At first glace, sure, but when you look into it deeper it’s a cowardly move. For one, Hexbear made it perfectly clear they expect their users to abide by the rules of the instances they visit and not cause trouble. Also,

“Defederation should only be considered as a last resort . . . We made the decision to preemptively defederate”

Along with their stated goal to (emphasis mine)

Provide a friendly, safe, and welcoming environment for all members; regardless of gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, disability, personal appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, age, religion, nationality, political affiliation, or other similar characteristic. Human comes first.

Not to mention how long they dragged their heels defederating from the fascists at exploding heads yet are preemptively defederating from hexbear. And to top it all off there’s loads of comments calling hexbear users “Russian bot farms” and “a cesspool for genocidal lunatics.” The whole thing is ignorant as hell.

On the other hand it was enough to convince me to switch away from lemmy.world, so there’s that.