MolotovHalfEmpty [he/him]

*martyr

Maybe I can clear up some of your concerns or confusion around the “pro-Russia” stuff if you’d like me to?

I feel a little sorry for the Lemm.ee users here that came to make measured, personal posts specific to the annoucement. There’s a fair amount of long off-topic arguements happening in bits of the thread now and that probably makes it harder to read and manage.

This is something that’s often been pointed to as a pure result of Hexbear users or federation with Hexbear and given rise to accusations of ‘brigading here and in the past’. While I don’t think every segue into debate has been useful here, and have also told comrades that I didn’t think this was the place for specific comments (which they removed) I also think there’s some important context to point out - and I hope it helps lemm.ee users wondering about all this traffic not to fall into the trap of assuming the worst based on a couple of comments:

• Hexbear is a very big and very active instance. A very small proportion of users posting in a thread (especially one explicitly about them) can seem like a lot to a lot of instances.
• Hexbear doesn’t have downvotes and Hexbear users do not have the ability to downvote posts or comments on other instances. This creates a culture where if people disagree, they tend to reply, not downvote instead. Another reason we’re very active.
• This thread has constantly been at the top of people’s feeds on Hexbear. if they’re not only set to ‘local’.
• Finally - and I say this fully acknowledging and appriciating the many ordinary, good faith, pleasant lemm.ee commenters that I’ve enjoyed reading and talking too even when I totally disagreed with them - a lot of these off-topic arguements and more heated comments do not come from nowhere. While not at all the majority, I do see a pretty shocking amount of actively hostile, hateful, and insulting behaviour here. Sadly, quite a bit of it would be banned under Hexbear’s moderation policy against things like slurs and hate speech too.

So try to keep in mind if you see salty Hexbear users replying to people that, just in reading through this thread myself, I’ve the following instances of abuse or smears against my comrades (and they continue popping up). So I absolutely support them defending themselves (as long as they stay within the rules here):

• Dimissal as the pejorative “tankie” - 4 times (although we actually think this one is pretty funny usually)
• Users stating that Hexbear users are propagandists - 8 times
• Stating that people from Hexbear are specifically paid Russian/Chinese bots/propagandists - 10 times
• Direct equivalences of Hexbear posters to Nazis or just straight up calling us Nazis/fascists - 7 times
• Insults regarding mental health or IQ that would be classed as ablism on Hexbear - 8 times
• Dismissing users as children - 2 times
• Claiming Hexbear users are using vote-manipulation (impossible, as explained above) - 4 times
• Accusations of deliberate brigading rather than just commenting, being active - 11 times

I’ve tried not to count repeated instances from the same users. But sadly that’s not all. Just a handful of the following are comments that have been made against Hexbear users in this thread, without any kind of equal hostility. As far as I can tell they all still remain:

• “You guys are like cancer”
• “Braindead fucking tankies”
• “Get fucked”
• “Asshole” (multiple)
• That our beliefs are “moralistic bullshut”
• That some of our beliefs are “a criminal ideology”
• A comment that simply states “No Russians”
• That we’re “evil” (multiple times)
• An elaborate comparison to us “vandalising a Jewish graveyard” and other Nazi equivalences
• And of course a comment that explictly minimised the Nazi death toll with glee, seeming to imply they should have killed more. On the subject of disagreeing with equating the hammer and sickle to the swastika (hidden with spoiler tag, for those who don’t want to see it repeated)…

There’s also been numerious instances of users misgendering Hexbear users. I’m not going to put all of these down to malice, but at Hexbear we display our pronouns for a reason - we love our trans comrades! You don’t have to, but could you please at least respect them and not misgender them?

Again, this isn’t the majority, but it’s honestly disappointing and worth keeping in mind amongst some of the louder, minority yells of ‘brigading’ etc.