Hexbear, together with Lemmygrad and Lemmy.ml are left wing, communist instances here on Lemmy.
A lot of (new) users of Lemmy have very strong - as in negative - feelings about them because of their ideas. Which to me makes sense because a lot of these users tend to be more centrist in their views and have never read Marxist literature before.
I will be honest with you and tell you my experience: they can be dickish and straight up trollish in their behavior, but not anymore than your average online trolls. The actual main reason people dislike them, is because they stick together and sometimes "brigade" post which nominates them and talk shit about them.
I personally was on the receiving end of their trolling when I first joined Lemmy too. But among the trolls, there were also very nice users who gave me friendly replies. And I had great conversations with them.
Eventually I even decided to open an alt account in one of those instances to learn more about their views and engage with them on their political knowledge. I really enjoy learning from them and having open conversations about politics with them. Even when sometimes I see their more extreme opinions, I still try to always be open minded at first. More often than not, I will learn that something I used to think on a subject, was the result of historical misconceptions or straight up propaganda. That is not to say that they can't be wrong of course. But it pays off to be receptive about new points of view.
There are some elements that can be considered extreme, especially to someone from the general public who has never engaged in political conversations with someone who is very much to the left. It takes a little adjustment if you want to try and engage because so much of the media and literature we consume reinforce our views on the system while they specifically try to be critical of it.
Bur FOR SURE you will never see that instance be racist or bigoted. I have lost counts how many times I've seen that in other instances, but with them, you know exactly where they stand on that. As in, they do NOT tolerate that.
Tldr: Hexbear (with Lemmygrad and Lemmy.ml) are openly communist instances on Lemmy. They are very vocals because they have a large userbase. They can be trolls that stick together sometimes. If you are politically interested/involved, I instead recommend joining one of their instances to see for yourself.
Edit: you can also tell how much people here have a negative feeling about those instances by the reactions in this post. Everything remotely critical is upvoted, while anything that even hints a positive opinion of them, will be downvoted. And then more and more users will start downvoting without even reading the comments. And they will start attacking users because they disagree and feel the need to attack them because "that instance bad"...in a way not too dissimilar from the brigading I mentioned before for some of the users from those instances. Showing you a real life example of how there are extreme users in every online community
