Here are some reflections on my personal experience of federated social media.
A bit of background. In the 90-9-1 trichotomy, I am one of the 9%: an occasional active participant. As of 3 years ago I had been dabbling in social media since I was a teenager in the 90s, but never very deeply. Newsgroups and IRC; a bit of invisible blogging; various techie web forums; Twitter from 2008 (hardly any tweets); Facebook in the early 2010s (a post or two per week at the peak); then Reddit. As of 2023 I had been “on” Reddit for nearly a decade and not even written 100 comments. Then I decided on a whim to join Lemmy.
The good
Three years later I have written nearly 100 original posts and over 3000 comments! This is an order of magnitude more than I used social media in the previous 25 years. How to explain it?
A bunch of things. I liked the UX instantly, it’s much better than Reddit. No ads, so no nagging feeling that you’re bankrolling a corporation. A (slightly) higher level of conversation quality than Reddit.
Probably the single biggest explanation is just that it’s quieter. On Reddit I always arrived too late to the party. It’s hard to find the motivation to say something when a thread already has 800 comments. On Lemmy, I’d arrive 12 hours after the post and there were only 6 comments. If I take the time to compose my thoughts, somebody might actually see it! I get the paradox here (there are tons more eyes passively looking at Reddit), but the “quiet room” effect is real.
Highlights
Hands down the best community I’ve found hear is (no surprise) a specialized one: !birding@lemmy.world. Lots of original content and genuine expertise, zero vitriol or toxicity. Perfect. In a similar vein, !pigeon@mander.xyz, where you can literally post pics of pigeons to an adoring audience.
I’ve also got some value out of !linux@lemmy.world and !privacy@programming.dev for one of those reasons: the ambient expertise. It’s not really breaking news: Linux and FOSS and privacy are really the only subjects where the fediverse can go toe-to-toe with the corporates in terms of expertise. IMO that’s already an achievement that should not be squandered!
Quite a few of my 96 posts are original content (“OG”, ugh). A whole bunch are photos from my bike-touring escapades, which I posted somewhat arbitrarily to !bicycle_touring@lemmy.world , !bicycling@lemmy.world, and !solarpunktravel@slrpnk.net. I rationalize this as an alternative to blogging: instead of hosting your own invisible vanity website, you can write what you have to say in a place where you have less control but where people may actually read it. It’s the logic of social media, basically, but minus the ads and opaque algos and shareholders. As expected, my holiday photos were not viral sensations, but they did attract some love and a few nice comments. Success!
The less good
My experience on Lemmy has taught me something that I knew in theory but (somehow) not quite in practice: Socializing via text on a screen is quite hard to pull off successfully. The lack of physical accountability, the inherent difficulty of text communication (avoiding ambiguity without the help of a face or body language), all this tends to make people into worse versions of themselves. Me included to some extent, I’m sure.
And then there’s the echo-chamber problem. It turns out that when people have an option to avoid dealing with ideas they disagree with (even slightly), very many of them choose that option. IMO this is a major (perhaps fatal) problem with social media. The fediverse is not magically immune from it.
Lowlights
The first - and definitely worst - experience I’ve had was 2 years ago when I got banned from !europe@feddit.org for “racism and gaslighting” on the basis of, well, pretty much nothing except the moderator’s paranoia. Shut out of the single community that had most drawn me to Lemmy, I tried !europe@lemmy.dbzer0.com and in short order had a similar experience. I am a European liberal who votes green, and a moderate on social questions, although admittedly I do enjoy debate. To be shut down so brutally for daring to question progressive doxas in the politest terms - for me this was quite a shocking confirmation of the intolerance of a certain section of the (mainly US) left.
On !degrowth@slrpnk.net I got a virtual slap on the wrist for posting an article offering constructive criticism of degrowth. I’m basically a degrowther myself but I believe it’s important to stress-test one’s ideas (cf. J S Mill). The moderators politely disagreed. Fair enough. I deleted my post and unsubscribed.
