I was just reading this post https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1gmv76n/is_reddit_going_to_remain_the_primary_space_for/ and many barely see the fediverse as an alternative and they seem to have a negative bias towards it. Super ironic when it comes to the self-hosting community. Yes, some instances are problematic, yes, some devs might have had problematic views. But it doesn’t really matter when it’s federated and FOSS. I think it’s clear-cut that the selfhosting community on Lemmy is a perfect alternative to reddit. Why is there such a negative bias?
Lemmy has a toxic puddle problem. If your first experience with Lemmy is sauntering into a community and getting chased out for not agreeing with someone hard enough, something like that, you’ll probably just go back to Reddit and say ‘that place is full of whack jobs’.
And the default sort, kinda hard to dodge
My experience is a little better with comments sorted by “top” instead of “active”. “active” seems to promote controversial comments because they get the most replies.
What is the default sort on Lemmy.World btw - is it Local, or All?
For me without an account, it is All. Which means that they’ll see all the tankie stuff, and most will immediately want to nope out (I’m currently sitting at 100% of every person I’ve ever told about Lemmy irl).
On the bright side, PieFed adds a warning label to messages on communities located on Beehaw (about their differences in moderation policies), and surely could do the same for lemmy.ml - in fact I saw such a message this morning (sth sth warning do not criticize China or Russia or you are likely to be banned - quite neutrally yet helpfully worded, very much to the point), though now can’t seem to reproduce, so perhaps it’s in testing.
Why is that tankie?
That post criticizes “any western leader” talking about human rights and shows photos of bombing gaza below it, if I interpret it correctly. It certainly is whataboutism, but I don’t see how it is directly used to justify anything else, even though that might be thought behind it and be more clear after reading more posts of that person. Though I’d rather use the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, since that’s a more direct human rights violation than supplying Israel with money, weapons and defense support.
I never said that that image proves that the originator is a tankie. For one, such content turns people away from the Fediverse, regardless if offered by a conservative, a leftist, a tankie, or whoever. Mainly why I included it is that it is an example of content offered on an instance known to have tankies. See e.g. https://feddit.nl/post/16246531.
What “makes” them a “tankie” instance is that they literally deny that the Tiennamen Square massacre involved any fatalities (and ban anyone from every community on Lemmy.ml, even ones that you’ve never posted or commented in) if you say otherwise. They are really quite open about it too - it definitely is no secret, though you won’t see it immediately upon looking at the sidebar for the instance, so usually people from the Western world (which they seem to be so against in many of their more politically aligned communities) have to discover that fact on their own, then get disappointed (especially those considering themselves liberal and therefore a bit “left-leaning”, not knowing just how far left the scale really goes, i.e. nearly every American is fairly right-leaning, when using the global rather than USA scale).
But more generally, if that instance wants to make fun of the West, particularly Americans, that’s fine - do their thing - but then why is it so shocking when Americans get offended by that? All the more so when reading the sidebar of such places as e.g. Lemmy.World and Lemmy.ca, but then the content federated from Lemmy.ml’s communities work according to an entirely different set of rules.
As we try to entice people over here from Reddit, it’s confusing to them to have all these conflicting sets of rules and behaviors - e.g. in some instances people are allowed to behave as trolls, even encouraged to do so apparently by their admins, but then they also come out and do it here as well, where it is a violation of the rules.
Anyway, again, I’m not using that image to try to prove tankieness - that’s already been established. This is content from tankies, as the person I replied to said “that place is full of whack jobs”, and this whataboutism seemed a kind of illustration of that, not proof.
I saw that on ML you might get banned for stuff like calling Xi Jinping a Winnie. But not for an opinion. Especially about Russia.
Could you please tell more about Beehaw’s “moderation differences”?
Beehaw is a bit fragile. They’ll remove any comment they don’t like if it offends their current sensibilities.
I am not certain I can explain it, but for one thing they have defederated from two of the largest instances including Lemmy.World, bc they wanted a narrower range of experiences yet the mod tools would not allow them to keep up with vetting the flood of content from them and thus their userbase would have been “exposed” to it.
The mantra is “be nice”, but I also saw people discussing literally murder of “others” who they disagreed with, like they voted the wrong way, or didn’t vote despite being in a deep blue USA state or something. So I have no idea of what the criteria really is.
In any case, people report being banned from there at the drop of a hat, bc their mods are quite zealous. Which can be quite shocking to someone coming from a place that has significantly looser moderation practices.
So anyway the label I see for a post hosted on a Beehaw community says:
And then that link goes to Beehaw’s own description of their own policies. I love this approach! It’s quite friendly - it allows Beehaw to speak for itself, and rather than penalize the instance for being different, yet it addresses the interface between it vs. the wider Fediverse that is more used to content such as appears on Lemmy.World, which again has significantly looser standards (due in large part to severe lack of moderation efforts, which in turn relates to lack of development of tools that mods seem to consider sufficient).
