we purged a significant proportion of the site's userbase about 6 months after launch because they couldn't shut the fuck up about pronoun tags lmao
We used to have downvotes until reactionaries used them to mass downvote trans users and coming out threads so that they weren't visible, then the mods revealed that they could track downvotes and banned all the reactionaries downvoting trans threads at the same time and guys were malding
That was such a beautiful moment to watch unfold we love our mods
oh you know it, meanwhile my drow bard has this relationship with Shadowheart:
losers are missing out
This was incredible to watch. I was just lurking then, but this era, the addition of pronouns, and the requiring of content warnings (including on meat) was really illuminating to me. It really showed how strict moderation can make a space more welcoming and safe and also shift the culture in a really positive way.
I never expected it to be so unreasonably effective at rooting out reactionaries in a revolutionary leftist website
They really can't. Some scum fucker in a videogame kept spamming the whole "only X % of the population but do Y % of the crime" racist dogwhistle so I kept harassing them until they called me a 'N-word loving F-slur' and got banned by the automod. Lmao. Good riddance to losers.
You gave him the "morning after walk of shame" the same night as the date? Dayum. That's awesome.
You should feel proud of that. You made a racist squirm. I think of it this way: racism is inherently selfish and racists tend to racist shit because it comforts them and makes them feel good. You denied him his comfort blanket. You forced him to feel bad.
It definitely increased the rarity of an OG account by quite a bit lmao
The old subreddit was a much bigger place, and in addition to a lot of succdem types (myself included at the time), there were a lot of stupidpol type folks, patsocs, chasers, and so forth.
Hold on to that account comrade, it's only increasing in value
The real non-fungible tokens? The friends we make along the way through struggle sessions.
Hot damn, I didn't even realize I'm a day older than a legend like kristina
Same here. And yet have not achieved nearly the same posting powers. Endless respect.
Beat ya by one day
It feels good to be the "old guard" together
never forget haz.posted his shit here and got banned for being a reactionary piece of shit
Sorry, only comically large spoons are available for discipline. Get to it comrade.
The hell you on about with that bougie decadence crap? Use your finger and nail you spoiled git.
We floss our teeth with the soft and flexible spines of Reddit liberals.
Yay new friend! Hoping that if defederation does happen some of the other cool people over there, however many they are, decide to make the same switch. Liberal queer people just depress me. I sort of get psychologically how one can get temporarily attached to the idea that the only salvation for queer people is the Democratic party (or whatever the equivalent in their country is). But the reality is, like i posted elsewhere, there is no queer liberation under capitalism. And NATO and neoimperliasm in general uphold the neoliberal capitalist world order.
Welcome, comrade.
same. i sometimes wonder if they never had anything bad happen to them and have a rose tinted view of the world, but obviously that isnt always true either. whats the point in trying to be nice to people that wanna rip your guts out?? ill never fathom it beyond calling it stockholm syndrome
its also just... they believe this flowery shit that gets trans people killed in foreign countries. how do they not care?!
Most of them don't realize it activly but subconciously they just want queer westerns to have the capitalist version of "equality" in whatever country they are from and for queer people to have their share of the plunder. In my experience with them its not actively, cognizant malicious but thats what drives it in the end.
I do think part of it as well is being trapped in the Overton window, where the Democrats or whatever their country's equivalent is are the only socially accepted method of liberating queer people. As has been commented before, thats what "The left" is. I mean I certainly believed that at one point. So they cling to that out of fear of the outright fascists and think that voting for left-liberals is the only way to stop them. Its a fear response, and tbh a sort of understandable one. But when your reaction to seeing a better path to TRUE liberation is to violently reject it and close your ears, my sympathy starts to stop.
Probably an element of internalized assimilationism as well.
yeah ive always been a commie of some variety (and sometimes not describing myself as anything because i had a period of misanthropy where i hated everyone), so its a view that is extremely hard for me to understand
I'm definitely an ex-liberal so I get the mindset to an extent but like, it didn't take me very long after exposure to communism to accept it as better. Accepting anti-imperialism was a bit harder admittedly it took a few struggles but I got there.
(I don't listen to this pod I just know he thinks we should be normal)
Shadow the Hedgehog represents Nicaragua and I won't elaborate
Now who wants to hear my analysis of the Sonic Adventure 1 and 2 plots and the anti imperialism of the first game and that GUN from the second game are literally NATO allagory shadey killings/illegal bio weapon research n' all.
this would unironically end up being one of the most popular posts on this website and I look forward to it
One of my recent popular posts was one where I described in excruciating detail a REALLY weird storyline in one of the American Pie sequels.
