This post and its comments go more in-depth about the Hexbears’ grievances: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/1989401
The announcement from a Hexbear admin: https://hexbear.net/post/369410
The casus defoederationis that’s got me most concerned is that the 196 mod appears to endorse usage of the -tard suffix. When the Hexbears mention ableism, this is the specific objection they have.
Really bad form of OP to not include any links, and honestly it should be a Hexbear admin making this announcement, anyways.
If you go to “trending” or “recently added” it will say “scope : federated” near the top of the page. If you go to “local videos” it will only show local videos sorted by default by upload date. If you go to any of these pages and click “more filters” you can choose under “scope” whether it shows federated videos, whether to sort by popularity or upload date etc, which languages or categories to display, etc.
Still, it is difficult to find good content on PeerTube in my experience. Your best hope is probably using sepiasearch.org rather than the search feature of your own instance.