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.
real moderate or usian moderate?
WhY dO yOu SuPpOrT gEnOcIDe?
Real life. If you want moderate, complex opinions. Talk to real people. Not the bots and shills that populate this place.
You want an online community that allows both the right and the far right? That would be ALL OTHER ONLINE COMMUNITIES!
We came here specifically to get our own forum, where the centre left, regular left and far left are all allowed. This is a forum for the working class, not for the capitalists. And you capitalists can’t handle the fact that us workers for once get to have a forum of our own.
Who said this is a forum for the working class? I have not seen this mentioned anywhere. Read the sidebar: this is a generic forum for everyone. I’m inclined to think you are making this up.
Why do you want people with extreme views (left or right) in your community?
(ive been told my writing style is a bit abrasive, but i got a touch of the tism’, and that can effect the “cadence” of how i write. so take that into perspective when reading this inside your head. im not hostile.)
“Who said this is a forum for the working class?”
its implied, considering almost 99% of the worlds population needs to work to make a living and to support their loved ones who cant. and the vast majority of the people who post here arent billionaire oligarchs, or petty bourgeoisie. its statistically unlikely. therefor, fair to say.
“Why do you want people with extreme views (left or right) in your community?”
radicals are at the forefront of change in every conflict. for better, or for worse.
today (in the US) to be opposed to fascism, is to be considered a “far left terrorist” or ANTIFA. another boogeyman made by the fascists to scare people away from “socialism” or the “wokes” or some other nonsense.
the new modern definition of “far left extremism” is a dog whistle used by fascists trying to play the “both sides bad” or “innocent centrist” take that ultimately leads left leaning people and fence sitters further down the road of fascism, for those who take it at face value. overuse of the word “tankie” as well, which has been used as a blanket term for socialists/communists a lot more in recent days. but most people dont understand its roots, or the roots of socialism/communism, and how they have changed since their inception.
unfortunately, the reason so many “far left” voices appear here, is because platforms like reddit started banning people because they called out fascism, and began communicating on how they should stop it. or simply joking about it. i personally am one of those people, i said elon musk did a nazi salute, and was likely a nazi to some degree. and i was perma banned within minutes. for “violent” content. (it wasnt in the slightest) so here i am. and honestly its quite nice, people are more level headed, kind, and willing to discuss things thoughtfully. without the “gotchyas” and hostile armchair intellectualism that is so rampant on platforms like reddit.
this is a platform of the people, each instance essentially ran/hosted by volunteers. working class people, like you or me. thats the basis of the fediverse. anyone can spin up an instance, some bigger/better than others, and choose to link with all/certain instances. some instances can be honey pots, filled with bots, AI slop. or real human beings, making real connections. who knows. its crazy out here. still small, quiet. but growing, and getting louder.
the best thing about the fediverse, is that if you dont like an instance. you can leave it.
but if you dont leave quietly, its always a little bit sus as to your real motivations.
OP seems to be confusing people with a distaste for fascism/general knowledge of communism/socialism, and the history that birthed them, for actual “tankies”
a common mistake made by the misinformed, and a common tactic used by the misaligned.
but id rather not make those assumptions, and assume its coming from a purely anecdotal view/experience of the world that i havent seen reflected in my own use of lemmy.
regardless, at the end of the day, its not left vs right, its up vs down. and i think thats the bigger zeitgeist here on lemmy
sorry for the wall of text. i hope this helps provides a bit more context.
There are no moderste Nazis. Get fucked.
If someone planned to divide and conquer lemmy, they did a fine job. You can tell lemmy is left leaning by how fractured everything is. And it’s mostly filled with leftist who hate anyone left from where they are.
.world is the answer as long as you remove the reason able part.
You can block individual instances, I have a long list of instances that I have blocked.
What I first did is to limit my home feed to ‘subscribed’ only. Doing so, I don’t see anything from communities I’m not already subscribed to. And since I’ve made a rather… careful selection of those communities (from various instances), I seldom have have to deal with low quality content/noise. Making it a lot quicker to remove the occasional nuisance that passes through.
I joined about two years ago, and to get the most content I have kept browsing All, however that is annoying when some new guy decide to set up a new NSFW community outside of the NSFW branded instances and I have to block them individually.
When lemmynsfw existed most people went there to post, but some either didn’t like the instance or didn’t know about it and posted on generic instances.
