Hey everyone, I've removed bans for everyone that did not request one in the previous admin thread. (I think. If you got banned and I didn't restore your account yet, let me know and I'll fix it.) Don't worry! We're not gonna just ban people for no reason.
In case anyone hasn't seen it yet, Alaskaball confirmed that Sangria was their admin alt. They were messing around with their admin tools on their own account and figured it would be seen as a funny bit, but without being informed of the bit many of the mods and admins were just as shocked, confused, and appalled as you were. I've talked to the other admins and mods, and we're all gonna take it easy on bits for a bit. (Pun intended. This is the last one, I promise.)
If you're afraid that there's been an infiltration of transphobic, egomaniacal wrecker mods who hate the users, I want to assure you that's absolutely not the case. The overwhelming majority of mods and admins on this site are trans. Our admins are all trusted, long-time users in good standing. We regularly browse, comment, and post on our main accounts. You post and chat with us daily as comrades, and we value all of you. You may not recognize the usernames on our admin accounts because we regularly swap the alts used for admin privileges. This is why you'll see really old or unused alt accounts as well as really new accounts on the admin team.
I've seen a lot of speculation down below, some entertaining, some upsetting. We absolutely do not accept transphobia or any form of bigotry on this site. Some of the statements provided by mods and admins have been seen as transphobic and bioessentialist. I want to offer some transparency, but also clarify that I can't get much more specific on this for personal security reasons.
During the earlier discussions on how we felt things could be improved with these communities, multiple trans mods and admins described their reasoning in favour of the change by expressing with a variety of wording that it's the [he/him] demographic in particular that has been the source of toxic and troubling behavior in the tanks. That the he/hims haven't been beating the accusations, so to speak. With that group being largely cishet white guys on this site, these two terms were assumed to roughly correlate. We weren't making prepared statements for release, the comments that got posted here were paraphrased and combined from more casual comments made by trans people, in the mod chat to mostly other trans people about some of the chauvinistic and ironically bigoted posting habits that they saw as alienating and unhealthy for the site, and what we could do to improve the situation. We genuinely didn't foresee the potential for a miscommunication of those statements as being bioessentialist, and want to extend our sincerest apologies for the misunderstanding.
Edit: Please feel welcome to post in c/gossip as you would have posted in the_dunk_tank, and in c/counterpropaganda as you would have posted in the_dredge_tank.
Hello users of hexbear, I have gone back and tried to unban everyone from the past couple days related to this struggle session.
I was offline most of yesterday so I missed what happened.
From the bottom of my heart I am deeply apologetic to everyone who was hurt by the statements and actions of the past few days. I know it will be a long and tough road to regaining back the trust of the userbase.
We are going to let this post sit for a couple of days and then move towards rebuilding. I'm back today and am happy to answer questions.
Please bear with me if I fail keep up with questions and comments. It's quite late here, but I'll do my best to address things and will link and pin Q&A's here
"Why were we banned in the first place?" -NewAcctWhoDis
"Just to clarify, most of this is just around @Alaskaball@hexbear.net being banned and that was something they did to themselves?" - radio_free_asgarthr
Several questions and comments on site culture, not forgetting about chauvinism issues, and more - cowbee
Why did you quote @radio_free_asgarthr@hexbear.net asking a question about the Alaskaball thing? The answer to his question is actually "No, most of this is about completely different things, Alaskaball just did a poorly timed bit with some confusion on gendered terms, but that was resolved and is just a tiny blip in this whole debacle which has many facets involving admins and mods complete disregard for the users of this site, which in turn has many of those users very upset."
I am trying to understand, I guess the issues with the admins and mods goes deeper than Alaskaball, but I guess I don't know what is happening other than mods maybe being a little ban happy?
Literally no one is upset about the Alaskaball thing and it was only for like 20 total minutes that anyone was before the matter was cleared up. Pretending it has anything to do with the core of the struggle session is just yet another in the seemingly endless series of shameless admin lies.
Is it the large amount of bans flying around and some of the mods stepping down? I am still trying to understand what is happening.
At this point it's like 4 struggle sessions stacked on top of each other. In short, the mods/admins still hate the dunk tank and are mad that they failed to kill the dunk tank using rule 8 ages ago. So they tried a new strategy which was wildly unpopular, insulted and condescended to and banned loads of people for expressing the unpopularity of this strategy, and then repeated. Like 3 times.
