Disclaimer: I'm not a SIJW local, but wanted to pop my 2¢ in the discussion.

I see Hexbear as a hard left instance, with a very unique culture derived from their political views, downvotes being disabled, and the 1000s of custom emojis at their fingertips.

Their popular posts seem to be mostly jokey and unserious (comparable to our memes communities) however comments are usually a different story, where we're text first and they're emoji-first. Where us on the tiddeRverse mostly have the ability to downvote unconstructive takes and upvote others challenging them, Hexbear usually leans towards commenting emojis, and there being lots of them, what would usually just be upvotes/downvotes on a text post turn into a very visual personification of how they feel about your perspective.

Politics - this is probably the only thing I don't like. We know that quite a few things boil down to politics, but it can get tiring when almost every post in !worldnews@lemmy.ml and similar communities have similar variations of the same comment loads of times. It makes it difficult to discuss the actual news article itself when most comments are taking the country leadership to the metaphorical laundromat.

Ukraine stance - From what I've observed, most are in support of the war being stopped. If you dig into the weeds and see what sides people are on, it varies.

Dunking. The political dunking can get tiring. But do you know what I can absolutely get behind? Calling out people who are intolerant of queer individuals. I was absolutely pleased to see a user (who tried to push their intolerant line of thinking) get absolutely dunked on by Hexbear, without a single ppb too. Usually our mods just delete LGBT intolerant comments and move on, which gives way to persistent trolls creating alts on other instances to annoy mods (a story shown in the modlog over and over).

Occasionally I've run into some really nice discussion threads on /all and not even realised it was a Hexbear community. This actually leads me on to something else - some discussions on lemmy.world to tend to have a very hexbear-like passionate attitude about politics, one thread recently made me double check what instance the comm was on, because it felt very hexbeary despite literally being defederated from them. Discoveries like that make me laugh when I see how each side calls out the other without realising perhaps they're both human, and the difference is a cultural and communication barrier of sorts.

Brigading. I think the root cause of this is the tendency for Hexbear posts to link directly to our discussion threads, instead of just posting a screenshot (common courtesy on the tiddeRverse as far as I'm aware, to prevent this very issue) which encourages the Hexbear discussion to shift to the linked thread, rather than stay on Hexbear. It's a bit of a problem as it can drown out local perspectives, considering Hexbear's sizable and mostly unified userbase.

My opinion of Hexbear is mostly neutral. They are vocal, vibrant, and their culture may not fit in everywhere, especially if you're on one of the lemmy.ml news communities where they tend to get politically active. I block a lot of politics comms so it's likely I'm not seeing the worst of it.

Their users appear extremely varied looking at discussions, although overall more unified. It's possible an extremely vocal subgroup is painting a picture for the whole instance though when we look at the types of tiddeRverse posts that attract their attention.

To wrap up, I've noticed some hexbear culture is starting to leak over into the tiddeRverse, but it's not the everything-is-politics stuff so I'm mostly fine with this personally - just an interesting observation if anything