Hexbear admins decide to shut down two communities. All hell breaks loose.

Yesterday, an unexpected admin post was made announcing that hexbear would be shutting down and recreating two of their most popular communities (a): 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 (a) , followed by more resignations (a)

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 (a) 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(a) but it seems those popular comms still remain shut down.

EDIT: Even lemmygrad is wondering what the hell is going on

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156 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.
  
  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.
  
  I love enlightening people about their potential ND like that. So many people are struggling because they feel they are inadequate or flawed, when they're just divergent from the norm and struggling to follow the norm.
  
  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.

156 comments