/pro-capitalist ideology with which I'd been inundated (and grown disillusioned) for most of my life.

• What made me stay:

The core of this site's community is like an oasis in a vast desert of internet edgelords and shitlibs. This is a place of solidarity and a place to shut up and learn just as much as it is a place to shitpost terrible lute puns. Come for the shit piss owls, stay for the READ FEINBERG .

I found out about chapo.chat somehow a little while after the ban happened. I wasn't on r/cth much at all, but the idea of a new lefty lemmy instance sounded pretty cool. It just felt like my kinda place, and I've learned a lot here. I enjoy the full spectrum of shit posts to effort posts on offer. Comrades being comrades online, what's not to love?

If memory serves, I was looking for front-ends for . Accidentally found Hexbear and made this account a couple of months later.

Don't really see a reason to leave, especially considering that I have almost no social life outside of here.

I would see my friend on bear site and she had a bunch of spicy memes. At the time I wasn't a commie but I was an anarchist so I was drawn to it regardless.

People said nice things to me and I desired more

I was on the old cth subreddit but didn't know about chapo.chat when the sub got removed. When reddit banned all the good apps to make their IPO look good, I started checking out various lemmys. I happened to be on blahaj when it was briefly federated with hexbear and made this account here after they defedded, preferring to be with the tankies.

I was looking for a leftist site to learn about Marxism

All you lovely people have made me stay. 3 years now and idk what I'd do without yall.

I follow the trail of PPB, wherever it may lead.

The shitposting

Got on CTH sub after most "leftist" subs I was on became property defenders/not all cops apologist during the George Floyd protests.

Stayed because I like the funny memes and have learned a lot from differing perspectives on hexbear.

I've been here since the offboarding from r/cth and when this was called chapo.chat. I was @Zodiark.

Probably just the occassional insight, leftist safe space, and good vibes all around. A general permissiveness and acceptance, even anonymized, to be who you wish to be. I did like to comment and post, but this space was a genuine thought refuge when 10/7 happened.

I was posting on chapo as a teen while I was somewhat of a lib but had read a decent amount of theory. Tried chapo.chat back in the day, but it just wasn't active enough for my tastes at the time. Ended up staying on Reddit for a while after the ban, fully internalized the theory after a few years without realizing it. Left Reddit during the whole third party app debacle and ended up on Blahaj zone. When I saw the Hexbear comments on there, I knew I had to come over now because it felt like the libs over there just became completely unhinged after Ukraine.

I came here from the discord lifeboat after the banning of r/cth. It's corny but I'm kind of proud that this account is almost as old as the site (maybe off by a day or 2 idk).

I stay because of the positive culture, the good politics, and the vast library of obscure emojis.

come for the empathy, stay for the ~~cats~~ beans