My first months on Lemmy were spent on Lemmy.world, which was the biggest instance at the time. I had no experience with Hexbear because .world had defederated that instance. I sometimes saw it being described as a “tankie” instance, but it was nothing specific.
After I moved to .zip, I came across !games@hexbear.net, which seemed to be free from anything overtly political and reminded me of r/Gamingcirclejerk, so I subscribed to it and occasionally made comments related to gaming.
Today I made multiple comments to a post about an article on the STALKER game developers having removed the Soviet symbols and the Russian audio in the remastered edition of the game. I would argue that in the thread, there were no comments from me that could be construed by a reasonable person as defensive of Nazism, fascism, or even hinting at it. For example, in one of the comments, I linked a Ukrainian law that prohibits the use of Nazi symbols, though I highly advise looking through all my ten comments as to avoid any misunderstanding or false impressions.
Conversely, one comment posted by another user dismissed Holodomor as Nazi propaganda, which I reported, but a moderator of that community just ended up calling me out for that and taking no action, followed by them banning me.
The thread containing all of my untouched posts is still available via lemmy.zip. My comments are also available for viewing via my user page. They are not available on hexbear due to the ban.
And now you know why most instances have defeated from hexbear. It’s extremely toxic.
Agreed, though I’m still not sure I’d defederate even after this incident. It may be best that we inform people of what Hexbear stands for and let them decide.
Incidents like that were not why they were defederated. Those were just the cherry on top. They were defederated because they would organize brigading on communities they had no direct control over. Ie couldn’t just ban you as they did. For going against dogma. Grad was similar.
The main reason .ml is still federated is because they don’t generally brigade. Despite having the same broken dogma. So it’s sufficient to let people interact with them and learn as they recoil from being struck. When the vanguard strikes back against facts and reality. There’s a very good chance you would get the same treatment there if you were to pierce the groupthink.
By the way, where would Andrew Eldritch stand on this issue? He’s certainly in the know.
My nome de plume is more lovecraftian. As a child of the 70s and 80s as well as a goth. I certainly know the name. To be honest apart from generally having a leftward lean having come from the punk postpunk scenes. I really couldn’t tell you much about his particular politics. I generally don’t look to musicians for politics. They are just people like the rest of us . Far more often than one would like only disappointment is found. Other than that, Beyond him being musically inspired the only things I can really say about him. Mostly stemming from is history with Wayne and Patricia. Is that he is stubborn, a bit dickish, but dedicated.
Relatable! Though when it comes to Eldritch, it’s hard not to think politics with song titles like Mother Russia and lyrics about “another motherfucker in a motorcade” or “I tried to tell her about Marx and Engels, God and angels. I don’t really know what for”. And that makes me genuinely wonder if he’s as far gone as Hexbear or if he’s the more reasonable type (like you seem to be).
Anything is Possible, especially given his tenacity and willingness to dig in. Conversely John Lydon went from antichrist, anarchîst, with a tongue in cheek good save the Queen. To all hail good emperor trump.
Ouch.
I just tend to defer to Jim Morrison who once said
If they want to guzzle auth propaganda they can get it from the tap and make a hexbear grad or ml account. The fact that you genuinely though a mod would do something about holodomor denial on hexbear shows you don’t fully understand what they’re about and why numerous instances already defederated ages ago.
Yeah, in my mind, Holodomor is not a gray area at all, even though I’ve seen my share of pro-Putin people from the West. One of the first encounters I remember was back on Diaspora. Funnily in relation to this ban, I’ve done a lot of research into neo-Nazism, but probably not enough into those Hexbear type views.
Just lurk more political comms there (and grad) and you’ll get an idea pretty quickly.
Nah, it’s pretty simple, America bad, tell me what else to repeat, RT!
Even the Wikipedia page is unsure, how are you so sure?
Wikipedia is not uniform. An article is as good as the active users behind it and the sources that support the claims. Still, on its actual page on whether Holodomor is a genocide, the summary is that it was real and had millions of victims, that most scholars at least hold Stalin responsible for it, that the EU and 34 other countries have recognized it as a genocide, and that even the person who coined the term “genocide” is of the same opinion. Simply put, it feels as though Wikipedia is trying to play two sides without really committing or succeeding in being convincing about it not being more or less clearcut
I think one encounter with hexbear is going to inform most users better than any third-party warning.
We’re witnessing the results of a first proper encounter here, in fact.