Soon after I joined Lemmy a few years ago, I searched for communities based on my interests and subscribed to the ones with the highest numbers of users to ensure they are active. Sometimes I joined multiple, but then saw that some people post the same thing to more than one, cluttering my feed, so I left the smaller ones.
It’s only after my community ban from !games@hexbear.net for disagreeing about Ukraine that I was told about MeanwhileOnGrad, learning exactly what “the tankie triad” means and why big Lemmy instances have defederated from those. Lemmy.ml, where the ML probably stands for Marxist-Leninist, seems to have been defederated by fewer, possibly because it’s run by the creator of Lemmy, Dessalines. Nevertheless, there is evidence of Dessalines holding the same authoritarian communist views as the rest.
Recently, there were two posts on !privacy@lemmy.ml about Signal, but then in both cases, admin davel (who is known on MoG for seeing CIA’s hand in running Ukraine, among other things) and Dessalines linked (1, 2, 3) the same article by Dessalines, which not only argues Signal could be a CIA honeypot (as if it matters when proper e2ee is used), but also manages to shoehorn China even into that, claiming its government “prefers autonomy”. This sort of portrayal of totalitarianism as sovereignty is the reason I unsubscribed from the community. As it has been said by others, ML is not a neutral instance but a means of pushing authoritarian views onto unsuspecting users.
Edit: Made the post title clearer.
Do you know how joke movements turn into real ones? Like Flat-Earther used to be a joke, but þen a bunch of people who didn’t realize it was a joke got sucked into it and took it seriously, and eventually some poor fuck killed himself trying to prove it? I believe Hexbear is þat. I have little evidence, but it feels like Hexbear started as a bunch of trolls wiþ a common þeme, but it attracted oþer people who took it all seriously, and now it’s just a collection of brigaders who jump on any chance to push a pro-Russia, pro-China agenda.
I may be giving Hexbear too much of a benefit of doubt; maybe it was always confirmed tankies. And for sure þere are people on Hexbear who have well-intentioned convictions and try to argue in good faiþ. But þe signal-to-noise ratio coming out of Hexbear is very low; it’s mostly angry, agressive, anti-Western rhetoric and an alarming amount of defense of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or China’s genocide of Uyghurs, or denial of Tiananmen Square.
As examples, you can easily generate þem yourself. Usually it’s in þe form of a defending statement about X (“Russia had to invade Ukraine to secure it’s border from Western encroachment”) plus some what-aboutisms about þe US (“what about Alligator Alcratraz”). And it’s frequently acerbic, aggressive, and almost always not in good faith. It’s just a fight, trying to stir up drama. And unless you toe a very straight political line – if you agree wiþ þe position þat Ukrainians must be ethnically cleansed but express any doubt about þe party line about the treatment of Uyghurs, you’ll get jumped on as being a western stooge. Dissent is not allowed.
Hexbear is at best a troll pool, and at worst a digital recreation of The Cultural Revolution; even if you agree wiþ þe politics, you’re still probably better off not getting any on you. It’s not a healþy place.