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 risk 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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I was curious about the posts mentioned so I took a look at your history and can kinda see why. The Linux one didn’t make too much sense to me but people were generally nice to you, although understandable skeptical since you’re talking about hardware not working. Honestly you had a bit of a meltdown in that thread, which I think contributed more to the down votes than the initial opinion (like you said, text brings out a worse version of yourself).
The political ones, I mostly pieced together genecide denial (?) which has generally been very unpopular here. To be fair, that was more than a year ago, although what was unpopular then has aged even worse, what with people in Europe getting arrested for pro-Palastinian views and such.
I’m not saying the behavior of mods and such were justified, of course, just… y’know, two sides of the story. You’re in the right to express your views and seek discussion, but others have an equal right to call you out on it-- especially if you get defensive and rude over polite, reasonable responses.
But that’s just my two cents. I only ever comment, and I’ve had moments with people being rude or misunderstanding my intent. It happens, as social media is just that way.
Even the ones agreeing and cheering with op are ones with the same circumstances. Mod log full of terrible comments and behaviors which they are here actively trying to diminish
Sure, that sounds mostly fair to me. Except on the silly genocide point, which is maybe revealing of something. Again, I do not have a personal opinion on it and never expressed one beyond refusing to endorse the progressive party line, which seems to have taken on the quality of a religious purity test.
especially if you get defensive and rude over polite, reasonable responses
Defensive, sure. But almost never rude. I’ve made a massive effort to avoid insults and mockery because I understand it’s counterproductive. That is unlike very many of the people who I’ve had the temerity to contradict or disagree with on this platform. It sometimes feels like others often don’t made that distinction (between testiness and outright insult), and take any contradiction of viewpoint as a licence to get personal. You seem to be fair-minded: If you looked more closely, I think you might see what I mean.
The general tone of your comments, i.e. generous but a bit mystified, suggests to me that you just happen to share the prevailing values and assumptions and opinions here. That will go a long way to getting you a good experience.
Again, I do not have a personal opinion on it and never expressed one beyond refusing to endorse the progressive party line, which seems to have taken on the quality of a religious purity test.
I think it would help to know in more detail what went down here. If we’re talking about justifying, perhaps even unintentionally, genocide in either the sense of mass killing or mass removal by other means… I think it’s pretty understandable that civility starts to go out the window a bit. Arguably the position itself is uncivil, whatever words are used to support it. When your start to talk about the right to exist or not, to not be killed or forcibly removed by a state… that’s a life or death question and people will react that way. There are some issues there’s no room for reasonable disagreement on.
That said, on wider issues, as someone firmly on the left, I do completely agree that the left can get kind of ridiculously emotionally invested and toxic over even minor disagreements from other leftists that absolutely don’t meet the above threshold, even on questions as banal as pure strategy vs actual ideological disagreement. But it’s hard to say if what you experienced was the latter and not you possibly being oblivious to your part in the former without more detail.
There are some issues there’s no room for reasonable disagreement on.
There’s always room for reasonable disagreement when the issue in question is a word whose definition contains an element of intent and is therefore unfalsifiable.
When the pattern of behaviour gives very clear indication of intent, the denial of this indicates that either you’re in favour of it, or don’t think it’s a bad thing.
When what folk see makes them feel sick to their stomach, such as a child being shot in the head, or families being shot in line for food due to a scarcity created by those making the people line up like animals, it’s going to elicit a visceral response. I personally could not fathom how a human being with functioning empathy could be fine with that.
You’ve already stated you like discussing with people of privilege. That I’m alright, Jack attitude when it comes to life and death is pretty disturbing. What makes us feel is what makes us human.
I’d argue that this empathy is selective. Were you as exercised by the horrors that were inflicted by the other side in this particular conflict? What about the handful of conflicts in the world, for example Darfur, where the scale of suffering and atrocity is unarguably worse than anything happening in the Middle East? People seem to know inside-out the situation in Gaza and who’s responsible and how terrible they are. Much less interest in, say, Myanmar, or even Iran, where the government seems to have inflicted years worth of Gaza’s suffering in the space of just a few days six months ago. It’s revealing.
This discussion isn’t about empathy, it’s about genocide. Changing the topic to a different, irrelevant subject as an attempt to deflect, distract, or disengage with a thought is something known as whataboutism.
As an example, let’s say the answer to all of your questions is “yes.” Does that change the fact that a genocide is happening in Palestine? No, it does not.
