The truth is though, I’ve been moderating online spaces and building and developing communities online and offline for nearly 30 years. I’ve managed tiny communities, and communities with hundreds of thousands of users.

It shows. You've handled this saga admirably. As someone with none of that experience who has performed significantly worse in navigating this situation, I'm happy to know that there are people to lean on.

Hexbear voted strongly in favor of federating with us and their admins assured us they would be well behaved. They immediately brigaded our main community and disrupted all local discussion for about 48 hours by spamming our communities, and then defederated from us, citing absolutely no evidence of misbehavior by our users in the defederation announcement. They claim ableist slurs, but considering they think the word "crazy" is an ableist slur... it rings somewhat hollow.

It's not even the politics that bothers me, despite the fact that they often take pointless, inflammatory positions. It honestly feels like they intentionally lose arguments by aligning themselves with horrific human rights abuses and authoritarian regimes, just so they can claim to be misunderstood and preserve their safe space.

When they see a user from another server make a good point against their narrative, they swarm like white blood cells fighting an infection, hurling a combination of invective and irrelevancy to prevent the cold hand of logic from penetrating their bubble. The discrepancy between their treatment of their own users and users from any other server (barring lemmygrad) is remarkable to witness.

The most dangerous idea that exists, from their perspective, is that any Western nation has ever done anything beneficial for the world. As soon as they acknowledge any positive aspect of democracy or capitalism, they surrender their moral high ground in being able to call for the genocide of all westerners and white people, and their noble communist crusade collapses into the shape of most other human enterprises, that tattered and wizened visage of emotionally fuelled tribalism.

I'm still very upset about this whole situation because I know chapos, I listened to the podcast, I frequented the subreddit. Back in 2016/7 I thought wow, the far left is making a bit of a comeback here in America, this could be the start of something.

Then eventually reddit banned the subreddit and it seems that was all it took to dismantle that budding source of leftist activism. I guess I'm partially to blame, because I'm one of the many voices of reason that didn't bother putting in the effort of joining a different site. Clearly, the extremists were the only ones who cared enough, and the 3 year isolation surely solidified that fact. The only question remaining is whether governmental agencies (whether they be American/Chinese/Russian) have played any role in infiltrating the community and nudging it toward its current level of absurdity.

And now they actively sequester themselves from... pretty much everybody, comforting themselves by making vague assertions of unspecified minor communist victories in their real lives. It's extremely frustrating to know that thousands of potential comrades have been neutralized, and in fact are potentially being wielded like a bludgeon against real western leftists to blunt our ability to effectively collaborate and find common ground.

[–] ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 1 year ago

I’m still very upset about this whole situation

Yeah, I feel that. I put a lot in to trying to federate with another instance that is strongly protective of its gender diverse members, and for it to end the way it did was a bit crushing...

[–] Gullible@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There’s really no sage advice that anyone can offer in the wake of what is very apparently a major disappointment to you. They were just more insecure and… emphatic than was required for the job you entrusted to them. Looking back a decade, you’ll find people preaching for social changes that are now ubiquitous despite their champions’ entirely uncharismatic involvement.

The game’s not over, it just needs new players. I fucking despise hexbear now, but my opinion on socialism is largely unchanged, if that improves your mood in the least.

[–] imaqtpie@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

If nothing else, the past week has reinforced my confidence in the local users of sh.itjust.works. Hexbear has been a massive disappointment, but SJW has, as always, provided an abundance of good takes.

I'm not cashing in my chips, I'm just realizing that I need to raise my level going forward. Hexbear is like the level 1 boss that we need to defeat to reach the next stage of Lemmy's growth. They have a bombastic opening attack, but upon closer analysis they also have gaping vulnerabilities.

[–] InEnduringGrowStrong@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago

To me this is kind of a life lesson on extremes.
As in, adding opposing extremists into the mix doesn't really balance things out, you're just stuck with more extremists of a different cult.