Wait, so this all boils down to the dunk tank/dredge tank struggle session, and everything else is downstream of that? seriously?
This is my understanding of it.
The dunk tank stuff is an incredibly minor thing, that should have been easily fixed. Everything else has just been logs thrown on a paper fire over and over again.
It's all incredibly silly and it seems like nobody in this team understands that less is more when dealing with minor drama. Responses to drama should be kept proportional to their size, if something is major and deserves a major response fair enough, but if something is minor and you give it a major response then what you do is immediately blow it up into a major issue instead of keeping it the incredibly minor thing it should have been all along.
In this case the entire admin and mod team should STOP FUCKING POSTING.
Seriously. Stop. Just stop. It's that fucking easy.
Yup. Admins can't stand that the users of this shit posting site want a comm where they can post low effort dunks. That's the core of it. At every opportunity the mods and admins could have just stopped antagonizing the users of the site for no reason, and at every opportunity they have instead doubled down with some of the worst and most offensive arguments I've ever seen from supposed "socialists."
That's where it originated but it is well beyond being about that alone now. As just one other little event to mention here, it was revealed that our main admin was telling other lemmy admins about this as a plan a week before any hexbear users were told about it. That admin (who has since stepped down amid calls for them not to, so they may return) told us that they were lying to the other lemmy admins to try to get them to remove their dunk comms, and that they weren't lying to us. But that is as weird as it sounds.
One of the things that was revealed by showing mod chats and mod reasoning for the change was that they were saying the people who like to dunk here are toxic cis-hets exclusively when that is clearly not true and got a lot of our trans and queer users who enjoy dunks rather upset at being told their behavior is toxic cis-het. Plenty of misgendering ensued as well.
There's also a person who has been making alts and harassing people who express dissatisfaction with this unilateral mod/admin decision and it is almost certain that this chronic harasser is herself a mod of some comms here.
And there are plenty of other things going on with this too, so hopefully that gives you an idea as to why this is beyond just being about some comm changes. I'm also exhausted and probably didn't explain things well, but again, I hope that gives you a better idea what's happening.
So in watching a lot of this go down, yes a lot of people were pissed about the handling of canceling the tanks, but what REALLY pushed it all overboard was someone,
presumably a modwho was confirmed NOT to be a mod but was thought to be, making a bunch of alts (if you search the mod log it's the "debatebro" accts harassing the upset users. Misgendering them, infantilizing them, telling them to kys, etc etc. Many users felt that that issue wasn't addressed at all. Hence people feeling like the admin team was letting that shit slide, which really pissed everyone off. That's where shit REALLY started to pop off. That, combined with there seeming to be multiple different reasons coming from admin about why the tanks were closed, then a controversial mod figure coming back after years and just banning everyone and admin turning this whole thing into a bit and posting instead of either ignoring things or answering questions, which just made people feel even MORE disrespected.
At this point it's like 4 struggle sessions stacked on top of each other.
This wording kinda reminds me of those trail markers where people stack rocks on each other.
I'm starting to think dengism won because the Chinese people really were burnt out after red guard struggle sessions.
One of the justifications for the removal was that the dunk culture on the site is inherently 'white cishet bro'-ish. I'm paraphrasing, but this comment goes a little deeper.
https://hexbear.net/comment/5620140
Which is also a knee-jeek reaction at best. Pronouns do not indicate sex assigned at birth, sexual attraction, or skin color. It's kind of cishetnormative-brainwormy for a mod to make the statement 'white cishet bro'. The one who wrote that needs to do some hardcore self-crit.
I'm sorry, but if people are garnering resentment for "the [he/him] demographic" at the mod/admin level, that's a failure of having pronouns on this site, no one should be reading posts and judging them based off of the poster's pronouns unless they are engaging in misogyny or something else where pronouns would actually be a relevant factor, also you don't know whether these [he/him]s are cis or not, that is extremely reactionary for a leftist website
With that group being largely cishet white guys
How do you know this? There is not a cis box next to the pronouns, there is not a race box next to the pronouns, there is not a sexuality box next to the pronouns, people are just assuming this about other people who have not made this clear? That's kind of a fucked up thing to do, I'm not personally assuming whether any user is cisgender or not, or is white or not, or is hetero or not, based on how they post unless they explicitly mention it.
