we're very active and have an anti-lurker culture + no downvotes, so if we see a bad take, we reply instead of downvoting and moving on. this leads a lot of people to get very animated and angry about us.

We just

Early on hexbear really came out swinging and users were basically dunking on people left right and centre in lemmy.ml worldnews so that liberals would post something dumb, be prodded slightly by one or two users, then say something incredibly bad and have several hexbears dunk on them, then because of how active sort works their comments would be pushed higher up in the thread as would the thread into people's feeds and then they'd get absolutely swarmed at that point.

The only people with bad experiences of hexbear are bigots and ideologically committed neoliberals.

If I had to be nice, I would say that a lot of new Lemmy users have reddit brain and approach using Lemmy like reddit. A constant game of treating your fellow posters as opponents and trying to embarrass them. HexBear early on also had to work on eliminating this mentality

I think it’s largely a disagreement about who is fair game as a target for aggression. Even the “I think everyone should be kind to everyone at all times” crowd has their own share of unkindness, because their concept of kindness tends to revolve around interpersonal nonaggression rather than an empathetic validation of people’s experiences and feelings. In my experience, this emphasis on politeness over validation enables a lot of abusive dynamics. But it’s also a lot simpler to enforce and provides a pretty “objective” judge of correctness of behavior. If you’re focusing on validating people’s feelings, at least in a public forum, you run into many more zero sum games where by validating one person’s feelings, you invalidate another’s. This requires a more complete worldview to create an agreed upon set of standards for how those decisions are made.

In our case, we sacrifice the validation of our reactionary impulses for the sake of making the space more comfortable for the more vulnerable among us. We see this not only as a righteous tradeoff but also as a cornerstone of the culture we enjoy here. The casual support of marginalized people goes hand in hand with the chill vibe when we’re amongst ourselves.

The inverse of this is that we are critical of others just as we are critical of ourselves. For most people, it’s the pushback against criticism rather than the criticism itself that causes the real friction. Ability to self-crit is paramount to thriving here, and it’s a skill that is generally taught in a very toxic way for most people in the west. Criticism is used interchangeably with deprecation, when targeted at others as well as the self. So we draw a distinction there between deprecation and criticism and do our best to take a step back.

I know we’ve been rowdy with all the federation discourse, but people often fail to see the distinction between us being aggressive in the face of bigotry, us being invested in criticisms we’re facing, and us not taking the situation seriously or respectfully. I’m not saying the latter never happens. But it’s much less common than the first two situations.

Just as a clarification, our hatred of liberals is not the same as that of right-wingers. We hate capitalist ideology, not "wokeness" or something nonsensical like that. We are the exact people conservatives are trying to shit on when they say that.