I've been quietly observing hexbear for a while now and I can tell you with relative certainty that people love to straw man them.

Here is an example:

People say they outright deny the Tiananmen Square Massacre, which is not true. They do believe 300 or so people died in that tragic day. What they do deny, though, is that Tank Man himself was run over by a tank and that people where indiscriminately shot and run over by tanks in the square. They believe the shootout occurred not because China is evil, but because some of the protestors decided it was a good idea to start killing unarmed soldiers.

I'm not going to describe in detail hexbear's timeline of events and evidence for it, because I myself do not fully understand it yet. But it seems this video somewhat explains it well.

People insist time and time again that hexbear users believe the massacre never happened to the point where they can't bother explaining themselves anymore because "what's the point if we are just going to get straw manned?"

People also like to call the massacre a "genocide", which is a massive overstatement. In comparison with the kill count of the holocaust, the death toll of the massacre is a rounding error. I would like to kindly ask people to stop calling it a genocide, as it detracts from the meaning and intensity of the word "genocide" when it is miss used like that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_genocide_theory

Any who, can't wait for people telling how wrong I am for supporting hexbear despite never once saying they were right.

People say they brigade other instances, but that's just because they are very active. In fact, there are one of the most active instances on Lemmy.

This is not to say hexbear users are angels, far from it. They are known to not mix well with other communities, and their site culture can put people off quite a bit, and understandably so. They all also known for their custom emojis, which is a really neat feature their instance has, but they do like to use an emoji depicting a pig defecating as a way of saying "you take is shit", which is rather unpleasant and quite rude of them.

These are just my thoughts on hexbear anyways. I must say I don't really hyper analyze any instance, so I could be somewhat wrong, but I don't really care too much.

NOTE: right now hexbear is using chapo.chat as their temporary fall back domain.

A Communist/Anarchist instance.

It's an instance for Communists. Unpopular with the liberal/moderate Lemmy crowd.

Once upon a time there was a reddit sub called chapotraphouse. It started as being centered on discussion of a leftish pro-Bernie podcast of the same name but quickly exploded in popularity and became more about general left politics discussion. Over time, especially after Bernie's defeat in 2016 it shifted more and more left. The sub became a specter haunting reddit, having over a hundred thousand users. Eventually because they tolerated too much talk of killing slave owners (Spez famously said he thought if the world went to shit he'd probably be one of the people in charge of the slaves rather than one himself) as well as other things like being anti-cop they were banned in a both-sides-bad move along with The_Donald by reddit admins right after Trump lost re-election. This was after being quarantined some months previous. After that they built a lifeboat site for their users to gather at, that site eventually came to be a lemmy instance and eventually even later a federated instance so they were one of the first instances.

It's a leftist lemmy instance. Nominally left-unity with rules against just launching hate tirades against anarchists or Marxists it in practice leans Marxist though has plenty of anarchists, democratic socialists, etc. It's strongly anti-imperialist so tends to align with Marxist, Marxist-Leninists more than many (but not all) western anarchist groups on global geopolitics. It has stances that many Marxist parties would take issue with however including communities around drug use (the site is banned in China) and certain ideological beefs not really worth listing out here. It is in other words it's own unique culture.

In addition to being a leftist instance its posters are aggressive. People on reddit constantly complained and worried about CTH brigading (whenever the discourse in a front-page sub shifted left people would say that chapo was doing that) and though organized brigading seemed infrequent compared to how often people suspected it*, many of its users were incredibly active posters and there were a lot of them. So it has a kind of shit-poster history. Whereas some instances would just ban someone or remove their comments, they'll spam images of a pig pooping on its balls at people they disagree with first. Their way of interacting with those they disagree with is very strident and at times could certainly be interpreted as rude, they're very blunt and don't tend to do civil discourse. They can be antagonistic to an extent though it's not like they're a harassment site that will follow around an enemy user for days outside of their own instance.

*(it did happen in as much as they posted links to comments and posts they disagreed with until the quarantine when they stopped doing that, BUT they were accused more often than they could possibly do so as most of the sub was not about making posts like that)

And it should be mentioned they did have strong policies against bigotry which were enforced. They also had a large trans community. So they weren't fascists. They were not reactionaries. They did not have a culture of hate for marginalized groups. I've certainly had unpleasant interactions with users of theirs but I've also had pleasant ones. Some of them come off as real assholes, many don't.

Comparing to homeless people is a very poor comparison. Better to compare to a company with distasteful practices experiencing hardship. And yes in those cases I would laugh.

It's literally just a domain name after all

I think the cheering is lame, but the instance itself will be fine under a new domain. I don't think it's sensible to compare laughing at Hexbear (which Hexbear users are also doing) with laughing at homeless people.