For your question: I don’t think about them at all.

The rest is just my general feelings on federation and hexbear that you are free to ignore.

I was against federation to begin with. I was even against lemmygrad (still am, much as they are comrades). I browse by local even now.

Hexbear is hexbear. It grew out of r/cth (I voted for the name being chapo.chat and was against it being changed to hexbear). It has its own culture. It’s own social norms. It doesn’t need to be a part of anything bigger. Note: this doesn’t mean it’s users don’t have flaws and that there haven’t been things in its culture that have needed to be changed in the past and in the present.

IMO, there was a time when federation could’ve worked, maybe right after it was created when it was young and still finding its identity. I understand the idea of finding new users especially as the number has dwindled from the peak (which itself was a shadow of cth in the first place).

But attaching itself to lemmy, lib-central, was always a failed endeavour. A better option would’ve been trying to become a leftist hub for Reddit communities in the wake of the cth’s closure and that was tried but it failed due to numerous factors (some were, honestly, this community being too toxic to such things which is what has partially led to the decline in numbers in the first place).

But all that’s the past. We’re a part of Lemmy now for what it’s worth (and not even, as some tried to claim in the beginning, as the big bad posters - I remember that what some here tried to say we would be due to our memberships!). They can all defederate from us and I couldn’t care less. They are all useless libs.

Some positive things to end this on. The reason I was on cth and came to chapo.chat and have stayed on hexbear. This is the most trans positive place I have ever seen (cth wasn’t but I wasn’t trans then either lmao). But now? I dare you to find a safer space on the entire internet.

This is the only space where I can talk to other leftists from around the world to both shitpost and get educated. I learn new things everyday. I also take the memes with a grain of salt. We don’t worship at the altar of Assad. But it feels good to at least be among others who can see the fucking hypocrisy of supposed progressives who care about human rights criticizing Assad and then telling to us to vote for democrats. Go fuck yourself.

Like, this space was created because cth got banned for praising John Brown. Don’t forget that.

This place even now, despite being 99.99% Leninist professes by and maintains ideological neutrality. It is extremely rare to see a leftist space that doesn’t bash either anarchists or MLs (and isn’t instead just social democrats). You wouldn’t know this if you haven’t been here a while I guess, because most people here are MLs but you can be an anarchist here. You can also, btw, criticize china or dprk or Cuba etc. I’ve done so. Just don’t be a lib about it.

So, hexbear to me has become an extremely rare instance of a platform which is not only queer-friendly but also genuinely leftist and accepting of all leftists. It isn’t perfect. I think around a month or so ago (maybe more, maybe less) there was a big issue surrounding misogyny. I think admins/mods worked to resolve that but someone else might know more.

This became much longer than I intended it to be. TLDR: hexbear is a comfortable safe space. I know the people. I know the posts and comments. I know what to expect. Every other social media platform (except TikTok but it too throws the odd curveball) fills me with anger and I have to mentally prepare myself for battle because I know there will be useless libs spouting their regular bullshit. None of that here.