abfarid

I suppose you have a point. If Hexbear wasn't defederated from other big instances, then they would be more prominent in smaller instances that federate with them too. And when there's a lot of them, everywhere becomes a circlejerk. I mean, both Reddit and Lemmy are circlejerk-y by nature, but at least the circlejerks are usually less harmful than what HB does. I personally haven't had the pleasure to deal with lemmygrad, I think, but lemmy.ml seems just slightly harder lefty Lemmy, I haven't so far seen anything extreme, so Idk if they are toxic.
And again, I think the entire nature of this up/downvote-based media is somewhat toxic. People routinely interpret comments in the worst possible way and pile on it.

The c/196 was unfortunate. It is my only ever ban (so far), as I'm an extremely reasonable person. I have to say that my initial reaction was that, indeed, that instance doesn't want to have a conversation, but have everyone automatically accept whatever they think is right. But if you're saying that the community is an outlier, I believe you.

Your listing of alternative instances was helpful as I'm too lazy to look around, and would likely not found that info on my own. So far our instance is good enough, I think, but I'll consider the alternatives. Thank you for that, too.

Btw, if you're blocking all Hexbear stuff, how did you find my comment? It's a response to a Hexbear user. So you see their comment as well?

Idk if you see @OpenStars' comment, but he provided a link to the summary from blahaj.zone's perspective. It does mention an incident with c/196, but it's not the whole picture.

In short, users from Blahaj.Zone (as well as other Lemmy instances) were complaining about Hexbear users' obnoxious behavior, "Hexbear users calling people “libs” as an insult, denying crimes of Russia and China, denying the crimes of Stalin."
Users started asking to defederate from Hexbear and admin of Blahaj.Zone opened a thread to talk about it, which Hexbear users attacked and spammed the thread with images. Then, Hexbear user complained about c/196, that their comments were being removed, "comments that called out the use of the r-word and other call-outs". At which point, Hexbear preemptively defederated from Blahaj, mostly citing the incident above.

I linked the whole thing, so you can see the details for yourself. But at the end of the day, I would say that the incident started with Hexbear users being Hexbear users.

But also, what are "chasers"?

This applies tenfold if you lived in a country where the are only pirated copies of games and all consoles come pre-modchipped (especially if your game was a multi-language copy with a built-in selector/launcher). I assume the modchips had shit timing, so when the chip was having a bad day I would sometimes have to restart my PS2 for 10-15 minutes straight until it loaded. Sometimes I gave up and came back later to repeat the cycle.

Bonus memory: PS2 is supposed to play PS1 games. So when we got a PS2, on the first day I tried one of my bootleg PS1 games and it loaded fine. After that, it never loaded another PS1 game ever, showing the "please insert PS1 or PS2 disc" error.

True if big.

The communities you specified have been blocked on our instance. That's what I was talking about, they are listed in the modlog as "Removed":

When I first joined the Fediverse, back when Reddit 3rd party apps got nuked, I joined lemmy.world. While I didn't see Hexbear post, comments, etc., but I did see plenty of comments of people mentioning them and warning about them. So by the time I switched to startrek.website (don't remember why I decided to leave l.w, must have been due to some defederations) and finally encountered the mythical beast, I was already thoroughly prepared for it. So I would say, in general, newbies shouldn't be entirely shocked to encounter a tankie, as they are mentioned a lot.

And tbh, I prefer to stay federated with Hexbear, because among all the mindless circlejerk propaganda they will sometimes point out a fair criticism about the western culture/politics that I haven't considered. In addition, as a half Ukrainian who was living in Kyiv at the time of invasion, I prefer to know what kind of ideas and misinformation is being circulated on the other side.
Hexbear wouldn't even be that bad if they just stopped pretending that only western empires are evil, and stopped bootlicking the leaders of the pseudo-communist countries. A LOT more people would agree with them if they were only anti-western, instead of also being pro-dictators. But then they wouldn't be tankies, I suppose.

Btw, Hexbear reminds me a lot of r/GamingCircleJerk. They also have a semi-noble cause, but express it in such a way that rubs EVERYONE the wrong way, not just the "Capital-G Gamers" who they are rightfully mocking. Because of that, r/GCJ has caused several site-wide dramas and inconvenienced people. They both also operate in this constant state of maximum sarcasm, so you can never tell if they are saying is a hyperbole or they are being serious but insane.

Regarding Blahaj.zone, I haven't interacted much with them, but I one day discovered that I'm banned from their c/196 because "Transphobe". It wasn't even due to an interaction with that community directly. In a completely different instance, I think it was lemmy.world, I commented with a question about why a user's comment was called being transphobic. I then got mocked and eventually banned. So Idk if it was mod of that specific community or whole instance. I seem to be able to interact with Blahaj post from other communities though.

And thank you for these massive posts. You seem to be a proper Lemmy historian, might need to remember your username for future potential inquiries.

Yeah, I know they have been defederated to pieces, albeit not in as much detail as you provided, I was just trying to confirm that that was the reason, to better understand how federation works. Our instance has lately been blocking some of their communities, too.

I don't quite understand the vote results, especially in conjunction with the post content, I don't see any ties, but I was most surprised by the fact that they voted to defederate from blahaj.zone? Isn't hexbear rabidly pro-inclusion, in particular regarding trans people?

If you know the name of the fruit you usually know the plant, cause more often than not it's the name of the plant. For instance, apple comes from an apple tree.

You said (almost) the same thing as the top comment, an hour earlier, too, yet you only have 3 updoots, while they have 60+. What gives? Is it because you're from hexbear and most simply don't see your comment?

You have to be strong. Do it for the nose.

Your sudden but short-lived lathe-ing adventure.