Well something to keep in mind is that hexbear isn’t one person … it’s a whole community that’s developed independently for a while. So it’s reasonable to expect that there’d be variation in the behaviours of members in the same way there’s variation on the rest of lemmy. From what I’ve gathered, not all hexbear members are keen on the re-federation, and some aren’t too keen on being “well-behaved” around politically opposed users (ie “libs”), though hexbear admins and other users have promised moderation and that such isn’t part of the core hexbear values.
It’s social media, afterall … and people can be rather shit and ruin it for the rest of us. In the end, the core service provided a social media platform isn’t the hardware, sys-admin-work or software (however necessary they are) … it’s the moderation work.
The moderation keeps the place sanitary enough for people to actually want to be here … however much we may have problems with particular actions of our moderators, we should really support and praise them at every turn.