I feel it’s less likely to be hexbear and more just generally lemmy being lemmy, but I can’t say for sure. On that end though, below is a TL;DR on hexbear.

Hexbear is a large lemmy instance that hosts the previous subreddit r/chapotraphouse, a community thats based on a left leaning podcast that embraces “dirt bag leftist” style of discourse. (ie, very vulgar and often intense discourse) They migrated to lemmy after being banned from reddit, and have had federation disabled for a while due to being on a custom lemmy build. They are attempting federation again with an announcement making it clear they are doing it to try and pull political discussions towards their way.

They were banned from Reddit for a multitude of reasons, biggest being their history of coordinated harassment and astroturfing against anyone that remotely breathed potential disagreement their way. Their community takes toxicity to a next level, not even just infiltrating discussions & attempting to sway topics their way but pretty intense coordinate harassment campaigning. We are not a political focused instance but they have been defederated just generally because I know that community from my own personal experience and I’m just not willing to deal with the excess moderation load that will come if they decide to federate with us. If you want a glimpse of why just look at the lemmy.world announcement about it here and look at the mass downvotes and very new accounts.

I’m sure some people there are fine, but we are a team of volunteers and can’t really deal with a community that we have knowledge are very likely to make our lives harder. And for what it’s worth, most of the LemmyNSFW team does lean pretty left.

Hexbear is another community that was getting ready to federate with Lemmy.world. Tankies are a short name for generally communist people who are extremely vocal about their disdain for “leftist” people.

I’m trying to find the post to link too but am having trouble with the lemmy.world instance.

Edit: Found it