I don’t want to turn on NSFW filtering in general, as it is used in memes and jokes, but I don’t want porn on my main account, that is what my alt is used for.
I’m a big fan of the subscribed only home feed. I see so much less hateful things since I started doing that.
You’re not alone in this. Just keep blocking the offending communities or instances until your feed’s balance suits you.
Maybe have a look again, as I at least could block instances if I wanted to.
I am happy with only having blocked some communities, though.
Mainly the too US-centric political ones.Interestingly enough that also got me rid of a large part of the more ridicously exaggerated tankie stuff I encountered before.
None. Because that would mean that humans on Earth are being reasonable.
Have you met people? People are the worst.
people are great if they think you are like them.
once they get a hint of difference of opinion, or that their assumptions about you were misguided or false. they lose their shit at you.
but not individual instances.
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. 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 seems to be on the Fediverse seems to me to be on Pleroma, though I haven’t spent much time on non-Threadiverse Fediverse stuff.
moderate conservative
The 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, which is considerably more active (due to his own activity) than !conservative@lemmy.world. 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.
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 communities, 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 content like that among users. Anyway, today, there isn’t support for something like that on the Threadiverse. I understand that BlueSky has something along those lines.
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.
anyone who isn’t on their side, or is remotely nice to anyone on the ‘other’ sides, is evil.
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?
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.
And by the replies and attitudes in the rest of this thread as of today, you’re correct.
Not just lemmy.ml logic. A lot of people on Lemmy would call you a Trump supporter simply because you helped that neighbor. lol The extremism here has been getting really nasty lately.
In mod logs I am seeing a lot more banning for “advocating violence.” I guess the good news about that is that mods are banning people for advocating violence, so there’s that.
Pretty sure that Donald J. Musk is a Russian Z astroturfer banned from half of Lemmy with multiple accounts under different aliases.
I barely can go a day i the fediverse without my pro-peace socialist democratic views being classified as facism or nazi-apologia.
There are a lot of users who are ‘eternally vigilant’ and think anyone who isn’t with them, is automatically their enemy.
Could it be cause you say shit like this?
It might be worth adding that there is some backlash on BlueSky for their shared blocklists recently because they can accidentally catch reasonable people or be militarised to deliberately grab extra people. Or at least that’s my take. Personally I now consider a lot of social media along the lines of “if I might not feel comfortable with you around the wife and kids, then a block is reasonable like not inviting you to the next dinner party” and that having a block that you can click through removes a lot of these issues (collapsed post /comment with no title unless you click type thing)
Yeah, that’s why I mentioned votes — I think that it’d make sense to be able to maybe do something like build a score aggregated from multiple lists or something.
Another thing I’ve mentioned in the past is using this as a mechanism for tagging. The NSFW flag was a hack that Reddit put in because some people wanted to browse Reddit at work and some people wanted to post stuff that wouldn’t be considered acceptable in most work contexts. There are many, many different categories that someone might want to “tag” things on. Some people are fine with nudity. Some people are fine with gore. Some people are fine with suggestive content. Some people object to specific items in the above. I think that it will never be the case that everyone will manually tag their own content in all the same areas, but it could be the case that someone could create “lists” that one could subscribe to that could permit that sort of tagging; same mechanism.
Yeah, tags/labels are useful but do run into:
-
scaling issues
- you can end up with an overwhelming amount of tags
- if moderator adds tags then the post quantity can be overwhelming
-
abuse
- if poster side then not adding the tag
- if viewer side then adding it when the poster disagrees
-
disagreements
- what constitutes a given label - so most moderation arguments
Still, agreed they’re a useful addition
-
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.
What’s sus about Blahaj Zone? I’ve always found them to be nice people.
Well he’s looking for conservative content, and we’re a queer instance, so…
There are gay conservatives though. And there are conservatives who support LGBTQIA+ causes.
OP sounds like he’s just tired of the extremism of everything, not just left or conservative. So maybe he’s just a centralist or something.
Can do it through apps too.
ML is definitely everyone’s first and fav instance to block, and it sounds like it’s time for you too. A lot of the dumb shit will cut down very quickly just by getting rid of that one.
It’s so funny that the first instance Lemmy users ban is the one of the Lemmy developers lol
It’s not really “funny” but ironic perhaps.