The problem on !china@sopuli.xyz, meanwhile was (is) slightly different. It’s that the community is swamped by a single hyperactive member who posts relentlessly on exactly the same themes with the same POV, and - the echo chamber, again - responds badly to any pushback. I contacted the moderator in private and received a virtual shrug.
So I decided to ditch all politics and stick to photos and niche subjects. But even here it has not been plain sailing. A (slightly whiny) post I wrote a few months ago about the difficulty of installing Linux on cheap hardware (a pretty niche subject!) received an avalanche of mockery and insults that really took me aback. And then I really stirred up a hornets’ nest quite recently in this very community when I proposed a feature which would hugely improve my experience of Lemmy without affecting anyone else. Can’t link to that because it got (very belatedly) deleted, ostensibly because offtopic but in reality because the proposal was unpopular. In fact this was my last post on Lemmy to date. Probably not a coincidence.
Conclusions
For me personally, the jury’s still out. I’m pretty ambivalent about social media in general. Since The Atlantic introduced a discussion space a few months ago, I admit that I’ve transferred some of my energy there. And yes, it’s been a better experience. But the reason is no indictment of Lemmy: It’s that The Atlantic has a paywall, which essentially means I’m talking only to privileged people like myself there. I enjoy Hacker News even more, but that’s because it’s super specialized (politics is mostly banned), and professionally moderated, and also (attention: wild POV!) because it’s full of engineers and other spectrumy types who take a Spock-like approach to communication. The problems I’ve had on Lemmy are problems of all generalist social media, not specifically of the fediverse.
In my case what remains are the figures. Despite everything, I have contributed more, and more personally, on Lemmy than I ever did on the R-site or anywhere else. That has to count for something. Corporate social media is a manipulative money-driven spyware-fueled nightmare. The federated decentralized type is obviously, plainly, better. That’s why it has to succeed.
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So I decided to ditch all politics and stick to photos and niche subjects
Best plan! There’s a huge mob here that loves to fight and argue. I remember one comment to my other username said something to the tune of “…and I won’t back down until my revenge thirst is quenched!” or something dramatic like that. Some just enjoy the fight.
Once I deleted my old account, then started this one, and banned all the trolls and politics, smooth sailing.
But I’d never recommend Lemmy to my real life friends. Way too many keyboard warriors here calling or cheering violence, thinking the US is gonna have a violent revolution. lol
If you ignore the politics, it’s cool being on an platform where you can instance-hop if you don’t like how your current one is being run.
Whenever I see the leftist/liberal infighting and purity tests, like the ones in your comments, im always reminded of a quote from the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley:
“The revolution turns against itself, because its the only thing its strong enough to beat. You can’t get any group of more than four people without at least one fucking idiot.”
Thanks for your contributions to an open internet. Birding is one of the better communities on lemmy (im a fan of the_pack myself, because I ride a motorcycle and im uncultured i guess :) )
It look at lot of community blocking and leftist super-user blocking to make Lemmy palatable. And even then, you still end up with like the “football” community and all the top posts are about Palestine, Israel, Donald Trump, America bad, like jeez people can you turn it off for five seconds and talk about soccer. Its a bit like the Fox News comment section where you’ll have some innocuous article and half the comments are about Crooked Hillary. But there’s some good stuff on Lemmy you just have to work for it.
Just so yall know who some of you are agreeing with, this person managed to get permanently booted off the !france@jlai.lu community which is very VERY tolerant of differing opinions compared to the average fediverse community. I remember them, they kept defending racist news outlets for no good reason and using far right talking points and dogwhistles (while claiming to be a leftist), until the mods got tired of their constant denial.
Modlog (and this post’s comment section) shows some genocide denial too, no shit they don’t feel welcome in some communities…
One of the points of moving to Lemmy, for me at least, was to get away from people like them.
and some of us came here to get away from folks like you. the keyboard comment police warriors who want to ban/report/shame anyone who says anything they don’t like.