It’s very hard to convince people that fedi is a healthy place when the default servers are incredibly toxic. I wish they would at least advertise it as such, maybe hide the default from the number one spot. There are several servers up there that accept users that are way more chill.
Also for new selfhosters making it easier to say “these are some problem instances that are commonly blocked, if you want to start out with them”. I know that starts a new problem of “but then who decides” and it causes more splintering, but for a lot of posters it’s overwhelming the firehouse of vitriol that comes in at first.
ARE we a healthy service though? Setting aside how any social media can be addictive, Lemmy in particular is incredibly toxic. It can be MADE into something that is far more tolerable, but it is not that way fresh out of the box, for a new user - particularly a mainstream one - who does not know what they are doing, e.g. how to block, what an “instance” even is (neither Reddit nor X has an equivalent), etc.
Blaze, when he preaches about the benefits of Lemmy on Reddit to entice new users to come here, mostly tells people to choose lemm.ee, and even specifically mentions the tankie issue for those who are worried about it, specifically regarding lemmy.ml. However, lemm.ee does not block e.g. hexbear.net’s ChapoTrapHouse, nor does it block even the incredibly offensive lemmygrad.ml. I almost left the Fediverse entirely when I commented in each of those, and received WEEKS and WEEKS of replies (EACH) to what I considered an innocuous comment (e.g. “at least Biden lowered gas prices, which is not nothing imho?”) - I could do nothing (that I knew of) to halt it. Nor, having arrived in them via All, did I have the first inkling of what those communities were all about, or those instances. I did not consent to that! Having read the rules of e.g. Lemmy.World, and coming as I had from Kbin.social, I was not expecting anything remotely close to… THAT!!!
So I understand why my irl friends have all absolutely refused to use Lemmy, and moreover give me a dirty look for even having suggested it. It’s nasty. WE (who use Linux btw) know how to manage software, and can make it into something beautiful. But a day-1 noob with a guest or fresh account, trying to compare this place to Reddit, will not likely stick around long enough to see what we do.
As for the rest, I most definitely get what you are saying, and there are a couple of recent(-ish) posts in !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca that cover those topics in more detail, if you want!:-)
hm, maybe lemmy needs the feature to disable response notifications for specific posts or threads. Though that’s the less problematic scenario. The biggest issue in federated networks is when somebody is determined to stalk and pester you, though I haven’t heard of that happening here so far. But you could comment under each and every post of another user, since you can see all posts. And there is no way to stop that if they are persistent as they can just create a new account on a new instance anytime they get blocked or banned.
Oh I’ve seen it - some people receiving downvotes between replying to me and me seeing their content, which I thought was odd so I checked out their post history and literally everything had been downvoted. Obviously that’s a sort of troll attack (except one case where the person said that they were doing it to themselves, so as to imprint upon themselves how worthless those scores really are). Admins can see such and ban accounts doing it, but some instances allow automated signups so there can be an unlimited number of accounts that would need banning though, if someone were determined enough to keep making new ones.
But that’s not what drove my irl friends away - that was content that e.g. made fun of the Western world & society, and which they considered “extremist”, and did not want to see so they left. And as others have noted, if you remove politics and Linux, then other than Star Trek what else do we even have here?
A community, that’s what. But that takes awhile to see, yet they were already gone.
just wanted to drop that for the selfhosters there is https://fediseer.com/ which provides an API (which makes getting a crowdsourced and up to date whitelist easy)
But https://gui.fediseer.com/instances/detail/lemmy.ml received 15 endorsements, from some major well-known/top instances, with such kind words as “popular with our users”, and one going so far as to state “friendly staff; well moderated” - WELL MODERATED!? Tbf it did receive a single censure, and 2 hesitations (from places that I’ve never heard of before).
I was not here prior to the Rexodus - maybe it was (more) true then? Even if so, that info seems out of date. And then even if it is the singular instance for which that is true, that is still a fairly major deviation - e.g. the graphic that I showed in my comment above this was shared to both lemmygrad.ml and lemmy.ml, while others are shared also with hexbear.net. Banning lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net thereby helps but does not eliminate the “leak” that occurs when that identical content spreads out to the entire Fediverse via lemmy.ml.
e.g. the #1 rule on https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/ states to not perform “Attacks on users or groups”, though I constantly see anti-Western nation attack wording and graphics posted on those 3 (maybe now after the USA elections it will suddenly cease, having already served its purpose?). For Lemmy.World to act as a delivery vector for that content, despite how it violates their ToS - how is that all that much different from allowing CSAM to spread, which likewise did not originate from Lemmy.World, yet if the latter chooses to allow itself to be the method of delivery to all of its users…?
