Yesterday, an unexpected admin post was made announcing that hexbear would be shutting down and recreating two of their most popular communities: the_dunk_tank and dredge_tank. For those who are not aware, those two are some of the most notorious comms in the threadiverse which routinely cause inter-lemmy drama (disclaimer, the deteriorating relations between our instance and hexbear and my own ban from hexbear was ultimately triggered by various posts in the_dunk_tank)
The stated reason was to promote more thoughtful discussions and to prevent a white cishet mindset which was apparently promoted by the content in those comms, according to the mods and admins.
Within a day 1.3 thousand comments were made with hexbear regulars upset at this decision and discussing within.
However, before this announcement, the top admin of hexbear posted in the cross-lemmy admin matrix chat urging other admins to close down their “drama communities” as well.
Hexbears caught wind of this and quickly accused the admin of duplicity, and having other motives instead of their stated ones. The admin in question as defense admitted that it was their attempt to manipulate other lemmy instance admins and it backfired on them
After a whole day of this, the main admin decided to step away from hexbear , followed by more resignations
In the midst of this, people realize another old-mod had recently come back after a 3-year hiatus, and now people start suspecting some correlation. That mod makes a public post before shortly after deleting their account.
There’s also smaller pieces of chaos ongoing, such as one admin, banning one of their alts “as a bit” using wording that they were not aware is misgendering (“fella”) which caused other hexbears to pile on. Eventually that was resolved, and admins are asked to tone down the “bit doing” during this heated period.
This “struggle session” is still ongoing, with people are asking the resigned mod to come back, and other admins unbanning accounts which were getting banned left and right but it seems those popular comms still remain shut down.
I hope the instances burns. I’ll never forget Hexbear users threatening my life. Fuck. Them.
Maybe you should cool it with the kangaroo beastiality.
But yeah I remember them doing that shit and people like that have no place in the fediverse. We need to annoy sunaurus until he defeds from them.
We need to annoy sunaurus until he defeds from them.
People like you should be banned.
Feel free to ban me from your instance, buddy.
We need to annoy sunaurus until he defeds from them.
Please do not do that. I pay monthly to be on lemm.ee precisely because lemm.ee doesn’t generally defederate from other instances. You may not like hexbear, but I appreciate seeing certain posts from there and learning about viewpoints that may challenge my own.
That’s your issue, not mine.
Why not just block the instance for yourself? Then everyone wins.
I still have to see their horrificly uneducated fascism supporting comments.
I’ve been following the drama too. Total misstep from the hexbear admins/mods. I didn’t catch that TC69 deleted their account though, kind of a shame because they seemed to really stand up for trans people. I like hexbear, I agree with a lot of their points and like their community. I do not always agree with them, but I respect them in their fight and struggle. It’s one of the only places I felt safe talking about my feelings about the recent US election because many people felt similar. I don’t post or comment much on hexbear, I really should though. Hexbear did a survey that revealed a significant amount of their users were trans. I did not understand why the mods said white cis het men were the problem and was the majority of their userbase. I am a mixed bi cis latina, I know I do not have a hexbear account but I just wanted to point out that their assessment is wrong. I just hope they can recover from this.
They seem to have burnt a lot of their regulars with this one. I read two heart wrenching posts from ND people in their comms who were respectively devastated for being banned frivolously, or being stressed about potentially being banned frivolously. And I totally understand it as RSD is a common symptom and most of us are traumatized for being constantly excluded. It’s part of the reason why I try to be careful with the banhammer because I know how much it affects ND people.
Yup. I blocked the instance after being on the receiving end of such a frivolous ban, together with bad faith modding, and having people jump down my throat a few too many times over miscommunication interpreted the worst possible ways to justify “dunking” so that they can look cool to people on the Internet.
What the admin did wrong was to let those comms exist in the first place. Not only can such behavior have deeper effects on those of us who are ND but, by allowing the comms, they helped to cultivate a toxic culture on the instance that is at the root of much of the inter-instance drama. They’ve been celebrating and rewarding dehumanizing and deriding others, which motivates others to create situations, whether through behaving poorly or tailoring context so that they too can be celebrated and part of the in-group.
