cosecantphi [he/him]

The funny thing is, the bigger these threads get over on Hexbear federated instances, the more users from instances like .ca, .ee, or .ml show up complaining about the Hexbears. That stays small in proportion to the actual discussion in the thread, but eventually becomes large in proportion to the stunted version of the thread that .world sees. So despite being defederated with us, .world threads slowly fill up with spam from users complaining about “Hexbear brigaders” as it leaks in and piles up from discussions and dunkings outside of their federation network.

Lemmy.world seems to be the only instance that would have been big enough to downvote us down the thread as viewed from other instances, but they defederated so we can’t see them and they can’t see us at all.

The rest that are federated don’t have the numbers to do this, especially when you consider a large chunk of them are lemmygrad users who are posting side by side with us. So overall our higher posting activity (that is partially a result of the lack of downvotes changing how we interact) results in Hexbear user heavy discussions rising to the top of threads even as viewed from other instances.

To see the whole structure, go over to lemmy.ml or lemmygrad, find this thread there, then scroll. Toward the bottom you’ll find a sort of underworld in this thread of lemmy.world users downvoting lemmygrad users into oblivion.

394 from the perspective of Hexbear. The pre-emptive lemmy.world defederation with Hexbear effectively splits big threads like this into two sections. At the top is the much higher activity Hexbear posting, and at the bottom is the lower activity lemmy.world posting where instead of substantive discussion, people who are in support of China just get downvoted to oblivion.

Ironically, Hexbear’s total removal of downvotes on their end confers an advantage here. Discussions and dunkings involving a lot of Hexbear users tend to rise to the top of threads sorted by hot because the lack of downvotes promotes actual discussion upon disagreement. This results in higher activity levels than those produced by the passive downvoting behavior typical of more reddit-like instances.