Lots of people who are seeing top-level postings about Hexbear. Net are probably confused about what has been going on and I want to give an SRD-style overview of the whole thing.
Note: As a user of Blahaj.Zone, I am not a neutral party in this and I do not pretend to be. This is how the whole thing has played out from my perspective.
Hexbear. Net is another Lemmy instance that had relatively recently started to federate with Blahaj.Zone and other Lemmy instances. It had previously been known as Chapo.Chat because it began as an instance for fans of the podcast ChapoTrapHouse.
Recently users from Blahaj.Zone (as well as other Lemmy instances) began to complain about the behavior of Hexbear users. The complaints were about rude, obnoxious behavior: Hexbear users calling people “libs” as an insult, denying crimes of Russia and China, denying the crimes of Stalin,…
Such behavior was not necessarily forbidden on Blahaj.Zone, but certain sub-Lemmys had their own rules on these subjects.
One of the threads about Hexbear: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/1854795?scrollToComments=true
After an ever increasing number of users calling for defederating from Hexbear. Net, Ada (admin of Blahaj.Zone) opened a thread to talk about it. The thread was quickly inundated with Hexbear users, complaining in turn about being called out in this way. Though many of their comments exploited a current bug in the Lemmy code which resulted in emoji’s being embedded as pictures which results in lots of image spam.
Ada responded by removing top-level comments in the thread which were not from Blahaj.Zone’s users, because she wanted to get the feedback of her own community, not from anybody else.
This happened originally in this thread: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/1959801
The discussion on Blahaj.Zone was a back and forth: Lots of people calling for “leftist and queer unity”, others complaining about getting harassed by Hexbear users.
Meanwhile, elsewhere: Lemm.ee, a Lemmy instance operated and managed by someone from Estonia, also opened a discussion about Hexbear - at least partially motivated by the admin’s increasing unease of the rampant denial of soviet atrocities and the occupation of Estonia by the Soviet Union. Russian propaganda in regards to the war in Ukraine was also an issue.
Lemm.ee was largely encountering similar problems as Blahaj.Zone, though the Lemme.ee admin admitted that the Hexbear admin was generally responsive to reports and complaints.
The thread on Lemm.ee: https://lemm.ee/post/4543536
The thread was also flooded with comments from Hexbear users. The admin of Lemm.ee also responded by hiding most of the comments from Hexbear.
https://mastodon.social/@brooklynman/110911292961470110
Back on Blahaj.Zone, a tangent opens up: A Hexbear user complains about c/196, the new home of Reddit’s r/196 which had relocated to Blahaj.Zone and has been its biggest community ever since. The Hexbear user complains about their comments being removed, comments that called out the use of the r-word and other call-outs. The user posts pictures of the removal notices.
Blahaj.Zone’s admin Ada steps in and intervenes on behalf of the Hexbear user, having a stern word with the c/196 mod responsible for the removal of the comments.
https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/2136643
A Hexbear admin also gets involved and sends a message to the mods of c/196 demanding the removal of the sub-Lemmy’s banner, because it contains “fuck tankies²”, arguing that tankies is a slur. The c/196 mod refuses and publishes their message.
[²"Tankies" is a pejorative term for authoritarian socialists in the vein of Stalin and/or Mao.]
https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/1961004
While the discussion if Blahaj.Zone should defederate from Hexbear is still ongoing, the Hexbear admins defederated from Blahaj.Zone without warning from their side, because of…
unaddressed ableist removals from the /c/196 moderators, defense of chasers, no-quarter rules regarding our users, leakage of good-faith DMs from our admin team, and a general lack of initiative to punish these behavior
In her a response to these events, Ada points out in a comment that she never had the chance to adress the ableist incident (she was in bed) while other issues had happened in the past and had been adressed at the time. Thus she could not react before Hexbear defederated.
https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/2135406
TL;dr: Blahaj.Zone’s users complain about ill behavior of users on Hexbear. Net. A discussion about defederation begins on Blahaj.Zone. Meanwhile Hexbear users complain about Blahaj.Zone in turn and Hexbear. Net defederates instantly and without warning.
I’m trans and I’ve spent my whole life being told my gender is political. I believe that.
I’m gay and I’ve been told me whole life my sexuality is political. I believe that.
I’m pagan and since I became religious, I’ve been told that’s political. I believe that.
I’m neurodivergent and I’ve been told asking to not be the victim of hate speech is political. I believe that.
Patriarchal society says everything good and decent in my life is political. I believe that. Everything good is political, and politics is awesome.
My whole life people who talk like Abigail have told me that apoliticism means they get to be transphobic. Homophobic. Sexist. Neuronormative. Ableist. Religiously intolerant.
I don’t want people to talk like Abigail anymore. People who talk like that are mean. I want a safe space with lots of politics and trans people and gays and pagans and NDs and disabled people.
