There’s really no sage advice that anyone can offer in the wake of what is very apparently a major disappointment to you. They were just more insecure and… emphatic than was required for the job you entrusted to them. Looking back a decade, you’ll find people preaching for social changes that are now ubiquitous despite their champions’ entirely uncharismatic involvement.

The game’s not over, it just needs new players. I fucking despise hexbear now, but my opinion on socialism is largely unchanged, if that improves your mood in the least.

I’m still very upset about this whole situation

Yeah, I feel that. I put a lot in to trying to federate with another instance that is strongly protective of its gender diverse members, and for it to end the way it did was a bit crushing...

comforting themselves by making vague assertions of unspecified minor communist victories in their real lives

many hexbear users organize, volunteer, and work in orgs. Some have unionized their workplaces. As /u/Pax recently pointed out to you, no one on hexbear seriously views posting as praxis.

it honestly feels like they intentionally lose arguments by aligning themselves with horrific human rights abuses and authoritarian regimes, just so they can claim to be misunderstood and preserve their safe space

The actual hexbear position is that certain human rights violations appear to be fabrications to manufacture consent for US foreign policy, and there is significant historical precedent for this. See the Nayirah testimony in 1990 before the Gulf War, the Iraq WMD reports before the Iraq invasion, the fictitious accounts of genocide in Libya before the NATO bombing that obliterated the country, and the large number of North Korean defector testimonies that have fallen apart under scrutiny, as reported by the Guardian. Major operations against foreign nations require the consent of legislators and the public. Atrocity propaganda is how that consent is manufactured.

Hexbears can back up these positions with a large number of credible sources, but threads outside of hexbear rarely get to that point. There's no reason to write a long, well-sourced post when the audience views hexbears as fanatical, irrational tankies, assumes the sources are bullshit, and does not read the post. Threads get stuck at a simple level of discourse. People trade short jabs. Liberals accuse communists of supporting genocide, and communists, rather than dive in to respond to that accusation and have no one listen, instead accuse liberals of not caring about American imperialism, because this is shorter and punchier and it reaches some people.

That does not mean there are no human rights abuses in socialist states, especially the massive country of China, and it’s still important to have nuanced takes, but hexbear does have nuanced takes, it’s just hard to get to that point in the discussion when you first have to defuse allegations that you are some fucking sociopath who wants to watch the world burn for no clear reason.

I think hexbear flippancy is natural when the prevailing response to a good-faith post is "shut the fuck up you disgusting tankie, I'm not reading that." "Genocide denier" — or, even less accurate, "genocide supporter" — is an easy accusation to make, and a hard one to respond to when no one even fucking reads your responses because you're an evil tankie and nothing you say can be valid.

As for authoritarianism: hexbears generally believe, again based on historical precedent, that the alternative is to be coup'd by the US and replaced with a far-right dictatorship or neoliberal puppet government. This is what happened, for example, in Chile in 1973. Elected socialist leader Salvador Allende was overthrown by a far-right, US-backed faction in the military, which then went on to torture and murder thousands of socialists, infamously throwing some of them out of helicopters. Allende could have prevented this by purging fascist officers from the military. This would have saved Chile but condemned Allende to being called a fascist on lemmy.

I wish the Indonesian communists under Aidit had armed themselves, as Mao had advised them to. Maybe they could have prevented US-backed fascists from rounding up and slaughtering more than a million communists in Indonesia, as detailed in The Jakarta Method. As far as I can tell, no one on lemmy has even fucking heard of this let alone cares enough to condemn it.

The 20th century is a graveyard of crushed socialist states and movements. The only survivors were those that hardened themselves against attack, and that means authoritarianism. It means suppression of dissent and propaganda in the press, it means a secret police to ferret out CIA agents and their assets. It means mistakes and false positives. It means innocent people getting swept up in it. The best comparison I can make: it's like how a lot of the symptoms of an infectious disease are caused by your own immune system fighting it off with limited tools and hurting you in the process. The alternative is to get fucking killed by a pathogen.

Imagine if, after you fought off malaria, malaria then went on TV and maligned you for having an immune system.

On top of that, the authoritarianism has often been overstated! In authoritarian Cuba, recently, Cubans just democratically drafted the country's newest family code, hammering out the details in over 80,000 citizen councils around the country. That code, among other things, affirms comprehensive rights for LGBTQ people. Even earlier, hormones and gender-affirming surgery have been free in Cuba since 2008. And then western media depicts Cuba as a despotic regime that should be overthrown or sanctioned, while keeping silent about the 73% of dictatorships that America provides military aid to. Maybe democracy is not America's real concern.

continued:

that hexbear users who complained of chasers were misjudging or exaggerating the extent of the problem

This is exactly what happened.

The two instances that I am aware of.

The first instance was a cis guy responding explicitly to a prompt from a trans person, talking about how their attraction to a non medically transitioned trans man wouldn't work, precisely because he acknowledged that his attraction would be based on elements that would make the hypothetical trans man in question uncomfortable.

This was not a cis person volunteering an opinion to trans folk unasked for. It was a cis guy responding to an explicit question from a trans person, whilst respecting trans identities and acknowledging the reality of dysphoria.

The resulting discussion about that topic lead to a huge outbreak of transphobic commentary from external users. That lead to me making a post calling out the transphobia and aggressively banning anyone that crossed the line.

This all happened months before hexbear joined, and the post from me addressing the issue is still visible in 196.

It's not an accident that this incident only became an issue for hexbear folk after the 196 mods refused to remove anti tankie political commentary at hexbear's request.

The second instance was a hexbear user reporting someone making chasery comments to them. I asked for details so I could ban the person in question. Before telling me who it was, the hexbear user asked me not to ban the account in question, because they looked like they were a newly out trans person that had taken a joke too far (they were calling people m'lady as a joke). In any case, I talked to the poster making the comments, and told them that it's making people uncomfortable and they need to stop. They did (they already had before I messaged them)

And that's the "endemic" of chasers. A trans person making an ill conceived joke, and a single cis person answering a direct question from months ago.

I can absolutely understand why some people would be uncomfortable with both of the events in question. But even allowing for that, what we have is two misrepresented events that were actively addressed at the time they occurred, one of which occurred months before hexbear even appeared on the scene.

Again, it's not an accident that most of the chasers hexbear are concerned about apparently hang out in 196, a community that hexbear users wanted to join until they found out they couldn't. Only then did the chasers and transphobia appear in their narrative.