Why is Lemmygrad hated in the wider space of Lemmy?

I can't speak about lemmygrad since the instances I'm on all defederate from it, but Hexbear users have a reputation for being generally aggressive, grating, and immature. It's like that kid in class who keeps interrupting the teacher because they think they're funny and clever. e.g., some were screaming at me that I can't be an anarchist and I know nothing about anarchism since I'm married, replying with third-grade tier memes for some confusing reason

Exactly this. They are not leftist, they are just a bunch of idiot trolls who use extreme left views as a means of pissing people off. Their views, according to their posts, are cartoonishly extremist. And that's why people don't like them.
- I fully agree. The problem is when we point out that they're not leftist, they assume it's because we conflate leftism with liberalism, whereas this is not the case at all. I think they're not leftist because their antisocial/anti-human beliefs are antithetical to the concept of community and only serve to derail any chance we have to work together to create a new system. I can't imagine that anyone who legitimately seeks the goal of a stateless, classless society would behave as they do.
Thought I should add it was them informing me that certain countries banning same-sex marriage while endorsing heterosexual marriage is just fine, actually. They espoused an objectively homophobic belief, and when I referenced my own marriage, they switched to calling me ignorant about anarchism. There are anarchist texts exploring the issue and some of the potential problems with traditions like marriage, but it's not dogma. Nor do I view my own relationship as hierarchical.
TL;DR They were being objectively homophobic.
- This has the energy of a white gay man in a marriage pointing at a trans polycule and calling them homophobic because they said he had a bad take about how bourgeois privileges are more important than positive rights for queer homeless people.
  White gay men wielding their gayness as a cudgel against people who are queerer and more marginalized then them sure is a gross thing to see.
Lemmygrad does have its heated gamer moments but overall they're waaaaay better than hexbear when it comes to post quality.
some were screaming at me that I can't be an anarchist and I know nothing about anarchism since I'm married, replying with third-grade tier memes for some confusing reason
Sounds like Hexbear to me
- Do you want to hear the punchline? I caught a temp ban for expressing my plan to block their instance as soon as that is made possible for users. I will admit I was a bit harsh in that I said I wanted them to be "effectively silenced," but this was extremely mild compared to their comments to me.

Political views aside, the way they promote their political views is unappealing.

Look through any of their popular threads. Everyone piles on any comment which doesn't align perfectly with the agreed perspective.

Everyone piles on any comment which doesn't align perfectly with the agreed perspective.
Sounds like every popular community on Lemmy. The only difference is the "agreed perspective".
- Not really.
  In most communities you can at least entice some robust discussion, hexbear just seems sp aggressively intolerant of alternative views.
That's basically every political sub I've come across browsing in my instance
- It's a question of degree.

They are hardline Marxist-Leninists, something that is very rare in the western world even amongst those who identify as leftist or socialist. If their views make you uncomfortable, then you're not a ML, which is okay.

Left-wing politics is a very broad spectrum, and a lot of Lemmy users lean towards the more moderate end which brings them into conflict with the more radical communities that are Lemmygrad and Hexbear.

That's all there is to it.

- And they're not artificially suppressed like they are on other social media platforms.
That's all there is to it.
That's it? Nothing about their notoriety for posting pictures of pigs pooping on their balls as part of their lively defense of MLism?

Just take a look at this question, all of the answers are from lemmygrad and hexbear users. You are not going to get a good answer from them because they're the people you're asking the question about.

They are not hated they're just annoying, no one really cares about their opinions the problem is is that they try and push their opinions on everybody else.

