Has anyone else noticed how prevalent Hexbear posters have suddenly become? Maybe sometime last week I noticed nearly every political post had at least one long thread of Hexbear users that do nothing but repeat CCP talking points while waving anyway anything even remotely reliable as Western propaganda. That or getting all excited about trolled libs. The way they tell it, you'd think everything from DW, to Fox, to Propublica, to straight up AP News articles, are all written by the same people.
Not to mention, their info on the Fediverse observer is either straight up wrong or there's some serious botting going on. According to that, the instance is less than a month old, yet somehow they already have one of the largest, most active userbases, along with far and away the most comments of any instance.
Seems to me like Lemmygrad on steroids. Considering we defederated from them, seems like a no-brainer to block Hexbear as well.
So glad this thread could become such a perfect microcosm of why we need to defederate.
A lot of people do this, I used to do this. Its basically the linguistic norm in America. Back when I was an Obama liberal, it was because I thought he supported my social democratic values (Berniecrat, basically) that I held at the time because he was good at pretending he did. And I definitely thought I was "the left" then. I've moved left from there since then. But I do absolutely identify with your position and why people saying "dunk on libs" might be offputting to someone who has always thought that liberal meant left. But yeah, by Liberal we mean the original definition of the term, "person who supports capitalism".
Eehhhhhhh I'm going to disagree that there's much nuance to this but I dont totally know the history of the emote lol. Maybe someone else does. I think its just something people use to respond to outright fascist opinions (which sometimes, there is an unfortunate crossover between the opinions of a centrist liberal and a fascist, which is where the saying "scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds) comes from. But there's literally a post in our instance right now calling for people to chill a bit on using it and use it only when someone REALLY deserves it.
Also, thank you for keeping an open mind and being willing to learn new things.