Yesterday, an unexpected admin post was made announcing that hexbear would be shutting down and recreating two of their most popular communities (a): the_dunk_tank and dredge_tank. For those who are not aware, those two are some of the most notorious comms in the threadiverse which routinely cause inter-lemmy drama (disclaimer, the deteriorating relations between our instance and hexbear and my own ban from hexbear was ultimately triggered by various posts in the_dunk_tank)

The stated reason was to promote more thoughtful discussions and to prevent a white cishet mindset which was apparently promoted by the content in those comms, according to the mods and admins.

Within a day 1.3 thousand comments were made with hexbear regulars upset at this decision and discussing within.

However, before this announcement, the top admin of hexbear posted in the cross-lemmy admin matrix chat urging other admins to close down their “drama communities” as well.

Hexbears caught wind of this and quickly accused the admin of duplicity, and having other motives instead of their stated ones. The admin in question as defense admitted that it was their attempt to manipulate other lemmy instance admins and it backfired on them

After a whole day of this, the main admin decided to step away from hexbear (a) , followed by more resignations (a)

In the midst of this, people realize another old-mod had recently come back after a 3-year hiatus, and now people start suspecting some correlation. That mod makes a public post (a) before shortly after deleting their account.

There’s also smaller pieces of chaos ongoing, such as one admin, banning one of their alts “as a bit” using wording that they were not aware is misgendering (“fella”) which caused other hexbears to pile on. Eventually that was resolved, and admins are asked to tone down the “bit doing” during this heated period.

This “struggle session” is still ongoing, with people are asking the resigned mod to come back , and other admins unbanning accounts which were getting banned left and right(a) but it seems those popular comms still remain shut down.

EDIT: Even lemmygrad is wondering what the hell is going on

  • inlandempire@jlai.lu
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    14 days ago

    Interestingly, some Hexbear users accused the francophone instance jlai.lu to be authoritarian when it opened a discussion, and a poll for the community to vote about defederating from Hexbear (a final decision has yet to be made).

    Then an Hexbear admin unilaterally decided to defederate from jlai.lu claiming it had “reactionary” users and “no effort was made to address this” (no jlai.lu admin was contacted nor prompted about the existence of such users).

    Then this happens, again with complete disregard for the community members.

    • Ilovethebomb@lemm.ee
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      14 days ago

      They did exactly the same thing with Lemmy.nz, threw a shit fit and defederated, after a certain someone made a post suggesting we defederate them.

      It was a very “you can’t fire me, I quit” thing.

    • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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      14 days ago

      Ye, this thing keep happening. I was recently in a discussion where someone was accusing slrpnk of authoritarianism for blocking hexbear immediately and pointing to the various defed threads on hexbear and arguing therefore that hexbear is the example to follow for democratic decision taking.

    • DarkThoughts@fedia.io
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      14 days ago

      Then an Hexbear admin unilaterally decided to defederate from jlai.lu claiming it had “reactionary” users and “no effort was made to address this” (no jlai.lu admin was contacted nor prompted about the existence of such users).

      This is funny because it sort of mimics Russian, Chinese or North Korean politics to a degree as well. Everyone’s authoritarian, fascists, Nazis - except for them, the beacon of democracy, freedom, and values.

    • Letstakealook@lemm.ee
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      14 days ago

      It’s interesting that they would accuse anyone if being authoritarian when their own ideology is distinctly authoritarian.

    • GBU_28@lemm.ee
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      14 days ago

      Any time.i hear “reactionary” I just interpret it as the speaker plugging their ears and saying “lalalalalalala”

    • 🏴Akuji@leminal.space
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      14 days ago

      Je fais un tour sur jlai.lu de temps à autre, donc j’ai été un peu regarder ce qu’il s’est passé. Cette manière de vous tomber sur le râble sans même tenir compte du fait que vos utilisateurs, admin inclus, étaient plutôt d’avis que le thread dont tout est parti avait été ouvert par un gars froissé par ses interactions avec eux, et aller jusqu’à vous traiter de nazis pour le simple fait d’être francophones… C’est juste “😦”