Has anyone else noticed how prevalent Hexbear posters have suddenly become? Maybe sometime last week I noticed nearly every political post had at least one long thread of Hexbear users that do nothing but repeat CCP talking points while waving anyway anything even remotely reliable as Western propaganda. That or getting all excited about trolled libs. The way they tell it, you'd think everything from DW, to Fox, to Propublica, to straight up AP News articles, are all written by the same people.
Not to mention, their info on the Fediverse observer is either straight up wrong or there's some serious botting going on. According to that, the instance is less than a month old, yet somehow they already have one of the largest, most active userbases, along with far and away the most comments of any instance.
Seems to me like Lemmygrad on steroids. Considering we defederated from them, seems like a no-brainer to block Hexbear as well.
So glad this thread could become such a perfect microcosm of why we need to defederate.
I'm going to pretend this is being asked in good faith because even if it's not, there are people who probably are asking it in good faith.
Anyway, Hexbear has become visible recently because we began federating recently. The instance is not less than a month old, it's more than three years old, although it wasn't tracked by Fediverse Observer due to running on a forked version which had split from mainline Lemmy when the instance was created, which is why my account and many others have creation dates stretching back a relatively long way. Three years of posting on an instance made to replace a banned subreddit which had a lot of users is a recipe for having a lot of posts (shocking I know). If it looks to you like many of us have no comment history (or at least no comment history before a week or two ago), that's the result of some quirk of federation. When viewing the same profiles on Hexbear, their full often multi-year long history is visible.
Why was the subreddit banned?
We were banned for supporting violence against 1790s Haitian slavers
Hence the birth of my username