[–] Gullible@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

If we ever refederate, a whitelist rather than a banlist may do some good. SJW simply lacks the moderator capacity to filter the mix of culture shock and bad faith users. Granted, a whitelist would be a huge undertaking in and of itself, but I can’t see any other way forward between our two instances.

[–] mycorrhiza@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

comforting themselves by making vague assertions of unspecified minor communist victories in their real lives

many hexbear users organize, volunteer, and work in orgs. Some have unionized their workplaces. As /u/Pax recently pointed out to you, no one on hexbear seriously views posting as praxis.

it honestly feels like they intentionally lose arguments by aligning themselves with horrific human rights abuses and authoritarian regimes, just so they can claim to be misunderstood and preserve their safe space

The actual hexbear position is that certain human rights violations appear to be fabrications to manufacture consent for US foreign policy, and there is significant historical precedent for this. See the Nayirah testimony in 1990 before the Gulf War, the Iraq WMD reports before the Iraq invasion, the fictitious accounts of genocide in Libya before the NATO bombing that obliterated the country, and the large number of North Korean defector testimonies that have fallen apart under scrutiny, as reported by the Guardian. Major operations against foreign nations require the consent of legislators and the public. Atrocity propaganda is how that consent is manufactured.

Hexbears can back up these positions with a large number of credible sources, but threads outside of hexbear rarely get to that point. There's no reason to write a long, well-sourced post when the audience views hexbears as fanatical, irrational tankies, assumes the sources are bullshit, and does not read the post. Threads get stuck at a simple level of discourse. People trade short jabs. Liberals accuse communists of supporting genocide, and communists, rather than dive in to respond to that accusation and have no one listen, instead accuse liberals of not caring about American imperialism, because this is shorter and punchier and it reaches some people.

That does not mean there are no human rights abuses in socialist states, especially the massive country of China, and it’s still important to have nuanced takes, but hexbear does have nuanced takes, it’s just hard to get to that point in the discussion when you first have to defuse allegations that you are some fucking sociopath who wants to watch the world burn for no clear reason.

I think hexbear flippancy is natural when the prevailing response to a good-faith post is "shut the fuck up you disgusting tankie, I'm not reading that." "Genocide denier" — or, even less accurate, "genocide supporter" — is an easy accusation to make, and a hard one to respond to when no one even fucking reads your responses because you're an evil tankie and nothing you say can be valid.

As for authoritarianism: hexbears generally believe, again based on historical precedent, that the alternative is to be coup'd by the US and replaced with a far-right dictatorship or neoliberal puppet government. This is what happened, for example, in Chile in 1973. Elected socialist leader Salvador Allende was overthrown by a far-right, US-backed faction in the military, which then went on to torture and murder thousands of socialists, infamously throwing some of them out of helicopters. Allende could have prevented this by purging fascist officers from the military. This would have saved Chile but condemned Allende to being called a fascist on lemmy.

I wish the Indonesian communists under Aidit had armed themselves, as Mao had advised them to. Maybe they could have prevented US-backed fascists from rounding up and slaughtering more than a million communists in Indonesia, as detailed in The Jakarta Method. As far as I can tell, no one on lemmy has even fucking heard of this let alone cares enough to condemn it.

The 20th century is a graveyard of crushed socialist states and movements. The only survivors were those that hardened themselves against attack, and that means authoritarianism. It means suppression of dissent and propaganda in the press, it means a secret police to ferret out CIA agents and their assets. It means mistakes and false positives. It means innocent people getting swept up in it. The best comparison I can make: it's like how a lot of the symptoms of an infectious disease are caused by your own immune system fighting it off with limited tools and hurting you in the process. The alternative is to get fucking killed by a pathogen.

Imagine if, after you fought off malaria, malaria then went on TV and maligned you for having an immune system.

