hexbear is .ml but worse,

They have a history of brigading threads critical of them or tankies, then say its not brigading, as they are just federating.

Hexbear is defederated on most servers, not mine (I’m usually fine with this) but .ml is left alone since it has a lot of the official lemmy communities.

Hexbear was an independent site before it ever federated, so it has a very tight-knit community of like-minded users. There are lots of in-jokes and memes that only make sense to other Hexbear users. When it began federating, lots of federated users ended up clashing with them. And since Hexbear tends to be very tight-knit, this meant that getting into an argument with one Hexbear user usually meant getting dogpiled by a dozen others. Even just commenting about it here will likely have a few Hexbear users popping in to throw around the tankie or liberal accusation.

They also have a history of brigading smaller instances, and the mods/admins of Hexbear tend to take a laissez-faire approach to moderating posts on external instances. Basically, the Hexbear admins tend to use the “moderating communities is the individual moderators’ job. We take care of our own instance; you should handle yours” stance. Which means mods and admins on federated instances often ended up playing whack-a-mole with Hexbear users, whose admins refused to take action unless it was posts on Hexbear.

And yeah, the Hexbear mods+admins tend to be pretty heavy-handed with non-communist posts, which leads to a lot of the same complaints that people have about .ml. Even if the individual users are cordial, the fact that dissent is quickly squashed means there’s only room for one prevailing mindset; The nail that sticks out gets hammered down, so Hexbear users tend to fall in line or leave for other instances pretty quickly.

No, it’s worse.