We do weird here
GUN from the second game are literally NATO allagory shadey killings/illegal bio weapon research n' all.
lol I don't think you would've lasted long on blahaj
We aren't as active as hexbear, but our instance is pretty queer as well. The survey was done before I joined, so it's at least a little bit more queer and less white now. Feel free to stop by anytime!
If you're new here, there's a story you might not know. It goes back to before we were here, when we were still on reddit as chapotraphouse. The rumor was going around that our sub was about to get deleted. Some posts were questioning what to do, others were just reliving the good times. But the final post on our subreddit, before it went dark? A trans person was expressing their pride in the community, because it was the one place they felt they could fully express their identity and be acknowledged as they wished to be, and also just be treated like a normal person. That's our foundation, that's who we are. Welcome to hexbear!
I honestly beamed with pride when that happened. The shit posts, the dunks, the goofy memes - all of it. It was worth it. 10/10 would get banned from reddit again as long as one oppressed person found a little love and validation in our irony-pilled maelstrom of posting.
It serves as a never ending point of pride for me, and I believe everyone should know about it.
Ayyyy welcome! You'll see me around a lot. I like to be silly and keep things light here.
It's because none of these people seem to have ever seen an actual safe space in their lives.
Of course "nobody" uses neopronouns in general society. We all know what would happen if we did. Shame, ridicule, and violence would follow. And we're very attuned to reading online spaces for transphobia as well. Despite what a lot of people would like to think, many online queer spaces are NOT inclusive and safe.
I was an old-school redditor, and I browsed the trans subs for a few months. I saw so much hatred there. The general spaces erased all identities that didn't fit the "mtf" experience, so the trans men stayed away in their own space. Both their space and the general ones were OPENLY hateful of non-binary people for years.
This is one of the first spaces I've ever seen online that is truly inclusive. The neopronoun options are already there, you don't have to ask for them. Everyone is forced to show their pronouns, none of this "well mine are normal" garbage. There is a culture that promotes repressed voices.
And when some people see this, they can't even fathom it. To them, being "an ally" means allowing trans people to wear a pronoun pin and respecting those pronouns so long as they are "normal" enough, then carrying on with life as normal. If queer discussions ever start taking place in the open, they get uncomfortable because they're not used to it. If someone who uses any pronoun besides they or she or he, they get uncomfortable. This is transphobia. They just don't recognize it as such.
It's because none of these people seem to have ever seen an actual safe space in their lives.
Of course not, why would anybody let rabid transphobes wander into a safe space?
it also just straight up makes no sense. hexbear has had a queer majority long before federating with anyone. we were posting about being trans and gay for 3 years to trick who exactly?
literally before some of these people knew what lemmy is, and if theyre young enough (which is likely given its 196), probably before they even knew they were queer
Are we a majority on hexbear? That's actually surprising
assimilationist queers are not your friend, tokenizing yourself to appease your oppressor does nothing but harm your community.
Lemmy liberals explaining why calling NATO imperialist magically makes you cishet:
This is truly the heart of it. Because reactionaries in the imperial periphery pretend any organic LGBTQIA+ movement in their country is "western deg%neracy" and because liberals like to claim a (false) ideological monopoly on being allies to LGBTQIA+ people, any LGBTQIA+ person who shows solidarity with the anti-imperialist movement against NATO is a cishet reactionary red fash tankie disguising themselves as a LGBTQIA+ person, according to the fake ally imperialist liberals. And according to the reactionaries in the periphery, any Communist who shows solidarity with LGBTQIA+ is a liberal in disguise. We actually see the false narratives of the imperial core liberals and the imperial periphery reactionaries reinforcing each other in a sicko spiral. A NATO official can hold up a rainbow flag (a purely symbolic act of fake solidarity) and some prince in Qatar can say "see, I told you! The imperialists want to impose their deg%neracy on us!" Meanwhile if there's some kind of organic domestic LGBTQIA+ movement in the global south, the reactionaries will say "these people are agents of the western think tanks!"
ShowWow thanks for your excellent post! Really explains well the root brainworm rearing mechanisms behind the Natoid's crank thinking and the reactionaries (like the "patriotic socialists") who exploit the former's bigoted imperial dishonesty to further their own warped agenda.
If I may Id suggest you make this as a separate post on its own!
Yeah it's incredibly awful. Why the fuck would anyone say that?
You think people here have been secretly pretending to be queer for THREE FUCKING YEARS just to infiltrate your new queer space? Come on. The left has been doing queer politics a hell of a lot longer than liberals have.
Be gay. Do crime.