Well anyway, thank you for your helpful addition of the link. Though I think there is more to the story as I outlined here.
Take a step back, you sound ridiculous. CSAM is not the same AT ALL as someone criticizing the west for letting Israel bomb the shit out of Gaza. If you are used to reddit, you are used to more conservative views. You have never experienced views that would be considered radical leftist. I am from the US, the republican and democrat parties are very conservative. Reddit only deals with these two parties’ views for the most part. I found nothing wrong with the screenshot you took. There is no leak that needs to be plugged, try experiencing more views to broaden your horizon. There is nothing wrong with saying the US is a fascist hellhole and is complicit in the genocide of Palestinians. Some of Europe is also heading that way too. It is not against TOS to point that out. You are being a “lib” which is really just saying you are being a reactionary. The big three you hate so much are not afraid of telling you when you have reactionary views and how dumb they are, if you want someone banned for being mean to you then go to beehaw, it is against their rules to say anything that doesn’t coddle you.
That’s also reddit tho…
Yeah whatever, that’s a feature. Reddit became worse once it became a safe place for conservatives and center-right liberals to gather.
Conservative, TheDonald, KiA, red pill, et. all made Reddit worse.
I don’t want a second Reddit. Can better avoid eternal September issues if they self select to fuck off
But I guess that’s what .world is for.
A lot of communities on Lemmy have a ‘scene kid’ subculture and they will just harass people right off the platform for not being true enough to the cause, despite being for the cause.
You got a bunch of raindrops. They want to become a hurricane. They simply need a warm breeze but shit blows sideways instead. The corners of Lemmy where movements could be happening are basically mosh pits
I’m not trying to argue with you or correct you or anything, just pointing out why this is bad, how it shouldn’t be as it is, but it’s on deaf ears to the people I’m lamenting about. And you’re correct, a 2nd Reddit would suck, but Lemmy could be better if those people were being better.
If there’s anything anyone mad about anything in the world should know, by know, don’t attack people on the same team, welcome them in
I don’t quite understand your point. Do you maybe have some examples to understand better?
I actually blocked most of those groups but one was some climate community on another instance. There was a post where someone asked what they could do personally to help prevent climate change, and it was full of political theory as a response.
Someone said they actively boycott Starbucks because the CEO flies a jet in order to commute to Seattle to California, and if the government won’t do anything they felt like the least they can do is just commit to never giving them and their lobbyists a single penny ever again.
And they were downvoted to like -20 and had a dozen people attacking them over shifting the blame from the corporations to the working class by framing it in such a way that the working class should have any responsibility for the actions of the corporation. It was like watching a bunch of picketers calling someone a scab.
And I’m just reading it like “what the fuck guys, you’re sitting around discussing political strategies that have so far done absolutely nothing, they’re doing something, they have a point, the lobbyists make the laws, so defunding the lobbyists does make a lot of sense. He’s flying in a jet to work because people give him money, helllLLLOOOooo.”
Someone even went so far as to argue that a lot of people need to go to Starbucks because they might need a quiet space to study or hang out, so I jumped in pointing out that most municipalities have a library at the minimum, and people were fine before coffee shops were everywhere, and I got downvoted and jumped on by half a dozen people for not understanding the plight of others.
Homeless people need somewhere to go, so I’m an asshole for suggesting that other people could go to Starbucks less? Beats the hell out of me
In some climate forum, for no reason other than to win a stupid internet argument over the responsibility of emissions, everyone began defending the necessity of Starbucks of all things. Seriously. And at the same time, consumers shouldn’t have to endure hardships for the climate because they should instead focus on affecting policy, in order for places like Starbucks to change, because they’re fucking horrible. In my mind I was just like “well are corporations good or bad, or at the moment are they just convenient as both in order to use that person as a punching bag?” but noped right out.
It was basically a rat’s nest of tangled up incongruent statements that all led back to ‘fuck that person for saying they make a very small effort to do something towards a corporation as opposed to attempting to reshape politics’
So yeah, shit like that.
Maybe a simple “while I disagree with A due to B, it does have some merit because of C. But in my opinion I think D is more effective, and if you’d like to learn more about D, here are some resources! :)”
I’d argue that at this point, sticking to the collective vs individual dichotomy of climate attribution and action potential is climate action delayist. When your argument relies you or your group intentionally doing absolutely nothing to combat climate change, you don’t really have climate change in mind.
Leftism sometimes cares more about class than its very foundation, the environment, to understand why there is a problem with blame-shifting.
I’ve seen this in a similar fashion in relationship advice forums: Commenters not engaging with the issue or person, but knee-jerk reacting with advising instant breakup.