ND is neurodivergent in this context I assume, what is RSD?
Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria
Goodness. I’m reading the description and this really hits close to a lot of things in my life. Even down to having ADHD and commonly being mistaken as bipolar disorder. (I casually took one of those online tests about it this morning because I’ve been wondering about my mood swings.) A lot of my “spirals” lately have been tied to perceived rejections.
WTF. @[email protected] is now suspecting me being behind some sockpuppets because they claim I leaked private messages
By which they mean the screenshot I crossposted in the OP above from their own comm’s public comments!. That screenshot was in turn from a discussion in a public matrix chat for lemmy admins.
I am willing to give people the benefit of a doubt, this is some really fucking manipulative behavior and it’s pissing me off!
This is the most interesting development. it really exposes their finest member’s mind’s inner workings:
Well, time to leak private messages now right!
I’m so glad I’m not federated with hexbear & ml.
The plot thickens lmao
They seem to have a really messed up line of reasoning, just the claim that it was all a ploy to manipulate other instance admins was insane
I like popcorn.
I love that for them!
The revolution will not be televised.
We need a worker ran instance where every user gets to vote on reports.
Or even better; every user should have admin rights.
Sounds like an experiment from a Fallout vault. Interesting, but it would likely devolve into a single person using a macro to auto ban every other admin besides themselves or their pals.
What did everyone have for breakfast this morning? My wife made biscuits and I ate one with butter and fresh strawberry jam. It was delicious.
Black coffee. Nothing better than a smooth, fresh Americano in the morning.
No food? Just coffee?
Waffles with maple syrup.
Nice! I love waffles and I’m an artisan maple syrup maker. My favorites are big, fluffy Belgian waffles with berries, whipped cream, and maple syrup or chocolate chip pecan waffles with maple syrup.
I love waffles and I’m an artisan maple syrup maker.
That’s pretty awesome. “Tree to bottle”? That is, are you doing the whole process from managing trees, through to tapping, and concentrating? My grandfather was in the rubber industry, so, I find this stuff incredibly interesting.
Yum. Berries on Belgian waffles are also my favorite. Definitely miss all of the varieties from growing up in the PNW.
That’s pretty awesome. “Tree to bottle”? That is, are you doing the whole process from managing trees, through to tapping, and concentrating? My grandfather was in the rubber industry, so, I find this stuff incredibly interesting.
Yes. Not only that but I build the machines and automation to bring the sap in from the trees, store it, run in through the RO, and store it again for boiling. I also welded the evaporator that I use to do the boiling.
I don’t know the name of it in English, but I know it had egg in it!
I had some coffee, bupropion, and atomoxetine for breakfast. Mmmmmm!
I’m about to make toasted blueberry Pop tarts.
The breakfast of champions.
I ate a Catalan biscuit called Rosquilla, it’s very sweet with a touch of Anise so one is more than enough with some tea
Damn, I had 2 beers and a 3 minute argument about tupperware.
Your wife sounds amazing! Is she single? Tell her lemmy says sup
I could crush a biscuit with butter and jam. A nice, unsalted butter. Maybe even sweet butter if you can swing it.
The wife and I slept in today so we went to our local taco shop called Maskadores. It’s basically Subway for Mexican food. Pick your dish, pick your meat, then your toppings. She had carne asada tacos with lettuce, pico, queso blanco, and cilantro. I had a chile relleno burrito. Literally a chile relleno wrapped in a tortilla with rice, refried beans, guac, cilantro, and pico. It was delicious.
Sounds awesome.
Those people could really get some hobbies
Like imagine sperging online about communism 24/7
It’s actually incredibly sad that these people have nothing better to do with their lives. I pity them and hope they get well at some point
these people have nothing better to do
I’m confident a significant portion of their accounts are run by paid propagandists. They’re just following orders.
I got curious and read a couple of the threads. I think they are mentally ill. In my brief interactions with them, they called me a liberal and sent me threats of violence, and didn’t want to hear about reasons why Biden was good. Fair enough. This whole mess sounds for all the world like an LLM hallucinating a deranged exaggerated caricature of a far-left community.
