A kbin user has the most upvoted comment chain on that post.
https://kbin.social/m/meta%40lemm.ee/t/458933/How-do-I-block-all-of-Hexbear-from-All/top
sh.itjust.works and a 1-user Lemmy instance called lemmy.magnor.ovh also see and reply to Hexbear comments, though Hexbear doesn't see their replies:
https://lemmy.magnor.ovh/comment/2371501
I really think it's an honest misunderstanding, fueled by wrong first impressions.
Even for myself, the first time I opened hexbear.net a few months ago, I immediately saw some post about Trump on the front page, and a bunch of posts and comments criticising liberals. I completely misunderstood what was going on here, I also thought that it's some kind of right wing circlejerk. This misunderstanding was later reinforced by reading comments elsewhere on Lemmy calling Hexbear a Putin supporter instance, troll instance, etc.
I only started questioning my understanding when I started noticing some sincere comments by Hexbear users, and eventually I realised that you guys have pretty much the same worldview as I do (in terms of the rich only being rich because they exploit the poor etc).
It can really take some effort on the part of external users to figure out what's going on in here, and from my own experience, I think it's extremely easy to get the wrong idea.
See, I think another huge part of it is that American liberals tend to see crudeness as right wing, because their media glorifies civility and they only see those that don't adhere to it on the right, or teenage trolls.
Moderate republicans and basically all dems will gang up against you if you're uncivil in criticizing the status quo, and civil criticisms amount to... well, nothing. Hell, Occupy Wall St accomplished nothing and that was much more civil than camping outside banker homes with guillotines or throwing Molotovs (see any French protest from Robespierre till now). If these fuckers saw MLK Jr. in Selma they'd call them disruptive. Well, actual MLK Jr. anyway:
"I hear a lot of talk these days about our direct action talk alienating former friends, I would rather feel they are bringing to the surface latent prejudices that are already there. If our direct action programs alienate our friends … they never were really our friends.”
I call it Sorkin Syndrome. The nerds interested in politics today grew up on West Wing instead of reading politics. Like, Abe Lincoln bullied an opponent to tears with personalattacks during a debate before. That kind of energy needs to return to mainstream politics.
I think oppressed and exploited people have no need to be civil, but on the other hand, I don't think it's right to say that people who are alienated by "uncivil" posts on Lemmy were never really friends (I am extending your "dems" to include Lemmy users here, I hope I'm not misrepresenting your point) - I think a lot of them have good intentions and would probably support socialism if they understood it. Maybe I'm naive, but I've noticed several times seemingly decent people on Lemmy having negative opinions about Hexbear. Just recently, I saw one person calling Hexbear "tankies", and then in another thread the same person was calling for the elimination of millionaires. They're just a few steps away from being a "tankie" themselves, and they just don't realise it because they are missing some key information.
I was saying in another thread before, I think having a friendly "intro to Hexbear" type page or post would be awesome, because it could be shown to confused Lemmy users who don't understand Hexbear yet.
Sure, it is just a few steps away, but those steps are actually quite hard to overcome, because the Sisyphean boulder that liberals keep pushing up that hill only to watch it roll down again is this: upholding the system.
The Parliamentarian is blocking this, we can't do anything about it. Oh Manchin was a spoiler vote, dang. We can't expand the court. Oops, Roe V Wade was overturned. HRC won the popular vote but instead Trump won the election? Too bad we can't touch the Electoral College, an archaic system most other democracies don't have. The 50th mass shooting this year, and it's only February, the best thing we can do is vote Dem because Republicans are worse at gun control. Nothing else we can do, no matter how many hundreds of children die, the best is just voting dem. Oop, the Republicans Gerrymandered this district so despite having 35% of votes, they win the election? We'll make a Last Week Tonight episode about it.
But the issue is if you're against the system written by slave owners hundreds of years ago, you're attacking America itself, which means you're a Kremlin/CPC/North Korean bot.
Also, to address the "intro to Hexbear" thing, most of our pinned posts are fairly accessible and contain real history/literature but I think people by default skip pinned posts.
New pronouns just dropped
I think you're right but there are people who aren't just out off but irrevocably revolted by, idk, guillotine-posting, and those people were never our friends
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1-Our trump posts are mostly about how funny that piece of shit is, which can definitely be confusing to people who are used to viewing him as some kind of singular harbinger of social decay. We dont view him with any kind of unique horror beyond the horror of his class, which can look exculpatory to bystanders.
2-The "2" party dichotomy is dominant in the US and the left has been deliberately dismantled over decades, so it's a common and easy misconception to think that
There is a lot of anti-republican sentiment, but maybe the person got unlucky and missed it
I've had an interaction that pointed out posting Hunter Biden stuff (it was the cocaine and prostitutes news) is inherently pro Trump due to the connotations
I explained drugs and sex work should be legal and it makes Hunter cooler than any Trump or Obama.
And they went on to post that it was still pro-Trump in a different thread.
What I mean is "pro Trump" is a tenuous term.
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Don't get me wrong, I get it now, I'm just saying that when I first came to Hexbear, I was confused
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