We’re talking overt racism and genocide denial here 😂 enough to disgust even a rather conservative community, but you do you.
This entire post is users either pointing it out and op getting upset about it or those like op praises op for defending the indefensible
I got banned from !europe@feddit.org for “racism and gaslighting”
My account on Fedia got permabanned. Don’t even know why. No explanation given, just “account banned” when trying to login XD. I suspect I might’ve gotten caught in fight against bots spamming, but there’s no way to appeal.
Socializing via text on a screen is quite hard to pull off successfully.
People for millennia have been socializing via text on paper and found it extremely easy. Text on a screen is hardly that much different. I think the modern problems society has communicating via text has more to do with the wetware than the software. I imagine a moral panic also exploded 5000 years ago when writing letters became a thing.
Oh no, the bigoted sack of shite is upset!
Write another book about it if you want, but no, you can’t play with the leftists. Also getting banned from feddit for being too liberal is HILARIOUS.
Banned for a day. Next time is a perma.
I think the tribalism, purity testing, and mod power tripping is far worse here than reddit. I was banned from memes.ml two days ago for pointing out it’s in bad taste to celebrate the deaths of American soliders, and I totally don’t support at all what Americans are doing in Iran or Palestine. After a couple back and forths I was banned for spam. I was responding to comments, explaining my position, not spamming. Then to top it off, I was banned from privacy.ml yesterday. I saw a user I was arguing with the previous day using an argument I taught them. I literally explained something to them in a DM, and they were using it correctly against someone else, and I was again banned for “spam.” A single silly “I’m proud of you” comment. Granted it was obvious that they clearly didn’t like me but still, you can’t get caught doing that and not expect me to say something. Very immature.
What I find funny about it all is they’re banning someone who’s on their team. I’m on board with most of the stereotypical .ml ideology (I don’t think we’d get along OP), but some users, and especially those with power, have no tolerance for any dissent. I don’t even think I was dissenting, just saying the evil facist bootlicking troops probably aren’t as evil as they want them to be, so don’t cheer when they die. Is that really too much for some people?
I completely agree, but it makes sense as smaller communities have much less incentive to actually tell users the rules
Not all communities are run the same way, nor do any intend to do so necessarily.
At a certain point some people are just trying to maintain a walled garden with curated content. Sometimes they can be real shit about it, too. It’s not exactly suited for the Fediverse, but neither are broad, everything-goes communities or ones trying to appeal to ‘everyone’.
PS: The discussion on this post turned mainly into a (one-sided) debate about whether the content of my contributions passes the Lemmy ideological purity test. So dull, yet so predictable. To be clear: I stand by everything I’ve written on Lemmy. Efforts at shaming will fall flat, as will pompous denunciations and attempts at dunking based on virtual sleuthing. I’m far too secure in my convictions to be bothered by a brigade of insufferably self-righteous progressives trying to one-up each other in their efforts to root out dissidence. To the (quite numerous) others who offered interesting feedback and kind words, thanks.
So the entire point of this post is to just minimize the reasons for your entire post?
This reads as yes I have said terrible things that lead to the less good and lowlights but I am entirely valid to have them even though I am entirely the reason for the experience
It sounds and reads as someone who goes into as a football reference the pub that supports the team that hates the jersey you come in wearing and blame them for asking you to leave or say bad things about said team.
Tldr OP is a racist Zionist European and therefore has to stick to birding
And this is based on… What exactly? Asking because you’re not the first person on Lemmy to draw such an extreme conclusion based on reading a single phrase you disagree with.
Conclusions like yours are the reason people Fight so much on social media. Granted, I’m not immune to this, I got to do better, i urge you to do the same.
Patience, reason ate virtues
Scroll down a bit in the thread if you need more examples
Not who you’re commenting to, but for me it’s based on wasting/spending the time to read not only OP’s analysis about the Fediverse, but then looking into their comment history and public modlogs for their ‘perfectly polite’ takes that got them banned.
