This is a great post bringing up some serious controversial issues and discussing them in a civil way despite the personal attacks and disgusting comments you received, this is setting a very good example for what the vibe of the instance should be.

My personal opinion about hexbear in particular, is that while there are multiple cases of people being straight up trolls, replying in bad faith, lowering the quality of the conversation by name calling, putting labels on people, and saying really mean shit, there is also a very large part of their community that discusses politely even in difficult topics, and provide very good opinions and facts backed up by multiple sources.

I’m also a fan of ‘Theory Thursday’ that a user is doing on their instance where he provides a reading material about communism and then they discuss it in the comments.

I think they have a lot to offer, and after deliberately choosing to bear through some of their annoying users and not to block them to avoid creating my own echo chamber, I ended up seeing their good side and changed a lot of my views about things thanks to them.

That said, I think that the instance should enforce some rules strictly and ban users that ruin the image and message of the rest. I noticed that some of them aren’t interested in being federated and would rather be left alone, if the rules don’t end up being accepted and they continue as they do then I think it’s sensible to defederate with an instance that wishes to stay disconnected.