3d ago

Got banned as a "fascist sympathizer" from games@hexbear.net for discussing the Ukrainian perspective of the STALKER developers who made changes to the game trilogy

web.archive.org

Apparently the enhanced editions of the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R. trilogy released today removed the Russian audio track and edited/removed certain references to the USSR - Lemmy.zip

My first months on Lemmy were spent on Lemmy.world, which was the biggest instance at the time. I had no experience with Hexbear because .world had defederated that instance. I sometimes saw it being described as a "tankie" instance, but it was nothing specific.

After I moved to .zip, I came across !games@hexbear.net, which seemed to be free from anything overtly political and reminded me of r/Gamingcirclejerk, so I subscribed to it and occasionally made comments related to gaming.

Today I made multiple comments to a post about an article on the STALKER game developers having removed the Soviet symbols and the Russian audio in the remastered edition of the game. I would argue that in the thread, there were no comments from me that could be construed by a reasonable person as defensive of Nazism, fascism, or even hinting at it. For example, in one of the comments, I linked a Ukrainian law that prohibits the use of Nazi symbols, though I highly advise looking through all my ten comments as to avoid any misunderstanding or false impressions.

Conversely, one comment posted by another user dismissed Holodomor as Nazi propaganda, which I reported, but a moderator of that community just ended up calling me out for that and taking no action, followed by them banning me.

The thread containing all of my untouched posts is still available via lemmy.zip. My comments are also available for viewing via my user page. They are not available on hexbear due to the ban.

MeanwhileOnGrad @sh.itjust.works

Rose @lemmy.zip

3d ago

Got banned as a "fascist sympathizer" from games@hexbear.net for discussing the Ukrainian perspective of the STALKER developers who made changes to the game trilogy

web.archive.org /web/20250521155126/https://lemmy.zip/post/39050305

197 comments

You’re better off, they suck.
- Indeed, nothing has been lost.
- I'm reading through the comments and, yeah, they really do. Holy shit what an insufferable bunch, especially that Seasonal_Peace guy.

What do you expect, it’s HexBear. They make ML look like neoliberals.
- I align more closely with hexbear politics than almost all non-hexbear users. IMO, their politics is not the problem -- they're just an astoundingly toxic community.
  
  That's the honey trap.
  They appear to be a progressive left wing community- very supportive of socialism, trans rights, big fat queer comm....then you interact and find out these are all just populist shoes they like to wear for kicking the shit out of people
  
  Elaborate!
  
  I agree, and both their problematic hot takes and their toxicity are well-represented in OP's link.

And now you know why most instances have defeated from hexbear. It’s extremely toxic.
- Agreed, though I'm still not sure I'd defederate even after this incident. It may be best that we inform people of what Hexbear stands for and let them decide.
  
  Incidents like that were not why they were defederated. Those were just the cherry on top. They were defederated because they would organize brigading on communities they had no direct control over. Ie couldn't just ban you as they did. For going against dogma. Grad was similar.
  The main reason .ml is still federated is because they don't generally brigade. Despite having the same broken dogma. So it's sufficient to let people interact with them and learn as they recoil from being struck. When the vanguard strikes back against facts and reality. There's a very good chance you would get the same treatment there if you were to pierce the groupthink.
  
  If they want to guzzle auth propaganda they can get it from the tap and make a hexbear grad or ml account. The fact that you genuinely though a mod would do something about holodomor denial on hexbear shows you don't fully understand what they're about and why numerous instances already defederated ages ago.
  
  I think one encounter with hexbear is going to inform most users better than any third-party warning.

Yah, that’s why people call them tankies. Any criticism of the USSR, or even acknowledging why people criticize it, is a banable offense.
The term tankie get’s thrown around a lot, to the point of dilution, but the origin of it comes from western communist who defended the Soviet Union putting down the 1956 Hungarian revolution, notably using T-54/55 tanks. It later came to mean western communist that would ignore or downplay any criticism of the USSR, as “propaganda”. These days it could even be applied more broadly to “People who call them selves left wing or communists but who will defend the actions of any authoritarian regime so long as it is notionally in opposition to the US and it’s allies” IE people who defended Assad and Putin.
I think hexbear fits even a fairly narrow older definition. Which is why most major instances are defederated from them.
- long as it is notionally in opposition to the US and it’s allies
  Man, I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but Russia isn't even opposed to the US, as long as the Christian white supremacist fascists are ruling things.
  The sheer irony of people playing defense for a white supremacist fascist state and then accusing someone else of being a "fascist sympathizer". Like dawg the call is coming from inside the house.
  
