Here you go, grabbed a few examples:

"Describing specifics ends up drowning everything in copious bizarre personal drama between individuals.

My judgment of "Hexbear" is very big picture = bad vibes. You're neither hanging out with close friends nor visiting a public forum. You're forced into a constant struggle session where everyone's a wrecker, everyone's angry at each other, everyone's having a personal crisis because of what someone else said, everyone's getting banned for hurting mods' feelings, etc. Every week is new drama.

I blame the admins/mods for being moody micromanagers - constantly tinkering with everything, but never having a clear idea of what they were trying to do. With my conspiracy hat on - their goal was to kill the Chapo community, invite in leftists and make them feel shitty. Without it - they're the worst online community managers I've ever seen. Some outsiders were definitely stirring shit up on purpose, but the responses were worse than the problems."

"It's an over-moderated echo chamber that doesn't have easy access to adjacent communities of indoctrinable libs like Reddit. The site is bad at promo/marketing, they changed their name from chapo.chat which was PERFECTLY FINE to.. Hexbear?! for what reason I don't know, but that and also some ridiculous modding decisions as well as a bunch of people whining about nonexistent "wreckers" drove me off the site."

"That's only the tip of the iceberg. The discord server went through a lot of drama with many MLs getting punished and eventually banned from the community while the same rules were not being enforced for other tendencies within the community. They have had a history of banning trans people so much that a majority of trans people on the discord at the time splintered off and made their own community separate from chapo, and the hexbear response was to bring on a token trans person as mod who hasn't been active on months. To this day hundreds of trans people are banned from the site if not completely disillusioned with the place. The mod team has taken to calling these people "wreckers".

There have been allegations of stalking, pedophilia, and grooming too. The staff there is tight clique and there are allegations that the server has changed hands a couple of times already. The evidence for these can go either way depending on who you believe but the fact that this controversy exists to this day is indicative of a huge problem and personally I cannot trust anyone who has allegations of grooming (like Beatnik for example).

I also remember there was at one point they were promising mod elections in response to all of the criticism but I don't think that ever happened."

"chapo/hexbear would ban us for our takes on sex-work, not to mention they prohibit "sectarianism" and fuck that.

I also don't believe one second chapo/hexbear will ever be federated, it's a "road-map" that was all but abandoned once they started fucking with the code.

And their mods are overly online assholes.

Lemmygrad ftw"