The biggest divide between Hexbear and the instances hostile towards Hexbear (not all instances are hostile to Hexbear, despite what many try to claim) is analysis of Imperialism. Hexbear largely agrees with Lenin when he analyzed how Capitalism eventually evolves into a form of international exploitation in the book Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. Not everyone here is a Marxist, many are Anarchists, Syndicalists, or other forms of Leftist, but this central critique of Imperialism forms the basis of Hexbear’s overall foreign policy. There are other divides, of course, such as Hexbear’s (correct) unapologetic support for trans rights, veganism, opposition of the settler-colonial genocide in Palestine, and more, but the Imperialist critique is the biggest divide.

How do I view Lemmy.world? Fairly negatively. The Admins have admitted open hostility towards Marxism, and censor comments and posts that point to the Democrats being complicit in the genocide of Palestine. In addition, many users have been guilty of bigotry, and open transphobia I report seems to stay up as long as it’s directed towards Leftists.

Overall, if you’re chill, you’ll be fine here. Really, despite the fearmongering on other instances, my time on Hexbear is the most enjoyable. The News thread is informative, the general thread is fun to chill out in, the gaming comm is great for talking about Fallout: New Vegas (my hyperfixation, lol), and more. The people here are the friendliest on the Fediverse if you’re a Leftist, and the scariest if you’re a bigot.

Hope that about does it!

I’m shocked at how often people there claim that all our Communism and Trans posting is some sort of front and that we are actually secret right-wingers.

Lemmy World defederated from Hexbear for political reasons. They didn’t like explicitly socialist content. They are incapable of accepting its existence. They did this in tandem with banning leftists that were vocal and active on their platform at the time.

This is extremely obvious because at the time this occurred the reasong they claimed for the defederation was because that Hexbear does hate speech. This is blatantly bullshit to anyone that spends even the slightest amount of time here, Hexbear is probably the LEAST tolerant of reactionary behaviour and views of every lemmy that exists.

That however does not agree with the turbo neoliberals who run lemmyworld, who can not tolerate any views to the left of their own.

How do you view .world

Dot world has trended rightwards ever since the defederation of Hexbear and banning of leftists on it. They will continue to trend rightwards. If you remove left wing voices from your space the result is a right wing space that increasingly alienates everyone as it becomes more and more reactionary, with more and more people leaving because they can not tolerate how obnoxious the right is, and leadership increasingly will pander to the right when left with the choice of doing so or dying as a site as those are the only users they will still have.

I personally wanted to remain federated with lemmyworld in order to continue to engage liberals, educate them, and pull those that I could leftwards. The truth is that lemmyworld defederated because they knew I and others would have been successful in doing that. The majority of Hexbear would probably oppose federation now.

I feel like the rest of the fediverse thinks about us a lot more than we think about them. We were here for years before most of the big Reddit-clone instances started up, and had already developed a significant site culture and norms. Many of us were ambivalent about federation in the first place, and .world and others defederating from us as a “preemptive last resort” was pretty much just funny. The hysterical propaganda about how insane and abusive we are is also funny; this is one of the friendliest and most supportive places on the internet as long as you’re not a fascist. We’re happy over here doing our thing away from all the Redditors.

I don’t think much about them at all unless they’re brought up. I do find the fact that they need to lie about us in order to make us look bad very telling though.

I’ve had mostly bad experiences with world users. Lots of blue MAGA liberal types, who think any criticism of democrats is a vote for trump (and now look what’s going on with the Gaza ceasefire…). I got banned over sharing the fact that democrat senator joe Lieberman single handedly tanked the public option of obamacare. And they really don’t like it when you support Luigi.

Honestly they’re “centrists” but leave racist and anti semitic (not anti Zionist, straight up anti semitic) content up while removing leftist content.

I’m over at the anarchist instance dbzer0 after my original account hosted on world got banned.

I just want to thank you for being open minded enough to give us a chance after how they talked shit about us

They convinced themselves we are all tankies and now are hiding from us. In reality, we just got the better more consistent arguments and they don’t have any recourse against them except to ignore us, make up a strawman of us and lie to themselves.

I’m gonna be honest, I don’t browse any of the Lemmy instances defedded from Hexbear, so the only time I hear (and think) about them is when there’s some drama sufficiently inane that it’s spread over here (.world’s recent policy changes, cis Lemmy users throwing a fit over neopronouns on the other trans instance .blahaj.zone).