Now let’s pretend the answer to all of your questions is “no.” Does that change the fact that a genocide is happening in Palestine? No, it does not.
If you think the left is not politically educated enough, the solution to that problem is reading books and sharing knowledge and educating your peers, not engaging in the very same purity tests that you find so problematic.
Ya man this is a bad faith discussion. I can understand why you got banned.
whataboutism is just marginally better than personal insults and arguablY more counter productive.
This is whatabouttery. I care about Darfur, Myanmar, Tigray, etc. That doesn’t take away from what is happening in Palestine.
You have yet to describe why any of those situations are worse than flattening schools, hospitals, collapse of healthcare, full blockade of food, medical supplies, water, people living in camps where disease is rampant.
How is Iran killing a number of civilians worse than killing civilians, starvation, disease, shooting babies in the head?
All your post is doing, is showing bias, and a lack of care about what is happening there. The problems is you cannot persuade someone to care about human suffering, and if you don’t, why should I engage with you in a logical debate?
Your problem is, you don’t care, and you want people to be fine with you being fine with children being shot in the head. You’re on a left-leaning platform where people give a shit about their fellow man. People who give their time to work on open source generally have empathy as a core view.
Post your pro-Israel views on Xitter, or reddit and you’ll get the validation you prefer. Its an echo chamber close to yoir political persuasion. You enter a place that think differently and prepare to be challenged. Ultimately, if you want to be an empathetic human being, prepare to be wrong. Can you handle that? Your bio suggests you won’t engage if downvoted. I’ve not down voted you, but I’ll tell you you’re wrong. I say you’re wrong because I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt and I’m assuming you’re not evil.
I can’t respond to such a circumspect answer.
I can only answer generally that there still sometimes not room for reasonable disagreement where intent is involved. Courts absolutely do prove intent for some crimes beyond a reasonable doubt… someone could still disagree, but by definition it isn’t necessarily a reasonable disagreement.
Murder (vs manslaughter) in most jurisdictions is a question of intent. We prove it to the point of no reasonable disagreement all the time. That’s the very standard we use.
Sure, I get that. On this particular question, it seems clear to me that no such “beyond reasonable doubt” exists.
Categorically, as you claimed before? Why not? If we can prove intent of an individual action beyond reasonable doubt, why not an action by an organization of people?
Or are you now acknowledging intent can be proven beyond reasonable doubt but that it hasn’t been in the case you were banned for arguing it?
The second. Anything that is technically unfalsifiable can be “proven” beyond reasonable doubt in a court of law, I understand that. Anyway, I find this subject stultifyingly boring, I don’t have anything else to say on it.
There’s always room for reasonable disagreement when the issue in question is a word whose definition contains an element of intent and is therefore unfalsifiable.
This sounds to me that you would rather discuss semantics, than spend five minutes trying to actually falsify the term “genocide” when applied to Palestine [0] [1] [2]
These links alone are enough to prove intent from the defence ministry.
Yeah the dude is trying to point it a “their problem”, while he is trying to excuse a genocide. I don’t know about the ban, but it’s funny that these kinds of people always think they are somehow victims.
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.
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.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.
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.
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!
“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.
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.
deleted by creator
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?
I’m mostly here to argue about politics with people who aren’t conservatives or libertarians - just like you, I think engaging with different opinions is healthy, and I’ve had a hard time finding leftists to argue with elsewhere.
Now that is a genuinely interesting comment! I assume you have a thicker-than-average skin. But how do you go about not getting banned? My literally centrist views got me insulted and mocked to oblivion, and banned in two communities. It was so tiring.
Insulted and mocked is par for the course in political discussions. Banning too, although it’s annoying when that’s overused. Perhaps you should set up a centrist instance specifically for political discussion, and not ban anyone unless they spam?
But why should we accept that insults and mockery are par for the course? That’s my problem. Federated social media is no better (or hardly any better) than other social media on this point. Starting your own community of people you already agree with - to me that seems to totally defeat the point of political discussion. In democracy we should be able to talk civilly to people we don’t agree with. Done properly, it’s also more interesting.
True. I concede that it’s far better without insults and mockery. Although none at all is also bad. Gotta be balanced and flexible. If you become hypersensitive to even mild insults and mockery, discussion becomes very sterile. Risk-free. Constrained. Frustrating.
Usually the answer is a bunch of very hard-working mods with the right idea, a sense of humour, a desire to be fair, and the ability to be decisive. Takes a lot.
