No need to delete posts here - it’s okay to be wrong occasionally, and anyway the wording here was ambiguous, and I had the same take as you at first until the explanation was delivered separately.
Not all, but it’s definitely not for everyone’s tastes. Just block the instance and move on. Go to your user settings, blocks tab, scroll way down to instance, and put hexbear.net. You will still see posts from it and its users, but still that improves things immensely e.g. you won’t see communities on it anymore and you won’t receive notifications for when the people continue to respond to you weeks and weeks and weeks after some innocuous comment you made that they did not agree with hard enough and thus earned their undying ire.
I would rather in the future see such things be opt-in rather than opt-out… but then I don’t run an instance and this is what we have now.
Also most instances already defederate from lemmygrad.ml for the same reasons, but not yours so if you do it for hexbear.net then you should probably do it for lemmygrad.ml too while you are at it.
And then eventually, even if months later, you will find yourself doing this again for Lemmy.ml, for vastly reduced but again still similar reasons. That one will cost you some good communities, but is more than worth the cost imho to entirely transform your experience on the Fediverse, to have blocked the big three. Also some people add Midwest.social but I haven’t done that one yet. All of those call themselves “leftists” but more importantly somehow feel that their political beliefs entitle them to behave like jerks - not uniformly so but as you are seeing, definitely it’s a noticeable pattern.
The motto of the Fediverse: to stay sane, block early, and block often. To which I will add: you cannot control the entire world, only yourself, i.e. if it drives you crazy to see such, then curate your experiences.
Kind of annoying and disappointing that people won’t treat other people better
There, ftfy.
But also, that’s their right if that’s how they want to be… I suppose. It’s just that, again, I wish that it - like porn - were opt-in, or at least fucking labelled with a warning, rather than make each new Fedizen figure this out entirely on their own. Every single person that I’ve told about Lemmy comes back a week later with the same questions… did you know what all is on there? Places like Chapotraphouse are extremely special, but again, like porn, I’m not arguing that they should not exist, just that they be opt-in, possibly by labeling them. Not everyone wants to see random dicks in their All feed.
Basic mental health config for a non tankist user of Lemmy is to block hexbear, lemmygrad and lemmy.ml instances first. Then, any user from there that you will see calling nazis anyone who don’t think like them.
I almost left Lemmy thinking it was a tankist shithole before understanding the pattern.
Then it gets back to the average former-Reddit techie activist, which is still pretty left.
I will not define insanity or who is or isn’t, but hexbear users’ stances and opinions tend to be missing nuance as one often do when one is terminally online and mostly form opinions based on the reverberations of an echo chamber.
They do occasionally have a golden meme, though. But the amount of shit coming from there got too tiresome, and I could only look past so many genocide denials before I ended up blocking the entire instance.