Which is far more than basing a conclusion on a single phrase.
People wearing the skin of decency usually gives reason for people to fight on social media. And sometimes people do the research so others don’t have to.
Probably the OPs comment history is my guess.
I agree 100% with everything you’re saying. Expectation of conformity and zero-tolerance of nonconformity form a sort of tyranny that always makes any discussion of locally accepted gospel impossible. Many social media communities seem founded on absolutist beliefs that just aren’t up for discussion at all. Sometimes even asking informational questions out of genuine curiosity is treated as shilling or trolling - I suppose in those communities asking questions about doctrine any right-thinker should already know and accept is automatically suspect.
As a Hacker News-type person I never thought of my communication as Spock-like, but that’s a great term!
It’s comments like these that stop me from leaving. Thanks.
You’re welcome! [also notice we both got douchevoted lol]
I’ll swap my “Spock-like communication” for your “douchevoting” any day.
The douchevoting brigade is real. And I don’t like it.
Why are the comments above downvoted? Because downvoters don’t like OP. Not because of the comments. And that’s stupid downvoting. But hei, they do they.
The lack of physical accountability, the inherent difficulty of text communication (avoiding ambiguity without the help of a face or body language), all this tends to make people into worse versions of themselves.
This is so true, and I hate it. I actually find Nextdoor quite refreshing because people are posting as their real selves, and nobody wants to be known as the local asshole. (Before someone makes an assumption, I’m not suggesting that we de-anonymize every social media platform. I just like having a platform that isn’t anonymous.)
Nextdoor is the perfect encapsulation of why having real names tided to people doesn’t do anything to improve how terrible or racist the comments are.
Hell they are even more than happy to keep the worst of the worst on the platform no matter how many times a person makes tos breaking comments.
I want to live where you live bc I’ve had to block several people on Nextdoor who are not afraid of being the local asshole. Entitled red state middle aged curmudgeons.
I deleted it entirely because they preferred having the assholes over the ones calling out the assholes.
Hell someone was running their entire campaign for public office on nextdoor (explicitly against their tos) and they didn’t do anything until after the election
tried !europe@lemmy.dbzer0.com and in short order had a similar experience.
looks in the mod log
reason: blatantly denying genocide
Yep i guess i can skip this section of the post
genocide means nothing nowadays (since ww2) back in the good old days the species had to have no surviving members, now there are “genocide survivors”.
If you try to kill somebody and fail, that’s still a crime.
yes, attempted murder, amd it wasn’t murder.
Partial or attempted is part of the definition of genocide. You really should do your research before you start arguing on definitions.
Words don’t mean what you want them to.
You don’t know the meaning of genocide and probably confused it with mass extinction events which are totally different thing
PS: The discussion on this post turned mainly into a (one-sided) debate about whether the content of my contributions passes the Lemmy ideological purity test. So dull, yet so predictable. To be clear: I stand by everything I’ve written on Lemmy. Efforts at shaming will fall flat, as will pompous denunciations and attempts at dunking based on virtual sleuthing. I’m far too secure in my convictions to be bothered by a brigade of insufferably self-righteous progressives trying to one-up each other in their efforts to root out dissidence. To the (quite numerous) others who offered interesting feedback and kind words, thanks.
They’re even blaming us for not wanting to go along with them that their experience has nothing to do with their comments or posts
That was probably the single post I’ve written on Lemmy that I would have deleted if the mod hadn’t done it. But only because the language was confusing. I said something like “it’s not at all certain that”, which I meant literally, but obviously it reads like “I don’t believe that”, which is absolutely not what I meant.
Anyway, you don’t care about any of that, or listening to anything that anyone would say if you feel they’re not on your team (letting alone assuming their good faith), what you care about is scoring points with your tribe, and being righteous, and dunking, and all the rest of the boring litanie of social-media ills.
But I’m putting this correction out there anyway.