Lemmy is ostensibly leftist, so purity beatings will continue
until morale improvesalways, it just goes with the territory. The Left always eats its own (the Right too, though they typically wait until they are in power first, instead of right out of the gate).Also, YSK that tankies aren’t actually “leftist” - just bc they call themselves that does not make it true.
If you don’t think left-wingers can be authoritarian, isn’t that just a no true Scotsman fallacy? You don’t like the idea that people could genuinely be in favour of socialism, against the wealthy, etc, and also happy to murder people in the street and put kids in camps to make it happen.
Which, by the way, it is definitely okay to be against that. I’m just saying that “authoritarian left-wing” is a real thing.
I mean, if it looks/sounds/smells/walks like fascism, then at some point we should start to wonder if it is fascism? Even/especially when people who notoriously do not tell the truth and are extremely well-known for hiding their true intentions say otherwise.
I am less interested in political theorizing, and more whether I will be grabbed off the street and sent to a concentration camp (personally).
After all, you know what the Bible says: fuck the poors, let them eat
cakeeasily-prevented diseases and die, no need for justice or mercy, just lower taxation on the wealthy and it’s all good bro, just trust me.Or perhaps we could be skeptical and not simply do things because people attach a label next to them that we like. Anyway I am not stopping you from moving to North Korea if you like, where everything is wonderful, in theory.
Fascism and authoritarian communism are different things. Fascism is built on and relies on expansion through war, whereas authoritarian communism can survive without that.
Fascism is built on the idea of purity and strength, and the pollution of the blood of the pure race by dirty foreign influence. Fascist rhetoric holds the Leader as the ultimate ideal, the perfect man to emulate and sacrifice yourself for, whereas authoritarian communism upholds the ideal of the Party or the Revolution.
This is not nitpicking, this is important, because of that expansionism and reliance on an enemy I talked about. Fascist nations must be at war, it is part of their support structure, they cannot survive without a war to fight. Their society is built to support the military. You cannot make peace with a fascist nation. They will always attack you. Also, their obsession with purity means they purge their ranks of anyone not considered racially pure, or male, which is a big disadvantage compared to communism.
Authoritarian communism can survive by focussing on conversion of their society into the communal ideal of a Marxist system, and their security structures are all built around that. Thinking correctly, not believing in capitalism, being educated in socialist modes of work, etc. Education is emphasised, with a strong bias towards one correct way of thinking, to make you a perfect worker, no matter who you are or where you came from.
When authoritarian communists purge, it’s usually not for race, or sex, it’s for your beliefs and ideals or your class loyalty.
Learning how to recognise different kinds of danger is important, because it lets you make the right choices to survive.
You seem to be speaking sincerely, yet while entirely missing my points. I was not speaking against communism, I was speaking against “communism” in name only, while actually being fascism in disguise. For example, if you think about it, doesn’t almost everything you say work well as a description about Putin and modern Russia, both of which many call “communist” (despite being ostensibly a “democracy”, while in reality a totalitarian regime, and definitely capitalist rather than “socialist”)?
This idea that the likes of Russia, China, and North Korea are simply going through a fascism phase after which they will eventually emerge into being ideologically pure seems the height of naïveté to me. Never once in the entire history of the world has that ever worked out in practice, and there is no proof that it ever will. However, this idea that in the meantime all other forms of government must be converted into your theoretical ideal, despite going against all logic and history, THAT style of thinking is going to LITERALLY get me ACTUALLY killed irl.
Some modes of thinking are actually genocidal in their outcomes - and yes I know the counterargument is that “it’ll be worth it later, just trust me bro”, but as I said I do not believe that.
Anyway, this is not a politics community and thinking ahead to how my death can better serve someone else’s theoretical ideological agenda is somewhat triggering to me for some reason, so let’s not go any further into this tangent. I’ve had this identical discussion over and over before and it never seems to solve anything at all ever.
I want to disengage here, but I hope you will continue to think about the points I raised. Fwiw, I promise you I’ve put literally decades of thought into your points already.
I think perhaps we are arguing past each other. Clearly you and I have different definitions of fascism. If you don’t want to discuss it any more, that is perfectly fine, of course. I certainly apologise for my sloppy attempt to define what makes fascism different, I did not even look up the various authoritative sources, like Hannah Arendt.
I agree that it’s not just a theoretical game. It’s a very real distinction that effects billions of people. If China had been a fascist government after the Soviet split, say, we might have had World War 3 long ago.
The same might apply if the USA was always a fascist state, as so many on the left assert. I think it might be soon, and it has always shared some characteristics, as Arendt pointed out.
