In the past week I’ve been absolutely roasted for criticising two different countries. Normally I’d be okay with that, I can handle a mild toasting and after all debate is a good thing.
On both occasions though I was flamed for mentioning human rights issues that are established facts and have been known for many, many years. I was critical of the actions/laws of their governments and not the people, their race, religion, general political ideology or nationality.
On both occasions I was bombarded by long posts that parroted propaganda, and in the case of one country I was told (on multiple occasions) that I was ignorant, racist and even fascist for mentioning the issues I did. I’m not complaining about how I was treated, but as a reminder, I was discussing internationally-recognised human rights concerns that can be verified and based in fact.
I could just be paranoid but I’m fairly convinced the responses weren’t from patriotic citizens. I think they were paid trolls or bots, and I think their purpose was to quiet negative talking points about the countries that were mentioned.
Has anyone else had a similar experience?
Lemmy has a echo chamber problem.
People don’t want to challenge their beliefs, their want a space in which all agree on the same stupid thing.
When I joined I was curious about how Lemmy/federation works. When it was explained to me it was said that with this approach there will be no one big Hitler who controls the discourse.
I had a hunch that this means that we will just get a bunch of smaller Hitlers. And… Well…
The problem in itself is that Lemmy means that you host a whole bunch of communities. Thats to much power concentrated in one place.
It should be that everyone hosts one community and all communities can talk to each other.
Then an Ideologie wouldn’t have a one-stop-for-all place to fester.
Everyone of us is an idiot in some way. We need other people with different views to make us aware of our idiocy. Otherwise we stay ignorant and stupid.
So I don’t think you interacted with bots. You interacted with cultists.
Hitlers all the way down
Lemmy is just three Hitlers in a trenchcoat.
USA, China and Russia?
You my friend, are like a very welcome breath of fresh air.
It’s a trade-off between accessibility and power. On platforms like Reddit, power is totally concentrated within the corporation that controls the service, but they allow any old dunce without any technical skills to make a subreddit, making it very accessible to the average person.
On the flip side, if every community was its own server, the power hierarchy would be much more flat, but the ability to make a community would be reserved mainly for people with sysadmin skills and money. It also would make discoverability and community more difficult to maintain.
In other words, I think the Threadiverse strikes a nice balance. It’s certainly not perfect, but there’s no right answer.