Omg ofc there is!:-)

Upvoting bc response but dayum, I am so sorry to hear that.:-( You are a friendly person who is so considerate to others, so I know you will get back on your feet again soon. Though various markets especially tech (I don’t know your career but this is Lemmy so that seems to be >=80% likely:-) isn’t great so indeed, brace yourself. With effort, and only the tiniest bit of luck, you got this! 😁

Excuse me, I’ll just hop on over there…

Edit: hey, good to see you posting again - we missed you! ☺️

You might want to move your account over to mander.xyz and then browse mostly by Local rather than All or Subscribed.

In large measure what you are describing is considered by most people to be harmless - although it is actually not harmless at all.

Anyway, the good news is that this aspect is mainly “contained” within the communities that actually want that. As opposed to e.g. Facebook where it is everywhere (one presumes - I left it even before the pandemic).

There is an ENORMOUS amount of diversity on the Fediverse, more so than anywhere else I’ve seen, and nothing at all like Reddit unless you count the small niche communities, but even there… anytime a post would hit r/all people would comment like “brace yourself, the trolls are coming!”, plus people in those niche subs would browse all and become tainted by it.

I was one of them. I started noticing how defensive my posture was getting, and becoming more snarky, and then even doing that irl at work. Therefore I left Reddit. I almost left Lemmy too, but I refuse to be that way. Us olds (or maybe you aren’t old and instead only mature - or at least talk as if you are haha! 😂) know that we can touch grass and read books - social media is a privilege, not a “right”, and not mandatory for my existence (although it is nice to keep up with things, other than having to use e.g. Google News, so I would have had to investigate finding a good RSS reader).

Reddit started to devolve when the “kids” came in and drowned out all the longer-form, more in-depth discussions involving actual facts, and replaced them instead with “I know you are but what am I?”, “^This”, “I also choose this guy’s wife”, etc. Which don’t get me wrong - humor has its place in the world, it’s just that when here are TENS or even HUNDREDS of such comments, IN A ROW, and they get upvoted whereas someone who writes a longer response gets actively downvoted, plus receives demeaning replies (“hey, tell it to someone who cares <expletive>”), that is when I decided to quit Reddit. Whether I stay here or leave this too, I will not go back to Reddit. Or Facebook.

And most of that I blame the platforms for encouraging people to talk while actively discouraging them from listening. Notice that ads appear between posts, but not between comments, hence they encourage - with their UI elements and such - people posting. One example is how poor their internal search functionality is - oh well, it’s easier just to post my question than to search for an answer. Another example is restricting pinned posts to merely 2 - when they could easily allow like 5 or 10 or something, especially if they allow a folder system. And then even the pinned posts would only show up as being pinned under certain conditions, which users of an app may not see. Omg and don’t even get me started on their official app… 🤮

On Lemmy, it is possible to have good conversations. Make liberal use of the block button to curate what you don’t want though, bc moderation is in short supply, and what is there tends to be heavily biased, so e.g. a person behaving as a dick to someone else is likely to do so to you sometime later, so consider your future self’s mental health as a priority:-).

I disagree somewhat bc of one very crucial factor: here bots exist but they tend to be labelled as such. Look in your settings on the web UI if you find this not to be the case.

You click on a user account, then click block them, repeat just a handful of times and then bam, pretty much you have blocked all the bots there are. Yes it takes effort - it’s not done by default - but at least it’s possible, whereas on Reddit there is simply nothing that can be done, with virtually any amount of effort. Over there they are baked right into the system… right?

And here the bots are, or even can be, helpful. A bot that you know is a bot is a good bot, or at least an honest one.:-)

“yes sir”

I tend to start out that way… but it can be so easy to forget and get sucked in. Well, so long as you know what you are doing!:-)

I am glad to have maybe helped, even if only in some small way.:-)

It is hilarious to see that on every single “we should defed from the tankies” post, the tankies always show up to demonstrate for us all first-hand precisely why we should defederate from the tankies. Not b/c of their political views, but b/c of the abusive toxicity.

b-b-bUt SuReLy rUsSiA hAs NeVeR dOnE a GeNoCidE?!

Or ChInA eItHeR?!

The USA supporting Israel is… ahem, never mind, anyway it’s not anywhere on the same class as Russia CURRENTLY and ACTIVELY being the very ones DOING the genocide.

Nobody is that dumb. Therefore that’s beyond ignorance - that’s sheer, willful obstinacy.

