Democratic centralism is when I upvote every Hexbear post no matter how much I think the post is cringe.

TL;DR first because I got rant-y

Hexbear and Lemmygrad formed to be leftist first and individual interests second. So your take is spot-on. I also think that they get mad that Hexbear doesn't have the option to downvote. So they don't get the satisfaction of the power trip and makes them even more pissed off. lol

The funny thing about people thinking we are assholes is that between here, lemmy.ml, and lemmygrad.ml I have found this instance to be the most chill. I find myself more concerned about getting attacked on lemmy.ml for even trying to say something that is not in-line with the western media narrative. I am a bit worried about getting jumped on for misunderstanding or having a bad take on lemmygrad. However I have begun to be better at thinking about how I say/ask things when replying to posts. Which I think is overall a good thing and have better accepted that even if I may disagree with folks, that it is better to learn more about those things over all.

For all the shit that I am learning and seeing that gets said about here and lemmygrad. Those folks on lemmy.ml and the other instances are just beyond quick to just outright refuse to take a moment to consider that they are not questioning shit at all. Just super binary "good or evil." Even if they agree that their "side" has historically both lied and done super fucked up shit. It is still unwavering "still much better than insert whatever shit they think anti-capitalism has done to so many people." They completely misunderstand that us "tankies" are just dumb motherfuckers brainwashed into thinking that AES nations never did anything wrong. It also doesn't help that even "progressive" liberals are so firmly conserned about being super slightly left of dead centre. To go around talking shit about how the hammer and sickle should be treated the same as the Nazi swastika. Still believing that the US is the reason we won the war. Nor do they realize how the Cold War was completely kicked off by the western allies renegging on promises made to the USSR for helping recoup. That the massive build-up of nukes was due to our own war hawks lying about the supposed rapid build-up of anything from the Soviets. Cuba and USSR are always the "war mongers" for putting nukes on Cuba, but the US's shit in Europe/Turkiey.

The giant emotes (which generates a lot of animosity when combined with the dubiously low PPB-trigger-threshold of some of our posters when on other instances) are solvable issue. If the devs were so inclined, they could just run imagemagick over them automatically to make downsized copies.

I'm not necessarily saying they should, I'm just saying they could.

and most importantly we are generally speaking unified.

It's been a while since I did a sectarianism. I have a good reason to later today though

😔

The emojis issue won't be forever though

Pretty damning TBH

Hexbear gamers, explain yourself!

Your comment lead me to learn about the many sequels to the smash hit NES game Excitebike. I feel that I should have been informed of those titles prior to now, but the Hexbear games community has let us all down.

excitebots was the SHIT

lies, hexbear users would never besmirch someone for eating beans

You silly Hexbear, that's the fakest story I've ever heard in my life.

Why would somebody bother making a movie about a plastic doll for little girls?

You're correct to be jealous of us. Although, I think we managed to port that feature upstream to the main Lemmy thingy as an optional feature? Check with your instance administrator!

Chapo Trap House is a leftish comedy podcast with three (later four, then five, now back to three) hosts that knew each other from twitter. It mostly commented on happenings in politics with regular segments going over the latest right wing bullshit, and was one of few places that would criticize the democrats as well. The /r/chapotraphouse subreddit was nominally for discussion of the podcast but it quickly outgrew that and became a general-purpose left-wing subreddit with a focus on irreverent shitposting and hostility towards outsiders. Fast-forward a bit and the podcast hosts remark that they don't like the subreddit anymore because people were criticizing them for various things, but nonetheless the subreddit continued to grow. A long-running joke that the "official podcast of the subreddit" was actually an entirely different podcast called Citations Needed began.

