Democratic centralism is when I upvote every Hexbear post no matter how much I think the post is cringe.

to all our brave posters

TL;DR first because I got rant-y

Hexbear and Lemmygrad formed to be leftist first and individual interests second. So your take is spot-on. I also think that they get mad that Hexbear doesn't have the option to downvote. So they don't get the satisfaction of the power trip and makes them even more pissed off. lol

The funny thing about people thinking we are assholes is that between here, lemmy.ml, and lemmygrad.ml I have found this instance to be the most chill. I find myself more concerned about getting attacked on lemmy.ml for even trying to say something that is not in-line with the western media narrative. I am a bit worried about getting jumped on for misunderstanding or having a bad take on lemmygrad. However I have begun to be better at thinking about how I say/ask things when replying to posts. Which I think is overall a good thing and have better accepted that even if I may disagree with folks, that it is better to learn more about those things over all.

For all the shit that I am learning and seeing that gets said about here and lemmygrad. Those folks on lemmy.ml and the other instances are just beyond quick to just outright refuse to take a moment to consider that they are not questioning shit at all. Just super binary "good or evil." Even if they agree that their "side" has historically both lied and done super fucked up shit. It is still unwavering "still much better than insert whatever shit they think anti-capitalism has done to so many people." They completely misunderstand that us "tankies" are just dumb motherfuckers brainwashed into thinking that AES nations never did anything wrong. It also doesn't help that even "progressive" liberals are so firmly conserned about being super slightly left of dead centre. To go around talking shit about how the hammer and sickle should be treated the same as the Nazi swastika. Still believing that the US is the reason we won the war. Nor do they realize how the Cold War was completely kicked off by the western allies renegging on promises made to the USSR for helping recoup. That the massive build-up of nukes was due to our own war hawks lying about the supposed rapid build-up of anything from the Soviets. Cuba and USSR are always the "war mongers" for putting nukes on Cuba, but the US's shit in Europe/Turkiey.

Pretty damning TBH

Hexbear gamers, explain yourself!

I agree with this tbh

You're correct to be jealous of us. Although, I think we managed to port that feature upstream to the main Lemmy thingy as an optional feature? Check with your instance administrator!

Chapo Trap House is a leftish comedy podcast with three (later four, then five, now back to three) hosts that knew each other from twitter. It mostly commented on happenings in politics with regular segments going over the latest right wing bullshit, and was one of few places that would criticize the democrats as well. The /r/chapotraphouse subreddit was nominally for discussion of the podcast but it quickly outgrew that and became a general-purpose left-wing subreddit with a focus on irreverent shitposting and hostility towards outsiders. Fast-forward a bit and the podcast hosts remark that they don't like the subreddit anymore because people were criticizing them for various things, but nonetheless the subreddit continued to grow. A long-running joke that the "official podcast of the subreddit" was actually an entirely different podcast called Citations Needed began.

/r/cth was getting too big for the admins at reddit (one of whom thinks he'll own slaves in the post-apocalypse to give you an idea of their politics) and was banned for ill-defined reasons of "promoting hate" against slave owners (perhaps the reddit admin was insulted by this). In the aftermath of the banning, some people got together on a discord channel and a variety of volunteers got to work creating the website chapo.chat using lemmy. A couple months(?) later, chapo.chat was complete, though it forked from lemmy relatively early on and would be unable to federate for some time. A variety of comms were made, including /c/chapotraphouse, which then was ostensibly for discussion of both Chapo Trap House and Citations Needed, though this wasn't enforced or anything.

After some time, the admins decided to change the site name from chapo.chat to hexbear.net, because they no longer wished to associate with the podcast. In a completely failed attempt to encourage the growth of other communites on the site, the default "Main" comm was closed. Rather than this leading to the increased use of other comms that the admins were hoping for, /c/chapotraphouse became the new default comm. And finally, after much work from the dev team, hexbear.net reverted back to lemmy and was able to federate.

In summary: Chapo Trap House is a podcast.

I wonder if it’s because you have an in-culture that they don’t understand.

Definitely partially true. Some people have read posts here and made posts elsewhere saying things like "they're right wingers pretending to be leftist" because they can't understand satire and irony without having it spelled out to them and they're automatically trying to assume the worst instead of realising that the entire instance is irony poisoned.

CTH is a podcast, the subreddit was originally about it but quickly became its own thing. The podcast is your typical Brooklyn leftist hot couch thing where you get a bit of theory mixed in with a lot of jokes and parasocial relationships.

A long running joke is that the subreddit/Hexbear is actually a Citations Needed fanclub, because it's a much a better podcast.

In the early days, this sub was constantly brigaded by chuds, terfs, libs, patsocs, wreckers and branches of leftism that were somehow even more online than us and had an irrational hatred of us for reasons that frankly I never cared enough to bother learning. Like any such place, that means we're used to people coming in "just asking questions" with a bad take, and turning out to be a concern troll rather than someone asking in good faith and open to changing their mind.

This produced a culture of radical, frank struggle sessions, an approach to moderation that the Cheka circa 1919 would think lacks due process (and is good and cool and has made this place possibly the most LGBT friendly place on the net.), and a bad habit of dunking for a laugh. We're not nearly as edgy as a first impression might give, though.

We are aggressive and combative against racism, ableism, transaphobia or when someone is attacking one of us or our community...that is what gives us the moral high ground.

Those are literally the only things we have got remotely aggressive with on the fediverse so far.

Heavy is the head that wears the crown