Oh that’s so awesome! Mbin, Piefed, Sublinks, and even if Tesseract is currently running Lemmy (though I thought you mentioned wanting to switch it to Sublinks or something when that gets ready), it too helps mitigate some of the known issues. I do have enormous respect for the hard work and effort put into the Lemmy codebase… but I am even more excited to think about the possibilities of growth that lie ahead!:-)

There is only a singular instance in the entire Fediverse that blocks all of the big 3 including lemmy.ml, from what I can see: lemmy.cafe. And roughly a month ago it was still federated with hexbear.net - though that was due to a bug/oversight and when it was pointed out to the admin was immediately corrected. It is a tiny instance, with only 18 users per day or 44 per month, which leaves me wondering how “robust” it is - how long has it been in operation? How long would it expect to remain? (I recall instances such as dmv.social dying off with little to no notice, though that was due to the CSAM attacks that have since been mitigated by software).

I may switch to them regardless - they have some nice features (including a link for new users to check out [email protected] - so friendly and welcoming!!:-), though was waiting for the likes of Sublinks, Piefed, and Mbin to catch up a bit in case they would be better than any implementation of Lemmy. Anyway I’ve been busy irl lately and not wanting to spend time thinking about this.

I say all this in case my personal example could help illustrate: there are barriers to switching.:-) Though I don’t know if everyone suddenly jumping onto that same instance would count as much of a “vote”, and especially people not doing such shouldn’t count as a vote in the opposite direction, either? Though I do take your point, ultimately we cannot control others, only ourselves, so it is our “fault” for accepting the way that things are now, rather than seeking to change them.

Also if it helps to add: many people feel that communities such as [email protected] that have ~2/3rds of all monthly active users for a firefox-specific community essentially hold hostage the content that they want to see, without an account that can interact with it. Ideally the politics would be separated from the non-political content - much like the NSFW tag + especially the settings button to filter out such if desired - allows us all to exist in the same space free of any conflict (barring the occasional outlier, which I’ve seen only like once or twice in the entirety of last year), however, people (such as users of those big 3 instances) refuse to label their politically extremist content, and do other things not in good faith like brigade even instance-specific communities (I can find an example if you like, also relevant is that the option to set them to “private” does not exist until… is it 0.19.6 iirc?).

So for some people, it is not enough to simply leave, they want to help migrate everyone out. By increasing awareness of the situation.

YSK that it is not length, but whether what you tried to say is agreed to by the admin of the instance or not. That is the crux of the dilemma here: that goes against the philosophies of the Western world about non-authoritarian control, which ostensibly so too does true communism, yet here we are: the USA is “doing genocide” and “is capitalist”, yet neither Russia nor China are any of those things (in their minds). This makes them a “leftist” instance in the same manner that Trump supporters are “conservative” - which is to say, not.

Ignoring 99% of what you said, while hyper-focusing on a single matter that they choose, asking you to provide your references yet not providing ones in turn (or more commonly by the more prepared ones, the references that are provided turn out to support your position even, if read properly or possibly even at all!!!) is a common tactic. Don’t let yourself be distracted from whatever it is that you true goal is. You cannot win an argument against someone who refuses to engage in good faith. Moreover, by trying you simply give them a platform to continue.

Whatever you say, they declare “victory”, and those who refuse to realize the difference… well, that’s on them.

It isn’t a good faith argument.

This nicely summarizes enormous portions of lemmygrad.ml, hexbear.net, and a lesser though still quite sizeable proportion of lemmy.ml.

In short, we are trying to turn Lemmy into a Reddit clone, when it is a different toolbox with a different purpose.

Personally I think that people were just so burned out from leaving Reddit, that they just accepted whatever else they could find. Many did not even do that much - I have no idea where a great many of the content creators went, some seemingly went back to X, others from there onto Bluesky, but notably many seemed to have simply left social media altogether. And until this next USA election is over, that’s probably for the best…

Anyway, I am saying that people no longer feel the desire to put in the hard work that it takes to moderate a community. Some very few seem to shoulder the vast majority of the work, but it is not spread out. And ironically, this wraps back around to the OP issue, b/c the presence of such toxicity is precisely the reason why (okay well tbf among the top 3 lets say) I, who was a mod of two gaming subs on Reddit, did not want to volunteer my time here. 99% of the effort ends up going to deal with 1% of the people, I am talking about the people for whom “no means yes”, i.e. those who e.g. create alt accounts to get around bans and just keep going.