If this was going on on a widespread level some serious self crit needs to be had.
Honestly, NGL, that does give me really weird bioessentialist and non-intersectional vibes, too.
Despite this site having a large portion of trans users, I still am not wholeheartedly convinced that many users on this site, even some of whom are trans, have completely dealt away with their bioessentialist brainworms.
These kinds of pronoun-based judgments can absolutely be reactionary, cisheteronormative, and harmful. This site as a whole actually needs to understand that complaining about cis men from a more systemic "I'm tired of male privilege making them act like dicks" perspective can easily diverge into statements that seem suspiciously and needlessly harmful to men of color and trans people (and that includes both transfem and transmasc people) if these bioessentialist, cisheteronormative, and reactionary brainworms are not properly dealt with.
The fact that this site's userbase fails to realize this is a part of the reason why I feel uncomfortable as a POC, as it's just one of the site's more plainly obvious demonstrations of not really being considerate of intersectionality.
We genuinely didn't foresee the potential for a miscommunication of those statements as being bioessentialist
Yeah I'm definitely more on the side of there being some bioessentialism brainworms at play, instead of it just being a "miscommunication"
iirc, on the site polls, the site was overwhelmingly white, and almost all of the he/hims who responded to polls were amab.
I really don't think that excuses anything personally, unless you know the specific user's sexuality, gender, race it is fundamentally reactionary to assume what they are
At that point you are quite literally profiling people based on their pronouns
Pronouns aren't gender, nor should they tell you anything about somebody's sexuality.
I feel like the mod team probably has similar demographics to the rest of the site tbh
From the bottom of my heart I am so sorry for the pain of the past few days. Many folks here have been hurt by the statements and actions, we know that we have alot of work to do to begin rebuilding trust.
I love this place because of how many people have been helped by the community and the refuge it provides. I can see how important the tanks were to people, and we want to work with you to find a way that is satisfying for everyone.
❤️
I’m so sorry.
You’re incredibly brave and I wish you didn’t have to be.
Thankyou for putting the effort in to share this.
You write beautifully.
I have no idea what's going on, but every time I check in, it seems to be worse
It really is astounding how the mods and admins keep making it worse. It could have been solved so easily at several different points, but they seem to insist instead on doing the condescending lib PR thing and pissing everyone off, then banning them for expressing discontent.
I still can't get past the fact that the admins lied to all of us about why they were doing the thing (which IMO was a BAD reason), then when they got caught there was zero contrition. Y'all are quick to apologize for the ban rampage and the chauvinistic brainworms, but this seems to be just slipping to the back of the conversation.
The admins/mods demonstrated that they think this is their site, not the users. That was only reinforced by the gleeful cruelty and ambivalence of the ban waves. I for one spent yesterday afternoon reliving the intensity of anxiety I felt when I was in an abusive living situation, because I felt compelled to speak out despite people catching bans literally just for being upset left and right.
None of the apologies coming from the people who did this are speaking to this, that I've seen. To me that means the status quo still stands. Decisions about the site are for making behind closed doors, a week before any of the users know about it, and can be lied about when the rollout happens. And by my measuring of the timeline, that's the point where the userbase went from sad to angry, so letting this fade into the background is just setting us up for another huge drama like this in the future.
Why wouldn't I be afraid that the admin team hasn't had some form of transphobia kicking around in it when I got banned shortly after I attempted to defend my trans comrades with the following text.
The admin team needs combed through for transphobia immediately. Between the anonymous comment and this where an admin misgenders AlaskaBall, there's clearly an issue that needs addressed. If you folks want to continue being known as the transfriendly instance, it's time to act like it.
I don't care how much of a funny bit you think any of this shit is, but you need to gauge when shit is starting to careen out of control. It is not fucking okay that you folks banned me for that. As a transwoman, getting banned for that comment is a huge red flag for me. I've been here for a long fucking time. What was done and continues to be done is not acceptable and is purely childish behavior on the part of the people that run this site. You folks seriously need to all do self crit or get the fuck out.