Funny haha vs funny peculiar
the lemmy devs are very clear about their political views.
anytime you are clear about your political views, you are going to invite others to ban/hate/dismiss you on princple, because most people do not believe in a plurality of viewpoints in 2026. Increasingly folks just want to silence and other perspective than their own and create their own instances where they can fully police the views of others and have that instance be specifically for their political persuasions only.
I agree that blocking these instances will dramatically improve your experience.
I tend to not block instances FWIW. I have blocked several communities and found that it works pretty well. For now, browsing /all in lemmy is my preferred view because we just don’t have that many people to keep content coming in the communities I have subscribed to. Plus, it’s more fun to see the variety. Lemmy is small enough still where it’s easier to “opt-out” than there is a need to “opt-in” to limit the noise.
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
First and foremost, blahaj zone lemmy exists to give a space for queer folk to exist, with their needs explicitly protected as the highest priority, and with a particular focus on the needs of gender diverse folk. Most lemmy instances are not run by trans folk, and whilst many are still inclusive, they don’t always prioritise our needs. Others barely consider trans folk, and react only to the most blatant of bigotry.
We are not a political instance, however political communities have a space here, as does any community that is actively protective of the needs of queer and gender diverse folk. Given the impact of politics on gender diverse folk, that means lots of dialogue and strong opinions exist, and as long as those opinions are honestly held, and not bigoted or exclusive, people are welcome to have and express those opinions here.
For what it’s worth, I am a member of the Greens Party in Australia. I have no time for the middle ground politics of the Australian Labor party, let alone the right wing beliefs of the Australian Liberal party. Yet a community of queer Labor Party aligned folk would fit on blahaj lemmy, because the parties ideologies, are not explicitly anti queer. A community aligned with the Australian Liberal party likely would not have a place here, unless the goal of the community was to work at actively challenging the anti queer policies of the party.
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.
Great answer! Good to see a balanced take.
Lemmy has developed a habit of branding anything it dislikes as “fascist” or “nazi,” even neutral reporting from outlets like AP. I’ve even seen news articles from AP get called fascist propaganda simply because they reported facts in a neutral tone instead of demanding that all Republicans be removed from society.
Nuance isn’t a strong point for a lot of Lemmy ragers. Many users came from Reddit after bans or because they found Reddit insufficiently leftist. Lemmy calling Reddit “conservative” is wildly out of touch.
So it’s especially nice to see a reasonable, level-headed reply here.
Piefed makes it much easier to block instances.
I use piefed.social because it 's easy to filter out what I consider noise (aka most political content and all kind of excited people ;)
“Reason for blocking: ‘Too excited.’” 😅
I have an excuse: I’m getting old ;)
Are different communities/servers really all that similar? I kinda just assume that people choose a somewhat random instance when they start and stick with it.
That’s what I did, because I didn’t know anything about how it works when I signed up. I guess the big ones near the top of the instance list are more random than smaller ones (reversion to the mean), but even there, mander.xyz users tone seems different to me.
Unfortunately, I think the same effect works both ways. The reasonable people you are seeking will mostly gravitate towards low-effort instances - after all, they are just looking for funny memes. They heard about lemmy as “reddit, but with fewer bots”. They have jobs and hobbies and friends in the real world - all sorts of reasons to care about anything other than the specific instance of a random social media platform they are joining. It is no coincidence that the most tankie users on the most tankie instances oscillate between posting revolutionary content and posting suicide jokes. It will be the rare person who threads the needle of “reasonable enough to have real world perspective, but obsessive enough to create and manage a curated lemmy instance for reasonable people.”
As a pretty middle of the road liberal with a few conservative or libertarian sympathies (but a lot of opinions about auto oriented city planning), I’m afraid we just have to wade through the muck until our communities appear via emergent design. Until then, I like the neoliberal comm.
They heard about lemmy as “reddit, but with fewer bots”. They have jobs and hobbies and friends in the real world - all sorts of reasons to care about anything other than the specific instance of a random social media platform they are joining.
So much this! Not everyone on Lemmy wants their entire life defined by political news. lol
Some are, some aren’t.
Federation though, is such that if you say something one community doesn’t like… well they are likely to come over from their instance and harass the crap out of you. Or if you random comment in their instance, they will lose their minds at you.
