this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2025
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MeanwhileOnGrad
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Meanwhile On Grad
Documenting hate speech, conspiracy theories, apologia/revisionism, and general tankie behaviour across the fediverse. Memes are welcome!
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I'm almost too afraid to ask, but... What's the deal with hexbear?
I know:
Lemmygrad is very tankie.
Lemmy.ml is the pilot/dev instance of Lemmy or whatever, but has some of that.
So... where does hexbear fit in? What its ostensible niche?
tl;dr The_Donald subreddit, but for nepo Tankies
When reddit refugees flooded Lemmy, they filled it up with "libshit"
The regulars at .ml, lemmygrad and the developers themselves saw this takeover as a threat (despite telling Reddit to come join) and to even out the field of all these liberals, they brought in Hexbear.
Hexbear opened up their instance for the rest of lemmy, with the sole purpose to troll and 'purge the libs.' But that means liberals can also wander into their instance.
Within 24 hours Hexbear defederated from all the instances they wanted to troll because a bunch of clueless liberals asking questions was too much for them to handle with multiple members of their community having 'panic attacks'
In addition to what other people said, they were also trolls.
Hexbear is lemmygrad but a little more China focuswd while lemmygrad is more russia focused. but theyre both tankie central. Although not everyone on there is terrible. But the average user absolutely is.
I think it’s more the majority of commenters.
I like most of the posts.
Some of the anti-capitalist or anti-us posts are good.
But a good chunk of the posts are simping for Putin/Xi/Kim etc and denying Uyghur genocide so idk I don’t really enjoy that.
Hexbear is (originally) the outcome of the chapotraphouse subreddit getting banned
They were originally a subreddit that got banned, years ago. They moved to a private server, running some fork of a fediverse platform (I don't remember which but I sorta recall it not being Lemmy) and spent years there developing their own little 4chan-like subclture that's big on using a bunch of custom emotes and lingo and being aggressively sarcastic. Also, yes, entirely supportive and uncritical of China, as a while.
When Lemmy started taking off after the reddit API-calypse, they decided to open up federation across the Lemmy network, to "spread their message to all the new users", and instantly became the loudest voices in almost every community. Quite a few servers defederated from them. Eventually, they toned down the aggression, outside of some of their own communities.
Me, I was never bothered by them enough to want to defederate, even found that a decent portion of their content, and their commenters in general are good faith. Maybe I just have a higher tolerance for being able it ignore their nonsense.
Also, FYI, to this day, downvoting is disabled across their entire instance. If your client lets you downvote a post from hexbear, it'll get saved on your own instance, but it won't federate to them, nor any other servers. Thus, if you see posts with high upvote/downvote ratios, don't make the mistake of thinking that means they're high quality, and if you use sorting algorithms that are based on downvote ranks, hexbear posts can end up not being fairly ranked.
How can a bunch of teenage shitposters roleplaying as "communists" (while supporting oligarch state capitalist regimes) be seen as acting in good faith?
No fucking way.
Just the kind of backstory I was looking for, thanks! Yeah, peeking in I didn't really get the tone of comment threads, but that makes more sense now. Seems that culture is still there.
And yeah, it seems not too defederation worthy... at a glance. Everyone's a little mad in different ways.
Well, they weren't de-federation worthy until they jumped in one of our threads and ended up calling for new Islamic bombings to take place again.
they were the least problematic of the triads to be honest but they do show that they are pretty annoying form time to time, so they get blocked. the most obnoxious being ML.
Collectively known as the tankie triad. A sizable chunk defederate hex and grad entirely. The .ml is let slide more because they're the home of the primary devs, but behaviorally not much better.
They're less overt comparatively, but still pretty bad.