This instance kind of pissed me off at first because I didn't really understand it, so I get where some people are coming from lol. The politics were foreign. My first encounters with them were on my Lemmy.world Alt, with hexbear seeming to defend Russia in their invasion of Ukraine, Stalin and Fidel pics, just really weird stuff to me. There were multiple thick layers of irony to pull back and they had their own emojis and lingo and such.

Basically what it took to get past the initial step of "wtf?", was that I took the unprecedented step of actually going in here and asking why people in here were doing that, what their thought process was. Someone gave me a couple paragraph explanation explaining their priorities of anti-imperialism, their criticisms of NATO, historical context, etc. How the instance doesn't have down votes so people comment to express opinions. They answered any questions and were actually pretty chill.

I took a look around and saw that they don't uncritically worship Putin and China like I was told they do, they just criticize these other countries from a materialist and historical perspective, rather than based on unfounded propaganda. Also they're not really a hive mind, they have different perspectives on things, based on their different experiences leading to endless "struggle sessions" (intra-instance arguments and debates essentially). So, as it turns out hexbear was just humans. (Although we all tend to be socialist, pro-trans rights, pro-Palestine, and anti-US's foreign policy because of the anti-imperialism.)

So ya, if you don't go into hexbear yourself and see how cool they are, just like I did and you did now, then I could see it being pretty weird from someone in the bubble of Western media. It's actually a pretty good metaphor to how people in the West uncritically consume propaganda about many foreign, third world countries as well, and it often takes physically going to those places or speaking to those people online or through videos or letters, to get past that.

And of course there's plenty of things to talk about here besides politics, but as that is the main things that bothered people about hexbear on Lemmy.world, I figured I'd mainly just address that. I like threads on art, games, movies, and other things like that, too, despite world making it look like we just exist in the office of a Russian troll farm to talk about politics every day.