And we shouldn't allow this concept to go unchallenged here on Lemmy.
Commenting on an active post is not brigading
Posting a link to something is not brigading
Commenting on something you were linked to is not brigading
The only thing that might be brigading, but isn't because it isn't a real thing, is someone explicitly going, "Hey everyone, go here and harass this person"
It's all fine and good that we have some new rules to keep the peace with other instances but we must fight against 
It's not just that you can't convert them so you shouldn't try, it's that by antagonizing them you push them even further away from mutual understanding. We set up the pretense that all their future interactions with leftists will be no better than the time their shit opinion got PPB'd. It's not rational, but it's how this stuff often goes. I get the frustration of being met with absolute nonsense when you're trying to have a proper discussion with someone, but I think we also have to consider the ramifications of creating an absolute shitstorm whenever someone posts uninformed bullshit.
FWIW I am pretty new here so take my opinion with a grain of salt, but when I first encountered a bunch of bears in a thread my first thought was "what the fuck is wrong with these people." I had to sift through many pictures of shit-smeared pig testicles to find out what Hexbear was really about, and even further to find out that you're all a bunch of really great people. Not everyone will take the time necessary to separate the rhetoric from the culture like I did out of curiosity. Most will see the worst and form hasty, unfair conclusions about the community and it will only poison their interactions going forward. It sux and I don't think Hexbear should water down its culture for the sake of any other community, but I think we all could do with being a little more mindful of how aggro we can be when we dunk and what it looks like to people who just want to laugh at shit memes on their phone.
See and that's fine. We want people who do their own work. That's the point. It weeds out people who merely react to content. That's the strategy, that's the mechanism, and based on my very old personal experience, it works.
It's about quality, not quantity.
I suppose I can understand that justification, yeah. I've always considered it a matter of quantity, i.e. the more people you have in support the better, but In terms of fostering a community/movement I can see the merit in filtering out people who won't make the effort to understand or learn further since they're just as likely to be swayed by something else at a later point. Hope you don't think I'm trying to "change" this community, I just have the outsider experience fresh in my head still and can understand some of the more flippant reactions we have gotten.
I totally understand your trepidation. Sometimes people can get a little out of pocket. I myself generally prefer to stick to the hexbear instance and deal with things that come up through that. That being said, as a dedicated old-head of forum posting in general (I have been on different forums here and there since 2007) I have yet to see or be with anything that creates as consistent (and actually relatively insightful) local culture as to the chapo posting method. It's more aggressive than I personally am, but It just works for cultivation purposes. Our posting dominance and the reaction it has had proves it,
Let them react how they will. They are only showing their own ass.