Yesterday, an unexpected admin post was made announcing that hexbear would be shutting down and recreating two of their most popular communities (a): the_dunk_tank and dredge_tank. For those who are not aware, those two are some of the most notorious comms in the threadiverse which routinely cause inter-lemmy drama (disclaimer, the deteriorating relations between our instance and hexbear and my own ban from hexbear was ultimately triggered by various posts in the_dunk_tank)
The stated reason was to promote more thoughtful discussions and to prevent a white cishet mindset which was apparently promoted by the content in those comms, according to the mods and admins.
Within a day 1.3 thousand comments were made with hexbear regulars upset at this decision and discussing within.
However, before this announcement, the top admin of hexbear posted in the cross-lemmy admin matrix chat urging other admins to close down their “drama communities” as well.
Hexbears caught wind of this and quickly accused the admin of duplicity, and having other motives instead of their stated ones. The admin in question as defense admitted that it was their attempt to manipulate other lemmy instance admins and it backfired on them
After a whole day of this, the main admin decided to step away from hexbear (a) , followed by more resignations (a)
In the midst of this, people realize another old-mod had recently come back after a 3-year hiatus, and now people start suspecting some correlation. That mod makes a public post (a) before shortly after deleting their account.
There’s also smaller pieces of chaos ongoing, such as one admin, banning one of their alts “as a bit” using wording that they were not aware is misgendering (“fella”) which caused other hexbears to pile on. Eventually that was resolved, and admins are asked to tone down the “bit doing” during this heated period.
This “struggle session” is still ongoing, with people are asking the resigned mod to come back , and other admins unbanning accounts which were getting banned left and right(a) but it seems those popular comms still remain shut down.
I hope the instances burns. I’ll never forget Hexbear users threatening my life. Fuck. Them.
Maybe you should cool it with the kangaroo beastiality.
But yeah I remember them doing that shit and people like that have no place in the fediverse. We need to annoy sunaurus until he defeds from them.
We need to annoy sunaurus until he defeds from them.
People like you should be banned.
Feel free to ban me from your instance, buddy.
Speaking personally, them stating they outright lied to other instance admins is just one step too much. Wielding our collaborative spirit for manipulative purposes just sows distrust, and is downright asocial behaviour. It’s so out of line, that I honestly don’t believe they actually lied. I think they were being earnest and only claimed they were being manipulative when caught by hexbears to save face. But if not, that’s even worse.
I’m missing something. What was the difference between what they said in matrix chat to other admins, and what they said to their users? Because from your description it kinda sounded the same.
This is the action which made you realize that they are operating in bad faith? Not… gestures wildly
As much as I love my personal instance overlord for most of their beliefs and being a generally good person, they are incredibly naive, I assume purposefully so to avoid ever accidentally upsetting someone
Its an admirable trait to a degree even if it is incredibly frustrating
I’ve been following the drama too. Total misstep from the hexbear admins/mods. I didn’t catch that TC69 deleted their account though, kind of a shame because they seemed to really stand up for trans people. I like hexbear, I agree with a lot of their points and like their community. I do not always agree with them, but I respect them in their fight and struggle. It’s one of the only places I felt safe talking about my feelings about the recent US election because many people felt similar. I don’t post or comment much on hexbear, I really should though. Hexbear did a survey that revealed a significant amount of their users were trans. I did not understand why the mods said white cis het men were the problem and was the majority of their userbase. I am a mixed bi cis latina, I know I do not have a hexbear account but I just wanted to point out that their assessment is wrong. I just hope they can recover from this.
WTF. @CARCOSA@hexbear.net is now suspecting me being behind some sockpuppets because they claim I leaked private messages
By which they mean the screenshot I crossposted in the OP above from their own comm’s public comments!. That screenshot was in turn from a discussion in a public matrix chat for lemmy admins.
I am willing to give people the benefit of a doubt, this is some really fucking manipulative behavior and it’s pissing me off!
The plot thickens lmao
They seem to have a really messed up line of reasoning, just the claim that it was all a ploy to manipulate other instance admins was insane
This is the most interesting development. it really exposes their finest member’s mind’s inner workings:
Well, time to leak private messages now right!
