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.
The thing we've been seeing is that most of these people are recent migrants from the reddit API drama and act like American tourists with little regard for the local culture. OP here has only been on the site for a month and they're already acting like they own the place. Also their baseline is tainted by spending so much time on a website utterly flooded with with US centric mainstream propaganda and bots and censorship of leftists, so when they step out of that place they receive culture shock from an explicitly leftist community (and just about ALL of the lemmyverse was before the influx overwhelmed them) that doesn't have that kind of manipulation.