Hexbear began as refugees from r/chapotraphouse, a leftist subreddit that was purged from Reddit by the admins 4 years ago, well before the API drama of last year.

The subreddit was banned due to supporting violence against """people""" known as slave owners. Posts saying kill slave owners, John Brown did nothing wrong, etc, was the catalyst.

Hexbear was then an un-federated Lemmy instance until last year. Basically, due to not being federated with others and being born from crude dirtbag leftists, culture on Hexbear has splintered from Reddit and Lemmy at large. Mainly, being civil was not a requirement so personal insults and ad hominem is seen as not only perfectly fine, but preferred. Also uniquely being a leftist space that hasn't had a large, community ending schism between the anarchists and Leninists has been a factor.

When Hexbear did become federated, Reddit refugees people didn't like our hardline LGBT inclusive anti NATO Anarcho-Stalinist takes, and used Reddit terms such as "brigading" to describe our behaviour, which is more or less a misunderstanding, we have posts sorted by "Active" by default so what you see first is what someone replied to most recently, and we don't have down votes so if you disagree with someone you reply to them to voice your disagreement instead of down voting and moving on like a coward. (EDIT: This has been the setup since BEFORE FEDERATION. By YEARS. Were we brigading ourselves? Christ. We discovered it promotes discussions and engagement, which is why our instance is the highest activity per capita by an order of magnitude before federation)

So oftentimes when a newly federated instance user posts something like "Vote blue no matter who!", it will show up to us, we can't downvote, we reply with something along the lines of "You're a dipshit", that increases engagement, other people see it, also reply with serious and unserious answers alike.

Oftentimes, Reddit refugee liberals see our scathing hatred of Democrats as pro-Trump because their brains are programmed to only see the existence of 2 parties, despite one of our biggest threads before federation being hundreds of posters hoping Trump dies when he first caught COVID. Or being against the expansion of NATO as being pro Putin. Or support for Palestine as antisemitism. Etc.

So basically, a combination of "crude" language, "brigading" and being "MAGA/Putin/CCP/Iran/shills/bots" makes Hexbear a prime target for hating on.