My entire family disowned me after I came out. If I hadn't already been working a pretty great job that allowed me to be fully self-sufficient I would've been homeless for sure. And in the time since, I've met some incredible people. I've loved and been loved by, helped and been helped by, and had my world enlarged and enriched by some of the most beautiful people in the world. Anyone who would think to negate that because I would like to see society improved somewhat is welcome to take a short jump into a deep mineshaft.
The entire "how can you have that many different pronouns" discourse is by far the dumbest thing i've seen since the start of our federation, and it isn't just painfully cringe and ignorant and a clear sign that these people lack any and all experience with queer spaces unless you count r/196 and the trans category on pornhub, it is simply outright, open transphobia to deny peoples' gender identity. That's the very core of transphobic sentiment, to deny us our right to gendered self determination.
It's sad to see these reactionaries have now also extended their attacks to other parts of the queer community, but it isn't surprising. These people always start with what they perceive to be the easy targets, but it's part and parcel of reactionary persecution campaigns to expand the outgropups they go after. This, besides the moral imperative of solidarity, is the strategic reasoning behind "an injury to one of us is an injury to all of us."
We cannot tolerate such attacks on our queer comrades anywhere on lemmy. The perpetrators should be hunted down wherever we find them, and we should make it a cross-instance effort to make lemmy a safer space for queer people, and an extremely unsafe space for queerphobes of all kind. I propose that federated instances share blocklists of queerphobic users so that eventual bans can be extended to other instances preemptively. In a day and age were our community faces the worst attacks since the AIDS pandemic, we must look out for and protect each other.
One guy told me he "doubts any online community would be that gender diverse" which is just a new flavor of the early aughts attitude of "there are no girls on the internet". But yeah its also REALLY telling that they have no interacted with queer communities before. The majority of places I interact online I'm outnumbered as a cis man.
just shows he mostly hangs out in spaces that are openly permissive of transphobia, which unfortunately is most spaces. just hexbear's moderation policy is reason enough we constantly draw in trans people and eggs that will crack shortly.
Maybe we should just defederate from them instead of waiting for them to do it. Cite their transphobia as the reason, compile some chud posts from there into a list. Would be more honest than whatever the fuck their reason for defederation is going to be.
i actually love this tbh. we have the moral high ground, there's no reason not to use it
That was the "Everyone but me is a bot" guy right? Or was there another with the same ?
That was the "Everyone but me is a bot" guy
Thats like every lemmy liberal lol so I have no idea? I THINK it was the Bernie2028 guy but I've had so many weird experiences since federation I have no idea.
Lol true. But yeah, thats the account I was talking about
These people always start with what they perceive to be the easy targets
Just point me at them and I'll go ham
Nobody hurts my trans comrades
You get your license when you create your account here, not really needed
yea these claims are very malicious. their default assumption is that 'this person is tankie therefore not LGBTQ+'.
the default assumption should be to believe that the person is saying they're gay in good faith.
Western ally behavior is so selfish. Once it gets uncomfortable for the "ally" or they have their beliefs challenged, queer people become much less human in their eyes and need to be discredited somehow.
It makes me furious how few online spaces are truly safe for the community, don't doubt that there are tons of cis comrades who see you as completely valid with no strings or nefarious bullshit attached.
It is extremely hurtful. I live in fear every day because of homophobia and hate crimes, yet I'm a fake gay because I don't share the same beliefs as a westerner? What the hell?
Do gays in the global south/third world not exist to them? Do I have to become some comparador for the west to be gay? Why would I even do that when South Africa legalised LGBT rights before any of the western nations they are from? Despite all our homophobia and bigotry, we still managed to legalise LGBT rights before them. How does this work. It sounds like they're doing the whole LGBT is western decadence shit, but unironically.
I'm still a baby budding imposter feeling queer but fortunately I was also raised a cis het man so when someone tells me that I'm not queer I have the socialized energy to say "how dare you tell me what I'm not!"
How dare anyone tell any of my comrades, queer, trans, or otherwise, what they aren't. You are who you are whoever you are. You're all heckin valid. We're all heckin valid. Send those bad beans to me I'll smash em if they tell you otherwise
I like to repeatedly yell "WEEE WOOO WEEEE WOOO THE GENDER POLICE ARE ON THE SCENE"
gonna be honest -- "how dare you tell me what I'm not" is a hard place to get to for a lot of trans femmes. it's remarkable how fast social conditioning snaps back the other way.
so: you're valid
accusing hexbear users of not actually being queer is fucking deranged, what the fuck is wrong with libs
Literally would not have realized these things about myself without talking to all our queer comrades here.
Throwing that accusation around as though we have more that like 5 cishets in the whole damn site.