I think the worst part about all of this is that the ban reason given made it seem like I asked for it, obfuscating and giving absolutely no real reason as to why I was banned. This is clearly because there was no reason and you folks just wanted me to shut up for whatever reason. Fucking figure out your shit admins.
Show
Show
I'm in absolute agreement with you. You absolutely shouldn't have received a ban, especially given the topic of the comment. You were banned independently by TransComrade69 for that comment, her reasoning given was because she was afraid further comments about the topic could lead others into further wild speculation based on mistakenly thinking an admin banned and misgendered Alaskaball. In actuality, they did it to themself.
Fucking figure out your shit admins.
I'm sorry you were banned. I hope that I and the rest of the mods and admins can work to earn your trust again.
her reasoning given was because she was afraid further comments about the topic could lead others into further wild speculation based on mistakenly thinking an admin banned and misgendered Alaskaball. In actuality, they did it to themself.
Then perhaps this information should be divulged to the userbase rather than banning people without a proper, given reason.
For someone who told us to read the modlog, she seems very upset every time we read the modlog.
her reasoning given was because she was afraid further comments about the topic could lead others into further wild speculation based on mistakenly thinking an admin banned and misgendered Alaskaball. In actuality, they did it to themself.
The ban do not stop this no? Other user will still discuss. It does not make sense to me. I am not trying to be mean. Do I not understand it?
I do not understand it either. Really all I can do is undo it.
I go for a run and TC69 deletes her account
Anyway I'm back from the gulag. I've got thoughts, but I'm gonna chill out and not post for a little while - Trying to embrace @Awoo@hexbear.net thought - so it's only going to be a short novel of a post.
Thanks for the support y'all, it's warmed my heart to see all the people who wrote about me getting banned. TBH I was being hostile, though I felt like my hostility was an appropriate response, and it was not like I came out swinging. It ramped up slowly as this situation became more... Situationy.
I'm really happy to see the direction things are going right now. @Lyudmila@hexbear.net Is handling this how it should've been handled from the start. Truly doing a great job. 10/10
I wanna say I don't think there's a shadowy mod cabal, that's not what I meant by "clique", but I guess it could be read in the commnist way.
I didn't expect immediate action, I still don't.
Renaming the comms for a joke was not okay. Renaming them because of racism was very okay.
Just how we gotta be watchful for transphobia, we gotta be watchful for ableism. The infantilizing "you can't take care of yourself, I know best for you" attitude of a lot of people is ableist. Even when the sentiment is rational, speaking like that to other users is ableist and it creates an environment that is not welcoming for ND people. Extra sucky to tell someone who was a back- and knee injury that flares up and makes them literally unable to walk at times - that they should walk outside. This wasn't completely relevant this time (hence the run), but still, it has hurt to be told to do so before.
Embrace Awoo thought.
Main.
little bit of drama if you're a messy piggy
I'd forgotten how bad TC60 was a community admin though lol. Thought she'd mellowed out This was just the VCJ all over again, really exemplary.
> Comes back
> Immediate strugglesession
> Carcosa steps down
> Vagueposts about misogyny in the modlog
> Bans all dissenters
> Condescends and infantilizes the userbase
> This will surely stop the conflict
> 72T steps down
> Deletes her account
> Refuses to elaborate
I know the strugglesesh isn't her fault, but it is very funny.Go kiss your dad on the mouth y'all <3
edit: forgot to say that banning me was fair. Not for the post I got banned for, but for how I treated @blight@hexbear.net. I apologised later, but I was way too much. I do not think I was too much elsewhere, since I believe I gave back what was passed around. I do not respect Ben Shapiro and I do not respect people that behave like him. Also death to redditors.
Here a couple of thoughts.
If you’re an admin posting, don’t do bits. Have an alt and preferably recognisable as such.
Mod actions shouldn’t be anonymous. Own your shit.
For the love of god stop posting please.
I mean this with love, for this team and this site.
Context for my take:
https://hexbear.net/comment/5620189
https://hexbear.net/comment/5620267
Just stop fuelling this whole thing. It's that easy.
72T is resigning? wtf
And TransComrade69 has deleted her account.
It's all incredible levels of overreactions on top of overreactions. It's all blown entirely out of proportion.