/r/cth was getting too big for the admins at reddit (one of whom thinks he'll own slaves in the post-apocalypse to give you an idea of their politics) and was banned for ill-defined reasons of "promoting hate" against slave owners (perhaps the reddit admin was insulted by this). In the aftermath of the banning, some people got together on a discord channel and a variety of volunteers got to work creating the website chapo.chat using lemmy. A couple months(?) later, chapo.chat was complete, though it forked from lemmy relatively early on and would be unable to federate for some time. A variety of comms were made, including /c/chapotraphouse, which then was ostensibly for discussion of both Chapo Trap House and Citations Needed, though this wasn't enforced or anything.

After some time, the admins decided to change the site name from chapo.chat to hexbear.net, because they no longer wished to associate with the podcast. In a completely failed attempt to encourage the growth of other communites on the site, the default "Main" comm was closed. Rather than this leading to the increased use of other comms that the admins were hoping for, /c/chapotraphouse became the new default comm. And finally, after much work from the dev team, hexbear.net reverted back to lemmy and was able to federate.

In summary: Chapo Trap House is a podcast.

I wonder if it’s because you have an in-culture that they don’t understand.

Definitely partially true. Some people have read posts here and made posts elsewhere saying things like "they're right wingers pretending to be leftist" because they can't understand satire and irony without having it spelled out to them and they're automatically trying to assume the worst instead of realising that the entire instance is irony poisoned.

CTH is a podcast, the subreddit was originally about it but quickly became its own thing. The podcast is your typical Brooklyn leftist hot couch thing where you get a bit of theory mixed in with a lot of jokes and parasocial relationships.

A long running joke is that the subreddit/Hexbear is actually a Citations Needed fanclub, because it's a much a better podcast.

I would just like to be an anecdotal nuisance and say that I found this community without knowing or interacting with the chapotraphouse podcast or subreddit

I have never listened to Chapo Traphouse.

There is quite the in-culture for sure. I’ll laugh at something on here and my partner will ask what’s funny and I have to give like ten minutes of back story.

chapotraphouse

Never heard of it

No it's the drug dealer

Chapo is the podcast that started it all. It’s a pretty decent socialist podcast with our smart boy Matt on the rants radicalizing a lot of people from 2016-2020. A lot of us have politically moved beyond it, but it definitely colors our culture in that we use the same insults and heightened irony that the original pod did. Very early Chapo episodes had a section where they would read a couple articles from major papers and decide which authors get fired out of a cannon and which ones get jail for life, for example and pull up pictures of the writers and mock them. We very much do not care about polite frivolities or “umm akshually” pedantry and debate shit. We know we are communists and we mock anyone who isn’t

Want to talk about outdoor cats?

This is the most correct answer.

the in-jokes become less obscurant with a little exposure. the rabbit hole goes shockingly deep.

In the early days, this sub was constantly brigaded by chuds, terfs, libs, patsocs, wreckers and branches of leftism that were somehow even more online than us and had an irrational hatred of us for reasons that frankly I never cared enough to bother learning. Like any such place, that means we're used to people coming in "just asking questions" with a bad take, and turning out to be a concern troll rather than someone asking in good faith and open to changing their mind.

This produced a culture of radical, frank struggle sessions, an approach to moderation that the Cheka circa 1919 would think lacks due process (and is good and cool and has made this place possibly the most LGBT friendly place on the net.), and a bad habit of dunking for a laugh. We're not nearly as edgy as a first impression might give, though.

We are aggressive and combative against racism, ableism, transaphobia or when someone is attacking one of us or our community...that is what gives us the moral high ground.

Those are literally the only things we have got remotely aggressive with on the fediverse so far.

We're hyper aggressive when it comes to certain things like hate.

This is then used by racists and bigots to claim we're aggressive all the time. And because they say it ALL THE TIME it begins to be believed by people, even if that's literally the only context in which they've seen our people get that hostile.

Stop right there, criminal scum! Nobody breaks the law on my watch!

Everything is politics

Yes.

Pretending otherwise is lib.

Yes.

You are getting it

😔

Heavy is the head that wears the crown

Being mean to bigots

Being uncivil

Being correct

Being smart, hot and sexy

this but unironically. I want to be as hostile and unwelcoming to libs as possible

Death to America

Too sexy

I agree with your last statement 100%

I am generally against defederation and censorship.

