they’re a group of early reddit refugees from when /r/chapotraphouse got banned on Reddit for celebrating John Brown and the death of slave owners. They set themselves up a few years before the mass migrations from the Reddit API debacle, and over time they cultivated a distinctly uncompromising (and at times inscrutable) culture that heavily moderates the slightest hint of Western chauvinism, transphobia, and anti-vegan sentiments.

However, they also despise what they consider the farcical nature of Reddit style civility, and combined with disabling downvotes to force people to vocalize their disagreements, they also have the tendency to dogpile on people that aren’t perceived to be acting in good faith.

The biggest conflict with other instances is their third-worldist oriented strain of Marxism-Leninism which has a more accepting view of “AES” (Actually Existing Socialism i.e. China, Cuba, USSR, etc) that leads them to conclusions that critically favor actions by non-socialist states (Russia, Sahel States, Yemen, etc) which undermine the United States/Western hegemony.

When they updated their code to be compatible with federation, their extremely active users clashed pretty hard with the more liberal tide of recent Reddit migrants so the generalist Lemmy instances decided to just defederate from them.

Is there any way to set one up that protects the anonymity of the people involved (where even the organizers don’t know each other’s real names) for opsec purposes?

you will probably stop seeing much of that if you block users that post a lot to fediverselore and meanwhileongrad. They’re like the /r/subredditdrama of lemmy

confused by exactly how badly the people there were going at each others throats in the comments

I’m reading that thread and I don’t see anyone being aggressive.

someone there also mentioned Nixonland which actually is a good book to understand the circumstances of era

if you can’t handle political content then just excluding worldnews from your feed should be enough

he can fix her

you should go ask them

yes, hexbear is currently doing a donation drive to support and evacuate people in Gaza

the problem with hexbear is the same handful of users that have made it their hobby to complain incessantly about hexbear all over the fediverse

Plus the original demand was 15 days of sick leave, and then a tepid 7-day sick leave proposal was sent to die in congress. It’s not a miracle that Biden was able to get 5 days. Breaking the strike with state power and then casting crumbs in our direction was a flex on the working class saying “nah you’ll only get what we allow you to have. You don’t deserve to demand shit.”

I’m not holding out any hope that this is anything more than a PR campaign like kneeling cops and kente scarves.