On top of that, the authoritarianism has often been overstated! In authoritarian Cuba, recently, Cubans just democratically drafted the country's newest family code, hammering out the details in over 80,000 citizen councils around the country. That code, among other things, affirms comprehensive rights for LGBTQ people. Even earlier, hormones and gender-affirming surgery have been free in Cuba since 2008. And then western media depicts Cuba as a despotic regime that should be overthrown or sanctioned, while keeping silent about the 73% of dictatorships that America provides military aid to. Maybe democracy is not America's real concern.

continued:

[–] mycorrhiza@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

only question remaining is whether governmental agencies (whether they be American/Chinese/Russian) have played any role in infiltrating the community and nudging it toward its current level of absurdity.

in the previous sentence you pointed out that hexbear has been isolated for 3 years.

Why the fuck would any government give a shit about them?

The most dangerous idea that exists, from their perspective, is that any Western nation has ever done anything beneficial for the world. As soon as they acknowledge any positive aspect of democracy or capitalism, they surrender their moral high ground in being able to call for the genocide of all westerners and white people, and their noble communist crusade collapses into the shape of most other human enterprises, that tattered and wizened visage of emotionally fuelled tribalism.

I'm gonna gloss over the "genocide of westerners and white people" comment and give you the benefit of the doubt.

You mentioned democracy. What democracy? In all seriousness. People have looked, and they don't find it.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B

Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens (2014) — Cambridge University Press

from the abstract:

Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

and from further down

In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule — at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.

What was it, 70% of Americans want single-payer healthcare?

Where is the democracy? Even mathematically it's questionable. The districts are gerrymandered, poor communities have woefully inadequate election resources and wait in line for hours to vote, first-past-the-post tosses out millions of ballots, and it’s all filtered through the electoral college. But even before all of that, corporations own the fucking political parties and the media! Corporations own the think tanks that write the fucking policies! Corporations fund the campaigns! Voters are a fucking afterthought!

America is not a democracy. And even if it were, where are its accomplishments? Domestically, living conditions are getting worse every year. People are poorer and more precarious. Infrastructure is failing. Millions of people have addictions they cannot treat. What wealth there is is massively concentrated. Internationally, much of America's wealth is extracted from the impoverished and underdeveloped global south, contributing to massive, widespread global poverty. 9 million people fucking starve to death every year under global capitalism so that western companies can buy cheap outsourced labor to enrich a small number of owners and shareholders.

Imperialist appropriation in the world economy: Drain from the global South through unequal exchange, 1990–2015 (2022) — Global Environmental Change

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095937802200005X

Unequal exchange theory posits that economic growth in the “advanced economies” of the global North relies on a large net appropriation of resources and labour from the global South, extracted through price differentials in international trade. Past attempts to estimate the scale and value of this drain have faced a number of conceptual and empirical limitations, and have been unable to capture the upstream resources and labour embodied in traded goods. Here we use environmental input-output data and footprint analysis to quantify the physical scale of net appropriation from the South in terms of embodied resources and labour over the period 1990 to 2015. We then represent the value of appropriated resources in terms of prevailing market prices. Our results show that in 2015 the North net appropriated from the South 12 billion tons of embodied raw material equivalents, 822 million hectares of embodied land, 21 exajoules of embodied energy, and 188 million person-years of embodied labour, worth $10.8 trillion in Northern prices – enough to end extreme poverty 70 times over. Over the whole period, drain from the South totalled $242 trillion (constant 2010 USD). This drain represents a significant windfall for the global North, equivalent to a quarter of Northern GDP. For comparison, we also report drain in global average prices. Using this method, we find that the South’s losses due to unequal exchange outstrip their total aid receipts over the period by a factor of 30. Our analysis confirms that unequal exchange is a significant driver of global inequality, uneven development, and ecological breakdown.

And that's not mentioning the fucking wars.

Post-9/11 wars have contributed to some 4.5 million deaths, report suggests

There are open-air slave markets in Libya now. Great job, America.