Yesterday, an unexpected admin post was made announcing that hexbear would be shutting down and recreating two of their most popular communities (a): the_dunk_tank and dredge_tank. For those who are not aware, those two are some of the most notorious comms in the threadiverse which routinely cause inter-lemmy drama (disclaimer, the deteriorating relations between our instance and hexbear and my own ban from hexbear was ultimately triggered by various posts in the_dunk_tank)
The stated reason was to promote more thoughtful discussions and to prevent a white cishet mindset which was apparently promoted by the content in those comms, according to the mods and admins.
Within a day 1.3 thousand comments were made with hexbear regulars upset at this decision and discussing within.
However, before this announcement, the top admin of hexbear posted in the cross-lemmy admin matrix chat urging other admins to close down their "drama communities" as well.
Hexbears caught wind of this and quickly accused the admin of duplicity, and having other motives instead of their stated ones. The admin in question as defense admitted that it was their attempt to manipulate other lemmy instance admins and it backfired on them
After a whole day of this, the main admin decided to step away from hexbear (a) , followed by more resignations (a)
In the midst of this, people realize another old-mod had recently come back after a 3-year hiatus, and now people start suspecting some correlation. That mod makes a public post (a) before shortly after deleting their account.
There's also smaller pieces of chaos ongoing, such as one admin, banning one of their alts "as a bit" using wording that they were not aware is misgendering ("fella") which caused other hexbears to pile on. Eventually that was resolved, and admins are asked to tone down the "bit doing" during this heated period.
This "struggle session" is still ongoing, with people are asking the resigned mod to come back , and other admins unbanning accounts which were getting banned left and right(a) but it seems those popular comms still remain shut down.
Speaking personally, them stating they outright lied to other instance admins is just one step too much. Wielding our collaborative spirit for manipulative purposes just sows distrust, and is downright asocial behaviour. It's so out of line, that I honestly don't believe they actually lied. I think they were being earnest and only claimed they were being manipulative when caught by hexbears to save face. But if not, that's even worse.
Thus they lied either way? Either preemptively to other admins or after being caught by their own - so whichever may be worse, it's still lying either way.
This is the action which made you realize that they are operating in bad faith? Not... gestures wildly
You made me spit my coffee :p
As much as I love my personal instance overlord for most of their beliefs and being a generally good person, they are incredibly naive, I assume purposefully so to avoid ever accidentally upsetting someone
Its an admirable trait to a degree even if it is incredibly frustrating
It's not naivety. I try to be charitable as a matter of course because I've been personally burnt too many times by people being uncharitable towards me and my ND expressions. It's a learned behaviour I have, to make sure I don't attack someone for a mere misunderstanding. Of course even I have my limits.
Having read everything that's been linked here, I'm inclined to believe this.
It's of a piece with a lot of the behavior I see on Lemmy. It is, at the root, hostility to collaboration. It's the model where the person speaking is automatically right, and anyone who doesn't reach the same answers as them is an enemy who must be either corrected or defeated. Once you adopt that mindset, then of course lying to people to achieve that defeat is justified. After all, the people with the bad ideas are hurting everyone, on purpose, and they must be stopped. Reasonable conversation and argument doesn't enter into it, at that point.
The thing is, there's no single person who's got all the answers. There aren't any worldviews that apply correctly to all situations. Part of the idea of talking things out is that you can learn from others, detect missing pieces in your own thinking and correct them before they become too deeply ingrained into your worldview. I see way too many mods who think that their job is to remove the wrong ideas if someone "attacks" their community by posting them, or instance admins who think their job is to "wield" their instance against the people with the incorrect ideas. I think adding tribalism to the mix, allegiance to the other vegans or anarchists or whatever, just makes it ten times worse.
Even if the liberals or non-vegans, or whatever, are wrong, then the right answer is to talk with them. I understand that it might be difficult, because they might have the model that they have to defeat your incorrect worldview without listening to anything you're saying except to detect things they should disagree with, but for as long as that's your model on your side, you're doing something wrong, regardless.
I'm missing something. What was the difference between what they said in matrix chat to other admins, and what they said to their users? Because from your description it kinda sounded the same.
You can see both on my screenshot and my link. They themselves claimed they were lying as a ruse. It's not me editorializing.
No no, I'm not claiming you're editorialising. I'm just having comprehension issues and failing to understand, thus I'm trying to get an ELI5. So basically, as I understand it, hexbear admin urges others to shut down their drama comms, then proceed to announce they'll be doing the same on their own instance. I'm not seeing the duplicity or clash of motives? Maybe I'm just bad at understanding this drama stuff.
I guess they were not technically lying about their actions although one could argue they were not really planning to truly shut them down but primarily to rename them. That said, they did lie about their motives and objectives for doing so to the others with the aim of manipulating them to do the same (i.e. shut down their own "drama comms").
The point being that any such manipulation erodes the inter-instance camaraderie of admins.
They absolutely lied. They said they shut down some communities for one reason, when the reason was something different and they planned to keep going with their own clusterfuck communities and activities. They were just hoping other people would stop doing it to them. Pax and chronicon both used the word "lying" in their messages.
I don't see why they bothered. Most instances will get rid of their evil communities without needing to be prompted by a Hexbear recommendation, kind of a "fool me 50 times, shame on me" type of thing, and the kind of people who like evil communities on their instance will keep them going regardless.
Ah I see. Thanks!
I was also confused. Thanks for the clarification.