Anyway, you don’t care about any of that, or listening to anything that anyone would say if you feel they’re not on your team (let alone assuming their good faith), what you care about is scoring points with your tribe, and being righteous, and dunking, and all the rest of the boring litany of social-media ills.
But I’m putting this correction out there anyway.
You could have left all of that out. You don’t need to project insecurities onto other posters like that. It’s not very constructive and will repulse anyone reading. That or it will only invite troll replies and no serious responses.
Which maybe is your goal, just saying personal attacks like that aren’t going to make anyone want to engage with you even if they’re in agreement with you on whatever topics.
That or it will only invite troll replies and no serious responses.
Seems like that’s entirely what they wanted
Sounds like a Zionist but then how did they manage to get banned from Feddit.org?
They let the mask slip too much
blatantly denying genocide
I do wish the removed content was always available from the modlog. We’re not immune to a mod saying something that someone said something that they didn’t strictly say. While we’re better about keeping things open, i thing we’re better protected with keeping it all available.
that and i wish you couldnt get banned from a sublemmy you’ve never interacted with.
just check my modlog, i’ve never broken any rules anywhere, yet i have the label of a “tankie bootlicker” forever stuck to my account from getting banned from a sublemmy i’ve never interacted with, probably cus the people running it are more paranoid than even stalin was
edit: it’s not even a sublemmy apparently lol. it’s a… whatever u call communities in piefed
If you were blocked on a community because they were hostile modded, you probably don’t want to be there anyway.
yeah, it’s definitely a community i very much don’t care for.
it just sucks having that in my mod log, u know
Yeah, sadly only the comments are visible, i hope it’s fixed in Lemmy 1.0
They’re even continuing it in the thread
A feature I like about Lemmy is that the mod-log is public and that you can go from comments in the mod-log directly to the related discussions.
People should really check out OP’s mod-log and make up their own minds.
Especially about the things he wrote about in his “Lowlights” section.I’d rather react to posts and comments based on the content rather than peer into the author’s background to decide whether to put a black hat or white hat on them.
“Background” is a funny way of describing the things someone believes, says and acts on in the world
No, “backtround” is a perfectly normal term for history. There must be a better way to pretend to make whatever point you’re trying for.
Then just say you’re in favor of ignoring the OP’s facist history and present, instead of doing the thing where you deliberately phrase it as vaguely as possible in order to frame people as unreasonable for not accepting wretched and failed antihuman ideas.
I haven’t even looked up their history - so apparently you’re not a mind reader, and things can be obvious to you without being true. Two good life lessons.
The context of the author is valid when judging their content.
Right, if your personal social justice hero and somebody who clicked Like on a tweet you found offensive say the exact same thing, I’m guessing you upvote your hero and douchevote the other person so you won’t be complicit in their evil. Congrats!
The mod logs are public in a sense, but also completely useless against the power hungry mods since they can ban and hide all the details of post/comment removals, and hide behind the anonymous mod name.
They should indeed, if they care that much. I stand by everything I wrote, namely a bunch of banal viewpoints that are completely middle-of-the-road anywhere outside the bubble of Lemmy.
People classified as “progressive” make up 9-15% of the US population by one count (I believe another pollster put it at 7%). Americans here who are arguing with me are in fact arguing with the overwhelming majority of their compatriots.
“Middle-of-the-road” in a land of fascist “compatriots”. If you care about the world and not just the US, you would quickly (or maybe slowly for you in particular) find out that the overwhelming majority of the world are “radicals” (gasp!) who consider Israel to be currently conducting a genocide in Palestine.
A viewpoint being popular doesn’t make it right.
Indeed. That includes those that are so popular around here.
It does have a bit of a echochamber (defederation and moderation) problem, i agree. We should look out for that.
I am so tired of this lazy narrative, the obvious truth here is CENTRALIZED SPACES ARE MORE SUSCEPTIBLE TO THE ECHO CHAMBER EFFECT.
