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2 yr. ago

  • So what you are saying is that since you are banned from lemmy.ml, you cannot participate in communities such as Firefox@lemmy.ml, for reasons entirely unrelated to anything that you said in that community?

    Which means conversely that from your perspective, that entire community - and all others likewise hosted on lemmy.ml - are "held hostage" behind you either outright agreeing with whatever stance is taken by the instance admins, about whatever subject matters they choose to be the defining criteria for exclusion from the instance, or else at least you need to STFU about your true thoughts, about e.g. China, and capitalism, and Russia, and whatever else they feel like adding at any given moment.

    It would have been nice to have had a warning presented to you, wouldn't it? Like when you first go there, have a popup or sidebar note saying "Warning: you must agree that neither China nor Russia is actively engaging in genocide in order to participate in this community discussion about...

    <checks notes>

    the popular Firefox web browser".

    I bet reading the sidebar notice presented on lemmy.ca did not quite prepare you for that!?!?!?

    It would be nicer to segregate "political" communities and instances from apolitical ones. Except these days, facts themselves are political, and all we can do is suck it and swallow.

  • That's bc you are an established user who knows their way around how to use Lemmy. Perhaps you even use Arch btw? (/s, but only partway, bc those of who enjoy the customizability of Linux really are a breed apart from the mainstream, in terms of our value judgements in particular)

    However new users to Lemmy find it very off-putting. Also, people in the USA are touchy, watching our democracy crumble before our very eyes - there is something like a 50% chance that it won't survive even though the next year, regardless of who wins, but if it does, then we'll simply repeat all of this again in the next one, and so on. So for those of us who watched e.g. Innuendo Studios' The Alt Right Playbook, to now see those identical patterns of behaviors on display (by "tankies" or whoever), is more than a little disconcerting.

    And tbf, the likes of lemmy.ml is nothing at all on the scale of Lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net. So if you want to remain federated with some or all of those, then power to you and I am very glad that you can enjoy your time on the Fediverse.

    However, not all of us are in the same boat and some of us would rather only see the half of the conversation that we don't have to mentally parse and decode what it means before we throw it away. Without having to block hundreds of individual trolls I mean. Ofc we are prevented from doing so since user level defederation does not exist, and the only instance I've ever even so much as heard of that blocks all of the big 3 is Lemmy.cafe. So rather than wait for Sublinks/PieFed/Mbin to improve, perhaps I should move there?

    Maybe this is all intellectual laziness? I dunno, I truly don't, but also I don't see the harm in allowing people to have their preferences met?

  • I found this in like 30 seconds yesterday: https://lemmy.ml/post/21605430.

    Not that the content isn't true, mind you, but it takes a special kind of cognitive dissonance to constantly make fun of capitalism and the USA, then wonder why people in capitalist nations and especially the USA don't want to come hang out there. (Hey, only we can say the bad stuff about ourselves, ya'know!?:-P)

  • Hey, we can't like unsee that, you know!? :-P

  • A lot of the issues people have with .ml are the practices of the admins.

    Though also when hexbear.net was defederated from so many instances, a lot of those users switched to using their Lemmy.ml alts - many are quite open about this fact - and just continued posting as they had done previously, despite that style being the very reason why hexbear.net had been defederated from.

    And when more instances - like lemmy.cafe - start defederating from Lemmy.ml, then those users will surely switch to alts on something like lemmy.world or Lemm.ee that are generally considered too large to be defederated from.

    A lot of innocent users get caught up in the cross hairs of this fight between tankies vs. anti-tankies. People using your instance as a platform to attack (e.g. brigade and otherwise spew forth toxicity) other instances, yet possibly behaving normally else wise inside the instance itself.

    Also, whether something is "extreme" or not depends on someone's background context, and I would definitely say that the content on lemmy.ml is considered somewhat extreme for someone on America. Even/especially those who even consider themselves as "liberal", not realizing yet what little that means on the international stage. The content is nowhere close to being as extreme as that from lemmygrad.ml or hexbear.net, but far more so than e.g. Reddit or Mastodon.

    So I hope I have adequately conveyed that it's not your fault in any way, you also expanding to mean all the other innocent users on lemmy.ml, but I wanted to convey that yes, I would defederate myself from your instance in a heartbeat if given half the chance. Possibly you won't even mind:-), but you seemed interested, so I hope I helped by writing all this out.

  • Similar "moderation" practices as done on lemmy.ml, but unlike the latter, the users of Midwest.social themselves seem mostly well-behaved rather than toxic edgelords. Note that not all of the Lemmy.ml users are that way, and I might even believe that most are not, but conversely whenever I see the most batshit insane comments, it is always from one of the big 3: lemmygrad.ml, hexbear.net, and to a lesser but still extremely notable degree, Lemmy.ml.

    https://lemmy.world/post/18414833

    https://lemmy.world/post/19849559

    etc.

  • 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.:-)

  • Moreover, the founding fathers warned us of this happening, in advance. They knew that it would, they told us that it was all but inevitable, we have had multiple centuries of time in which to shore up democracy... like to implement ranked-choice voting, while instead... we chose not to.

    I do not hold out hope for democracy to last much longer, not against such repeated assaults as this. The game of Russian Roulette never ends in happiness, but it does always end.

  • Which itself is something notable imho, in showing how far it has come along, i.e. as a barometer reading on how far gone his supporters are.

    They used to hide it, feeling more shame that their views might not be as acceptable by the general public as they now know that they are.

    Don't forget that some sitting members of Congress are currently calling for an active, not-joking civil war.

    We ignore all of this at our peril.

  • Instructions unclear. Got free and unlimited electricity anyway. So now neighbors won't ever leave me alone.

  • 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.:-)

  • Uh oh, you pointed out a flaw. Expect goalpost shifting in 5... 4... 3...

  • You will lose that ability as soon as Lemmy.world upgrades past 0.19.3. My instance likewise had 0.19.3 until like a week ago, and ever since it "upgraded" to 0.19.5, I get notifications now from users from blocked instances. The developers of Lemmy seem adamant that people are not allowed to ban whole entire instances, which I find... ironic for... reasons:-).

  • 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.