But it isn’t one yet.
Russia obviously isn’t communist, as you say.
It’s a dictatorship of the managed democracy variety, a corrupted shell. Right-wing, with fascist elements as part of the coalition, but Putin is not a Fuhrer, even though the cult of personality is well-established.
You raise a thought about North Korea, though. If the popular conception of the place is correct, it does share a lot of the aspects I mentioned as being fascistic.
Clearly I need to sharpen up my definitions and knowledge again before being a useful partner for discussion. Thank you for your patience and your replies.
Now explain why tankies seem to be extremely fond of current Russia, even though it makes no attempt to hide its rightwing authoritarian nature. “Geopolitics”/“enemy of my enemy” can only explain so much of that IMO.
Hehe, I’m pretty sure I’m banned in at least one community as well, not sure how to check. I rarely visit communities and in stead just react off posts in my feed.
But you must be subscribed to some? I’m guessing nobody much visits them one by one, it’s single feed all the way. I just checked and, yep, a ban is also an unsubscription, so you won’t be informed but the posts will just stop coming.
I see you’ve posted to !europe@feddit.org. I’m still pretty pissed about what happened there. On one hand I tell myself they’re not worth my time if they’re going to treat any tiny ideological micro-dissent with such ferocity (again: I’m a frigging centrist). On the other, they’re clearly still the best Europe community on Lemmy, unfortunately for me. That community was literally the reason I signed up in the first place.
Well, I checked it now, and found a thread about immigration with some fairly centrist takes ( https://b.piefed.social/inbox/posts/https%3A%2F%2Fjlai.lu%2Fpost%2F41340213 ) so maybe your position isn’t the issue?
As I remember it, the community I was banned from was one that claimed to be for a united left, but where they kept posting memes about how voting is stupid. Eventually, I had enough and posted that it’s as if they’re working for the Republicans, which I’ll admit was not very constructive, and that got me banned. Not something I agree with, and I doubt they’d be as strict with someone who posted in disagreement with me, but that’s hard to know :l
found a thread about immigration with some fairly centrist takes
Indeed. !europe@feddit.org seems relatively uncaptured by ideology, but still, I basically got banned for wrongthink rather than for breaking any actual rules. Last time I checked, the particular mod seemed to have gone away, but I can’t be bothered begging to let back in.
I doubt they’d be as strict with someone who posted in disagreement with me, but that’s hard to know
That’s very diplomatic and generous.
again: I’m a frigging centrist
I’m not saying this is the case in your case at all, but depending on the issue this isn’t always an ironclad defense. We certainly have historical examples of political centrists aligning with very extreme ideologies in an attempt to cling to power.
And just logically, some issues don’t have a valid centrist position. There’s no valid centrist position between a flat earther and one who believes the earth is a planet in space. For example, in a science community, I would expect people pushing flat earth to possibly get banned and could see the logic in someone trying to find a middle between those two positions getting the same treatment. Just because there are two sides to an issue doesn’t make a moderate position between them reasonable or defensible. Sometimes one side is just wrong.
I think the merits of the situation are more important than affiliation.
I think the merits of the situation are more important than affiliation.
Do you not think this is what a flat-earther (or climate denier) would say? Before they shower you with factoids (“the merits of the situation”) that “prove” their point? On the contrary, I think that affiliation can be very important in such cases, because science works on the basis of consensus. If you disagree with the herd, then you should expect to have an uphill struggle.
In any case, here we’re talking pure politics, i.e. questions where the responses are conditioned by people’s personal values, and which (theoretically) are open to debate.
Do you not think this is what a flat-earther (or climate denier) would say?
But just because they say it doesn’t make it a valid argument in their case.
My point here was just categorically being a centrist doesn’t necessarily make the position reasonable enough that it should be tolerated. If you’re a centrist between a reasonable position and an unreasonable one, you might still be being unreasonable. It really depends on the specific issue. That’s really all my point was.
Sure, I understood your point. My point was that you are inadvertently making the same claim as the flat-earthers: “Don’t worry about that boring scientific consensus, this specific issue is different”. In science, there’s absolutely a value in tribalism, i.e. respecting consensus (being a woolly “centrist”) when one does not have expertise.
But again, my positions were not scientific but political. Here everyone can have their opinion about what’s “reasonable” or not.
You can always just use an alt. Fortunately I haven’t been banned from any communities I really enjoy, but I’ve always had several alts on standby in case that were to happen.
