this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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Funny enough, Hexbear actually defederated from my main instance first, due to it not being inclusive enough for their standards. My own experiences with Hexbear as an autistic enby are that Hexbear is actually the most inclusive Lemmy instance out there, by no small margin. The issue with Hexbear is that its users like to "punch up" at non-leftists, pointing out how people propagate or benefit from exploitative systems, and justify these systems to themselves.
Being "dunked on" may annoy and wound the pride of non-leftists, but this is also very much not the same as the actually evil Nazi shit posted to EH, which "punches down". I have for many years understood the difference between being annoyed and having my pride wounded for having a bad opinion, and being actively terrorized and marginalized for being a member of a marginalized group. The world would be better off if more people understood that difference.
By no means am I saying it's just as bad or remotely the same as a Nazi instance. I mean, I consider myself anarcho-communist, so it's not like they're too leftist for me or whatever, but it's hard to call it an inclusive space while communicating in such a toxic, off-putting way. It leads me to question whether they're even genuine communists when they don't seem to be motivated by any sense of community.
Maybe I'm a bit quick to judge them, but they remind me of dirtbag leftists from CTH, who were so toxic that I'd actually encounter them freely using slurs in the threads. Not exactly punching up, eh?
So no, I'd take a million hexbears over one exploding-heads, but to be honest l don't have any reason to associate with any of them. Maybe it's my age, but it all seems so very childish and off-putting to me.
Hexbear at least has a no-tolerance policy for open slurs, as far as I'm aware. But you're saying with regard to /r/CTH, that it wasn't, like, people reclaiming slurs, or using "slurs" for non-marginalized groups -- that it was actual, proper, undeniably hurtful slurring you saw? And by the way, what is a "dirtbag leftist", anyway?
I can definitely understand being put off by the way that the Hexbears often talk. I have managed to have a lot of constructive conversations with the Hexbears, where they honestly just write normally and almost unfairly politely for my asininity; but when the Hexbears aren't in Serious Mode, which is most of the time, then their comments just look like cryptic emojis and weird slang, right? And I think that's appealing for a certain type of person, but not for others. I don't think it's necessarily bad to be childish or flippant, so it doesn't bother me.
Whether the Hexbear culture is toxic is a different question. I can feel comfortable asking silly questions there or expressing sides of my identity that I might hide in other spaces, but there are also parts of the Hexbear culture that I like less and wish would change. Foremost that they could use a reminder of Hanlon's razor sometimes.
I think you're trying to frame my disgust for hexbear on some non-existent sense of fragility. And I don't give two fucks if they thought they were "reclaiming" or "tactically" using slurs. Fuck all of that, there's also a reason people dislike 4chan and tumblr.
I've been quite active on subreddits like FWR and AHS, so I understand the difference between punching up and down, and I grasp the value in dismantling the patriarchy and other hierarchies. This ain't it. I've not seen anything positive come out of hexbear, and any potentially decent conversation is spoiled by people deliberately acting like a bunch of unlikable d-bags.
Admittedly, I've got my own traumas to cope with as a gay person in a conservative region, and I can be sensitive. I actually ended up blocking 196 from your instance due to some unchecked misogynistic and homophobic slurs that were never addressed by the mods.
What's this about people disliking Tumblr due to slurs...? I haven't heard about people particularly disliking Tumblr for any reason, much less usage of slurs. And I don't know what FWR and AHS are, either. The second seems to be American Horror Story, but I'm not familiar with that.
I don't particularly like 196, either. It was the mod endorsement of an ableist slur on 196 that was sort of the impetus for Hexbear defederating from Blåhaj, actually. So I've always wished that 196 would just move to its own instance instead of being basically this parasite on the rest of Blåhaj Lemmy where prejudices are allowed to flourish.
It's only just now occurring to me that when you talk about slurs you might be referring more specifically to a word that alliterates "quest" and rhymes "near", and maybe also a word that alliterates "bid" and rhymes "switch". Are those the words you're thinking of? The first in particular would be a word that an older gay person from a conservative region would probably have a traumatic past with, but that younger people in spaces like Blåhaj Lemmy or Hexbear or Tumblr would use without having that trauma. I could understand taking issue with that if that is your trauma, because that is something that people should be more respectful and aware of, and that younger LGBT+ people in particular could do better about.
I'm sorry to have touched a sore spot.