What had me block the instance was how the majority of Hexbear posts and users I was encountering initially was how annoyingly spammy they were. Acting like Lemmy was Twitch chat, spamming giant ugly reaction stickers everywhere, literally behaving like 12 year olds.

Then I also started to notice the far-right authoritarian simping buried under all that chaos.

It's a combination of tankies and some more level headed leftists. They do have a decent proportion of OK users and the occasional decent meme, but the frequent genocide denialism and too many tankies have resulted in a lot of blocks and bans.

They were founded after being kicked off reddit, then self isolated from the fediverse for years, creating the echoiest of echo chambers. It's like those Appalachian families that were so isolated they basically developed their own culture, language and all. They've spent too long "struggle sessioning" together and driven out any of the more reasonable users with their purity tests. They think they're the "true" Lemmy users and only refederated to "spread the word" and antagonize all the "liberals" (read: anyone that's not 100% with them). The one thing I dislike about my server is that they haven't defederated from that place.

All responsible server admins have them defederated. Hate speech and genocide denial, that is almost certainly against the law in Canada, Germany, and other places. We defederated lemmygrad for the same reason.

It's where r/chapotraphouse went after it got banned from reddit.

Hexbear isn't being paid for anything, they are largely made up of Anarchists and Marxist-Leninists. Hexbear has been unafilliated with Lemmy for years before integrating with Lemmy a year ago.

You might be seeing their zero tolerance policy for liberalism in action, but if you genuinely want to know what their users are about, just visit it. Just hop on over to Hexbear.net and scroll the news megathread and whatnot, try to understand what's going on.

Finally, I want to question why you believe anyone would be paid to mess with Lemmy, moreover when the lead developers are aligned fairly closely on ideological lines. If they were here to "cause chaos," why would the devs support them ideologically? To ruin their own network? That narrative is just a wild hypothesis.

Nope, just good ol' fashioned communists! Beware the red scare!

They have a zero-tolerance policy for political viewpoints that differ from their own. That becomes a breeding ground for an extremely toxic echo chamber.

I have been doing the "The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love" book club at menby@hexbear.net recently which has been my only real interaction with hexbear. The book club has been great so far and if anyone wants to talk about feminism and masculinity should join.

There are a lot of in-group signaling across their own users which mostly shows up with acronyms, specific phrases and calling everyone comrade. This hasn't been that difficult in the book club which is long form text and discussion and everyone is respectful and nice. That being said I have blocked a few communities at hexbear because I have found them annoying and taking over my feed. So like everything here at Lemmy I had curate my own experience

you should go ask them

Just block people you don't want to interact with. My instance isn't even federated with Hexbear but there are still people fitting that description. And plenty of folks there didn't fit that description.

!meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works