That's not the actual reason. Hexbear was openly advocating for their "army" to brigade other instances once it was federating. It just so happens that the basis of that brigading was going to be political.

Lemmy.world pre-emptivly decided it wasn't worth the hassle of having to deal with that.

[–] TheIceKaguyaCometh@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Ohh okay. I didn't know the context but that sounds really bad. Brigading instances should be de-federated.

[–] Caoldence222@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

what's the line between brigading and just getting into political arguments though? cause hexbear is plenty good at the latter, they used to fight among themselves a lot, but doesn't really have a huge history of the former, they mostly keep to themselves since the reddit ban. Most I've seen is a handful of accounts posting in the defed announcement thread here, which like, fair enough, it was clearly a politically motivated decision. It's hard to believe they'd be any worse than lemmygrad for example, if anything they fit the culture of the wider lemmyverse a lot better (not to say lemmygrad should be defed'ed either by a general purpose instance such as this, but there is more culture shock there than hexbear)

[–] TheIceKaguyaCometh@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

what's the line between brigading and just getting into political arguments though?

What is the similarity?

Brigading is when you are targeting your entire group to a single post and attack users or disrupt the discussion.

[–] Caoldence222@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

it's worth noting that the statement about the war in ukraine is written by the people who run the news megathread, not the whole site, and the degree to which people agree with them seems to vary widely. It's been the subject of a fair amount of arguing on the site in the past.

But the seeming majority opinion of say, lemmy.world, of outright supporting NATO unconditionally is probably further than even the most skeptical hexbear user would go, give or take a few outliers. The majority lie somewhere inbetween, with most people disliking both russia and NATO, and thinking that NATO influence is serving to prolong the war, not shorten it.

So from the perspective of a US liberal they are outliers yes, but they aren't a monolith who all love russia either, and they are very accustomed to being shat on from both sides of the US and EU political spectrum as russian bots, CCP shills, etc. because of their communist views.