I came here a few weeks ago after many years of reddit. Altogether I find discussions I enjoy, however, the posts and comments noticeably lean, well, tankie (I didn’t know that term before I came here). It’s not that I am looking for an echo chamber, but I also don’t want to spend my time reading propaganda. I’m really curious about a lot of things outside politics, as well as the opinions and arguments of reasonable people across the political spectrum, but I don’t want to listen to the boring canned lies of fascists and tankies. I realized that people celebrating communist dictators trigger me, and this is something I didn’t have to deal with before I started reading lemmy, I didn’t even know this type existed.
I also notice that accounts created just a few hours in advance come from other instances to brigade political posts. Because of how lemmy works, I can block individual users or communities, but not individual instances. Is there an instance that could be a “safe space” from this kind of brigading and tankie spam? Or a way to use the internet to read interesting things now that blogs died and then Reddit became whatever it became?
Edit: Thanks everyone for the helpful and wholesome comments. Of course, some trolls/wackos showed up as well to say hi.
You can. If you’re using a Lemmy home instance, as you are currently (lemmy.world), in the Web UI, go to your user menu in the upper-right corner, click “Settings”, click the “Blocks” tab, and then you can choose instances to block in a panel there.
If what you want is “I don’t want auth-left stuff”, avoiding hexbear.net, lemmygrad.ml, and lemmy.ml can help. You aren’t going to get some kind of ironclad avoidance, but that’ll avoid the great bulk of it. Your home instance is lemmy.world. lemmy.world is defederated with lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net for exactly the reason you mention (in fact, I see people who don’t like lemmy.world because they consider it liberal, which they don’t like) so you already won’t be seeing stuff from the first two instances.
I don’t think I’ve personally seen fascist material on the Threadiverse (though there are some people with quite broad definitions of the term), though there are or were some far-right instances out there, based on defederation lists. Most of what little I’ve seen on the Fediverse seems to me to be on Pleroma, though I haven’t spent much time on non-Threadiverse Fediverse stuff.
The home instance that I use, lemmy.today, has one user (@DonaldJMusk@lemmy.today) that posts a bunch of Trump stuff and a conservative community, !conservative@lemmy.today. I don’t know if your definition of conservative and his match up, but maybe you’d find it to your taste; it’s probably the closest to mainstream US, Republican material that I’ve seen with much activity on the Threadiverse. The instance isn’t going to be just moderate conservative and moderate liberal users though. But, if that’s the kind of community that you might be participating in, I’d imagine that he’d like to have more users.
EDIT: My own personal take is that the long term solution to having people with disparate positions on what content they want to see, above-and-beyond use of moderated communities and admin activity on instances, is to have “curator lists”, where people can basically “share” lists of blocks/subscribes/votes or something like that, and other users can subscribe to them. Then you have a list that — for example — excludes or includes content on various grounds without requiring effort on a per-user-who-wants-curated-content basis. I think that Usenet pretty much established that killfiles don’t really scale well in combating spam and stuff like that, because there was never a mechanism to share killfiles among users. Anyway, today, there isn’t support for something like that on the Threadiverse. I understand that BlueSky has something along those lines.
Wow, thanks, such a helpful response! I’ll try the web interface for instance blocking. Another sus instance I saw today was blahaj.zone. To clarify, I also didn’t see fascist stuff, I just mentioned it because I felt it important to point out that I also don’t want to see that kind of content. I guess I saw one too many “so you are not a fan of Stalin, you must be fascist” comment today.
hey, just so you know blahaj.zone is not a tankie instance, it’s an instance aimed at protecting oppressed minorities (it hosts a women-only community, protects LGBT+ users from bigotry, etc.).
I think technically the instance doesn’t take sides in terms of political ideology and is thus not a “political instance”, but the top community on blahaj.zone is vehemently anti-tankie, so I would say they’re the opposite of the people you’re worried about
You can read more about blahaj.zone’s intentions as a space here:
https://lemmyverse.link/lem.lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/14736607
basically you’ll only have issues with blahaj.zone if you’re transphobic, homophobic, etc.
got it, thanks for the explanation. I know nothing about the content and the general crowd over there, but some accounts registered there were definitely brigading political posts over .world, and not in a tasteful way. I don’t have screenshots or names because I blocked them. I’m not saying this is the instance’s fault.
I enjoy that you gave a serious and helpful answer.
Posts like that are the ones that keep me here. There are some really dope people here who want to help and inform other people.
What’s sad is often content like this gets labeled as ‘evil’ and then brigaded by users who perceive it as a threat to furthering their political agenda, because anyone who isn’t on their side, or is remotely nice to anyone on the ‘other’ sides, is evil.
By lemmy.ml logic, if I help my elderly Trump-voting neighbor take out his trash, I’m also a Trump supporter. Apparently I’m if I was a ‘good person’ who was really anit-Trump, I’d beat him or slash his tires or something.
Politics isn’t a game with minimal consequences. When they’ve spent their entire lives attacking you and your communities, trying to claim you’re a sexual predator just for existing, and are directly responsible for your own displacement, then yeah, they are fucking evil.
of course. you’ve been victimized, so the answer is to just go around victimizing others in the name of your own personal revenge. and by the way, anyone who had nothing to do with it, you can victimize them too, because having nothing to do with it is evil too.
clearly that will fix the world! and that won’t come back on you… clearly all that matters is the satisfaction of your own rage, everyone else be damned.
The time for compromise was 2016. It’s been 10 years. If someone hasn’t come around by now, that’s no longer my problem.
it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better. buckle up.
Is that a threat?
no, but in your world view everything is, even when it isn’t, no doubt.
weird how your fear of others causes you to perpetual the same patterns of behavior as those you claim are evil…
It would be important for people to understand that what separates good people from bad people is decency and basic human kindness, not political ideology. In reality, the good people are in the center, and the bad people are on the extremes. Yet, due to the polarization of public discourse, a left leaning person may be convinced that the good people are to the left, and the bad people are to the right from them. If they keep drifting towards the extreme, and keep thinking that everyone to the right is a bad person, eventually they will hate all the decent people in the center, while everyone still to the left from them is an actual monster. Needless to say, the same goes for people who start right leaning and keep drifting to the right. I wish more people realized that the enemies are the crazies on either side, not the moderates on the other side.
People don’t believe that anymore. They believe your goodness derives from your politics first and foremost, and everything else is secondary. And if you aren’t on their side you are the enemy and violence is justified against you. It’s also a great way for shitty people to manipulate others and get their abusive jollies in.
I’ve dealt with this in real life too. Where I live if you aren’t a far leftist on some issues, people basically threaten you to your face or will socially exclude and character assassinate you. Because if you aren’t ‘with them’ you are the enemy.