I’m so glad I’m not federated with hexbear & ml.
The election is over so it’s obviously time for an instance wide reorg.
I love that for them!
Those people could really get some hobbies
Like imagine sperging online about communism 24/7
It’s actually incredibly sad that these people have nothing better to do with their lives. I pity them and hope they get well at some point
I got curious and read a couple of the threads. I think they are mentally ill. In my brief interactions with them, they called me a liberal and sent me threats of violence, and didn’t want to hear about reasons why Biden was good. Fair enough. This whole mess sounds for all the world like an LLM hallucinating a deranged exaggerated caricature of a far-left community.
I can’t even make sense of it. An admin went on an alt account, and banned their own main account, and then everyone got really mad about that, because they were being transphobic when they sent a message to their other account, and now they’re saying the whole thing was a “bit,” and the site has too many male users, and there are a whole bunch of people who got banned somehow that they’re now unbanning, and also they’re tightening up their policy about bigotry and apologizing because they blamed the whole thing in the end on the males, and that explanation would imply there’s a difference between men and women, which they can’t do. It was a struggle session. I am not making any of that up.
As far as I can tell, there is no problem at all and never was, and they managed to create a massive problem. It’s like someone was walking down the street, and somehow fell down, and all of a sudden their leg fell off. I did learn some new words, though.
Bioessentialist.
I already thought they had one of the most “redditesque” userbase of Lemmy. The mods and admins being on par for the course isn’t surprising. Also, with the lack of trust in their users displayed here, it seems like they reject the monster they’ve created…
Lemmy.world is by far the most redditesque userbase. I’ve had a much improved Lemmy experience since unsubscribing to most of it. Hexbear is its own thing, unknown in my experience and unique to itself.
Lemmy.world is by far the most redditesque userbase
And I won’t be the one telling you otherwise. It’s reddit 2, period.
I won’t deny that Hexbear developed a culture while slow-cooking in their corner (nor would I say there’s nothing interesting to read on their instance, very far from it). However, I’ve seen the same kind of behavior coming from them that turned me off reddit in the first place. It makes me avoid interactions with them…
I cannot, for the life of me, understand what the appeal of all of this is.
I think it’s the same hunger for excitement that makes sports appeal to people, or leads people to create drama at work.
That was a ruse in an attempt to get the other admins to close their drama communities like the ones that harassed vegantheoryclub admins but I did not expect the hexbear sleuths to find that so not only did the ruse fail but I blew up any chance of doing another in the future with other lemmy admins while further alienating hexbear users.
It blows my mind that they thought this would work.
Hexbear users are alienated because they enjoy being annoying. That’s it. That’s the secret. They can always stop doing that, that’s always allowed. Being dishonest isn’t great, but there are a lot of people in authority on Lemmy that are dishonest, and it’s mostly not a problem.
I also like the implication that it was the unmasking of the ruse that made it not work, instead of the fact that this is the stupidest ruse I’ve ever heard of.
Eventually that was resolved, and admins are asked to tone down the “bit doing” during this heated period.
Not in general, of course. It’s only a problem right now during this heated period. I wonder what some other “bits” are.
One admin there pretty much admitted that their only purpose for interacting with the fediverse is trolling. There is legitimately nothing of value lost by ignoring them.
Yep. Their stated purpose for federation is to “dunk on liberals” and “dispel the illusion of Western propaganda”, whatever that’s supposed to mean. They were never intending to participate in good faith. Heck, when they were planning to federate with the instance I’m on, they were talking about how they were going to “plant their seeds in our field” as if the instance is just space for them to force their ideals on others, and not a community full of people. Like you said, they bring nothing of value to the platform.
What in the Open-source-Zuckerberg-hating hell is the “Threadiverse”?
Portmanteau of “Threaded” and “Fediverse” (which is itself a portmanteau of “Federated Universe”). Effectively “Threaded discussions Fediverse”.
But why rebrand it? It already was the Fediverse. Just because Meta decided to start its own instance, we’re now rebranding it for them? Fuck that. Threads is not even playing by the same rules. They basically just took the activity pub protocol and made their own closed source clone.
