I’ve felt this way for a while. The lack of ideological diversity is what creates the illusion of “left unity” over here. One example:

Imagine if we had a sizeable chunk of people who are anti-Dengist. Then nearly every post about China, every use of Xi emotes, would be filled with replies criticising China, Xi, and the OP.

And you couldn’t call all these people libs and just ban them because there are a lot of leftists, from Maoists to anarchists to ultras to even non-Dengist MLs who genuinely oppose the modern Chinese state based on their ideological convictions.

And if the mods banned them, that would be pure bias, and could lead to an exodus of those other leftist users, which would mean we are not actually left-unity.

But if the mods didn’t, then it would be a severe restriction on the kinds of content that can be posted on the “main” communities. You couldn’t say things like “China is moving towards socialism or that it is in the primary stage of socialist construction” because these are controversial opinions not held by other leftists. Allowing these, would mean allowing the opposites, which would mean a war in the replies every time you post something like this.

As an example, see what happened with vegan posting. In this “left unity” Hexbear, anarchists would have to confine their controversial opinions to the anarchist comm, MLs to the ML comm etc.

Right now, we have an extremely small minority of people who are against the majority opinion in some way. And those people are tolerated in their dissent as long as they frame it in very careful ways and never outright go against the majority. I mean, we have left unity emotes and anarchist emotes and that’s all cool.

But what happens if there are a 100+ anarchists who start posting and commenting about their analysis/opinion on the USSR? Would that be allowed? Would anarchists, if they existed in sizeable numbers be allowed to not just criticise the Soviet Union in the narrow ways in which is allowed currently but to state the full breadth of their opinions on it from the start? Even more controversial, what if Trots started talking about Stalin? How long would that be tolerated?

Now, I’m not saying the way Hexbear operates is wrong. Maybe left unity is a pipe dream and that there are just too many controversial positions and opposing visions for it to be real. Maybe, if there were other tendencies here, the mods would figure out a way to balance things out. Be calm on main, go wild on specific comms. But I think that is the point - Hexbear’s claim to left unity needs to be properly tested. The users and the mods need to face these challenges and come up with proper solutions that doesn’t end in purges of other communities. We cannot claim to be this big tent when we’ve only been in this tiny sandbox with a handful of small rocks.

  • quartz242 [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    tbh i’m confused is this like a sitewide strawman or just spitballing?

    I often see anarchists self-identifying in posts and while [email protected] may not be as active as [email protected] its not like you can mosey over to raddle.me and say “hey come populate our anarchism comm” hexbear is going to get what hexbear is going to get.

    Ive seen people try and put out the hexbear name in some reddit communities, like r/anarchism and you’ll get the usually folks spouting about the evils of hexbear and the tankie coding of lemmy itself.

    As much as any aspect of the code of conduct the mods ebb and flow in their effective removal of “sectarian” content. I’m personally not an anarchist but if you are be the change you wanna see post shit in the anarchism community and I know there are [email protected] mods that are active and will remove any comments in that community shitting on someone for voicing criticism of marxism and etc. there.

    Suppose I’m rambling at this point but unless you’ve got specific examples of what you are saying is occurring I’m here to say that I don’t see it.