Administrative actions taken by the Pawb.Social Admin team across our Mastodon and Lemmy instances.
CW: Some instance URLs may contain disturbing, offensive, or adult material.
screenshots
Thank god, those losers are insufferable
Yeeeh I fucking hate tankies...
They're just like nazis, but they're almost always competent trolls who know how to be annoying.
Nothing of value was lost. Seriously, it seems like hexbear is right-wing pretending to be cancerous left-wing to drive people away. As the screen cap of Xtallll mentions, people having pronouns in their username shouldn't be a negative thing, yet somehow, hexbear managed to turn it into something negative.
Edit: I've also noticed that they claim to be super protective of their LGBT members, but then they use them as a shield whenever people bring criticism against the instance that they can't defend against (e.g. talking about how they treat their LGBT members the best, how they love people who're lgbt, etc)
I don't think they're actually right wing trolls, just because I don't think I've ever once seen one of them accidentally "break character" so to speak (at least, I'd bet that they do largely believe what they claim to believe, I don't think tankies really are as left wing as they think they are, but that's a whole other discussion). I suspect it's more that they're a community that exists on their own site because other more mainstream sites wouldn't take them, so they're going to both be an echo chamber and one that self-selects for extremes, and given the small size of lemmy they suddenly find themselves being a big fish in a small pond.
I do still support defederation with them though, I don't think all their users are tankies, but I've seen a fair few that have been making the kinds of points those types tend to, mostly apologists for the Russian government. It does feel kind of unfortunate for those users that aren't, but if a significant quantity of trolls are coming from one instance, to the point of being able to overwhelm communities on another instance, then defederation is the best tool other instances have on a network like Lemmy, given the designed lack of any central administration to appeal to.
Ty admin for transparency
This is a good call. I have seen them causing chaos in the wild often, though not always. I'm sure some of them are nice people, but one of the main problems with Hexbear is that they already have a huge established community whereas everyone else is a lot smaller, and they seem to engage in targeted manipulation of posts and comments, upvoting each other and downvoting others etc. Whenever anything regarding Hexbear comes up you will always see "Hexbear isn't so bad! they're just having fun!" as the highest-upvoted comment, and if you check who upvoted it it's 90 Hexbear users. I've seen it so often that I really don't feel that comfortable having them around manipulating political posts and who knows what else.
Respectfully, fucking finally
Man, what is this larp bullshit? They aren't exactly making a great case for them to not be uniformly defederated across the threadiverse.
Honestly, good those guys spam in threads and attack people very frequently. I'm glad that at least here I won't have to worry about being brigated by them or having to scroll through their PPB image spam that they very often post.