Yeah, they have a very alternative interpretation of geopolitics and they're loud about it. If there was a flat earth instance with users that spammed every physics thread there would be some grumbling just the same.
- Hexbear also weaponizes accusations of transphobia the same way Israel weaponizes accusations of anti-semitism.
  Now Hexbear hasn't done any genocide yet, but it does loove to talk about executing people, many and frequently.
The hexbear and lemmygrad users/posts I run across in All mostly remind me of those street corner preachers. I don’t care one way or another about their ideologies but it’s tiring that they always feel the need to shout it in your face.
I don’t hate them but find them to be obnoxious and mostly cult-like.
- mostly cult-like.
  Very much like a cult actually. Often times the opinions they are espousing don't actually make much sense even within their own ideology, mostly because their kids and they don't actually understand what they're talking about.
  It's not communist ideology to claim that Tinnamon Square didn't happen, it's just China's propaganda. It's not the same thing.
  Equally criticizing China is not the same as criticizing communism as a concept. It's perfectly acceptable to think that communism is good but what China did is bad, but these idiots won't allow you to say that. If they actually understood what they were talking about they'd realized that, but they don't because as you say they're in a cult.
Well, when I see a .ml user from here on out I'm not sure I'll be able to give them the same sort of leeway.
I had one of their users confirm they were racist. Then I saw that only the parts where our conversation was removed by mods, and not shit canning the user.
You want people to like you, don’t lie down with racists.
- I concur about .ml. It's been eye opening being on the receiving end of a homophobic rant by a moderator of their world news community implying I'm not queer enough. It wouldn't surprise me that they're racist, too. Bigots tend to subscribe to more than one strain of bigotry.
  I know it shouldn't matter what people like that think, but I'd be lying if I said I'm not disappointed and dismayed. I've survived so many things and had a long hard road to self-acceptance. It's disgusting to be invalidated by someone who likely has more than I've ever had.

Lemmygrad is filled with the American patriot version of communists. You will excuses for the Uighur genocide and acts of repression against ethnic minorities for the good of the nation as a whole. You also get into weird cases of trying to redefine words because the words don't match their narrative. For instance, I was in one discussion trying to argue that China was a democracy because the government worked for the people, even if there was never any official method of communicating the public will.

Hexbear seems more geared towards being angry and bitter at liberals for not doing what they see as the right thing. There isn't any discussion on political theory, talk of political organization outside of violent revolution is frowned on, and the focus seems geared on one small part of the political spectrum while ignoring other parts entirely.

If anything, solarpunk may be the healthier leftist sub because it is geared in part towards solutions instead of focusing on problems.

Excuses for the Uighur genocide
Are you seriously still on that shit?? After everything that has come out??? Also I give solarpunk like a month tops before it goes ecofash.
- Ok, I'll bite. What is "everything that has come out"?

Generally, they aren't marxists, they're "tankies". And even fairly extreme socialists tend to dislike that. That's lemmygrad.

Hexbear is just filled with trolls that federated specifically to troll and disrupt the rest of lemmy in the name of their beliefs.

On either, you can find individuals that are perfectly cool to talk to. But it's like rolling the dice where only snake eyes win. And, even when you win, you can't be certain that it isn't a long troll waiting to fuck with you because some of them do that too.

Sounds like Lemmy's version of r/atheism 10+ years ago. Atheism itself is fine, but the sub became an insufferable circle jerk.
“Tankie” is a term that’s applied to literally any communist. I’ve heard it used against Trotskyists and fucking social democrats.
So, what’s actually the problem with them? Are they Maoists? CPC apologists?
- They like Stalin, Putin , Xi and Kim. And defend everything they do.
  Like WTF? How can a communist defend putin!?
- People who throw the word “tankie” around indiscriminately aren’t using it right. From what I’ve seen, it applies specifically to extreme communist fanboys who are apologists for communist militarism. For example, Tankies will say that the Tiananmen Square massacre was either justified or didn’t happen.
  Just being a fan of communism doesn’t make someone a tankie.
  Edit: see below for an excellent example
Thank you!

Lemmygrad and Hexbear aren’t “leftist” in the confused sense that Americans usually mean “leftist.” They’re actually leftist in the original sense, meaning that they want to abolish private ownership of the means of production. To the extent they’re “widely hated,” it’s largely because the Anglosphere has been indoctrinated against real, actual socialism their entire lives.