One of the core problems seems to be that everyone is moving incredibly quickly. Like, things that should be taking DAYS to spread in the community and come to understanding over are occurring in posts that are up for 2 hours, then locked, then everyone is expected to understand what happened in those threads.
Nobody knows what the hell is going on because half the drama is stuff that occurred between a literal handful of users and admins in a timespan that means only a few people even saw it and then everything else is being roughly understood through tail end tacked on threads over and over again.
SLOW DOWN.
Surely once the third admin steps down, the fourth will post "Update from the admin team: there's no update, we'll examine the issues that led to the recent drama and reflect on how to move forward. Everyone has been unbanned, continue posting comrades" and lock the thread
Surely...
This is how I would go about it. A cool off is sorely needed. People need to stop posting about it. The new comm name needs deciding. And that's about it.
Yep. That's the goal here. I'm here toanswer a few burning questions and help fix some things that got messed up, but we're all taking a little cooldown here.
One thing I think sorely needs impressing on the admin team is the need for announcements and big staff posts to really get 48hours of time between them so that the existing post can run its course (mostly posts last 24 hours) and then have another day of time to be digested properly.
The pace of things that happen leaves the community completely confused about what is going on. Everyone is fragmented into different segments based on whether they saw something or didn't and people did not get time to see many things, myself included.
(I plan to leave this post pinned and unlocked for at least 72 hours.)
I'm not locking anything or going anywhere. I'm here til we get this fixed.
I really don't know what the fuck is going on at this point. Was the first few months of Hexbear like this?
The first few months of Hexbear was slower than this(in a better and more understandable way) over issues that were genuinely larger. This has occurred at such a speed and frenzy over something that literally could have been resolved with a single paragraph post that it makes everything else look relaxed by comparison.
Policy/staff announcement posts should not occur more than every 2 days. It takes that long for the MOST ACTIVE users to see them. Most people login once per day, and miss a day here and there. Hexbear this week has had announcement posts that were up for 2 hours before new announcement posts were made and then new ones.
If I were going to tip cold water on this I'd post a single paragraph about how the dunk tank is being renamed, a contest for it is occurring, some policy changes to avoid federated drama will be discussed but there will be no further policy or staff announcements until after the new comm name is decided in a few days.
Simple, easy. Give it all a cool off period. Tell people in the team to stop posting.
I wonder to what extent Trump getting reelected has anything to do with people's emotions being so out of wack. That was my very first comment. I made it in half jest, but perhaps I shouldn't have done that. I really wonder if people are genuinely afraid of Trump and that this fear is creeping into their decision-making. Emotions aren't always instantly felt. It's like how many people (most people?) don't immediately start sob when they receive news that their love one has died. It's only a while later that the sorrow really hits them and they start crying. Fear is the same thing as well.
I have never seen the admins and mods (and even some users here as one user who got temporary banned immediately typed some 10+ paragraph comment about how they self-harm because they think they'll never pass) here act so melodramatic. I tie all this with UlyssesT deleting his account as well. He was very clear that Trump's win genuinely scared him and he wanted to touch grass and build a small community so his family and friends could weather the storm. Perhaps the fear is creeping into the admins and pushing the admins to "do something," which is where the frantic energy is coming from.
Yes, it's the cool leftist thing to say that Trump ain't shit and the US already treat marginalized communities like complete shit, but emotions are emotions. You can either ride out the emotion and steer it towards productive ends or you could bottle it up and mask it before it explodes like what we're seeing right now.
I wouldn't know, being in britland. I feel basically nothing about it, but I have seen similar emotional behaviour from americans I consider friends in other spaces. They are snappier, quicker to boil over, and scared.
The first year of Hexbear had a struggle session like every month. They were usually confined to one thread though
i genuinely believe this struggle session is sillier than the outdoor cats one
There were constant struggle sessions, this is kind of a return to form. Difference is that people have now formed more social/parasocial connections at this point which makes it more personal it seems.
