Most hexbears are stand up chaps and under normal circumstances we get along great. The main issue as far as I’m concerned is that their posting culture does not align with what I want out of my Lemmy experience.

Basically, they are fighters. They run around the fediverse picking ten arguments at a time, getting in people’s faces, escalating moderation decisions to instance admins and generally have zero chill.

Me, I like to hang out with chill people and relax and shoot the shit about video games and stuff. Yes yes I know western imperialism bad, but after the fifth time I’m done with the topic.

They're a bunch of tankies who dogpile, sealion, and brigade at basically any opportunity.

They literally have a community on their website dedicated to shitting on people they disagree with while having rules that require you to provide a link to them and not having a rule against interacting unless it's with instance admins. They'll defend it saying it's not for brigading but it's obvious what it's for. "This isn't for brigading," then doesn't condemn brigading when it happens.

My general experience is that they are obnoxious and combative and is working to make "the libs" have a bad time on Lemmy and when they are mentioned with these kinds of post they fill them saying that they are just some silly spicy boys in the hope that it will fool the people that are yet to meet them in the wild.

In short, tankies that won’t shut up and stop shoehorning themselves into every conversation. Feel free to block every user that will inevitably reply to this comment about how I’m not Trotskij-pilled and really a bourgeoisie Jeff Bezos semen demon, or some stupid shit like that.

They’re just trolls. They say their communist, but I haven’t seen any evidence other than they say they hate capitalism. But who doesn’t nowadays? Really they’re anarchists with nothing more to do.

Imagine the worst right wing trump supporter spouting off crazy shit and trying to get you pissed off. That’s them, but the left side.

They also like to team up and have multiple accounts.

Buuut… they usually hate all the same things I do, so it’s hard to hate them too. 🤷‍♂️

Don’t feed the bear.

They’re annoying as fuck with a toxic culture, which is why they were running as isolated instance for so long

The place is awful. Waiting for individual instance banning.

They're annoying, like over-caffeinated teenagers, and they like to use what I presume are something like Twitch emotes that don't work outside of hexbear, which looks really stupid.

I don't think they're evil or anything, but they're just so universally awful to deal with that I can fully support immediate no-questions-asked defederation. They're the fediverse equivalent of a decent enough guy who just fucking reeks because they refuse to ever shower or wear deodorant.

Unfortunately they are very in your face unless you fully submit to their view. They belittle your efforts if it is anything but outright revolution, cheer on horrible regimes and deny genocides. Very US centric point of view.

Of course it is not all of them, but that's what you will experience very soon if you interact with them, because it is a radicalized echo chamber let loose.

Our instance actually managed to get defederated from them though. Although it wasn't handled well from either side they seriously only dish out, but can't take a hit. I won't say that nothing of value was lost, because there were a few moderate users and of course some interesting content might be lost, but overall my lemmy experience got better without them.

I think a lot of the backlash is because people are used to being inside their comfortable echo chambers where dissenting voices are totally marginalised and they felt like their opinions were universally shared among sensible people.

With federation, those echo chambers are interacting with each-other a lot more than they usually would, on relatively equal footing, and being confronted by the idea that other people think that your opinions are shit and that you tacitly support some evil practice is an uncomfortable feeling! The natural inclination is to reject that sort of experience as a jerk who is intentionally trolling you, personally, because they’re wrong or brainwashed or whatever.

The reality is that we’re all just flawed people who aren’t very good at dealing with our emotions and it’s a lot easier to blame and banish someone who disagrees with us than to talk to them and come to a consensus. But the latter is how we actually solve our conflicts.

We have a lot more in common with each-other than separates us.

Except from Nazis, fuck Nazis.

I've been on Hexbear for two and a half years and honestly I still couldn't tell you what the deal with its userbase is

Lemmy is mostly leftists and communists and it seems that patience is running thin on how some very active reactionary HB's behave against the ideologies. There are also cool & funny leftists there but they get lost in noise.

They are absolutely huge hairy brawny angular posting units.