cross-posted from: https://lemmy.basedcount.com/post/114721
My humble takes on the most popular Lemmy instances, or “how to piss off the whole Fediverse with a single meme”.
Here are the links to each one of the mentioned instances:
Far Left Centre Left Centre Right Far Right Lemmygrad Exploding Heads Hexbear Lemmy.ml Lemmy.world Beehaw Pricefield Lemmy Based Count sh.itjust.works Blåhaj Lemmy Divisions by zero Lemmy NSFW Hack Liberty
Blocking instances on the user level doesn’t solve the core issue which is that Hexbear brigades, trolls and harasses enmasse in the first place. Their comments might be hidden for you, but they’re still a problem for everyone else. Blocking them is really just putting a bandaid over the problem.
Hexbear doesn’t brigade from what I’ve seen, there’s just more of them and they’re very active. If a post is at the top of your feed it’s likely to be at the top of theirs also.
If you haven’t seen it, that’s genuinely surprising. It’s what they’re known for at this point. Any thread about China, Russia or Ukraine gets flooded by them on any instance still federated with them. They shut down discussion, spam huge ugly emojis, and argue in bad faith to defend authoritarian regimes. They aren’t being defederated enmasse for being well-behaved.
The huge emojis is a lemmy bug, one which has basically been fixed (at least the lemm.ee admin seems to have fixed it, I imagine he’s pushed the code to the main stack but others won’t necessarily have adopted it yet).
I remember seeing a bit of a burst of them interacting with stuff when they first federated, but since then it died down massively - and not just because they’d been defederated, but in the threads they were still a part of. The novelty quickly wore off and users on both sides started noticing where they were posting more (hexbear users when they step out and lemmy users when they went in to hexbear) and behaving accordingly. Frankly, I’ve seen far more posts spamming moans about them than actual things to moan about.