Yeah it’s just getting ridiculous at this point
More thoughts later commuting rn
Whoever got banned for pointing out that the drama started when TC69 came back is laughing so hard right now. It was almost certainly a coincidence but still
Yeah I want to be clear that while I don't personally like TC69 this drama is not their fault
But it is a very funny coincidence
Definitely true. I was hoping that in the few years she's been gone she'd have mellowed out a bit. Maybe in another few years
Oh hey, I'm unbanned. Neat. I don't know where it would be best to post this but my recent thoughts are as follows:
After all this I feel conflicted on returning to any sort of activity or interaction with the site. I don't really feel that seen or welcome as a non-white, trans, nd person and it has nothing to do with the tanks. Despite being here since the beginning, I've never been a poster of any renown(?), and as of late I feel like celebrating posting clout and reputation has often taken a higher priority in hexbear's culture than being a safe place for discussion for people like me.
The arrogant dismissal I and many others were recently confronted with is disgusting but, for me, unsurprising. I am disappointed but I expected something like this would reoccurr, as the phenomenon has been demonstrated many times since this site was chapo.chat.
The recent "struggle session" concentrated a lot of the feelings I experienced as an auDHD person throughout my life. Facing broad assumptions about how I felt and having to argue against a person built in the shape of me. It was uncomfortably similar to the arguments I've had with family, authority, educators, that have stemmed from them assuming the worst possible intention and refusing to hear otherwise. It was and is emotionally exhausting and simply not worth it for what this site has provided.
The worst was assumed of people because nobody in power bothered to ask or communicate, and when action was taken, founded on this blind assumption, not only were poc, trans, nd, people ignored but mocked, shamed, and banned.
The aspersions cast on me and others like me, in contradiction to years of our demonstrated cameraderie, have been disheartening. Ultimately I don't think it matters much personally as I've never been a celebrity or poster of renown, just someone who enjoyed the occasional dunk, art post, commiseration on the state of the world.
I don't have illusions of being some valued presence or improving the site culture or anything, and I don't mean all this to convey some high melodrama; for me it's just a dull grey disappointment.
This is the first sensible post to come out of the admin team since the start of this insanity.
Still a lot of room for improvement - not sure that “associating behavioural trends with pronoun tags” is a route we should ever go down, to be honest.
But after the past few days of being entirely baffled by whatever the hell was going on with the rest of the admins, this is a step in the right direction.
this is not in response to you specifically @Lyudmila. I appreciate the work you and @CARCOSA are doing in this thread to sort things out. thank you.
effortpost preface:
I started writing this at 5am this morning after checking to see if I was banned (confused? keep reading!), seeing @Aradina had been unbanned, stumbling onto the horrifically sad comment that apparently @morte made from an alt after being banned, and crying my eyes out. I've been working on it (and crying! 😂😭) off and on all day, in between reading the comments here to catch up on What Happened.
I have to get this out, and presumably we're supposed to keep all of this contained to these threads.
admins, mods, fellow users – this is not an attempt to restart The Shit.
I'm posting this to get it off my chest and hopefully get some clarification from some people on it, so I'm gonna leave it and close Hexbear and maybe see you tomorrow.
ATTENTION, FELLOW HEXBEARS:
telling me anytime after Friday to logout and let things blow over was ableist, actually.
also, saying this is just a website is callous and fucked up.
please allow me to elaborate. get your clicking fingers ready, because baby, I got links.
I am autistic as fuck. I only just realized this last year, and got diagnosed last week.
justice sensitivity is a well-known neurodivergent trait, and it has been a defining part of my character for my whole life. one of my earliest memories is getting whipped with a spatula for "talking back" because I questioned the justice of adult decisions, for responding to "life isn't fair" with "why aren't you trying to be? why don't you make it fair?"
I have been repeatedly socially ostracized for sticking up for others or finding repugnant behavior intolerable. I lost my hometown friend group when I wouldn't attend functions to which they had invited the asshole who abused another person in the group.
CW: DV
(photos of large, vivid bruising were not enough. seeing the bruises on her in person wasn't enough to make the host uninvite him.)
my husband and I lost his hometown friend group when nobody gave a shit about covid. they stopped inviting us to things because we were masking and distancing. I'd rather have no friends than friends like that.
it's the biggest reason for having left most of the two-dozen jobs I mentioned – somebody outside the management clique is unjustly fired or otherwise punished, and I quit in solidarity with no backup plan. 🤦🤷
it made me unwelcome in the glass program at art school because I reported the head instructor's abusive treatment of a fellow student to the program director.