To me that feels like too much of a concession to the abusive mod. If they don’t want me in their community, fine, I will respect that. In the case of !europe@feddit.org, I can see the quality of the contributions. I know that mine would have raised the level. It’s their loss. And Lemmy’s, unfortunately.
You could make your own Europe community with blackjack and hookers 🤷
Lemmy is a total echo chamber, so I was smiling when you said “it’s not immune to it”. That’s the understatement of the year award. :)
Upvotes make sure that popular opinions are at the top and people even report opinions they dont like to moderators here. Lol.
At least I’m on a good instance with a sane owner, but Jesus Christ, this place can be ridiculous. I’ve been told I’m a troll for disagreeing with the majority many, many times.
Not vaccinering against covid used to upset almost everyone, and it probably still does.
Upvotes make sure that popular opinions are at the top
??
I have sorting set to “newest”.Yeah its a good choice to not get influenced by voting.
What i wanted to say: sorting is up to you.
But maybe the default should not be set to votes.
I think its different defaults in different mobile apps, yeah.
And instance websites? I have no experience with them, is this not a (federated) profile setting?
Not federated and it doesn’t need to be since you use the same instance all the time. It’s the content that is federated to your instance and you just view it on your instance.
my favorite was being banned for being both anti-gaza and anti-israeli, in the same thread.
Would love to see that to see context and the comments in question
Cause this thread seems to be you’re very antisemitic and don’t give a shit about the Palestinians
https://lemmy.zip/post/58290305/24384479
At very least using nazi dog whistles
Idk if you already knew and were just engaging to fight the anti-semitism, but “follow the money” especially in reference to “the rich ones (Jews)” is literal neo-nazi dogwhistling. Just pointing out that you won’t get anywhere productive with that one unless you plan on using a loaded gun as your primary means of communication.
you got me bro. i’m just a Big Zionist Nazi who wants to kill everyone everywhere all the time.
i hope you feel very important and special now, for all your hard investigative work, exposing me for the horrid piece of shit human being. i bet that little thrill you got up your spine for ‘exposing’ me was very yummy for you.
instead of like you know, acknowledging the hard fact that AIPAC is spends a fuckload of money buying off US politicians… to get them to vote for weapons packages… nah that can’t be real. it’s that i’m a nazi who hates jews, but also i love israeli and hate palestians. we can’t be looking at facts because facts are thinks that nazis and jew haters and palestian haters would look at. we can’t do that. we can’t make statements based on the facts of the political situation, no sir.
hey, did you know i don’t use pronouns on my lemmy profile and that means i also hate an want to kill trans people! yeah! that’s how all of this works. anyone who isn’t on your side and goosesteps the way you think you should goosestep, is your enemy.
Tyty for proving the point!
you’re welcome.
now leave me alone and let me keep being a zionist nazi who wants to destroy all of society by citing wikipedia articles and statistics.
let me keep being a zionist nazi who wants to destroy all of society by citing wikipedia articles and statistics.
So that was why you were banned and comments removed?..
There is a lot of truth to what you are saying here. Lemmy users are very quick to categorize other users into extreme categories, such as nazi or fascist, based on a few comments they make.
How many actual nazi or fascists do we have that are Lemmy users? Can’t be many.
the legit facists and nazis don’t exist in public accessible spaces. if you follow any legit reporting you know they recruit in like discord, but the have their own tech spaces out of the public eye. sadly they are often far smarter and far more tech savvy than the leftists that claim to oppose them, at least the dummies here who claim that.
ProPublica and other sources tell these stories, but they’re written at a grade-level that the labeling lemmites can’t understand, because it’s legit reporting instead of sensationalism.
You might also notice that basically no legit hard hitting news sources ever get posted here… but all the shitty rage bait leading headlines do… because any these fools probably thing FrontLine and ProPublica are Zionist or something, despite them having some of the best reporting on the issues they claim to care about.
It is cool at least to see there are smart and reasonable folks here, and sometimes there are super cool threads full of them where the dummies don’t even show up because the reading level of the comments is too sophisticated for them.
when you said “it’s not immune to it”. That’s the understatement of the year award
My post is stuffed with strategic understatement. I wanted people to take it seriously so I had to try not to lose them.
Yeah the China one is atrocious. It’s that one account along with 3 others doing it throughout the fediverse who can’t seem to understand why people are critical of the narrative they pushed when constantly using extremely questionable sources. Favorites are either the an extremely Christian or the ones, yes multiple, based in Washington DC
!birding@lemmy.world mention! Easily my favorite community here too.