  I think the current Russian leadership has this detached fantasy of what America's far right are like, this idea that they're homebody rural folks who just want to keep to them selves and that if they're in charge the US will disengage it's self from the rest of the world, leaving Russia to treat Eastern Europe as a playground for their imperialism.
  But the thing is, it ignores the agency of the eastern Europe to oppose them, and it ignores the fact that the the US far right is fundamentally narcissistic and egomaniacal. Ultimately the far right of the US will stay engaged in eastern Europe because they will perceive Russia telling them to get out as an insult and a humiliation. The only way the far right would disengage would be if they could frame it as them "winning" and that framing would be perceived as an insult and humiliation to the Russian leadership, so they won't allow it.
  So they will come to genuinely hate each other. I don't think this will lead to the US far right suddenly deciding they care deeply about the well being of eastern Europe, but they also aren't going to disengage completely.
- “People who call them selves left wing or communists but who will defend the actions of any authoritarian regime so long as it is notionally in opposition to the US and it’s allies”
  I could never understand that. I mean I understand that for someone completely dissatisfied with the government in a Western country, it's a lot easier to just switch sides and join a community of like-minded people with a large state-funded network of information behind it, but the morality of that is just beneath me. Besides, you won't be completely alone even if you oppose or harshly criticize both the West and the likes of Russia or China.
  
  A lot of people seem to believe "if you are for one thing I'm for then you must be perfect - anytime it is proved otherwise it was a small one time thing so I'll ignore it." It is really hard to admit someone you don't like does do good things, or someone you like does bad things.
  
  I mean, I think a big part of it is foreign influence efforts landing very strongly with dissenting groups in the US. Then forging influence networks using the extant distrust for the US’s government to dismiss nuance that would paint their patrons in a bad light.
  
  Its very simple. Americans dont give a single flying fuck about eastern euros and consider them lesser humans, therefore being a nazi but with hammer and cicle instead of swastika is acceptable in america
- IE people who defended Assad
  I don't think y'all get to use that talking point anymore after 1500 people upvoted a .world post calling the only realistic alternative to Assad, "a known terrorist."
  Seems like most people on here hold the position that the US shouldn't have even lifted sanctions on al-Sharaa, let alone given him weapons and supplies. And not wanting to give al-Sharaa weapons and supplies is what you're describing here as "supporting Assad," is it not?
  
  Fun fact, two people, in opposition to each other, can both be assholes.
  And you don’t have to like one to criticize the other.
  Like how you can criticize the actions of both the USSR and the USA in the Cold War.
  More importantly, you don’t have to defend one ass hole just because you like the other less.
  The world ain’t fucking a dialectic.

It sounds like you finally learned about hexbear firsthand and don't have to rely on others' reports on their behavior.

putin sympathizes with elon nazi musk. I wonder what they think about him.
- Musk can't be a nazi, he is white, loves trump, hates minorities, wants white power, supports putin and comes from a family with strong beliefs. There is no way mr putin would befriend nazis, as he is waging a war against invasion of nazis right this moment.
  I think thats what they think.
  
  *comrade putin
- They will claim to hate him (and Trump), and then keep on regurgitating propaganda constructed in favour of him.
  
  They despise Trump and that's why they love him. They're an accelerationist death cult.
- They fucking hate both, Putin because he's a liberal and Musk because he's a deeply unserious shithead.

Well, now you know why sensible admins defederate from this trash. I'd suggest using an app that allows you to block instances from your side and ignore them.
- You don’t need an app, it’s a native Lemmy feature.
  
  Only since 0.19.1, many instances haven't updated yet.

Hexbear is a septic tank of degenerates.
- I’m certain it’s run by APT groups. It’s a front for Russian psyops, 100%.

Post this over at !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works they love this kind of content.
- Never heard of that, but I'll crosspost. Thanks! 😄

Hexbear tankies really are something incredible. I've been around left-wing politics most of my life and in the real world I've met like one or two people actually like them. Difficult to understand where they all came from. I'm thinking maybe it's a r/Pyongyang where it started as a joke and then they started taking it seriously.
- I agree, most of the tankies we're plagued with online simply don't exist in irl leftist spaces, because no one likes them and most people in irl spaces understand that you don't get to call yourself a leftist and support authoritarianism in the same sentence.
  