In response to the OP of this topic though, people hate hexbears because of the constant hardcore brigading and the huge inline image abuse.

It's annoying as fuck. As soon as you smell a "lib", even though you are usually wrong, it just turns into a massive dogpile on anyone who doesn't share your identical belief structure.

That isn't debate, it's bullying. You have the numbers to pull it off but if it carries on you will absolutely end up defederated from everywhere.

Because they anus

As a day 1 Hexbear account; I agree

You dodged a bullet by not elaborating on what you think is dogshit

We're socialists. That's it.

Everything they say about us revolves around them not wanting people to come here and potentially learn. In particular the nato dorks don't want us influencing people into anti-nato positions because it'll affect their ability to wage unlimited endless wars.

As such they'll say anything and everything about us, even some of the completely made up things like homophobia/racism, which is funny as we're probably the strongest instance on the fediverse against that, going far far further than the liberals do on all social justice topics.

It is what it is.

You're a trekkie. You like space communism. We want the same thing. That's all we need to know about each other.

I think it's overblown. We're annoying commies and that's enough to make some libs mad.

but also to be fair we do call for acts of violence regularly and with great gusto. it's one of the main things i use the site for.

literally nothing happened to incite the drama. the people on this instance used the fediverse in the way the software was designed for. the instance, which used to be not federated became federated like all the other ones.. the drama was initiated prior to this even happening; just in anticipation of how bad it would be.

it was a bunch of spiteful, ignorant, small minded name calling provoked by fantasies of the people who stirred it up. they are really afraid of leftists because they know they are wrong and don't enjoy the feeling of being shown up. so they wanted to preempt this by doing red baiting to stir up a moral panic because that usually works pretty well.

We have an extremely aggressive site culture from our origins on Reddit when people who didn't agree with our general political tendencies would wander into our subreddit and act like obnoxious smuglords once they realized what we're about. Rather than outright ban these people, we would bully them until they left - and even though we have somewhat stricter moderation on this site than we did in the subreddit, the viciousness stayed. We also have an extremely online sense of humor, given that we were founded to discuss a left-wing twitter podcast, which can make the general tone dense and impenetrable for newcomers.

calling for acts of violence

FWIW the subreddit was actually banned because it said that John Brown killing slave owners was good which Reddit called "promoting violence."

I did not find anything racist or at least I haven’t seen anything or anything homophobic

We're very strictly against any form of bigotry on this site and have a strong culture of mocking and bullying bigots, we also have a slur filter that changes the slur to say "removed" so any user who tries to use slurs can't (also iirc it instantly auto reports them to the mods with the slur they tried to use included in the report so that the mods can see what they were saying and react accordingly)

Sup fam

Margo, how come you can only do a Long Island accent whenever you play an American

I think Blahaj wanted to defederate because they didn't like talking about trans rights or removing slurs

You're witnessing us after we've gone through countless internal debates and purges, some of which will always be legendary. We had a problem with transphobes at the start, they're all gone. We had a really bizarre fight for about a week over whether or not cats should be allowed outside.

My favorite of ours was the weirdly intense debate over if it's ok to stack rocks next to or inside of a river.

There was also BMF, one of the strangest people to ever live. My personal favorite was @LiberalSocialist@hexbear.net, who was the most contradictory poster we had. You'd think LiberalSocialist was an elaborate Andy Kaufman level bit of someone pretending to be an annoying liberal, but I think it's always been unclear whether it was a gimmick or not.

God damn I would love to see your reaction to some of the classic BMF posts lol

Death to America

Not all of them are huge though

Hexbear style "They hate our freedoms"

Abnoxious is the name of my 90's skater punk workout video

Objectively correct, but annoying? I'll accept it.

Valid tbh

So cool and correct in both ways?

Yeah basically ngl, just without any of the smug post 9/11 islamophobia that new atheism used to mix in