Threadiverse is a subgroup of Fediverse. It’s just a way to say Lemmy + Mbin + Piefed, without saying just “Lemmy” or all the three every time. It has nothing to do with Meta and it existed before they created threads.net
But it seems a valid point that Threads has now tainted it, bc as we just saw here, people are going to immediately assume that it includes Threads?
I like how Threadiverse puts the focus on threaded conversations rather than Mastodon’s emphasis on people that you have to find and follow.
But I’ve taken to calling Lemmy + Mbin + PieFed (& soon Sublinks) as “Fediverse” again, to avoid the nefarious implications. Or even just “Lemmy”, since that’s where 99% of the actual content is coming from, from places such as Lemmy.World that holds >80% of the Lemmy userbase. Mbin is somewhat complicated by crossing over both Lemmy & Mastodon, and PieFed is a super neat project but currently has next to no content available exclusively on it (then again, if that’s the criteria, then Lemmy is basically the same as well, since everything is shared by federation:-D).
Worst of all is how Threadiverse is technically correct (the best kind of correct! 💯), since despite defederation from threads.net (or hexbear.net, or lemmygrad.ml, or lemmy.ml or midwest.social or whatever else people decide to block, individually or collectively), it is the same style of threaded-based conversations (iirc). It’s just that “Threads” itself is so hated.
After Sublinks is released I was going to write a post asking people what name they wanted to use, but I’m too curious now already to wait: what do you think? Isn’t Threadiverse too controversial and would drive people off that would otherwise consider coming here, e.g. from Reddit?
Ye it’s a problem term. I don’t know if it can be reclaimed, but listing all the software is also not great and most people think of microblogging when they hear “Fediverse”. Maybe “Nestedverse” or “Forumverse”? I don’t really have a good catchy term in mind.
Interestingly, some Hexbear users accused the francophone instance jlai.lu to be authoritarian when it opened a discussion, and a poll for the community to vote about defederating from Hexbear (a final decision has yet to be made).
Then an Hexbear admin unilaterally decided to defederate from jlai.lu claiming it had “reactionary” users and “no effort was made to address this” (no jlai.lu admin was contacted nor prompted about the existence of such users).
Then this happens, again with complete disregard for the community members.
It’s interesting that they would accuse anyone if being authoritarian when their own ideology is distinctly authoritarian.
Hexbear users are stupid enough to think that way.
Then an Hexbear admin unilaterally decided to defederate from jlai.lu claiming it had “reactionary” users and “no effort was made to address this” (no jlai.lu admin was contacted nor prompted about the existence of such users).
This is funny because it sort of mimics Russian, Chinese or North Korean politics to a degree as well. Everyone’s authoritarian, fascists, Nazis - except for them, the beacon of democracy, freedom, and values.
They did exactly the same thing with Lemmy.nz, threw a shit fit and defederated, after a certain someone made a post suggesting we defederate them.
It was a very “you can’t fire me, I quit” thing.
As in .ee defed them? I like .ee purly because we dont defed most instances even if they are toxic.
Same. I’m an adult. I can choose what I want to see on my phone while I poop.
Their votes will still influence your feed though. In that way, you don’t get to choose entirely freely what you want to see, they will influence what you see as well.
You are lying. Hexbear disabled downvotes. They can’t downvote anything.
Please don’t accuse me of lying. Upvotes obviously influence the feed. I am aware that hexbear has disabled downvotes.
If you were on reddit at the time when /r/the_donald was a menace, you should know how harmful even upvotes can be.
Please don’t accuse me of lying. Upvotes obviously influence the feed
I am sorry, you actually make sense.
Luckily upvoting doesn’t change the ranking of posts
username checks out
Sometimes i look at what they say while i poop so i can compare them on an equal playing field
The revolution will not be televised.
We need a worker ran instance where every user gets to vote on reports.
Or even better; every user should have admin rights.
Sounds like an experiment from a Fallout vault. Interesting, but it would likely devolve into a single person using a macro to auto ban every other admin besides themselves or their pals.
