I think this is probably the fairest description. Hexbearians are dickish trolls sometimes. Unfortunately, because Hexbear was the biggest Lemmy instance for the longest time, a lot of communities found this initially overwhelming, plus the big jump in political perspective is too jarring and can seem nonsensical.

But I believe anyone who takes a moment to engage in good faith with the cool users, and ignore the trollish ones, will see you can have constructive, interesting and caring discussions and realise what the attraction of the community is.

Weird, because I find them also lovely.

I continue to say: Wikipedia itself states that between 0 and 1 people died in Tienanmen Square. Nobody denies protests happened elsewhere.

Anarchists are explicitly welcome, so authoritarianism is definitely not a requirement. And what “alternative facts”?

This is objectively untrue, Lemmy.world refused to ever federate, as, in their own words, a “pre-emptive last resort”.

In their statement, the reasoning they explicitly highlighted was Hexbear’s stances like being against western propaganda and disliking the mass overseas wars driven by the US. Don’t believe me? You can read it here - https://lemmy.world/post/2498330

So no, Hexbear was very explicitly defederated because of politics.

This analysis isn’t quite accurate. On the whole, Hexbear is actually one of the kindest and coolest and community-minded places I’ve ever been on the internet. But I’d agree there’s an issue of a portion of users who happily get overly aggro if you annoy them (and being allowed to get away with it).

You know mod logs on Hexbear are public, right? It’s very, very clear that “giving links” is not why you were banned.