I moved from Lemmy.ml because I liked the name of Lemmy.world and it ran a newer Lemmy version which meant I could make communities. I moved from Lemmy.world because they defederated from piracy communities they didn't even host (but for some reason still kept the small piracy community they DID host) From thelemmy.club because I couldn't see the Hackintosh community from there (probably defederated) Now I spent some time looking on join-lemmy.org and checked out some instances and this (lemy.lol) instance seemed good, so I chose that.
Calling hexbear a "trans instance" is pretty misleading. They're explicitly political first and foremost, and happen to have a high concentration of trans/queer users. They were defederated by .world for being overbearing and disruptive, not because of their transness or queerness. Blahaj zone, by comparison, is explicitly a trans instance first and foremost, and is still federated by .world.
I'm not really here to argue whether or not the defederation of dbzer0, hexbear, or lemmy grad was appropriate by world or the defederation of world by beehaw. I just wanted to have the option of seeing content from all those instances and I'm clearly not the only one.
This is the great thing about federation though right? You can just sign up to another instance and see their content. Personally I think it's nice that there's a large instance that's free of them, sometimes it's exhausting going through their annoying comments.
I assume when everyone talks about hexbear being annoying, they refer to the comment images or whatever, but I've been using Voyager (previously wefwef) this whole time and it's always had those as a link by default so they don't clutter up the comments for me.
I had to leave lemm.ee because they didn't defederate from hexbear, any even slightly political post got spammed with 300 giant shock images, plus they suffer from the nazi bar syndrome but with tankies instead of nazis
Hexbear was defederated from world for the same reason they defederated from lemmygrad; the admins of world are anticommunists. You can make a very easy argument for banning hexbear for their toxic users, but the same can't be said for lemmygrad who are way chiller.
I seem to remember that given as the official reason, and there were certainly plenty of complaints along those lines. Whether that was a convenient excuse for anti-communist schemes or the actual reason I don't know. Most likely it was some of both, at least in the case of hexbear.