Hexbear, together with Lemmygrad and Lemmy.ml are left wing, communist instances here on Lemmy.

A lot of (new) users of Lemmy have very strong - as in negative - feelings about them because of their ideas. Which to me makes sense because a lot of these users tend to be more centrist in their views and have never read Marxist literature before.

I will be honest with you and tell you my experience: they can be dickish and straight up trollish in their behavior, but not anymore than your average online trolls. The actual main reason people dislike them, is because they stick together and sometimes “brigade” post which nominates them and talk shit about them.

I personally was on the receiving end of their trolling when I first joined Lemmy too. But among the trolls, there were also very nice users who gave me friendly replies. And I had great conversations with them.

Eventually I even decided to open an alt account in one of those instances to learn more about their views and engage with them on their political knowledge. I really enjoy learning from them and having open conversations about politics with them. Even when sometimes I see their more extreme opinions, I still try to always be open minded at first. More often than not, I will learn that something I used to think on a subject, was the result of historical misconceptions or straight up propaganda. That is not to say that they can’t be wrong of course. But it pays off to be receptive about new points of view.

There are some elements that can be considered extreme, especially to someone from the general public who has never engaged in political conversations with someone who is very much to the left. It takes a little adjustment if you want to try and engage because so much of the media and literature we consume reinforce our views on the system while they specifically try to be critical of it.

Bur FOR SURE you will never see that instance be racist or bigoted. I have lost counts how many times I’ve seen that in other instances, but with them, you know exactly where they stand on that. As in, they do NOT tolerate that.

Tldr: Hexbear (with Lemmygrad and Lemmy.ml) are openly communist instances on Lemmy. They are very vocals because they have a large userbase. They can be trolls that stick together sometimes. If you are politically interested/involved, I instead recommend joining one of their instances to see for yourself.

I remember reading somewhere that one of the possible reasons for that feeling might be because of the change in times.

As in, when we go to work, we usually have to wake up early and then have our routine during the rest of the day. But on holidays/during the weekend, we tend not to follow any schedules. And then after getting used to waking up whenever we want (or later than usual), we get cranky because our body is (forced to get) used to our working schedule.

So a solution might be go to bed at times that aren’t too different from your usual times during your working days.

Basically, some consistency with your sleep might help.

And please don’t tell me “just change jobs”.

Fair. Can I then suggest a social and political revolution to change the current system in which we have to waste our lives working for rich fucks who don’t care about us?

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It isn’t necessarily my personal view, its what I’ve experienced empirically throughout certain forum based internet spaces

Unless you ran experiments/collected data (in which case, I woul genuinely love to see that) to gather such info, your “empirical” data is just observation-based. In which case, it can be skewed.

I’ve noticed your account is relatively new. So of course if one were to hang out with centrists and/or on Reddit, the average experience would be unbalanced as the typical use of the term tankie would be viewed as “generic insult to a person on the political left”.

But on Lemmy I’ve noticed far more people using the term tankie accurately to describe a specific fringe of the leftist movement. The type of fringe that, for example, still defends the USSR no matter what and is incapable of criticizing authoritarianisms.

Having said all of this…welcome to Lemmy! Lol hope you like it here :)

I see tankie used far more as a pejorative Term for leftists (socialists, communists and or anarchists) than actually being used with any nuance to criticize authoritarian apologia

Your view is incorrect. It can be both. There are people who will absolutely use tankie as a generic insult for “person on the political left”. But it’s also a specific term within leftist movements to criticize specific issues with other leftists (I.e., defending authoritarianism, an either-with-us-or-against-us mentality, unconditional love for the USSR/China, etc)

One can draw parallels between capitalism’s failures and the successes of authoritarian socialist/ communist regimes without praising authoritarianism

This is very true. But, by the latter definition I gave, a tankie would actually not do that. We’re having a conversation that has been had thousands of times before by leftist people about the more radical wings within their communities

One can also condemn authoritarianism while also acknowledging that one form of authoritarianism will be or is worse than another

By definition, one who has that level of nuance, would not be called a tankie. Now, obviously a user can just use the term tankie as a generic insult for “you leftist”, but that’s when nuance comes into play. Sadly, we’re are talking about instances that are very much incapable of such level of nuance.

Those are my thoughts as someone who was literally a member of my country’s communist party and left that same party precisely because of the issues I mentioned within the second definition. And based on my experiences, instances like Lemmy.ml and Lemmygrad are absolutely that type of tankie.

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