  If a tankie ever went public in the Baltics countries and said that shit out loud they would immediately get a well deserved beating. From some perspectives they're equivalent to nazi sympathizers because thats what they basically are.
- I’m thinking maybe it’s a r/Pyongyang where it started as a joke and then they started taking it seriously.
  I know. The same thing happened with The_Donald. It started out as a meme space. It's where Donnie as "The God Emperor" all started. But then people actually started taking it seriously.
  So I guess we have Reddit to blame for the situation that America is in right now.
  Thanks Reddit!
  
  alot of cities, or regions were infiltrated by other right wingers, or tankies in the subreddits.
  
  In the comments to their repost of my post here, they're mocking my use of the word politics, but it's all twisted like you described. On Gamingcirclejerk, it's used satirically to mock bigots who say that people of color, trans people or women are political and thus unwanted in video games, but here in the Hexbear reading I'm suddenly the same as those people for not expecting a gaming community to be about the actual politics of authoritarian communism.
- r/chapostraphouse, if that subreddit rings any bells. Lemmy was the place they came for refuge after getting nuked off of Reddit for brigading (shocking, I know).
  
  I don’t remember such aggressive Russian and Chinese propaganda on that sub
- I think they’re just the people who’ve gorged themselves on the most propaganda
  I call them the MAGA of the left, they hate it, but they’re just as big of zealots for their own beliefs as MAGA is, they defend tyrants who’s values appear to align with theirs on paper and don’t understand the concept of nuance.
  They believe in only black and white and the idea that gray exists, and the thought they could be (are) morally gray, along side almost everyone else, is intolerable to them, they have to be “Good”, no shades of gray allowed and the way they prove it to themselves is by constant virtue signaling and purging to stay on top of the imagined “morally pure” pyramid they’ve convinced themselves exist - a lot of them are ableist and don’t consider disabled people in their grand schemes
  Life is messy, people are imperfect, they’re almost never a completely correct option that serves everyone equally. They want logic, which is simply making something internally consistent, context is irrelevant, they do not want philosophy which strives to incorporate as much context as possible in order to come to a conclusion
- I wouldn't be surprised if these aren't real people or they are being manipulated by very effective propaganda the same way the qanon are.
  If you look objectively, the various tankie movements are a net negative when it comes to promoting socialist ideologies. Its having an inverse effect of whatever they're trying to accomplish.
- They came from the response to rising right wing authoritarianism
  No I do not condone or endorse tankies, just telling you why there are so many of them now
  
  Reactionaries, in a nutshell
  
  I dunno how much I buy that. America's been going fasc for most of my adult life. Under Bush we had the patriot act, "enhanced interrogation," "extraordinary rendition," etc. Sure we didn't have masked brownshirts pulling people off the streets (of America) yet but everyone could see where it was all going and people were incredibly upset.
  The Putin and Xi-loving tankie seems to be an artifact of the internet. It's the meme-internet trajectory of "haha" to "ha ha only serious" to "seriously." It's a way to revel in the base pleasures of the malevolent thug without having to be Pro-trump, Pro-America or Zionist.

It will be a great day when the fediverse defederates from all the tankie instances.

how can i remove hexbear, grad and ml from my lemmy? i use boost app. thx
- In the app you can mute posts from instances, to also get rid of the users you need to use the webpage as someone else mentioned.
  To mute the instance in the boost app go on the profile icon, lower right, settings (upper right), "Filters & blocks", there you should see the option "mute instances", type in the instance handle and posts from that instance shouldn't show up anymore.
- You can block posts from different instancs, but you cannot block comments.
  I'd recommend you switch to a server that blocks them, like lemmy.ca, sopuli.xyz or discuss.online or use a different software like piefed which supports proper blocking (piefed.social).
- Log into the web version and block the instance. I just did this for lemmy.org yesterday and couldn't find a way to do it through the app. I also use boost.
  
  Oh, what did Lemmy.org do?
  
  thanks. :)
- Your Lemmy experience is about to get so much better.

Do yourself a favor and just block the entire instance from your profile settings. It's irredeemable.