it's the reason I left Christianity as a teenager. the adults wouldn't stand up for anything. they didn't give a shit about "love your neighbor." they were too busy gossiping and backstabbing each other while jockeying for positions in the social and institutional hierarchy. there were people with country club memberships while some of the other members of the <100-member church didn't have enough to eat.
it has made me the outsider in my conservative evangelical family. they thought it was super fun to get me all fired up about this stuff when I was younger, and then they'd make fun of me for caring until I cried and fled. they also hated that my best friend was a gay boy I met in band class. why should it matter that he was gay? didn't Jesus love everyone equally? I didn't understand. I still don't.
it's what drove me from the Republican indoctrination of my childhood to the Democrats as a young adult. it's what made me ditch them over the way they treated Bernie. it's part of what drove me from DSA. it's what has driven me further and further left.
it's why I would never have employees. it's why I pay for any little indie apps I use. it's why I left reddit during the API fiasco. it's what made me investigate Hexbear when you federated instead of just accepting the warnings about you as facts. it's what made me abandon my other fediverse accounts and live here on local on my previous account and this subsequent one. it's what made me start contributing to the Patreon the day I found out it existed.
I'm not online all the time, so I know there are plenty of things I miss, but since I joined last summer, this place has been fair, it has been caring, and it has been wonderful to see so much good come of this place. people have been fed and sheltered because so many of us are willing to share what we have, even when it is very little. lots of very little bits of goodness added together can make something great.
I'm 42, which makes me older than most users here; many of you are much closer in age to my 17yo son than to me. I don't bring it up because I think it makes me inherently wiser than any of you – far from it, I know I'm a dumbass, I have a lifetime of failure and fuckups to prove it. just because I've been fucking up longer doesn't mean I have learned more from my fuckups than any of you have from yours.
I bring it up because I'm fucking tired, and life is hard, and I genuinely had very little hope for the future until I made a post begging for distraction from terrible thoughts, and so many of you came through for me. 😭 it still instantly makes me cry when I think of it.
the months since then have been physically harder – I had to stop hrt for perimenopause due to life-threatening side effects, and I have been expecting to slide back into the abyss, but I hadn't yet. I really think the community of care I have found here is what was keeping it at bay. @morte's comment let me know I'm not the only person who feels that way about this place, and I don't want her to put herself out there alone.
some of you have become very dear to my heart.
a long-time user I have barely interacted with DM'd me yesterday offering help with getting my son T if Trump bans trans care.
there are no words to adequately express my gratitude for that sliver of hope.
Hexbear, I love you, but I care about things being "fair" or "just" more than anything else. I will stop caring about the way other people are treated when I stop breathing. you might as well tell me to stop getting rashes when I'm stressed.
wanna see what it looked like after I saw that @REgon had been banned?? 😂🙃
pic
Showthis might actually be the worst I've ever seen it. it was definitely the worst my husband has.
🏆🥇
you might as well tell me to quit loving my son or quit being 42. it is physically impossible. my parents couldn't beat it out of me.
"don't take it too seriously, it's just online, it's just a website!" friend, right now I wish it were just a website, because I would say fuck this place and never look back. no mere website is worth the amount of anxiety and stress I've felt and tears I've cried in the last 24 hours.
it's not just a website, it is a lifeline for my family and so many of my comrades. it has been a sanctuary for me, until this past weekend. really, until yesterday. "don't take that tiny sliver of hope too seriously"??
if you think that, then buddy,
with all my heart,
with every fiber of my being,
FUCK YOU.
is that hostile? good. maybe if someone who is usually kind to everyone gets hostile, this stuff will fucking matter to you, too. I'm glad that some of you are socially privileged enough to have enough support to not care what happens to this place. I'm not.
those of you who were applauding the behavior of TC69 and her Cool Kids Club this weekend should be deeply ashamed of yourselves.
I know I'm ashamed of you. I finally understand why so many people warn about this place. You Eat Your Own.
and for what??? what was the actual point of any of this? rename the comms plus change the comms equals change the site culture?
was the culture genuinely that bad?? this is a real and sincere question, I'm autistic, I'm sure there are problems that I don't pick up on.
most of the time irl, I don't realize a skillful bully is fucking with me until it's too late, so certainly I'm not gonna catch all the shittiness on here, where I don't have body language to help.
(continues below)
