man i lived with my mother who was like the epitome of the ideal of upward mobility, only to watch her body disintegrate and the systems nominally meant to help her shit all over her, i watched the deteriorating political situation cause once-loving family to turn on her as some kind of pariah parasite, i ended up falling far enough i began just being around people much worse off than me at the time, watching friends of color get harassed by police and their lives ruined by the ‘justice’ system - watched my dad’s mental health collapse - my grandfather lose all non-familial support as his mind left his body - i’ve seen what bootstrapping does for someone on the fringes (it destroys your body and mind) - i’ve been desperate for more years than i’ve been comfortable in the shadow of all of that - and hexbear isn’t even the first community of leftists i found that assured me that no, my experience wasn’t unique, in these ways i wasn’t actually going crazy - and the idea this place is somewhere that mostly radicalizes instead of being a place where the radicalized aggregate to in lieu of support from the major corporations that dictate most of the modern internet - it’s insulting yeah, but it’s also really funny. You have to be kinda derranged to think a federated reddit offshoot is causative rather than symptomatic