The rest of us just have the power to not have to listen to them
You’re describing this like we all, individually, are blocking Hexbear users. That isn’t what happened. They were defederated by a handful of individuals. They were censored. An authority blocking your words from reaching others is censorship.
Now, I agree with the defederation, don’t get me wrong, but you’re missing the forest for the trees, here. This is an obvious case where defederation makes perfect sense, because the instance’s admin was not controlling and banning users or stopping them from brigading other intances. That whole instance was an almost explicit raiding ship pulling up to the rest of Lemmy. Defederation makes sense.
But that doesn’t mean it is always going to play out this way. There are countless ways for defederation to be used as a weapon by admins, and just like we saw with the piracy change, communities can be vanished without defederation. Basiclly, there are so many tools available to admins of every instance to create invisible walls through the fediverse for any reason they like, and users will not be able to get around all of them, and more importantly, they may not even know about them. They may not be aware of what they’re not seeing. That creates a lot of avenues for manipulation and censorship, in both direct and indirect ways. That’s absolutely concerning, especially when there isn’t some unified standard admins have commited to.
Like, if this is the fediverse working as intended, then people need to stop advocating for this place as a reddit alternative, because it will never be. Reddit would never have gotten to be what it is if subreddit moderators could manipulate the visibility of others subreddits.