Getting banned from hexbear is your initiation into the broader world of lemmy. It happens to everyone who isn't a tankie at some point. Wear it with pride

Sounds about right for them. Sorry you had to go through that.

Yeah I think Hexbear is the only big server sh.itjust.works defederated with, probably for the best. ML is bad but there's enough other people to water it down I suppose
- Ml is bad, but I can imagine people who have honest opinions like that.
  Hexbear is just rage and hate for trolling.
  
  ml is the exact same people but keeping the mask on a bit better on their alts.

...but tankies are fascists.
- The "red" part of "red fascist" is a fairly important distinction so you don't give libertarians free ammo in their rhetorical war to claim all fascists are socialists.

yeah duh, thats why we block the redfash triad

Some people there post burning flags of other countries and want the total destruction of them... "Death to country XY" being upvoted is as normal there as using toothpaste... Mods seem to support that and ban people who criticize it.
If we had only those people on the planet, there would be nothing but war.
- I think you've just made a completely unwarranted assumption about how often those people are brushing their teeth.
- If we had only those people on the planet, ~~there would be nothing but war.~~
  we'd have a stateless, classless, moneyless society. If only.
  
  Humans have a natural urge to rebel and question authority.
  If your response to that is to be a authoritian dipshit and beat them into submission, you might be a facist and causing more harm than good.

That's why we add all tankie instances to our block lists.

Ukrainians have the same problem with neo-Nazis as other ex-Soviet countries.
Holodomor is a bit of a fuzzy matter, it's picking a part of the more wide scale events relating to Ukraine and calling it genocide of Ukrainian people, while genocide involves intention to wipe out an ethnic group.
This was more of Stalin's USSR treating people as expendable and hunger as acceptable when he needed the resources to build heavy industries for the military. Most of the grain producing areas of the USSR were in Ukraine and south of Russia, which is also where most of the victims were, because grain was taken by force according to planned norm and to fake reports (as it happens in such systems, administrators overreporting gains and underreporting losses).
So I somewhat feel strange when people talk of it like genocide example, but people arguing against that are usually worse, so let it be.
Anyway, the point of this comment was - those people don't even think of such things, they act purely on vibes. Most of Soviet propaganda was intended for people literate in the first-second generation, it relied on vibes even more than, say, Nazi German propaganda or Western propaganda of that time and of our time. That allows it to work on people very far from Soviet reality or knowledge of USSR's history. (Of course, there were more intelligent levels of Soviet propaganda, they seem almost fully forgotten, include marxist dialectics, optimism of the future, dreams of a united peaceful planet of intelligent people using their lives for learning and creation, and no war and violence. Would be weird to expect tankies to be familiar with anything of that.)
You can't reason with people acting on vibes. Your comments' vibes for them are predefined, you don't affect them.
- What do you mean by vibes exactly?
  
  Music, art style, socrealism in portraits. Soviet architecture (the monumental and decorative kind). All that.
- "holodomor is not a real genocide because stalin descided to just fucking let that specific group of people to fucking die from the famine that was fabricated through incompetence or other methods"
  people making excuses for commie war crimes are same pieces of shit like those who make excuses for nazi war crimes. Literally a palette swap.
  
  The whole fucking point is that this wasn't
  that specific group of people
  , it was much bigger in scale. Before thinking you're being ironic or calling others names you might want to check such things.

Probably fits on: !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works

There's a reason most instances are de-fed from them. Play with fire and get burned I don't know what you expected. This post makes you seem either oblivious or knowing but still complaining.
- It's not the only gaming community I'm subscribed to. It didn't stand out as being particularly problematic. If you look at its front page today, it's all about games and you won't be able to say it's done from a politicized perspective that would invite comments to the effect of "Russia good", let alone that Holodomor is a Nazi construct. Personally, I'm very open-minded and I try not to judge a book by its cover. In the thread, someone dismissed a source just because of their vibes rather than its content. I wouldn't do that.
  
  They said Holodomor genocide is a nazi construct, in the thread itself they believe Holodomor is a result of government inefficiency and a natural disaster
  
  Personally, I'm very open-minded and I try not to judge a book by its cover.
  It's not just the cover, and now you know that. In fact, it's the cover that misled you.

