I don't just mean outrage or regular rage, I mean shock that someone was to the left of "legal weed and free college but only for those that operate a successful business for 3 years in a disadvantaged community" 
takes.
I think federating took them by surprise, looking back. For about a week, those smug liberals were at a loss to even fathom what Hexbears were saying, and could only chant bullshit about how we're Russian/Chinese bots.
Sure they still do that but they've slightly adapted to Hexbear presence.
A lot of them encountered the very thing they've been conditioned to feel disgust towards, and for a lot of them maybe for the very first time in their lives in a conversational capacity. These are people who are inundated on a near-daily basis with propaganda designed to twist the socialist narrative into one of death and destruction that leads to the inevitable collapse of all civilizations unfortunate enough to let it take root.
I don't think that the average liberal is totally apathetic towards everyone but themselves (I think a lot of us have probably identified as such before, be it as a child or long into adulthood,) but their ideas on human rights, social justice, and broader politics are incredibly underdeveloped. When you don't have a considerable wealth of knowledge or experience to draw on, you're a reactionary subject to the pull of your own gut feelings and the preconceived notions instilled in you by your peers.
What I'm getting at is that I think it's important to realize that a lot of the libs pissing their pants at the sight of evil tankies have absolutely no idea what a tankie is or does, and everything they do know is buried under 10 layers of disinformation. This doesn't absolve them of their crimes of grand dumbassery, but I think it's worth considering that a lot of these people would probably agree with much of what we had to say were we to peel back the layers of their programming. Alas, that isn't often realistic and frankly isn't solely* our responsibility.
*edit
hexbear is definitely to the left of all the sites we federated to, and there has been some shit takes by our feddie comrades that were fun to laugh and dunk on, but i feel like we do have a responsibility to educate the other instances so long as they are willing to be educated. like im not at all against giving the other feds like blajah a second chance if they listen to us and understand why they suck.
I don't think it's really to the left of lemmygrad, though I wouldn't say the reverse either
most of you libs are libs like lemmygrad but I, the one true leftist am certainly to lemmygrad's left
ok bordiga
I agree. I wouldn't try to take the dunk culture out of Hexbear, and many people deserve to be dunked on, but sometimes if they don't seem like a lost cause you gotta just teach them what you can and then leave them something to think on that they can hopefully look back on positively.
On the other hand I have a lot of sympathy for people who do try to have a good faith discussion and then after a dozen thousand word comments the lib just goes "don't know why I bothered obviously none of you know how government works"