Hexbear, Lemmygrad and Lemmy.ml have been referred to as the “tankie triad” due to their authoritarian communist focus. Hexbear is also notorious for being defederated by most of the biggest Lemmy instances. The instance I’m on, lemmy.zip doesn’t go that far but has included it in the default personal block list of new users. My first notable encounter with Hexbear involved their community moderators’ power abuse, textbook harassment, and hostility in violation of their own rules from multiple users, including their moderators.

After I announced my new community, it didn’t take long for Maeve to repost that to slop@hexbear.net, the same community that fueled the past harassment and brigaded my earlier posts on other subjects, leading to what has every sign of another case of brigading by Hexbear users.

The timeline is as follows:

• On November 5 at 2:49 PM UTC, I posted a link to this new community to fediverse_vs_disinfo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
• On November 5 at 5:57 PM UTC, Hexbear user infoziSporg made a comment in my community. Possibly got there organically. I engaged and tried to anchor it back to the topic of the post.

• On November 5 at 7:48 PM UTC, Maeve posted a link to my dbzer0 post in Hexbear’s Slop.
• On November 6 at 8:54 AM UTC, Collatz_problem@hexbear.net showed up in my new comm and went straight for derailing, also upvoting infoziSporg’s comments. Collatz_problem’s comment was posted just two hours after their comment in a Slop thread, where the user is a frequent contributor, suggesting the user probably follows Slop.
  • On November 6 at 9:17 PM UTC, Feed_el_Castro@hexbear.net commented in my dbzer0 thread and upvoted Collatz_problem comment in my comm. The user has a history of recently posting to Slop, suggesting the user may follow Slop.
  • The upvotes also included one from culprit@lemmy.ml, who upvoted other Hexbear comments in the thread as well. The user too has a history of posting to Slop.
• culpritus@hexbear.net (the name looks similar to culprit - possibly an alt) also upvoted infoziSporg’s earlier comment. The user also has a recent history of posting to Slop. By my memory, this also followed the Slop post.
• On November 7 at 6:39 PM UTC infuziSporg@hexbear.net posted a comment upvoted by BeanisBrain@hexbear.net, who frequents Slop, where their most recent comment is from today.
• calmblue75@lemmy.ml downvoted my comment posted on November 7 at 4:09 AM UTC. The user is also aware of Slop and posted to it recently.

Though the activity revolved mostly around voting, every single one of the few comments that were posted was a case of the straw man fallacy.

Manipulation is against the rules of this community, while vote manipulation is against the rules of this instance. Most of the evidence has been sent directly to the instance staff.