Yes it is still a problem here of course but the diversity here mitigates not worsens that issue.
If you are going to disagree with me prove it with data and facts I don’t care about your anecdotally derived feelings about it.
Echo Chambers literally require large monolitiic enclosed spaces to echo, a series of isolated smaller foam cells forms materials with sound deadening properties so not only is the intuition/metaphor wrong here it is 180 degrees wrong.
https://www.thevitagroup.com/en/vita-blog/how-does-soundproofing-foam-work/
Sound absorbing foams are typically softer and more lightweight than their sound blocking counterparts. Sound absorbing foams typically feature open and flexible foam cell structures, which act as natural absorbers of sound waves, preventing further reverberation from hard surfaces such as walls, floors and ceilings.
This is achieved by converting existing sound energy to heat, as the sound-wave energy is dissipated within the porous structure of the acoustic foam, thereby reducing the ability of sound-waves to bounce back into the room.
The structure most prone to the Echo Effect is a Cathedral not a dense network of semi-isolated smaller spaces. Every time we discuss “Echo Chambers” without recognizing this it dumbs the conversation down further.
echochambers are what people want.
i’m not sure how you fix that ‘problem’. you can’t force folks to interact with those who are different than them without them becoming resentful and angry that differences exist, and inevitable demonizing people for those differences.
Not what I want, I want people to debate ideas with who argue back.
If I wanted non stop validation I’d chat with an LLM.
It would be great to have opt-in choices to either enter or not be forced into entering such spaces. Like I do not wish that e.g. ChapoTrapHouse did not exist, I only wish that proper labels would be more readily visible so that people would not stumble into them unawares. Likewise, Lemmy.ml’s disallowance of criticism of Russia, China, or North Korea is not exactly easily read from the instance sidebar, nor is that sidebar readily visible from most 3rd-party apps that I have seen - especially when browsing by All, which how else would someone even browse, especially when new and haven’t subscribed to much yet?
So agreed that labeling would solve most of the issues. But if e.g. Lemmy.ml refuses to allow any criticism of Russia, China, or North Korea, then at least someone would be aware that it has chosen to be an echo chamber in that manner (while others choose to be echo chambers in different ways - e.g. PieFed chooses to restrict votes to a daily quota rather than topic-based, which is just a different style of filtering).
Haha. I used Lemmy.ml for a little while, and I noticed that it had a lot of pro-China posts and tankies, to the point that I found it likely to be state-sponsored propaganda. It’s reassuring to hear that someone else noticed the bias.
Oh this is an extremely well-known and documented effect, although as you can see you will receive a significant number of downvotes whenever you state it publicly. See e.g. https://lemmy.world/post/29072279 and the community that it is posted in for FAR more details than you ever wanted to know about that instance. TLDR: as you saw with your own eyes, they are actively rooting for the downfall of all Western civilizations, and if that comes at the cost of millions of the lives of people currently living in them, so much the better - they “deserve it”, bc they did not stop capitalism single-handedly, or something. Crucially, Russia, China, and North Korea does not ever do anything wrong though, certainly not genocide or like “invading” other countries or anything like that (hey, in fact, don’t you know that UkRaInE iNvAdEd RuSsIa, not the other way around?!?).
This btw is why many people are refusing to donate to fund Lemmy.ml, and by extension further development of the Lemmy codebase, since the main developer Dessalines refuses to separate donated funds to only go to the latter without also being used to moderate and maintain the highly problematic Lemmy.ml instance.
And the pace of development of Lemmy is already glacially slow… PieFed’s is significantly faster, but like the Lemmy devs, its main dev is likewise quite opinionated and bakes that into the codebase in a number of ways. So they both have their advantages and disadvantages, but either way Lemmy.ml itself looks to me like pure disadvantage.
problematic communities like that are never going to label themselves as problematic.
they also don’t see themselves that way. They think they are bastions of truth and free speech and open-mindedness, it’s just that everyone else is wrong and close minded.
every echo chamber, and hate community, and cult-like group thinks like this. abusive sex cults don’t go ‘hey we are an abusive sex cult who will destroy your identity and steal all your money, come join us!’
