There are certain toxic behaviors that aren’t unique to them but are very common on the internet, so much so that it’s easy to take them for granted. The behaviors I’m talking about, which often go hand in hand, are 1. Crybullying, and 2. Making shit up. What makes Hexbear good is that we do not tolerate either of those. What makes .world awful is that those behaviors are extremely common and widespread.

It’s very common for a user on .world to get banned from some community for doing something shitty and then lie about why they got banned and go make a post whining about it, and the culture there lets them get away with it, nobody asks them for the receipts or goes looking for them and they instead give them sympathy and the benefit of the doubt, which bad actors take advantage of to spread drama. I have an .ml alt where my profile reads, “If someone claims something happened on the fediverse without providing a link, they are lying,” and I have lost count of the number of times I have posted those words and been 100% correct.

That shit does not fly here. That’s not to say we don’t have drama sometimes, but if you try to pull that shit, we won’t just dismiss it until you can show us the evidence of what really happened, we will dig up the evidence ourselves and if it turns out you’re full of shit and just trying to stir the pot, we will mock and bully you for our own amusement before bringing down the banhammer, and we don’t give a fuck if that makes us look like the bad guys or if you run off to another community to whine about us.

That might sound harsh, and admittedly there are times when that gets misdirected, but there’s plenty of people who come here after hearing all kinds of terrible things about us and don’t encounter any of it and wonder what all the fuss is about - because they simply don’t do the whole crybully routine. This is a tradition going all the way back to the r/chapotraphouse days, when so many of us found our way to the community by way of hearing all the worst people on Reddit talking about how terrible it was.

That sort of thing is the biggest culture shock I experience when I’m on my alt, the way people will just casually lie, just constantly, to the point that you start to second-guess if they’re even conscious of it or if they’re just so used to running everything they say through a filter that makes them look better or more like a victim that they aren’t even conscious of what they’re doing - and the way people just let them do it, never fact-checking, giving them the benefit of the doubt, coming to their defense when they’re called out. It’s a very different environment that’s way more succeptable to bad actors playing the social media game.