That's not the part people have an issue with, the part where their users deny genocides, call everyone that has a less extreme left opinion of politics Nazis, end up being so "anti-racism" that they're racists themselves and take all critics as personal attacks, that's what people have an issue with.
- Holy shit you got them to brigade your comment. They might as well be bots, I think Chat GPT's "intelligence" outpaces them.
- end up being so “anti-racism” that they’re racists themselves
  anyone complaining about "reverse racism" or "anti white racism" is a complete joke. like boo fucking hoo, someone called you a cracker on the internet, get over it.
- The “Uyghur genocide” is bullshit Atlanticist propaganda, and English-language Wikipedia is basically NATOpedia in its slant on the topic, so yes we will deny it. It’s a product of the new Cold War propaganda campaign against China.
- Extremely accurate
  I literally netted a 2 week sitewide-ban on one of my alts in this thread for a softer worded take than this
- That's a liberal with no framework. No one denies genocides (pro-tip just because the western media says it's a genocide doesn't make it a genocide.) Being so anti-racist you are the real racist is the Liberal Democratic party who elected a hard-core segregationist as president, not a Marxist Leninist. No one except people like you give a fuck about personal attacks. lol.
More often than not, when Americans say leftist they really mean left-liberalism a la Bernie Sanders, which is really center-left at most, and not actually leftist in the original sense, a sense which Americans have forgotten thanks to two Red Scares and the first Cold War.
- True, but leninists are not leftist in any significant sense either. They are more authoritarian/ totalitarian than they are left or right.
Any politically focused space on the Internet, left or right, is a cesspool of toxic lies and hatred of anyone outside their sphere
- British. Immediately discarded.

I believe you've answered your own question.

Lemmy isn't Marxist-only. The majority of Lemmy users are what the more vocal Lemmygrad and Hexbear users deride as "libs." As a thought experiment, imagine that you are one of us for a moment and then browse Local on one of those.

I haven't seen or maybe haven't noticed much of lemmygrad. But hex bear has a culture of spamming the same handful of images, using them like punctuation in their posts. And they show up huge in my reader at least (I just found out they look small to them.) So it's like you're trying to have a discussion and someone comes parading through with like five crappy drawings that take up all the space. Also I don't mind having Marxists around but they tend to want to steer every discussion toward it, regardless of its relevance. Can't wait to be able to block the instance.

Lemmygrad isn't "hated" by most of the wider lemmyverse. There's just a loud and obnoxious minority of people that will rail and rant about lemmygrad. They loudly rant about lemmygrad because they aren't used to seeing their worldview get challenged and by its very nature as a radical leftist community, lemmygrad is a challenge to the typical background liberal perspective.

It's no surprise we all end up seeing a lot of threads about "those mean tankies at lemmygrad" (and hexbear too) made by people who can't take their worldview getting questioned, or even shown to be flawed, or just not standing up to their own scrutiny, and who get mad when that happens. There are also of course people with ideological reasons to demonize leftwing politics and will spread shit for that reason alone. But overall, I don't think most people care enough except to think "oh yeah that's that instance with those radical lefties, they're weird but they do make some great memes sometimes."

There's a difference between challenging other people's opinions and calling them fascists or Nazis just because they're not at the extreme left.
Even worse, in this very thread I've been called a fascist for the sole reason that my instance is sh.itjust.works, one of the bigger instances and one where your political opinion isn't a criteria to subscribe (especially not when I subscribed, they didn't even ask for an email!)
- Yeah, I only joined shitjust works because that's where the cdda Lemmy is and that's the first thing I used it for, didn't even know people think it's a political instance. Though I guess with the hexbears and lemmygrads everything's political somehow. That's why I generally avoid dealing with them anyway.
I'm pretty left/lean socialist. The tankies that annoy me from those instances are pro authoritarian communists who say shit like "Stalin did nothing wrong" with no irony whatsoever. It's not really about bickering over ideological purity past a certain point, some of that shit makes a good case for the horseshoe theory
There are people who called the main lemmy.ml instance a community of tankies, so I'd take a lot of these claims with a grain of salt.
Hahahahahaha

Because they are populated by some of the dumbest people on the planet.

