this post was submitted on 27 May 2026
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MeanwhileOnGrad
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"Oh, this is calamity! Calamity! Oh no, he's on the floor!"
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Meanwhile On Grad
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I mean, not all users on Lemmy.ml are horrible people, but conversely after discounting hexbear.net and lemmygrad.ml, the most batshit insane comments left that I would see inevitably came from Lemmy.ml.
I do not regret blocking the entire instance. Maybe some innocent people get excluded that way, but that's a price I am absolutely willing to pay to avoid the insanity. And it's not like the opinions about ML are not widely known - someone who remains on that instance despite all that goes on there surely knows that being blocked is likely a possibility, so I don't let their recalcitrance get in the way of me enjoying my time on the Threadiverse.
I hear you, and if I was a blocker, I would block them as well. They deserve to be blocked.
Although you might be surprised as to the insights of some of their users. You never know.
The same can be said of discourse with MAGA supporters, and sometimes I have been yes (both ML leftists online and irl MAGA). Though for every time that has happened, I see 1000 comments from the likes of e.g. Cowbee who is disingenuous, and just random commentors across the entire Threadiverse, making that instance overall not worth my time.
Also, I don't even need an account to read comments from everyone, and viewing any post from its original host generally allows me to see the full complement of comments, but it is an exceedingly rare event (perhaps once a year) that I feel that I have missed out on something by not seeing comments from ML users regularly.
The noise to signal ratio is simply too high for my tastes. And since seeing such scares off people from joining the Threadiverse, which affects us all overall, it's an actual effectual matter.
You are correct though, if we did not block ML and especially hex bear, It scares off new people.
I'm against censorship but they have to be censored to grow the fetaverse on our side.
And frankly they are the enemy even if they do not know it.
They are the long palsied arm of Russian and Chinese intelligence. Communists are now fascists. That's what happened.
PieFed.zip takes an interesting approach to hexbear and lemmygrad.ml. They do not defederate from either of them, but a new user has those two instances blocked by default, with a message sent to them about how to un-do the block or later to reinstate it if they want. This makes seeing that content an opt-in feature, rather than forcing the only options affecting new users to be defederation vs. full membership. I love this idea - it doesn't stop people who legitimately want it (that responsibility to decide is on them), but neither does it force users into being exposed unwittingly, as if that content was somehow the same as all others. PieFed's motto of placing power into the hands of end-users is the only thing giving me hope for the Threadiverse right now.
That said, almost nobody defederates from lemmy.ml, or places such blocks afaik, which exposed new users to being bullied by the exact same people as are on hexbear and lemmygrad who hide behind their ML alts - since obviously to those incels, no does not mean no but instead that they simply need to push forward harder.
I doubt this problem will be solvable anytime soon, but if there is any hope for such, I'm placing those hopes into PieFed.