Hexbear is (originally) the outcome of the chapotraphouse subreddit getting banned

tl;dr The_Donald subreddit, but for nepo Tankies

When reddit refugees flooded Lemmy, they filled it up with "libshit"

The regulars at .ml, lemmygrad and the developers themselves saw this takeover as a threat (despite telling Reddit to come join) and to even out the field of all these liberals, they brought in Hexbear.

Hexbear opened up their instance for the rest of lemmy, with the sole purpose to troll and 'purge the libs.' But that means liberals can also wander into their instance.

Within 24 hours Hexbear defederated from all the instances they wanted to troll because a bunch of clueless liberals asking questions was too much for them to handle with multiple members of their community having 'panic attacks'

Hexbear is lemmygrad but a little more China focuswd while lemmygrad is more russia focused. but theyre both tankie central. Although not everyone on there is terrible. But the average user absolutely is.

In addition to what other people said, they were also trolls.

Collectively known as the tankie triad. A sizable chunk defederate hex and grad entirely. The .ml is let slide more because they're the home of the primary devs, but behaviorally not much better.