- Sorry, I didn't meant to exclude you. Of course some of them are on lemmy.ml, too.

Well it's because they are Marxist.
In the Lemmy culture Marxism has a very bad name because almost religious overtones of its adherents.

Which is of ironically very much what Marx was warning against. But that's how it works right now.

Leninism is antithetical to Marxism. As you said. If they were Marxist there wouldn't be a big issue. They're Leninist as an angry 13 year old can be. Combined with the fact that people in the West, the US especially, have no idea what either one is. And that's the problem.

So, as others mentioned, they're tankies. They circle jerk about how "the west" is entirely responsible for every bad thing that ever happened. They blame the Russian invasion of Ukraine on the West, they deny the oppression of the Uyghur people as pure western propaganda...

Any time you cite something horrible Russia or Iran or China or North Korea does, they say "the west is just as bad," draw some false equivalencies, and then proceed to explain why that means that the West is the only bad thing and there's nothing at all wrong with Russia or China.

And... they're so aggressive about it. It's not just that their opinions are so detestable, but that they brigade other threads and insist that everybody who isn't actively bombing US government buildings is evil.

They're annoying. On the fediverse, that might be the highest sin.

God yeah. Even if they had some interesting ideas they've been lost to all the circle jerking that there's no way of seeing how any of them can be taken seriously.

They're both good instances. People have been heavily propagandized to hate communists. You could make the kindest most welcoming space on the internet and if you put the label "communist" on it, it will be hated.

I'm the only person I've ever seen on Lemmy running an instance from a nominally communist country (maybe there are others?). You can come hang out with me I guess. I'm not qualified to be a proper communist though -- I've read very little of the literature, and leave politics to the Party. Which I am not even actually a member of. I'm basically Boxer from Animal farm, but ended up happily married and with a decent standard of living instead of shipped off to the glue factory.

I'm am a mercenary science hermit though, so my instance is very quiet! There are three people on my instance, two are me and the other is a bot I wrote doing I-Ching divinations using physics.

I am interested in the physics divination bot. How's it work?
- There's a detailed description on my home instance, along with other stuff.
  The short version is it uses a pair of BJT transistors to produce and amplify diode breakdown noise. That's amplified to TTL levels by some hex inverters. Then an 8-bit microcontroller passes it through a Von Neumann whitewashing algorithm (clock-cycle balanced in assembly language) to produce unbiased bits, which it accumulates into bytes. It's not a 'safe' way to use transistors and they will fail one day, but it will be fine for quite some time still.
  Then an ESP32 samples the bytes from the 8-bit MCU. It connects to Wi-Fi and pushes it to the cloud over MQTT. A server listens for the random bytes, and uses them with the traditional I-Ching algorithm (yarrow-stick probabilities). Coding the yarrow-stick probabilities into an algorithm was a pain compared to the newer method that uses coin tosses :D
  Also I had to convert the I-Ching to JSON, so I could programmatically pull the correct divination from it. The whole thing is gloriously absurd.
  I have build a few particle detectors so I can use quantum-tunneling to produce the entropy instead (so an upgrade from a hardware RNG to a quantum RNG), but the radiation sources I have access to are a bit too weak to generate sufficient entropy.
  I can't imagine any of this has any practical application, unless you happen to be a time traveler. In that case have work to do, meet me last week and we'll talk about it :P
  Oh incidentally if the bot is down, let me know and I'll gently beat it into submission so it works again.

Lemmygrad I can't comment on. As far as I can tell they basically just talk politics and I'm not interested in microwaving my brain by obsessing about politics online. Haven't seen them out in any of the threads I've been on.

Hexbear I've enjoyed honestly. They've got nice hobby communities and it's all I'm here for. Quality of discussion is usually pretty good. My take on people hating Hexbear is people have made their personality getting mad about politics and Hexbear don't share their views. People screaming "tankie!" just seemed deranged to me, literally who cares what a handful of nerds in the US think of China. Neither of you have any influence on what China does at all.

