Best to read it in their own words. That post really makes it clear how (in their own POV) other places should be linked to from hexbear solely for the purpose of making fun of them, and possibly to increase their engagement stats e.g. upvoting b/c otherwise it gets lonely just being on hexbear.net all by themselves. The only time they acknowledge the effects that THEY, the users on hexbear, have on OTHER communities is to state how fun it is to “[have the opportunity to] dunk on these lost [ones]”.
They are aware, and are even happy with how they are, and not only do they not mind being defederated, but they preemptively are defederating themselves from other places, as they said “As an admin team we have never wanted to prioritize growth”. They are an instance by and for people who enjoy making fun of others.
But don’t stop there: the comment section is where the real fun is at, and/or you can do the maths yourself too:-). e.g., they point out how the admins went to all the trouble to collect those votes, then threw them in the garbage and did the precise opposite of what the votes wanted and instead defederated anyway. Look at lemm.ee for instance at 41:4, that’s 91.1% for remaining federated and only 4 total votes, 8.9%, for defederation. aussie.zone was likewise 27 for vs. only 19 against, and programming.dev 27 for vs. 19 against - but they defederated from them all, despite how the (quite noticeable) majority of voters in each case indicated that they wanted them to remain federated.
In contrast, those other instances like programming.dev defederated from hexbear.net too, but only for purely technical reasons to avoid confusion by users not knowing the intricacies of how federation works - in their own words: “Weve added them to our blocklist as well so theres no one way conversations”.
TLDR: hexbear.net is not a “nice” place to visit - go there if you want, but like 4chan it’s not generally considered something that you want to stumble upon by accident, and it’s definitely not something that most people on the Fediverse want. I almost quit the Fediverse myself entirely after making the mistake of posting (edit: commenting) there, but fortunately for me v0.19.3 came out and I could instead simply block hexbear.net and lemmygrad.ml and now I enjoy being here:-).