Hi all,

Throughout the last few days there has been an uptick in arguments and turbulence throughout our site. This comes right at a time where we are onboarding new communities that are in danger of being banned by Reddit.

During this, we’ve seen that it would be beneficial to provide more clear communication around our decisions and stances on current issues. This post will be divided into two topics that have both come up: 1. BIPOC Comrades and Intersectionality and 2. Veganism

BIPOC Comrades and Intersectionality

We have an ongoing commitment to intersectionality. This will always be a continual process as we identify new opportunities for learning and process improvement.

Based on community feedback around BIPOC representation on the sitemod team, we have added two new sitemods who will bring additional BIPOC perspectives to the sitemod team.

While we had BIPOC comrades on the sitemod team previously, they made the understandable choice to not state this identifying information publicly and we support them in their decision. We will continue to increase BIPOC representation on the sitemod team over the coming weeks.

There have been concerns of implicit support of racism amongst the mod team. We hope that looking through the modlog will prove otherwise. Although we can’t get to rule breaking comments or posts immediately, we will never tolerate racism on our site, we’re sorry about this and wish we could do more. We encourage everyone to continue reporting rule-breaking comments and posts so that they are more visible to moderators.

To reiterate, any posts or comments that are exclusionary to our BIPOC comrades are against our Code Of Conduct and will be removed. Individuals should especially not appropriate comparisons that aren’t from their culture. Do not use appropriative comparisons like:

  1. Do not use appropriative comparisons like chattel slavery or the holocaust if they are not from your culture.

  2. Implying indigenous people are barbaric/mentions of “assimilation” or “evolving” their culture. These phrases are outright xenophobic and have a long history as a dog-whistle for settler-colonialism. They are not allowed.

Our moderator team is made up of volunteers and works to remove reported content that violates our CoC as quickly as possible, but we are unfortunately not able to remove objectionable content instantaneously. Objectionable content remaining up following a report does not mean the moderation team endorses that content. We are continually working to build up the moderation team and number of volunteers.

Veganism

Hexbear is a platform for all leftist communities. As a part of this, we’re partnering with a number of vegan communities on reddit who are migrating over to the site. The mods of these communities are intersectional and have a number of BIPOC comrades on their teams including indigenous comrades and we’re excited to work with them.

For those unfamiliar with the concept, veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to eliminate as far as is possible and practicable all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals. Veganism is about absolute liberation of our exploited and commodified animal comrades. Veganism is not a diet, although not eating meat and animal products is a common extension of this philosophy.

We encourage vegans to post throughout the site. Our sitemod team is a mixture of vegans and non-vegans, as are the mods of the !food comm. The mods of that comm made the policy change of requiring pictures of meat to be marked nsfw following feedback from multiple comrades who were uncomfortable seeing meat pics. After examining feedback on this issue, the sitemod team has made the decision to support the !food mods agency as moderators.

The “NSFW” tag is very much a “catch all” at this point, although more specific content tags are planned for the future. We encourage all comrades passionate about helping us develop this feature to check out !hexbear@hexbear.net for how to get started with contributing.

Vegans are allowed to advocate for veganism, especially in their own comm. This doesn’t constitute sectarianism, classism, racism, etc. and will not be actioned against as long as it does not break the site’s code of conduct or a comm’s rules.

As with any comm, individual posts and comments will need to be moderated. The diverse team of vegan mods already has experience navigating this from running large subreddits and will respond as these issues are reported. Bad faith generalizations of all vegans will not be tolerated, nor the delegitimization of trauma expressed by our vegan comrades.

In Conclusion

We appreciate the passion our community has for empowerment and intersectionality. As a team, we hope to consistently embody the communal standards we outline in our code of conduct. We feel these changes uphold our goals of intersectionality and left unity and will drive the site forward as a general, inclusive leftist space.

Thank you and viva la hexbear.

  • PM_ME_YOUR_FOUCAULTS [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    1·
    4 years ago

    So claiming that non-vegans are not leftists/reactionaries/liberals is somehow not secretarianism?

    Can I say, “All anarchists are liberals?” Is that cool now?

    These people literally do not believe that they are my comrade, yet I am expected to believe that they are?

      • asaharyev [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        1·
        4 years ago

        Claiming that non-vegans aren’t leftists is decidedly un-dialectical, detached from material reality, and reactionary.

        Users who do this should be warned once then banned if they continue.

              • asaharyev [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
                1·
                4 years ago

                It’s wrecker shit, people have been banned for less, and just because “lol vegans are annoying” doesn’t mean the users who do this should be allowed to be hostile on this site.

                Also, “vegans are stereotypically annoying” is a pretty BS generalization when the majority vegans on this site since launch have been great comrades.

  • crime [she/her, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
    1·
    4 years ago

    Vegans are allowed to criticize people for not being vegan

    Cool can’t wait to have to leave the site cause of comrades starting shit that makes my eating disorder super fucky.

    Sure you can say that vEgAnIsM iS NoT a DiEt line as much as you want but that’s literally the only aspect of it that ever gets brought up outside of the vegan comm, and giving people free license to bully comrades about it site-wide has pretty clear implications for comrades with eating disorders.

    Edit in case it wasn’t clear: This is a horrible fucking policy and should be removed, especially considering the behavior of the VCJ mods and posters at large.

  • cumwaffle [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    1·
    4 years ago

    i just dont understand what the point of this was. inviting /r/vegan over would be fine, but why invite a community that’s out and proud of being toxic and shitty to people? like geez, who’d have thought that a subreddit known for shitting up other subreddits would immediately start shitting up this site once invited.

    now the actual users of this site all feel pissed off and alienated, mods and admins exhausted to the point where like 3 are quitting and all we got out of it is a bunch of mean reddit weirdos

    maybe in the future you could actually ask the fucking community what they think of inviting in new people, instead of making the decision for us and scolding us like usual

  • Fakename_Bill [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    1·
    4 years ago

    Please crack down on VCJ refugees being toxic outside of their own comm. You say in this post that vegans will be allowed to criticize non-vegans, and that’s fine, but toxicity is not. If you foster a space where calling comrades “bloodmouth murderers and r*pists” is considered cool and good, the hostility of the past few days won’t be going away.