After reviewing the thread, it looks like you reported a comment that was just contradicting you.
- Yes, they assumed the community wasn't ML and that anything genocide was grounds for comment removal
  They themselves mentioned holodomor, no idea why though
  Probably wouldn't have been banned if they argued instead of reporting

This shit is much wider than just hexbear. The lemmy creator himself is leftist and has pro communist essays on his github
https://github.com/dessalines/essays/blob/main/dessalines_marxism_study_plan.md
This is atrocious.
- It’s more their support of authoritarian states and policies than the communist thought that I take issue with, personally.
  
  Communism itself is broken as fuck and produces authoritarian governments at best, and totalitarian regimes at worst. All these states are universally impoverished and abusing basic human rights
- What's atrocious about Leftist politics? I'm a Leftist and proud of it. I want free healthcare for everyone with guaranteed shelter and access to sustenance. How atrocious of me.
- Not sure you know where you are but just bc we ain't tankies doesn't mean we bootlick capital over here lmao
- And yet he created this platform for us to use...I don't agree with a lot of his politics, but I respect what he is doing (until the day someone provably reports some sneaky backdoor, doxxing IPs, serving private data to hostile states, undermining dissenting instances or other things like that)

I mean, their name and description say it all. They appear to fuse two rather telling themes:
1- “Hex” : as in the fraudulent cryptocurrency scheme launched by Richard Heart (real name: Richard James Schueler), a notorious spammer and lawbreaker who ultimately faced the consequences of his actions.
2- A shameful endorsement of communist-style authoritarianism : essentially, a system that violates basic human rights while promoting a fully centralised, stagnant, and corrupt regime devoid of meaningful technological progress.
Frankly, if I got banned from a place like that, I’d wear it as a badge of honour, LoL ❗😂

After seeing the effort you put into things that don't matter, I'm going to take this opportunity to not do so again.

Honestly the entirety of Lemmy is far left so for them anything not far left is nazi. If you're not far left, switch to a different platform or don't talk about anything even remotely connected to politics.
- Tankies are primarily authoritarians, not really far left in any useful sense of that term. And even though they are vocal, they definitely don't constitute "the entirety of Lemmy".
  
  I'm not very sure about that. I don't get banned on literally every community for being right wing (even when I talk about it) but I do feel hostility coming from everyone. I understand that their opinion is way different to mine but if they act passively/actively aggressive towards other opinions (not just me), doesn't it make them tankies automatically?
- Fuck that, I will gladly use Lemmy to tell tankies to fuck off. And if I get banned on some instances then so be it.
  
  That's my man.
- The entirety of Lemmy far left? You must be an American. .world is blatantly majority centre-left.
  
  Well in "far left" I mean "aggressively behaving left". I'm not really up to date with the classification.
- Other than commie symbolism, whitewashing and apologism being a problem, lemmy is pretty normal for a community of mostly educated people.
- I agree with your point that "the ideas furthest from you politically all look alike" (aka political myopia), that's why fascists think everyone left of an ultraneoliberal is a "dirty commie" and why tankies think everyone right of liberal socialists are nazis (no, I'm not one of those who say elon is not a nazi, he is, but for his own actions, lol). It's just terrifying when you see a friend of yours imbibe that bullshit and suddenly call everyone they don't like (including FDR) a commie...are they fascist now? :/
  
  It's just terrifying when you see a friend of yours imbibe that bullshit and suddenly call everyone they don't like a commie...are they fascist now?
  Nah it's just far right and far left movements are similar. They do the same things to those with a different opinion. What makes leftists way more successful is their disguise. They claim to support very nice things and people believe them. But ultimately both of them want a dictatorship of their opinion. After all they're on the ends of the political spectrum for a reason.

You could try not sympathizing with Nazis. The STALKER folks are big on OUN and Azov.
- Putin needs more zealots like you.

It's easy to get banned on that instance if you're not sticking to the facts. They're quite sensitive in this matter. Holodomor is Nazi propaganda tho.
- Last time I checked, to be classified as a “Nazi” you had to persecute other cultures and ethnicities , and engage in imperialistic, criminal invasions of your neighbours.
  Sounds an awful lot like russia and its supporters to me!
  The Holodomor is a well-documented historical fact, recognised by numerous scholars and parliaments worldwide as a deliberate act of genocide against the Ukrainian people.
  If you deny it just like that, guess who has just failed spectacularly at... "sticking to the facts"? 🤥
- You are literally a nazi sympathizer.

197 comments