New account but I’ve been using burner accounts and lurking since the sub got banned. I’ve been seeing all the standard liberal brainworms again for the first time since and everytime it’s an account from another federation. I was tepidly against federation at first but this has been entertaining, like the old days of people who wandered into the sub.
I gotta imagine this will only last another week before everyone defederates us, but let’s enjoy it for now.
I like the way @Munrock@[email protected] put it:
Hexbear won’t be the same as it was, there’s no doubt. I am going to miss the kind of community we had there, which wasn’t insular, but just a uniquely lib-free (relatively speaking) island of leftist sanity, despite the ongoing joke that everyone there is a lib. I’m still very interested to see how federation turns out going forward, but it really does fucking suck for the people who liked things as they were and used hexbear as a kind of refuge.
As for the original comment by Azzu:
It may not accomplish anything for you but there’s a reason the chapotraphouse subreddit was one of the highest volume posting subs on the site, often made it to the front page, and was growing quickly, only to be banned. It does work, and we know this because it worked on a lot of us. There’s a wide range of how people from hexbear respond to fresh libs, and part of that includes insults and reveling in the dunking on them. Just as there’s a wide range to the kind of rhetorical tactics that people (including lurkers just watching the dunks) are receptive to. It’s fine if you have other ways to cope, you don’t have to participate. Block the hexbear instance if you’re inclined to do so.
This is a great point that I think should be underscored. Lots of people here came onto r/CTH as vaguely disaffected libs, Bernieceats, “progressives,” or the like. For very many people here, it was interacting on that sub that actually kicked us down the road to a more sophisticated and radical understanding of political economy. It led to us reading theory, getting involved in our local socialist orgs, and generally learning to understand exactly what is wrong with the global capitalist order. I definitely believe that this happens–at least for some people–because of the tone, not in spite of the tone. The jokes are the thin end of a wedge that, for at least some people in the right headspace, can open your mind.