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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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.