This has probably given me a bit of a skewed view of, like, the more bigoted and intellectually incurious side to the instances. There are no doubt very nice people over there, but no one ever gossips about how nice another person is, so all I hear about is the creeps.

That said, I do think they have a really strange view of Hexbear over there that’s partly the result of the all the arguments that broke out when Hexbear first moved over to the mainline Lemmy fork and began federating, but also partly because how Hexbear’s been hyped up as some sort of evil, communist gestalt over there.

Take this comment from one of the threads in your recent post for example:

Hexbear was never federated with .world, from what I’ve seen browsing through the commenters account they’ve never made an account on any instance other than .world. This isn’t the first time I’ve seen someone say something like this, whenever this inter-instance drama comes up again, you get comments like this from instances that never federated. It’s like people have fixated on an idealised version of us to the point at which they have some sort of collective false memories of a much more aggressive Hexbear than the one that really exists.

I don’t think about them at all

They defederated before I even heard them speak.

Not a hexbear but:

VTC had problems with lemmy.world

Their size and ethos mean that users are very poorly moderated, and basically all users that would come to vtc to stir shit were identified with .world accounts.

The admins are also very hostile to vegans.

The other big instances that were only created as a response to the reddit “exodus” are kind of a joke to us, as we existed for 3 years in our own community before they were even conceived - yet somehow we are consistently derided as the “invaders”, “brigaders” or generally othered explicitly due to the range of political opinions expressed here and a site culture of having no respect for civility, decorum or norms when discussing political matters.

.worlders will continuously deny that reasons for their group hatred of hexbear are political, but as a number of posters have pointed out and supplied the link to, .world defederated with hexbear as a “pre-emptive last resort”. Therefore, no .worlder has ever been able to see our posts or comments whatsoever, unless they were also registered to another instance. Their announcement post outlining the “pre-emptive last resort” also explicitly outlines the reasoning as political.

On the civility aspect, realistically at the core of it this is also political - I think many here agree that the bounds of “civil discussion” are specifically drawn to entrench the status quo, and also note that an easy tactic to silence dissent is to attack the manner in which words are said when you cannot logically attack or disagree with the substance of the argument (I swear i’m not trying to act like a debate pervert, but I do sound like a dweeb here). This inherently grows from a contradiction though: Why is it civil to be able to debate the validity and existence of marginalised peoples, or justify genocide, or argue for the upkeep of the current hegemony? And why is it not civil to tell those who justify genocide, argue that the current hegemony is inherently superior, or believe that people’s existence should be erased to eat shit? This is where many other instances (mostly those established in 2023 and not 2020) refuse to apply thought, leading to a dedicated handful posting everywhere possible that hexbear is “aggressive” or “abusive”.

All in all, we have our little corner of the internet and we like it. We dabbled in federation, given Dessalines’ vision for lemmy as a platform, and had our ups and downs. But overall, given the process of the “pre-emptive last resort” and the related threads at the time, we probably don’t think about lemmy.world often, other than when we bring it up as a joke to laugh at. It’s a place where redditors ran to continue to be redditors on lemmy software instead of reddit and feel good about themselves for it. It is administered and moderated like the former “default” subreddits are, with all of the white cishet american male hang-ups that this entails. Many therefore think it is a deeply unserious place, and subsequently pay it the amount of mind it deserves.

I exclusively post on hexbear and have never visited, browsed, or posted on the other lemmy instances because I am exclusively here for the hexbear community.

Whenever I am reminded that .world exists (by someone here posting about them posting some frantic stuff about us), I remember that they “pre-emptively de-federated hexbear as a last resort”, which is such a hilarious phrasing to me.

The lemmyverse’s general hysteria about hexbear is an ugly little microcosm of how western chauvinism manifests towards foreign others, and in that respect it’s extremely pitiful and depressing to watch the same brain-worms at play.

Asking for evidence of Uyghur human right abuses from 2021 onwards will get you banned from most communities for “genocide denial”, saying that “Israel has a right to defend itself” is frowned upon and downvoted but accepted discourse. According to them, Putin is “le evil RuZZian war criminal” [fair enough, he’s oppressing women and minorities within Russia], whereas Biden is just a poor old guy who tried his best to stop a genocide in Palestine but the US position in the middle east is nuanced.

Basically they only move within the allowable western (mostly USian) Overton Window, and thus their flavour of “leftism” (most are self-declared leftists or liberals) leads them to parroting most US state department propaganda, especially when it comes to non-western countries because of racism