I can’t even make sense of it. An admin went on an alt account, and banned their own main account, and then everyone got really mad about that, because they were being transphobic when they sent a message to their other account, and now they’re saying the whole thing was a “bit,” and the site has too many male users, and there are a whole bunch of people who got banned somehow that they’re now unbanning, and also they’re tightening up their policy about bigotry and apologizing because they blamed the whole thing in the end on the males, and that explanation would imply there’s a difference between men and women, which they can’t do. It was a struggle session. I am not making any of that up.
As far as I can tell, there is no problem at all and never was, and they managed to create a massive problem. It’s like someone was walking down the street, and somehow fell down, and all of a sudden their leg fell off. I did learn some new words, though.
Bioessentialist.
I don’t even want to know what the heck all that means or is about. It sounds like a caricature for real. I try to focus on non fiction things in the real world. I simply don’t remember any of these childish discussions being applicable in my life despite theoretically being the primary target audience.
There’s a limit for insufferableness and chronically online tankies are way past it
The election is over so it’s obviously time for an instance wide reorg.
Aww, man! This is the first time I wish had not blocked carcosa on matrix!
Refreshing the page for new comments intensifies
I already thought they had one of the most “redditesque” userbase of Lemmy. The mods and admins being on par for the course isn’t surprising. Also, with the lack of trust in their users displayed here, it seems like they reject the monster they’ve created…
Lemmy.world is by far the most redditesque userbase. I’ve had a much improved Lemmy experience since unsubscribing to most of it. Hexbear is its own thing, unknown in my experience and unique to itself.
Lemmy.world is by far the most redditesque userbase
And I won’t be the one telling you otherwise. It’s reddit 2, period.
I won’t deny that Hexbear developed a culture while slow-cooking in their corner (nor would I say there’s nothing interesting to read on their instance, very far from it). However, I’ve seen the same kind of behavior coming from them that turned me off reddit in the first place. It makes me avoid interactions with them…
I wanted to post this in there but ofc I’m banned, so I’ll do it here :
Go woke, go broke
/s
Lol.
Speaking personally, them stating they outright lied to other instance admins is just one step too much. Wielding our collaborative spirit for manipulative purposes just sows distrust, and is downright asocial behaviour. It’s so out of line, that I honestly don’t believe they actually lied. I think they were being earnest and only claimed they were being manipulative when caught by hexbears to save face. But if not, that’s even worse.
This is the action which made you realize that they are operating in bad faith? Not… gestures wildly
You made me spit my coffee :p
As much as I love my personal instance overlord for most of their beliefs and being a generally good person, they are incredibly naive, I assume purposefully so to avoid ever accidentally upsetting someone
Its an admirable trait to a degree even if it is incredibly frustrating
It’s not naivety. I try to be charitable as a matter of course because I’ve been personally burnt too many times by people being uncharitable towards me and my ND expressions. It’s a learned behaviour I have, to make sure I don’t attack someone for a mere misunderstanding. Of course even I have my limits.
I’m missing something. What was the difference between what they said in matrix chat to other admins, and what they said to their users? Because from your description it kinda sounded the same.
You can see both on my screenshot and my link. They themselves claimed they were lying as a ruse. It’s not me editorializing.
No no, I’m not claiming you’re editorialising. I’m just having comprehension issues and failing to understand, thus I’m trying to get an ELI5. So basically, as I understand it, hexbear admin urges others to shut down their drama comms, then proceed to announce they’ll be doing the same on their own instance. I’m not seeing the duplicity or clash of motives? Maybe I’m just bad at understanding this drama stuff.
I guess they were not technically lying about their actions although one could argue they were not really planning to truly shut them down but primarily to rename them. That said, they did lie about their motives and objectives for doing so to the others with the aim of manipulating them to do the same (i.e. shut down their own “drama comms”).
The point being that any such manipulation erodes the inter-instance camaraderie of admins.
They absolutely lied. They said they shut down some communities for one reason, when the reason was something different and they planned to keep going with their own clusterfuck communities and activities. They were just hoping other people would stop doing it to them. Pax and chronicon both used the word “lying” in their messages.
