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.
Tbf the emojis being giant was due to them running a modified version of Lemmy that allowed those but to themselves they appeared smaller (iirc?).
Though I definitely blocked the instance for those other two reasons - the toxicity of interactions and low quality of posts and comments.
That almost sounds like it's intentionally disruptive to other instances of it is normal size to them, but large to everyone else.
Nah for most of their history they didn't federated with anyone, and made some custom changes to the software. So when they did federated there were a few issues like that
And somewhere in there they mentioned running off their own devs, so lost some ability to make such changes.
And now they are running off their mods and some admins too, so entirely on-brand, as in not necessarily intentional but they cannot help themselves.
It's only natural that such a toxic community would turn to infighting when they run out of other instances to pick fights with.
They literally cannot seem to help themselves, as they themselves realize and oftentimes on hexbear I've seen that fact directly acknowledged.
I left Reddit only partially for the reason of the Rexodus and far more bc its toxicity was seeping into myself (upon reading https://medium.com/@max.p.schlienger/the-cargo-cult-of-the-ennui-engine-890c541cebcb). Hexbear is far worse than Reddit ever was, seeing as how they were kicked out of Reddit for being too toxic.
That said, they can be however they like. I do wish a warning would have been offered though, from my Lemmy instances e.g. discuss.online that has not defederated from it. Walking into !Chapotraphouse@hexbear.net is not ideal for those not forewarned!
Ah, I see. God to hear that wasn't intentional.