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.
Lib successfully owned
We say "own the libs" specifically for this reason. It's never alone, and always followed up by dozens and dozens of good faith posts and responses that attempt to peel back the "liberal" facade. Owning libs isn't owning people, it's getting people to abandon the fence and actually come to terms with or reveal their ideological positions.
The two options are either "oh shit, you're making good points and I'm going to pay more attention" and "fuck you, we need more genocide". Without fail we either convert fence sitters or force fascists to reveal themselves.
Hexbear is the Thing test for Lemmy instances. Which is why you should be weary of any instance that defederates us. Especially because the reasoning of "oh were niche" is bullshit seeing as how we have an active mycology comm and I've never brought up a topic there that didn't have people engage with me.
The fact that we're so ideologically consistent and coherent and have diverse interest groups is what scares fash. Because we can come into your Warhammer miniature comm, talk circles around you in your own topic and also call out the fact that you painted a panzer division emblem on one of your Repulsor models and then drag you out of the community kicking and screaming.