Update:
The comments from this post will not be removed as to preserve the discussion around the announcement. Any continued discussions outside of this thread that violate server rules will be removed. We feel that everyone that has an opinion, and wanted to vent, has been heard.

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Original post:
Yesterday, we received information about the planned federation by Hexbear. The announcement thread can be found here: https://www.hexbear.net/post/280770. After reviewing the thread and the comments, it became evident that allowing Hexbear to federate would violate our rules.

Our code of conduct and server rules can be found here.

The announcement included several concerning statements, as highlighted below:

  • “Please try to keep the dirtbag lib-dunking to hexbear itself. Do not follow the Chapo Rules of Posting, instead try to engage utilizing informed rhetoric with sources to dismantle western propaganda. Posting the western atrocity propaganda and pig poop balls is hilarious but will pretty quickly get you banned and if enough of us do it defederated.”
  • “The West’s role in the world, through organizations such as NATO, the IMF, and the World Bank - among many others - are deeply harmful to the billions of people living both inside and outside of their imperial core.”
  • “These organizations constitute the modern imperial order, with the United States at its heart - we are not fooled by the term “rules-based international order.” It is in the Left’s interest for these organizations to be demolished. When and how this will occur, and what precisely comes after, is the cause of great debate and discussion on this site, but it is necessary for a better world.”

The rhetoric and goal of Hexbar are clear based on their announcement: to “dismantle western propaganda” and "demolish organizations such as NATO” shows that Hexbar has no intention of "respecting the rules of the community instance in which they are posting/commenting.” It’s to push their beliefs and ideology.

In addition, several comments from a Hexbear admin, demonstrate that instance rules will not be respected.

Here are some examples:

“I can assure you there will be no lemmygrad brigades, that energy would be better funneled into the current war against liberalism on the wider fediverse.”

“All loyal, honest, active and upright Communists must unite to oppose the liberal tendencies shown by certain people among us, and set them on the right path. This is one of the tasks on our ideological front.”

Overall community comments:

To clarify, for those who have inquired about why Hexbear versus Lemmygrad, it should be noted that we are currently exploring the possibility of defederating from Lemmygrad as well based on similar comments Hexbear has made.

Defederation should only be considered as a last resort. However, based on their comments and behavior, no positive outcomes can be expected.

We made the decision to preemptively defederate from Hexbear for these reasons. While we understand that not everyone may agree with our decision, we believe it is important to prioritize the best interests of our community.

  • zombuey@lemmy.worldEnglish
    21·
    1 year ago

    Why don’t you tell me what communism means to you. You can’t really communicate ideas if you don’t speak a common language.

    • Sphere@lemmy.ml
      4·
      1 year ago

      When I refer to communists, I mean people whose goal is to reach the stateless, classless, moneyless end-goal society known as communism, in which workers own and control the means of production and receive the full value of their labor. This includes tendencies such as classical Marxism, Marxism-Leninism, and Marxist-Leninist-Maoism, as well as some others, like Trotskyism or Posadism, which are a bit different but still definitely communist. Just about all communists today are Marxists of some form, but Marx and Engels did not invent the idea when they wrote the Manifesto, nor does the Manifesto lay out any sort of path to reach the goal of communism (it’s more a statement of purpose for a movement than a set of instructions).

      Socialism is a more nebulous term, encompassing everyone from reformists who seek to use electoral means to achieve their ends (something I and most other Hexbears believe is a non-starter, though many of us fell into this category not so long ago) to revolutionaries who are simply trying to escape the “negative branding” of Communism. There are also people who claim to be Socialist but are actually capitalists who support a welfare state, generally known as Social Democrats (we at Hexbear view social democrats as liberals, and generally don’t like them very much; there is some disagreement on the use of politicians like Bernie Sanders and AOC to the leftist movement, but we mostly aren’t super fond of them). To further confuse the matter, communists frequently refer to revolutionary states (e.g. the USSR, Cuba, China, Vietnam, and others) as “socialist,” positioning the concept as essentially the middle ground between capitalism and the end-goal of communism.

      And since you asked about China: views on China vary on Hexbear, but are almost universally more positive than you’ll see in a liberal space like this. Not everyone trusts that the CPC will seek to “hit the communism button” by 2050 as they claim they will do, but basically everyone recognizes that the US state department, and the US media who walk in lockstep with it, is constantly lying and otherwise obfuscating the truth to cast the country in a negative light, as they have been doing for decades. We do not believe that China was committing a “cultural genocide” against Muslims, as those claims rely almost entire on a single, deeply anti-China source named Adrian Zenz, and we also don’t believe that China is the authoritarian hellscape the US media and state department portray (people in China do vote for their local officials, the government officials with whom they have the most contact, and over 90% of Chinese people approve of the central government’s policies and actions, per a Harvard University poll of the Chinese public).

      Color me dubious that this comment was worth typing out, to be honest, but since you seem to be engaging in good faith at the moment, I have done the same.