What are my options here? I could act like Abigail. I could use the language of my oppressor and say I hate politics, and redefine politics into whatever I don’t like. I could implicitly accept the control of the ruling class and use their words to try and defend myself and the rest of the trans community. I could try to make my identity palatable to capitalism. “I’m not political, I promise. I won’t disrupt the status quo”
Or I could say screw that, I’m political and I’m proud. I could reject the premise of the game that capital plays with my life. I could say the things they’re doing are wrong, and I won’t participate. I could use words as I see fit, and use them to protect myself and the community. I could construct a worldview that makes sense and doesn’t oppress anyone.
And that worldview says: everyone loves politics. You’re human beings, and that’s a political identity.
lemmy.blahaj.zone/u/ada
You can be an advocate, you can be visible and loud and queer. But what you can’t do is insist that everyone else has to do the same.
I’m like you in that I’m openly, loudly and proudly trans and queer. I do advocacy work, community building, public speaking, I’ve done queer community radio and will likely do so again in the future.
But for my own mental health, I sometimes need spaces where my life isn’t that. Where I can browse and engage and talk about stuff in a light hearted way, without having my guard up all the time.
What I would suggest is that you take it to cis people, and you take it to gender diverse folk who are looking for those discussions. What you shouldn’t be doing though is pushing politics on trans folk who, like you, have to navigate the reality of anti trans politics already in their daily life. Give them space to recover spoons and exist without the doomscrolling.
I think you’re misunderstanding my intention. I don’t want Abigail to get into arguments about hot button issues. I want Abigail to voice their disdain for arguments about hot button issues in a better manner. I want Abigail to say “I dislike controversy” instead of “I dislike politics”. I think Abigail is embracing a definition of the word “politics” that harms trans people and a lot of other groups, and I think the entire issue could be solved by swapping one word for another. I completely understand and accept Abigail’s dislike of controversy, but I think they’ve been tricked by politicians into thinking controversy and politics are the same thing. I’d like them to have a better understanding of the word “politics” and use it in places that don’t remind me of transphobic arguments.
And what I’m saying is that this sort of talk of the semantics of queer discourse needs to be opt in for your peers, because not everyone has the spoons to deal with that discussion. Some people are explicitly trying to get away from it.
The only people that you should be forcing conversations on to are the people who oppress us, not your peers who share your oppression.
Seeing other queer people say they hate politics is triggering to me, because it reminds me of the way transphobes have attacked my gender in the past. Subjectively, it feels the same as seeing a slur. And I know that this language has horrible effects on the queer community, because I’ve seen it happen. I’ve seen gay people attack bi and trans people for being political. I’ve seen trans people attack enbies for being political. I’ve seen enbies with more acceptable genders attack xenogender people and neopronoun users for being political. And I’ve seen white people all over the queer spectrum attack BIPOC queer people for being political. I know from experience that speech like this is going to radicalise queer people against minorities and may contribute to someone being abused.
A person’s right to avoid having anyone disagree with them ends when they harm other people. And this speech is harmful. If the goal is to make everyone safe and prevent hostile disagreements, then the place to start is with removing harmful speech that embraces the narratives of the oppressor and ends with people getting hurt. Nobody had to go and use this speech, it was a choice. It wasn’t an informed or considered choice but it was still a choice that impacts other people. That’s why it needs to be informed and considered. It’s inflammatory and controversial in the impacts it has on how other people think, and I don’t want to see it here. Removing political controversy means removing speech like this.
I’m telling you, as the instance admin, you need to respect people’s right to opt out discussions like this. I understand that it’s triggering for you, but you having a reaction to the language because of the way it’s been used against you in the past does not mean that everyone is using it that way. If someone attacks you, even in a dog whistly, non obvious way, if someone invalidates your identity, if someone throws any kind of queerphobia at you, I will boot them from the instance without missing a beat. But if they’re using language that bothers you because you associate it with folk who have done that in the past even when it’s what’s happening, you need to find a way of moving forward that doesn’t involve getting in people’s face about language.
The reason that we created this space in the first place, is to give gender diverse folk a space to exist where they can let their guard down a bit. You need to allow people to do that.
It’s not just the triggering nature. I know that this language will be used to attack trans people in the future. Hearing it reinforced is increasing the chance that someone thinks this view is normal enough to attack a trans person over it. It needs to be removed so that trans people can be safe from abuse in the future.
I’ve made the expectations pretty clear. Please abide by them.
I could argue your name is triggering for me, considering it yells FAT in caps lock, which is with what I was bullied for a long time. Yet I do not, because it is completely unrelated to me and not meant to discriminate against anyone, I believe. Just like that, saying one does not want to talk or hear about politics, should not randomly trigger anything. Especially because “politics” is a very large term, ergo is your definition and association with it even more niche. I’ve never heard of LGBTQ+ being political, yet many politicians and parties discriminate against minorities. Therefore it would be - and IS - triggering to actually talk about them or politics in general.
Well, see, the thing is, the user who said they don’t like to talk about politics repeatedly misgendered me and said some misogynist stuff about it later on. So, I was right.