Also, the tools and infrastructure just aren’t really here yet. e.g., what concept could be more foundational than “helping guide new users to how Lemmy works?” Do a little digging and you will be fantastically depressed to learn the state of affairs there. e.g. Lemmy.ml’s sidebar features a post titled “What is Lemmy.ml”, except that is a broken link to a post that must have been removed at some point. And that is the chief instance of Lemmy!? Lemmy.world’s status is not much better, pointing to a neat Quick start guide, but so very many features (e.g. cross-posting, and in fact I only count a singular occurrence of the word “instance” in the entire thing). Notably, there is an entirely community to help people get acclimated to Lemmy, called !newtolemmy[email protected] (yes, that link is messed up, but I left it that way b/c this is how the webUI chose to expand it out - Lemmy is not polished, and is in fact broken in so many ways!), but have you ever heard of that community prior to my mentioning it here? Also nobody has posted to it in the last ten months except 3 posts from Blaze and I. We’ve asked instance admins to add this community - or some other one like it - to the sidebar of their instances but… crickets. (edit: though lemmy.cafe has it in their top banner, yay - that instance looks so damn welcoming and friendly!!:-)

Sadly, what I conclude from this is that this is still an alpha-level “experiment” in social media. I thought that we were at least in beta but… if so, it is quite low-level. We seem stuck in this downwards spiral where the people aren’t willing to put forth effort b/c the infrastructure isn’t quite fully here yet. Perhaps Mbin, Piefed, or Sublinks will offer greater hope?

Genuine question: HOW though?!? I’ve user-blocked the entire instance, yet I see those comments basically everywhere I go, plus they used to not be able to reply to me and have a notification sent to me, but now on 0.19.5 that seems to have been un-done. In no way is a user-block like a personal defederation.

Also, fully 100% (not making this up) of everyone that I have told Lemmy about irl has said that this issue is why they refused to join the Fediverse. As the number of alt accounts goes up (some of them mine) yet the total number remains mostly constant, that spells doom for us eventually.

And it is not fair to the users of lemmy.ml either, for the rest of us to see the instance they come from and immediately brace ourselves for an onslaught - thereby potentially misinterpreting what they say, just b/c their fellows are so arrogant and insensitive and we have come to expect that from them.

The whole “just ignore the cancer and it will go away” approach leaves much to be desired, imho. Feel free to do as you please, but that’s not what I am talking about: you asked, and as a result now you know some (certainly not all) of the reasons why others may not wish to do the same.

I triggered myself so I do not know either, nor is it likely relevant in any way since it was emotional rather than logical :-D.

Yes, and highly ironically, they act as teen edgelords and some people get banned precisely for being Marxist Leninists. Notably, the bans are often instance-wide, not just a community, and include being banned from communities that the recipient has never so much as heard of, much less posted problematic content into. Even a single sentence such as “the Tiananmen Square massacre actually happened” seems enough to trigger that. In short, like “conservative” Trump supporters in the USA, their claimed political affiliations are beside the point, and the reality is an echo chamber of misinformation and circle-jerking.

The caveat is that the instance admins also include developers of the Lemmy sourcecode so… Also it is one of the oldest Lemmy instances, predating its spread out to the rest of the world. Hence other instance admins do not want to defederate from it. Upcoming updates to the Lemmy sourcecode are also exclusively posted there (afaict, I mean other than raw GitHub).

Anyway, the people who get incubated inside of that echo chamber then come out into the rest of Lemmy, and many of us do not appreciate that.

The more you know.

First, the entire text is cross-posted from https://feddit.nl/post/16246531 - OP had nothing to add on their own, apparently. The OOP was likewise on feddit.nl. The community happens to be on Lemmy.world.

You also brought up your own personal experiences to add to the situation, so I pointed out that you, being on lemmy.world, would have different experiences than e.g. someone on feddit.nl. I note that that instance has not defederated from either lemmygrad.ml or hexbear.net. If you don’t know what they are about, I’m saying that yes lemmy.ml are still “tankies”, but like 1% of the problems of toxicity compared to those other two instances, so much so that while lemmy.world remains federated with lemmy.ml, it has chosen to defederate from both of those other two.

Also, don’t miss the main reason for the drama in the first place: the images show the OOP being banned. i.e. what you do not see is the point here, bc of the heavy handed banning. So you wouldn’t “see” it then, as you say just looking at the popular posts, unless you happened to have been viewing the mod log on your own initiative. The fact that any divergence of opinion is being suppressed is very much the point here. It leads to the creation of an echo chamber, which allows solely the opinions of the admins to be allowed to be spoken of.

But you need not simply believe me: check it out for yourself. e.g. go to lemmygrad.ml and see what is there - it took me (not joking) like two seconds to find this comment: “Shoot him in the head” at https://lemmygrad.ml/post/6010525, all the while making fun of Americans for being violent etc. (though when it happens on lemmy.ml - example, this one admittedly took a lot longer to find, maybe 30 seconds, though it was still on the front page - it tends to be far more tame) Note I am not complaining about the violent rhetoric here, but the total lack of self-awareness. USA=bad bc of genocide, while Russia and China are “not” doing genocide. It’s a special brand of “my side good, their side bad”, that I for one do not find very intellectually engaging. Therefore I do not choose to engage with Truth Social, or the equivalent Lemmy instances.