Has anyone else noticed how prevalent Hexbear posters have suddenly become? Maybe sometime last week I noticed nearly every political post had at least one long thread of Hexbear users that do nothing but repeat CCP talking points while waving anyway anything even remotely reliable as Western propaganda. That or getting all excited about trolled libs. The way they tell it, you'd think everything from DW, to Fox, to Propublica, to straight up AP News articles, are all written by the same people.
Not to mention, their info on the Fediverse observer is either straight up wrong or there's some serious botting going on. According to that, the instance is less than a month old, yet somehow they already have one of the largest, most active userbases, along with far and away the most comments of any instance.
Seems to me like Lemmygrad on steroids. Considering we defederated from them, seems like a no-brainer to block Hexbear as well.
So glad this thread could become such a perfect microcosm of why we need to defederate.
Ah yes, bots who've mostly spent one or more years just talking entirely insularly with each other about things of interest, and just random general stuff, like my account literally has pictures of me on it, and just discussions about questioning my gender or books I've been reading recently or films I like as well as like political discussion. This isn't even my first account, I've had like 2 or 3 previous ones that a forgot the password to and so just made a new one because I could never be bothered to use a password manager. And the vast majority of users from here I recognise from seeing posting in threads about their mental health, or memes, or the weekly queer discussion thread we have, or getting into dumb struggle sessions about inane shit like little libraries or outdoor cats or stacking rocks (don't ask)
Also I'm in discords with like several dozen of them and mutuals on mastodon with dozens and dozens more. point is, we're all real, we just all post and have basically no lurkers so we have a disproportionate level of influence on Lemmy.