DefederateLemmyMl @ SpaceCadet @feddit.nl

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2 yr. ago

Wait until you hear about Sesame street!

They're just going to do a classical boil-the-frog operation:

• Step 1: Make it opt-in and present it as the new cool thing.
• Step 2: Make it opt-out, and if the users opts out, show a scary warning about how the cool thing won't work anymore.
• Step 3: Silently opt-in, and hide the opt-out option deeply in a settings menu.
• Step 4: Silently opt-in, remove opt-out, but it still works with a registry hack. Microsoft apologists will still thinks it's cool because "just use this simple registry hack bro".
• Step 5: Remove opt-out alltogether, and silently opt-in everyone who had previously opted out.
• Step 6: Enjoy their boiled frog!

Honestly, even back in the day I hated the low-poly character model look of early 3D games in the late 1990s and thought it looked worse than the sprites we had before that.

Hmm, on one of the KDE plasma updates, my wallpaper did change to their infamous teletubby wallpaper. Mind you, I was still using the default wallpaper at that time, and this was their new default wallpaper, so that's probably why.

Nah, reddit restoring comments is a myth. You just didn't delete all your comments, even though probably you thought you did.

See, Reddit, being the duplicitous bitch that it is, doesn't really show you all your comments when you go to your profile. It's limited to your last 1000 (?) comments or so, any comment that goes beyond that horizon is gone from your view forever, but it still exists in the thread.

The way to solve that is to first do a GDPR request. After a few weeks you will receive a zip file containing a file with all your comments and a link to it. You can then use an overwrite and delete tool and point it to this information. It will likely run for several hours or even days, depending on how many comments you made, because reddit throttles edit and delete requests, but it will effectively delete everything.

When presented with a choice, people usually pick the community that is the most active and already has the most subs.

But I am definitely giving it a shot.

Hey I applaud your effort, yesterday the top post was several days old and top day was empty on one of the subs, so this is already better.

I'm a bit skeptical if that will be enough though. Active discussion is the meat and the potatoes for me when I go to a tech community, and for that you need more subscribers.

We should still try to have instances get along and try to find some common ground

Common ground can only be had with reasonable people you actually have common ground with. Personally I think it's a fool's errand to try to talk sense into the lemmy.ml admins.

The only solution I see is to salvage what we can from the bona fide communities that still reside on lemmy.ml and then put a big fence around it, so can have their toxic waste dump of an instance all to themselves.

It’s still annoying to migrate

I've switched instances three or four times when I was still getting my bearings on lemmy. I didn't really find it annoying. The only tedious part is resubscribing to the communities you were in, but there are tools for that.

I think the problem is not so much that "communities don't exist", but that they are far less popular and active than the lemmy.ml ones, and when presented with a choice new users will typically choose the community that is more active and has the most subs. You can't simply solve that by creating another community on another instance. A concerted effort would be needed to get people to move and to get them to pick the alternative community over the lemmy.ml one. Raising awareness and defederation by bigger instances (like lemmy.world) would help immensely.

For me the big ones are !linux@lemmy.ml and !programmerhumor@lemmy.ml btw, which do exist elsewhere but the alternatives are stale.

It's basically the underpants gnomes meme

1. Dictatorship
2. ???
3. Utopia!

I'm perfectly fine with just avoiding interactions with lemmy.ml communities

I would be fine with that too. If the instance was just tankie people talking tankie bullshit, like lemmygrad or hexbear, it would be easy to ignore. Unfortunately it's not that simple.

The problem is that lemmy.ml has a more privileged status in the fediverse: being the first Lemmy instance in existence it still holds quite a number of popular communities that are still frequented by people from the whole fediverse, and the tankies wield their power there as well. Like literally: make a disliked comment on /c/memes and you get banned from /c/Technology, /c/linux, /c/Progammer Humor, /c/Mechanical Keyboards,... and all your other favorite communities on lemmy.ml as well. This actually happened to me.

A second issue is that the mods make efforts to hide the censorship that they are doing, because they know it's not a good look. If you examine the modlog over there you'll see that the first half of the page is like a day's worth of moderation activities, and the second half covers 4 years. So where's the rest? The many controversial comment removals and bans that happened a few days ago on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre, and who knows what else, have all been disappeared.

So yes, I think it is very important that people are being made aware of this and I also think a concerted effort should be made to move bona fide communities away from an instance ruled by bad faith actors.

It's easy enough to switch instances, but which instance you joined is actually far less important than which communities you engage in. Rule of thumb: avoid any ...@lemmy.ml communities. Not because the communities are bad per se, but because the tankies have power there and they don't shy away from banning you from unrelated communities if you say something they don't like.

Ideally nobody who's not a tankie should create or join communities hosted on lemmy.ml anymore.

This is the best solution - the answers are in our hands

There is the problem of network effect though. People who frequent communities on lemmy.ml are often blissfully unaware of how problematic that instance is, like I was until a few days ago, and so they're unlikely to just move as they have no immediate reason to.

It's easy to say just pack up and move ... but I've been really struggling to find an alternative for !linux@lemmy.ml, to name one example. The equivalent communities !linux@lemmy.world and !linux@programming.dev are rather stale with days old posts without comments.

So I think it's not just something an individual user can solve for themselves, and I think that the larger instances also have a role to play here. If they would defederate from lemmy.ml, it would urge users along to move away from lemmy.ml communities towards communities on other, more suitable instances.

Next to that, we should also spread awareness about the lemmy.ml problem, and that was my intent when I originally made this post.

Like "how dare you actually show the atrocities my Chinese overlords committed in a way that can't be denied" ?

I told them something like: "The modlog of this community is ridiculous" and posted the same screenshot of the modlog that I posted on my thread on !fediverse@lemmy.world. Forgive me if I'm paraphrasing, because my exact comment is gone.

Defederation of lemmy.ml from the larger instances would be a solution.

let’s pretend lemmy was heavily conservative instead of liberal making this exact post.

I think you misunderstand the issue, so as you mentioned conservative, let's illustrate it with an analogy.

The situation with lemmy.ml right now, and apologies for the reddit analogy, is the equivalent if on reddit the batshit crazy mods of formerly /r/the_donald or /r/conservative could ban you from /r/linux because you said something bad about Trump on /r/memes. At that point it's not about dissenting opinions, it's about them wielding power they shouldn't have over those dissenting people.

An instance that operates like that shouldn't be part of mainstream lemmy and host general purpose communities. The only way to take that power from them is to shun them, i.e. defederate.

It's not defederating on the basis of political opinion. It's defederating on the basis of extreme intolerance towards and censorship of people who have different, non-fringe opinions that aren't even controversial in most parts of the world.

Right now, the instance hosts a lot of let's say mainstream, non-political communities, purely because lemmy.ml was the first instance and so "popular" by default. The way the mods over there behave, it's clear that they're not suited to be a mainstream instance for these communities. Unfortunately due to network effect, people won't just move.

The only way to dislodge these communities and move them to more neutral instances is if larger instances like lemmy.world start defederating lemmy.ml.

You can still see that your comment has been removed, but you can't see the biased mass removals of content, like mass purging all China critical comments from a post, unless you're quick enough to screenshot the modlog.