So I was just looking through literature.cafe a bit, and came across this excellent comment chain by Janvier. It outlines the history and culture of Hexbear, and makes a very solid argument for defederating them.
TL;DR- Don't defederate Hexbear because they're a bunch of genocide-apologist authoritarians. Defederate them because they're annoying, and will burn out your moderators.
Personally I think it’s an extremely toxic community that represents the worst of the internet. They’re extremely set in their ways and provide no meaningful content or discussions on the platform. That’s totally fine for them but they can do whatever they want in their own safe space.
I would prefer them to be defederated mostly because I can’t block an entire instance.
I commented on here already about our instances interaction with hexbear. It's a disaster that led to somehow them defedarating from Blahaj for being not safe for their LGBT members even tho Blahaj is like one of the most accepting instance for LGBT people. Many of us were trying to ask our admin to defederate from them because those on our instance felt unsafe. Felt like a "no u" moment they tried to pull before we defederated them for not being safe for our members lol.
Then Blahaj started getting spammed by a new user who was calling a bunch of trans users anti trans. They also said our admins was anti trans even though she was openly trans. Then that user began spamming across lemmy how Blahaj and it's admin were anti-trans and should not be visited.
Also saw that user get a Blahaj user banned from lemmy.world even though nobody in that discussion was commenting on an lemmy.world community. It has a lot of shit so everything below is just that story.
What happened was another trans Blahaj user commented on a post on some 3rd instance and the OP of that post basically said "I know your reputation from elsewhere and your comment here proves your anti-trans reputation". The Blahaj user went wtf and then realized the OP was one of those commenting on the original trolls post and was basically saying the Blahaj user was anti trans. The Blahaj user was rightfully pissed and accused the OP of being an alt of that troll since they wrote in the same style as the original troll (I honestly was feeling the same as I read it all). The OP wouldn't reply and just stuff like " I refuse to reply to you" or "please don't talk to me" or "I respectfully ask you to not engage with me". It all felt trollish since that OP was the only who started the argument and now refused to engage after starting.
After the 3rd attempt at an reply , a lemmy.world admin came in saying that if the Blahaj user replied one more time to OP then they would be permanently banned from all of lemmy.world. Keep in mind this wasn't even on lemmy.world and the whole thing started because OP insulted a trans user by stating they were anti-trans. The Blahaj user was still pissed since she got insulted for saying she has the reputation of somebody who would hate everything she was and replied again. The original troll from way earlier came to the post & replied to her and tagged the lemmy.world admin saying they needed to be banned for being a chaser and replying after being told not to. Then the Blahaj user got banned.
It still feels so fucked that a lemmy.world admin would step into that 3rd instance and threaten the Blahaj user with loss of access to the biggest lemmy instance if she didn't ignore being called an anti-trans. It really helped show me the short comings of lemmy since every instances admin will probably just take what a user from their instance state as fact and ignore the other person.
Sorry for that long comment. It's just that I saw how hexbear will twist words in their favor like with claiming Blahaj isn't safe for their LGBT members and then strangely had new accounts show up calling trans Blahaj users as anti-trans and realized that it was just way too on the nose as where could these users have came from.
We all laughed in Blahaj when they defederated first lol. It was so childish for them to block us for being unsafe right before we were about to do it lmfao. They tried so hard to change the narrative but it failed.
I feel bad for any instance that has to deal with them in a daily bases. It makes scrolling through lemmy annoying unless you block every fucking community from them.
Maybe we should encourage defederation from our end, that way we'll be safe from them since if they defederate us they can change their mind whenever they want and go back to spamming us if they are bored.
A bit misleading description of CTH on reddit, because they most certainly developed their obnoxious behaviour and jargon already back then, and they did very little to combat racism and fascism there precisely becuase their obnoxious behaviour was counter-productive to such goals (also there were other subreddits far more active and useful in combating fascism and bigotry on reddit such as r/againstallhatesubreddits, which did actual work on deplatforming fascists).
But other than that it is an apt description of their behaviour here and why they pose such a problem for lemmy in general.