You got “cynical tween” and “misread Nietzsche” from a four word joke about Arch users? Okay, sure buddy…

Lots of instances defederated because of the tendency to brigade. Since Hexbear was already a fairly large instance before federating, it meant it tended to dominate a lot of conversations on other instances. People have similar complaints about .world these days too. But fairly early in the first Reddit exodus, there were a few cases of Hexbear brigading smaller instances, and the Hexbear mods/admins clearly didn’t have any interest in stopping it. So not all of the defederation is purely politically based. Politics may have helped swing the decision, but it certainly wasn’t the only reason.

Hexbear is an interesting beast. It tends to be really insular because it is defederated by a lot of the bigger instances. But it does have a strong sense of community, and a lot of its own in-jokes. From the outside looking in, it often looks like a dumpster fire. But the reality is that it’s more like old 4chan, where it always looks like a dumpster fire on the surface… Then when you dig deeper and start understanding some of the memes, you realize it’s actually a really interesting community ^{surrounded by a dumpster fire}

Found the Arch user.