funnily enough i’ve only interacted with hexbear one other time and that was then they federated with the entirety of Lemmy as a way to troll. Unfortunately for them they didn’t consider that meant anyone could venture into hexbear. hexbear ended up defederating from all of lemmy within 24 hours. it was a humiliating defeat for them

This is blatant revisionism.

Hexbear attempted to federate with the rest of Lemmy but some of the largest instances such as lemmy.world and lemmy.blahaj.zone defederated from us first. Lemmy.world in particular famously pre-emptively defederated us before ever being federated, as documented in this thread (where they also state that defederation should always be considered as a last resort, you know, pre-emptively defederating Hexbear as a last resort). We were federated with lemmy.blahaj.zone for longer but once they took in a huge number of refugees from reddit /r/196 their largest comm became a lifeboat comm for that subreddit, and they were very unhappy with us; this eventually devolved into a conflict where Ada, their lead admin, decided to defederate Hexbear as a way to appease the moderator of 196. Hexbear generally has a conciliatory attitude towards blahaj to this day and many of our trans users would like to refederate eventually, but this hasn't happened yet.

Generally, Hexbear likes being federated with more instances because it allows us to spread propaganda more. That's the incentive in place and we like doing it. Other instances are the ones who generally don't like receiving tons of people like myself who are very argumentative and post giant walls of text.

Hexbear remains federated with other big instances like SDF, reddthat, .ml (which you might call part of the tankie troika), and lemm.ee before it went down. We get wanderers from there all the time and we play nice with them.