I don’t see why they bothered. Most instances will get rid of their evil communities without needing to be prompted by a Hexbear recommendation, kind of a “fool me 50 times, shame on me” type of thing, and the kind of people who like evil communities on their instance will keep them going regardless.
Ah I see. Thanks!
I was also confused. Thanks for the clarification.
It’s of a piece with a lot of the behavior I see on Lemmy. It is, at the root, hostility to collaboration. It’s the model where the person speaking is automatically right, and anyone who doesn’t reach the same answers as them is an enemy who must be either corrected or defeated. Once you adopt that mindset, then of course lying to people to achieve that defeat is justified. After all, the people with the bad ideas are hurting everyone, on purpose, and they must be stopped. Reasonable conversation and argument doesn’t enter into it, at that point.
The thing is, there’s no single person who’s got all the answers. There aren’t any worldviews that apply correctly to all situations. Part of the idea of talking things out is that you can learn from others, detect missing pieces in your own thinking and correct them before they become too deeply ingrained into your worldview. I see way too many mods who think that their job is to remove the wrong ideas if someone “attacks” their community by posting them, or instance admins who think their job is to “wield” their instance against the people with the incorrect ideas. I think adding tribalism to the mix, allegiance to the other vegans or anarchists or whatever, just makes it ten times worse.
Even if the liberals or non-vegans, or whatever, are wrong, then the right answer is to talk with them. I understand that it might be difficult, because they might have the model that they have to defeat your incorrect worldview without listening to anything you’re saying except to detect things they should disagree with, but for as long as that’s your model on your side, you’re doing something wrong, regardless.
Thus they lied either way? Either preemptively to other admins or after being caught by their own - so whichever may be worse, it’s still lying either way.
I honestly don’t believe they actually lied. I think they were being earnest and only claimed they were being manipulative when caught by hexbears to save face.
Having read everything that’s been linked here, I’m inclined to believe this.
What in the Open-source-Zuckerberg-hating hell is the “Threadiverse”?
Portmanteau of “Threaded” and “Fediverse” (which is itself a portmanteau of “Federated Universe”). Effectively “Threaded discussions Fediverse”.
But why rebrand it? It already was the Fediverse. Just because Meta decided to start its own instance, we’re now rebranding it for them? Fuck that. Threads is not even playing by the same rules. They basically just took the activity pub protocol and made their own closed source clone.
Threadiverse is a subgroup of Fediverse. It’s just a way to say Lemmy + Mbin + Piefed, without saying just “Lemmy” or all the three every time. It has nothing to do with Meta and it existed before they created threads.net
But it seems a valid point that Threads has now tainted it, bc as we just saw here, people are going to immediately assume that it includes Threads?
I like how Threadiverse puts the focus on threaded conversations rather than Mastodon’s emphasis on people that you have to find and follow.
But I’ve taken to calling Lemmy + Mbin + PieFed (& soon Sublinks) as “Fediverse” again, to avoid the nefarious implications. Or even just “Lemmy”, since that’s where 99% of the actual content is coming from, from places such as Lemmy.World that holds >80% of the Lemmy userbase. Mbin is somewhat complicated by crossing over both Lemmy & Mastodon, and PieFed is a super neat project but currently has next to no content available exclusively on it (then again, if that’s the criteria, then Lemmy is basically the same as well, since everything is shared by federation:-D).
Worst of all is how Threadiverse is technically correct (the best kind of correct! 💯), since despite defederation from threads.net (or hexbear.net, or lemmygrad.ml, or lemmy.ml or midwest.social or whatever else people decide to block, individually or collectively), it is the same style of threaded-based conversations (iirc). It’s just that “Threads” itself is so hated.
After Sublinks is released I was going to write a post asking people what name they wanted to use, but I’m too curious now already to wait: what do you think? Isn’t Threadiverse too controversial and would drive people off that would otherwise consider coming here, e.g. from Reddit?
Ye it’s a problem term. I don’t know if it can be reclaimed, but listing all the software is also not great and most people think of microblogging when they hear “Fediverse”. Maybe “Nestedverse” or “Forumverse”? I don’t really have a good catchy term in mind.