And that mismatch between the claim and reality is what will - if anything does - doom the entire Threadiverse to irrelevance. It’s understandable that inside the echo chamber they refuse to see what is plain, but what is far less fine is when everyone else simply goes along with it, with zero pushback.
Lemmy is a
Nazitankie bar (for anyone who does not know, see Paradox of Intolerance). The lack of moderation is why whenever Lemmy gets brought to in outside mentions, it is as the butt of a joke and laughed at (I’ve seen it treated such in Reddit, X, Bluesky, Tildes, etc.).Here is a perfect example: https://www.reddit.com/r/fossdroid/comments/1uiywal/should_we_switch_to_lemmy/. An entire community was deciding whether to move here or no, and the majority of the top comments are basically just “lolz no fucking way”. A few examples:
My answer is no. I have tried repeatedly to use the Lemmy/Piefed and have bounced off each time because the platform is fundamentally at odds with good content. Bluesky’s upcoming Reddit alternative shows far more promise and I’d personally wait for that.
I tried switching to Lemmy a long time ago, but that place is toxic and full of weird people.
There are big pockets of radical tankie communities on Lemmy that like trolling and being toxic
There are a lot more reasons than this but having spent the last 3 years on the fediverse alternatives, and just seen the shit that happens over there, I feel very confident in saying it will not ever serve as a serious Reddit alternative. It will serve as something, but not Reddit
Lemmy is shit. So is reddit but Lemmy is shittier
Lack of proper moderation… I once saw CP and have never used fediverse ever since. I’d rather not use social media at all than to take part in half measures
To be fair, some of these issues are older now - like PieFed has basically solved the onboarding issue, and db0 solved the CP spam one from years back, though such events tend to stick around in people’s memories… and I cannot honestly state that the lack of moderation has gotten any better. MAYBE will the upcoming release of Lemmy v1.0??? Though I exceedingly doubt that, especially after seeing what happened to Lemm.ee.
Also tbf, people did recommend Beehaw and mander.xyz as sensible choices. The former was more or less soundly rejected by bringing up its defederation status from lemmy.world, cutting it off from the majority of the Threadiverse communities (although the ones locally on it i think are quite nice - I’ve never had a negative interaction with any of them), and the point that a single cadre of super-mods controls the entirety of what is allowed to be said on it, which is what they would be wanting to get away from by leaving Reddit. Browsing locally on mander.xyz though… that just might work!? But only if you are exclusively interested in STEM and basically nothing else.
Being a tankie bar is our choice, but others refuse to enter into that journey alongside us. So long as we entertain the most toxic among us, refusing to distinguish them in any way from anyone else, mainstream normies are going to refuse to put in the enormous amount of effort required to do that work for themselves, and so will simply stay on Reddit or move to corporate solutions (like Bluesky) that do not shirk from doing so, rather than enjoy the Fediverse where they would be free but that also requires the high amount of effort that comes with that.
The solution is quite simple, really. Mods (or anyone else for that matter) should not be able to ban people. The concept of gloanl banning shouldn’t exist. If an account posts/comments stuff you like, then just block it on a personal level. Global banning (especially when the decision can only be done by the mods / a select few people) will always lead to echo chambers.
Ironically, PieFed has allowed such things for something like a year already - e.g. with keyword filters someone who does not want to view content involving “Trump” or “Musk” can avoid it on a personal level, without requiring a mod to make that decision for everyone.
Likewise, for all the flak it has received, the “reputation” visual indicators put additional power into the hands of end-users to decide how they best would like to interact with others on the platform.
Another one, back to actual filters again, is an automated collapsing or even filtering of comments below a certain score threshold. I always turned those off, but for those who want them they are neat to have - not every moment of every day does every person need to be ready to read such content, sometimes people just want a break from anything controversial and to enjoy a pleasant read?
