Has anyone else noticed how prevalent Hexbear posters have suddenly become? Maybe sometime last week I noticed nearly every political post had at least one long thread of Hexbear users that do nothing but repeat CCP talking points while waving anyway anything even remotely reliable as Western propaganda. That or getting all excited about trolled libs. The way they tell it, you'd think everything from DW, to Fox, to Propublica, to straight up AP News articles, are all written by the same people.
Not to mention, their info on the Fediverse observer is either straight up wrong or there's some serious botting going on. According to that, the instance is less than a month old, yet somehow they already have one of the largest, most active userbases, along with far and away the most comments of any instance.
Seems to me like Lemmygrad on steroids. Considering we defederated from them, seems like a no-brainer to block Hexbear as well.
So glad this thread could become such a perfect microcosm of why we need to defederate.
Meh... I don't think defederation is necessary. Personally, my biggest issue with Hexbear is, as with most other socialist-oriented online spaces, is that it's hard to find discussion that isn't focused on it, and especially international socialism since my main focus is my community (hence why I chose this instance). It's not really my thing, I hate terms like "shitlib" and "tankie" and my big interests are outside of my worldview- that's not to say I don't care about it, far from it, but it's not something I talk/think about all the time.
That being said, it can be refreshing once in a while to have an explicitly anti-capitalist instance whose discussions don't puppet ones pushed by massive, capitalist news organizations. Not only is it another perspective but there's sometimes totally new stuff that I end up learning.
Idk. I think the biggest reason we shouldn't defederate as opposed to, say, lemmygrad, is because Hexbear explicitly supports left unity as far as I can tell, so I think it's fine to keep federating.
I appreciate the activity, personally, though everything being political gets very tiring for me. The fediverse should be diverse and I believe things will get better with time. It would be premature to defederate. It's ok to have world views challenged, especially when the discourse is constructive and coming from a desire to reach and foster understanding. I'm hopeful we'll see that come true over time.