They are not alone in their dysfunction. Even lemmy.ml and especially lemmygrad get quite toxic. The biggest difference is they tend to keep to themselves and stay in their echo chambers. And this can generally be pretty easily avoidable. But people still accidentally straight and upon them. I don’t remember how I was browsing the other day but a post from their instance came up. And I clicked on it out of curiosity not realizing. Only to see someone inside there making cogent rational arguments getting down voted pretty hard. At which point I took a step back and looked at everything that was going on and realized with horror where both of us had wandered into. I specifically made a point of just informing him of where he was and what to expect. Which got plenty of down votes. I think I only said one more thing in the thread in response to one of the denizens and cut my losses.
The only thing different really about the hexxbears was the constant brigading outside their domain. And I say all this as a socialist myself. Just very anti-authoritarian. Those places are all fanfiction and charismatic hero worship.