Lemmy is glacially slow to add new features so I wouldn’t hold my breath for these anytime soon, but FYI, they do already exist elsewhere.
The concept of gloanl banning shouldn’t exist.
Then a few accounts could spam every community with nazi shit or child porn (hidden from users who blocked them), so any newly registered users would leave the second they joined.
Would this really happen, tho? Also you could give a prompt to new users on this issue and tell them how they can subsequently block those accounts. Sure, there are always pros and cons to doing things, but in my experience the current approach where you give a select few people total control always results in total echochambers. Which I believe on the broader scale just reinforces the political divide of a society.
I mean, having to deal with the torrent of that type of content was a big reason why the admin of lemm.ee quit altogether, so I would wager it happens quite a bit.
Edit: This content is also quite explicitly illegal in many jurisdictions, and hosting it on your instance can get you landed in jail.
yes, it does frequently. you’re naive if you think there are highly abusive actors in every online space like this.
determined folks with negative agendas also have a lot more resources and energy to put into harassment and spamming, than any ordinary person does. they are also often well-financed and emotionally driven.
This never works
ughhh why do libertarians think they are the first babies to use their brain in the most basic way possible?
How does Lemmy.zip have an echo chamber / defederation issue?
If it does, this is the first I am hearing about it, and I find it of great interest.
If not though, then why does it bother you that other people may have made a different choice than what your instance has done?
Uhm, more generally, not only lemmy.zip. Most of lemmy is more left-leaning + tech, while more conservatives might feel more welcome with the (defederated) tankies. This can be a problem, with fueling extreme views.
Most of Lemmy is also white and male in addition to being left-leaning and tech focused. We really could use more diversity across the board here.
There are no ads here, and no corporate Algorithm to contend with, plus everything is entirely freely offered. If we were more welcoming to mainstream normal folks, people would be outright flocking here.
In fact, people have checked us out and even made accounts, but at least half the people that came here have since left, often self-reportedly after remaining here for at least one or multiple years. We are driving them away in droves. Possibly we do not (collectively) want them here.
What we “need” (in order to survive) vs. what will actually be done are entirely separate matters.
mainstream normal folks
Everyone who isn’t white and male, you mean?
Thank you for clarifying, no I actually meant non-technical folks who don’t spend as much time in introspection, as opposed to e.g. creating things. An example could be a comics artist, or a craftsperson, let’s say working with wood, who gets confused by all the technical hurdles needing to be overcome in order to join the Threadiverse. We (who use Linux btw) thought virtually nothing of any of that, even finding it fascinating how and why the entire Fediverse is able to function as it does, but they tend to feel daunted at such and turn away rather than engage.
I felt the need to clarify since you chose my comment about needing more diversity of people with a quip about not wanting mainstream, normal folks.
It was the rampant sexism that initially turned me away from the fediverse. I think I tried two or three times before I found my groove and the communities that speak to me.
It’s not that confusing to use the Threadiverse and I think it’s a little snobbish of you to think crafts people shouldn’t be welcome if they get confused by some of the tech stuff here. I have never used Linux and can function fine on this site. You’re underestimating people.
What is degrowthing? Never heard of it before
All explained on !degrowth@slrpnk.net
What searches have you attempted?
Usually when you ask someone who’s passionate about something they have no issue going into detail. I guess we’re on that Reddit behavior of just telling the person to fuck off.
Btw the subreddit I was directed to, the sidebar literally said “Discussions about degrowthing”. Brother IDK what it is. Sorry if I sound like an ass it’s a pet peeve of mine when people do this.
It’s a bit of a pet peeve of mine when people are too lazy to even do a simple search for a definition. It’s fine to ask for detailed info. But it’s rude to ask a stranger to provide something you could instantly find on a search engine. I’m happy to provide detailed explanation, but I want to at least see the other person is willing to put in an iota of effort first. If they don’t care, why should I?
