Is just such a shock from being in China. Just got harassed and essentially threatened for being a socialist. They searched my bags and commented on my China flag and my little red books and my copy of Blackshirts and Reds. Fucking police state. The security in China is strict, but they don’t give a fuck about your thoughts, whereas this guy was very aggressive about “consequences” for being a socialist.
The nature of the federation is that there’s a huge incentive not to just moderate like a fucking cop, because if you do it will make your comm/instance look like a nazi shithole. Perfect example of this is blah’s 196, their modteam has to PRwash like crazy because of all the obscene abuses of power that show up in their modlog including blatant examples of banning people for arguing with the mods and removing people for “being a tankie” It got so bad that hexbear literally defederated from the entirety of blaj because their anticommunism was borderline noncery and the admins weren’t doing fuck all about it.
On reddit if you get mod-abused you have no option for accountability; the admins shut down the form you used to be able to use to contact them, and their TOS forbids you from making subs for places you got banned from (under harassment rules) which is a site-bannable offense. Best you can do is make a thread on your /u which nobody but your most dedicated followers will even get a chance to see. Is it any surprise that you can routinely get banned there for petty reasons, and/or almost always for political (“anti white racism”) reasons?
Just a point of clarification,
Hexbear defederated not because of their anti-communism, but because of their egregious moderation failures that made Hexbear users feel unsafe.
https://hexbear.net/post/369410
I remember a lot of discussion about the “paradox of tolerance” when that was ongoing, basically the idea that if you tolerate Nazi’s in your bar, you’ll quickly have a Nazi exclusive bar.
I know all about their moderation failures, they banned me for calling out someone quoting a (now outed) pedophile. Like, beyond reprehensible behavior and the fact that the admins just want to bury it shows where their intentions are as an instance.
BTW Reddit mods are still able to contact the admins and get responses when they need stuff.
Source: Got a privilege escalation from them in 2024
Cool, didn’t know about that. Though not helpful when the mods are the ones who are the problem.