• 6daemonbag@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 year ago

    Just chiming in because I’m a pretty casual user, but recently my everything feed became flooded with a lot of antagonistic posts. After a day I realized they were all coming from the same instance. Ngl it was incredibly jarring, not enjoyable, and I couldn’t even tell what the takes being made were.

    “These people actively hate everyone,” was the exact vibe I was getting. I’m coming to terms with it but… Damn. As far as I’ve seen y’all are “big meanies.”

    The first impression was not good but I’m happy to dig deeper to figure out what your instance is all about.

    • wtypstanaccount04 [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      If there’s one thing Hexbear users love doing, it’s dunking on libs. We’ve been building up posting energy for three years ever since r/chapotraphouse got banned. Since there are liberals amongst us again and this time they’re on our turf it’s been incredibly entertaining to make fun of them. Sometimes it is a bit aggressive I agree but it’s also very funny. Those threads, because they’re a novelty for us, often get a whole lot of comments and bumped up in the algorithm. What actually happens on the site day-to-day is a hubbub of chatter about being LGBT+, being leftist, talking about farts and pee and trying to be funny, talking about serious topics in the news megathread (which I don’t go to very often), talking about anime, supporting each other through tough times and building community, talking with each other and being friendly, and, of course, trains.

      • 6daemonbag@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 year ago

        I definitely discounted the fact that the algorithm bumps up active threads, and the threads that always come up are memes and dunks. That’s really all I saw for my first initial encounters. Like I said, I’m happy to dig deeper and I appreciate you expanding a bit on the nature of your instance. Thanks!

        • invalidusernamelol [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          It’s definitely different seeing it here versus seeing it on an instance that has 1/10th the activity.

          Sometimes we forget that we’re basically the largest instance and also have an incredibly well organized group of posters. Something that can be jarring initially when you’re exposed to it, but we really do try to be nice for the most part.

          We’ve also been through the growing pains of having a new instance. We grew from 2000 to 20000 users in like 6 months a few years back and the friction from that nearly broke the site, but after like a year and a half of working through it we’ve arrived at a very in sync and harmonious group.

          Also means we’ve been exposed to every possible struggle session imaginable and through the type of aggressive effort posting we do managed to arrive at conclusions. Which is another reason we can be overwhelming to new instances.

          An interesting side effect of this is a sort of self regulation. I’ve been moderating several decent sized comms there for a while now and almost never have to deal with moderator actions or reports because the community takes it on themselves to self moderate and do this sort of dog piling on people who come in posting bullshit.

          • This is my first and only account on hexbear, so haven’t been here since the beginning, but have come to love this environment even if I’m still too much of a lurker for the culture. It really felt like finding an online home instead of a subreddit. Seeing only a few of the major struggle sessions, I’ve come to much better understand socialist principles of communication around contentious issues, even if it’s just the terminally online version. I hope some of these federated communities come to understand these principles instead of just blocking it out of their minds like libs are wont to do.

    • heartheartbreak [fae/faer]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      We hate capitalism and all it’s excessive crimes and suffering it’s caused. We also hate people who are either too lost in ideology or benefitting from the suffering under capitalism who also put up shitty defenses of capitalism.

      Really we just want people to read more but the privileged or sheltered who can’t tell capitalism is bad can’t be “bothered” to read or care about those who suffer from their ideology upholding the capitalist system.

      • VILenin [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        You are being uncivil to the most murderous empire in world history, which is actually worse if you really think about it.

    • SootySootySoot [any]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      Much appreciation for the openness and willingness, I just subscribed to dbzer0 today <3 Indeed, would be nice to hear more about what you saw that felt antagonistic. I’m personally suspecting the root cause being just different cultural wavelengths, but would be cool to know more.

      • 6daemonbag@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 year ago

        At this point I can safely say it was just memes and their comments. The “dunking on libs” rhetoric made me think some instance had been taken over by crazy far right assholes or something. It honestly read like a truth social-type thread. Without context phrases like maga and fjb wouldn’t have been out of place.

        … Except for the pro-lgbtq+ stuff sprinkled around in there haha. That’s what really made me go, “wait who the fuck are these people?”

        Now I have a better understanding. Y’all really are crazy, but not the crazy that scares the shit out of me and my personhood. Like someone else said, different wavelengths. Same direction though

        • The “dunking on libs” rhetoric made me think some instance had been taken over by crazy far right assholes or something. It honestly read like a truth social-type thread. Without context phrases like maga and fjb wouldn’t have been out of place.

          I’m going to repaste a comment I’ve made a couple times already, just because I keep seeing this (understandable) issue come up:

          Just so it’s clear, OP isn’t drawing a distinction here between amerikkkan liberals and conservatives. A lot of times when leftists complain about liberals or liberalism, people who aren’t exposed to leftism will mistakenly take this to mean that we’re pro-conservative. We are NOT pro-conservative.

          When we talk about liberals, we mean in the broader sense of people who subscribe to the philosophical tenants of liberalism, or in other words, people who think that capitalism is a good and/or natural thing. To us, conservatives are pretty much just a subset of liberals who have even more reactionary opinions about certain social issues than the standard liberal. This misunderstanding isn’t the fault of the people who misunderstand, mainstream media depicts all politics as being a binary battle between the dems and the GOP, a sport where two teams face off and that’s it. But in much of the world, “liberal” is actually synonymous with right wing and that’s how we use it. In the US, liberal tends to mean “left wing” but only because the overton window is so grotesquely far to the right, and anticapitalism isn’t even a consideration in US politics.

          Forgive me if you already know all this, but because we’re seeing new people around here due to federation, I think it’s a good idea to point this out and avoid the possibility of conflating our utter contempt for liberalism with any sort of positive view of conservatism.

          I really appreciate that you came here and talked to us in good faith and gave us some valid criticism. That’s always a good thing, even when it can be hard to hear, so thank you. Personally, I loathe the thought of being mistaken for a right wing asshole, and I do feel that if we’re coming across that way, then we need to work on fixing our rhetoric.

          I do hope you stick around, or come back every now and then. Our community is dedicated to fostering “left unity,” so we really want to be inclusive to everyone who is, as you said, headed in the same direction, even if the wavelengths are different. If there’s something you feel we do or believe that doesn’t sync up with your own wavelength, ask us about it! It possibly might turn out we’re more in sync than it at first seemed. But over all, I think I can speak for most of us here when I say that we strive to be kind, compassionate, and supportive to anyone else who also genuinely strives to be kind, compassionate, and supportive, especially to those who are the most vulnerable in this capitalist society.

          “If you tremble with indignation at every injustice then you are a comrade of mine.” ― Che Guevara

          che-smile

          • 6daemonbag@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            1 year ago

            That’s awesome, thank for reposting your comment. I’ll be back to educate myself further. And I agree that “the left” in America would be conservative in much of the world. The fingerprints of puritan colonizers remains all over modern society

        • AcidSmiley [she/her]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          Y’all really are crazy, but not the crazy that scares the shit out of me and my personhood. Like someone else said, different wavelengths. Same direction though

          Thank you cat-trans