- tankie
Yes, it has nothing to do with their inability to follow other instances' rules and constant need to "dunk" on "shit libs" mostly by posting the same image of a pig pooping on itself. /S
Such discourse. Much Praxis. So brave.
- If this is your vibe normally I wouldn't want to engage and would just post a troll image as well, it's rancid.

Haven't seen any lemmygrad users in a while, but honestly the vitriol towards Hexbear is overblown. They're fine. Bit trolly, and they shitpost a lot, but it's kinda fun.

I could tell you, but the last time I responded to a thread like this I got banned for a couple weeks because toxic political personalities aren't very tolerant.

....shit
Tell everyone here what you said. Do it, coward.
My DMs are open
- Nah that's about it. The majority of active users are disingenuous in any real way to anyone outside of thier toxic insider joke club. The whole "my personality is based on this political view" is a tiresome trope, regardless of what that view they actually have IRL.

Im not in alot of communities but I've never seen the heavy handed claims everyone makes about seemingly any lemmy user to the left of Biden. I've seen occasional snark, but nothing out of line for standard internet snark/trolling that those same people never mind when the right does it. 🤷

Hope this isn't a Tankie instance.

edit: godammit

<@wtry@lemm.ee> I’ve been trying to find a good Marxist instance
<@wtry@lemm.ee> Hope this isn’t a Tankie instance.
Comedy gold.
There is a specter haunting
, the specter of
- I am a Communist
ML absolutely is.
.space instance
Into the woodchipper.

I wouldn't be a fan of a nazi or islamist instance either. One for communists is hardly any different as far I'm concerned. They're all groups of extremists that I don't want anything to do with. Just look at the modlog of this instance for example. Exhibit B is the fact that this message will get deleted in couple hours and I'll likely be banned.

Tankies are not communists
https://medium.com/international-workers-press/misconceptions-about-communism-2e366f1ef51f

It should probably be a hint of sorts - while the idea might be tolerable, once people enter the mix - it all goes to shit.

Just like literally every other system ever devised or imagined. Ideas never work perfectly when people are involved, best never make the effort right?
- I've seen the effort, seen the results. Thank you, no thank you.
Profile pic checks out

With how much anticommunism goes down in the federation I sometimes wish the developers would hide some code that would kick people who do this off the entire federation. Don't use a fucking communist platform to get away from the failing capitalist one and then spend all your time being McCarthy's left nutsack. I know that's never going to happen because that goes against the developer's values, but god damn would it be justified as fuck if it happened, and it would stop like 99.9999% of the toxicity and CSAM that gets posted here.

Who said this is a communist platform?
- It was literally created to be reddit without the capitalism. You didn't think what the implications of that meant?

tankies are not bastions of logical and rational thought. hexbear is way, way out there - about as divorced from reality as is humanly possible

ITT: offended lennygrad and hexbear users giving good examples to answer the OP

I pretty much enjoy most of what I see from hexbear, but I have blocked a bunch of stuff from lemmygrad.

I get blocking hexbear, I get blocking grad and hexbear, but blocking grad but not hexbear? Why?
- It's been awhile since I did the blocking. I just remember being annoyed.

Far-left echo chamber that from my experience really hates Jews.

Hating the settler colonial, apartheid State of Israel, which has been ethnically cleansing for three generations and is committing genocide as we speak, is not antisemitism.
Not just Jews. They also hate any LGBT+ people they deem not queer or marginalized enough.

A lot of it is McCarthyism, though i've personally had my problems with hexbear and you should probably stay away from them.

there are no good Marxist instances

Karl Marx had some great ideas. It's too bad everyone who identifies as a Marxist has such a twisted worldview.
- Please don't speak of Marxism without understanding it

Some people are to hypothetical conversation what a boulder is to the wind.

Strange question. Nothing's wrong with them? Nobody's hating on them. Just people...

Funnily enough Hexbear's origins come from when Chapo traphouse was banned on Reddit for the behavior that has them hated now across the fediverse
I agree though, they're basically r/the_donald at this point

For the same reason people hate the Nazi trolls. Extreme left or right does not matter. Normal people don't want that garbage.