Blahaj Lemmy Meta

I've had two major issues with these guys. While not necessarily worth defederating everyone, I really don't want to deal with hexbear because:

1. ALL of their content is political. When they first showed up on my feed, I watched what posts/communities came up and how their users interacted on non hexbear posts. I've done my best to remove all politics from my social media. These guys only talked about politics and would go to other communities to turn a normal conversation political.
2. Everything was extreme and obnoxious. I don't understand why everyone keeps calling them polite. There was a constant "you're with us or you're against us"/"my beliefs are always right" behavior that was really annoying, especially in a public space that wasn't polarized before they got there. It reminded me of this one girl from middle school who would walk into a room and loudly talk about whatever she wanted until all the other conversations petered out.

They're more than welcome to behave like that in their home, but they can't go to a public space and expect everyone to cater to their beliefs.

Haha.... They can deal out the punishment but they can't take it themselves... Thought so. Never in my life have I been called a slavery apologist, but 10 mins in hexbear was all I needed.

reminder:

left-unity means authoritarian entryism

tolerance must function as a social contract, or not at all.

reject auth apologists.

Fuckin tankies, man...

Reminds me of the often-told story of the punk bar bartender and nazis

based on @iamragesparkle;s tweets

I was at a shitty crustpunk bar once getting an after-work beer. One of those shitholes where the bartenders clearly hate you. So the bartender and I were ignoring one another when someone sits next to me and he immediately says, “no. get out.”

And the dude next to me says, “hey i’m not doing anything, i’m a paying customer.” and the bartender reaches under the counter for a bat or something and says, “out. now.” and the dude leaves, kind of yelling. And he was dressed in a punk uniform, I noticed

Anyway, I asked what that was about and the bartender was like, “you didn’t see his vest but it was all nazi shit. Iron crosses and stuff. You get to recognize them.”

And i was like, oh,ok and he continues.

"you have to nip it in the bud immediately. These guys come in and it’s always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don’t want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after awhile they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too.

And then THEY bring friends and the friends bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now. And it’s too late because they’re entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down.

And i was like, ‘oh damn.’ and he said “yeah, you have to ignore their reasonable arguments because their end goal is to be terrible, awful people.”

And then he went back to ignoring me. But I haven’t forgotten that at all.

I have been so glad that Sync allows instance blocking at a client level. I tried to give them the benefit of the doubt, but after seeing 4 posts from their instance that were just in bad faith "but it's a joke". I went ahead and filtered them and luckily haven't had to see it.

ok il note to add fuck tankies to the sign on of a social home instance

Fuck hexbear. I don't know if they just didn't try to federate with pawb.social or if they got preemptively blocked (or maybe they went, "ew furries" and nothing of value was lost), but I'm very glad they aren't federated here. It means I only get exposed to them via comments, and the ones I tend to see don't shine a good light on the community, especially when they brigade instance meta posts.

Drama is so exhausting.

My best wishes to the Admins, the whole thing must have been exhausting and depressing. I purposefully stayed out of the entire discussion since I'm not a member of Blahaj. I think it's for the better, because I have read a lot in hexbear and the people there are absolute toxic and unhinged. The mentioned Lemm.ee thread was absolutely swarmed with people from hexbear. Like, 3/4 of the comments must have been them. Anyway, wish you all the best.

I ended up filtering the whole instance. The users there are just so obnoxious

"you can't fire me, I quit!"

I made an account on blahaj zone a while back. seeing hexbear posts on the all feed (coming from lemmy.world, they're nowhere) with a load of troll and straight up unhinged commenters was really off putting :/

I like hexbear, but i suppose it comes down to a rather ... "abnormal" type of "liking".

There is definitely a pattern of asshole behavior from hexbear users, but they're fun to verbally spar with and they make Lemmy feel lively.

In the same way that capsaicin causes spicy food to be spicy by stimulating nerves that are intended to warn us of pain and injury while in fact it's actually harmless, I find hexbear's vociferous users to be endearingly abrasive.

Because turnabout is fair play, they're fair game to be rude to. By choosing to interact in a hostile nature, they are consenting to receive hostility. It's only fair. If they can't handle it, then they shouldn't be dishing it out. However, the exchange must be proportional and bigotry can not be allowed.

"Tankie" is not a slur any more than "Lib" is. If they honestly believe that it's socially acceptable to use "Lib" as an insult, then it's sheer hypocrisy to object to "Tankie". But all other known slurs, ableist slurs, sexist slurs, racial and ethnic slurs, are out of bounds and should be reported, and offenders ignored.

If they don't like this arrangement, then they have no business acting like they do outside of their instance and defederation may in fact be necessary.

I actually left lemm.ee because the sentiment there was anti-defederation. I don't regret it, my experience here has been far better without them.

This is a great summary, thanks for writing it up!