My experience is much the same as yours. The Linux community is usually a bit agressive everywhere. I have been banned for questioning things as well. Still, I’d never go back to mainstream social media platforms.
This reflects my experience, approximately.
Yeah… Lemmy/Piefed is a mixed experience for niche interests. I fear a set of “insulated hyper-political echo chambers,” to put it somewhat crudely, is not going to attract the masses from corporate social media.
It’s kinda my fault, though. I’m not putting enough effort in seeking out those niches, much less posting in them; it’s too easy to doomscroll.
I keep telling myself to dedicate more attention to “specialized” forums like HN or SpaceBattles or DPReview, but alas, my brain keeps failing me there too.
I think it is too early for such specialized niches tbh. The vast majority of those continue to die off due to lack of content. Even if you rigorously posted something literally every single day for three years straight - as so many of our communities have done before, just look back into our history - the community can still die off due to lack of engagement when nobody else is posting alongside you.
I don’t mean to focus entirely on the negatives here, just saying that merely posting is by itself insufficient. Additional posters and other engagers are not going to magically spring up from nowhere.
A lot of the issues can be solved by technological improvement - e.g. whenever you click on a link to a post and it goes to some other Threadiverse instance rather than automatically opening up in your home instance, where you can reply and vote and that applies your chosen filters (hehe, dark mode?:-P) - that leads to frustration rather than drawing people further in.
In the meantime, I think we need to accept that the audience here simply is not a large enough size to support whole entire communities that nobody even knows about and therefore will not participate in. Also, a LOT of people currently on Reddit are American, Christian, and centrist or even right-wing, who ABSOLUTELY do not feel welcomed here (what with all the constant calls for the deaths of everyone in any Western culture, especially the USA right now, what with all the invading other nations and such). So since the Threadiverse has chosen to remain tiny rather than welcome others to come join here, the audience for the vast majority of niche content simply is not and will not in the foreseeable future every be here.
This instead of a community dedicated to “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine”, we just have the likes of c/tenforward and c/risa that more generally hold all content in a larger category. Perhaps accepting that and posting to those larger categories will help make them more lively? PieFed offers post and user flairs to help sort content so that we can have our cake and eat it too - both aggregate into the larger communities (for discoverability) yet still help people find the niche material that they want as well. I think Lemmy was talking about eventually adding something along those lines as well.
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.
this was well written and a good description. I’ve seen a lot of the same. thank you for putting your thoughts out here :)
Thanks, I appreciate that.
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!
Why not !linux@lemmy.ml and !privacy@lemmy.ml which are more popular than the ones you linked?
Because where’s there’s a choice, I’ll take the non-Marxist-Leninist option.
Well, the guy is a Zionist, so it’d probably go really well.
I assume it’s for the same reason as me: to avoid the tankies like the plague they are.
I encourage everyone to continue actively promoting alternatives to .ml communities.
Also, to add:
Information hygiene here is bad.
Every day, nearly every time I scroll the feed, some spicy headline goes past. When I go to look it up, it’s often completely made-up misinformation, or a warped ragebait headline, yet it’s voted right to the front page.
…I thought Reddit refugees would be sick of this, and more careful/skeptical, but apparently not. I’ve even talked to some users who don’t understand the distinction between opinion columns and news.
Every day, nearly every time I scroll the feed, some spicy headline goes past. When I go to look it up, it’s often completely made-up misinformation, or a warped ragebait headline, or a literally bot-written Tweet, yet it’s voted right to the front page.
I think this is the thing that bothers me the most about Lemmy. I thought we all came here to get away from this intentionally misleading bullshit, but I guess not.
The political subreddits, especially the “politics” ones, are the absolute worst about this. Like, there is so, so, SO much real shit to get mad at about the current US administration, so why is most of what I see completely cherry-picked rage-bait bullshit??
Edit: Also, same as imaqtpie, I’m totally stealing “information hygeine” for calling out posts like that.
Yeah.
For a while, I came here with the attitude of “don’t block anything,” but the politics subs are just too much. It’s not that they post misinformation, but that it’s always at the absolute top of hot/new comments, drowning everything else out.
people don’t think.
they react.
…I thought Reddit refugees would be sick of this, and more careful/skeptical, but apparently not.
“I thought the behavior that they engaged in on the other site wouldn’t happen here on the new site!”
shocked pikachu face
Yeah while Lemmy has been great for refugees from reddit. Lemmy’s decentralized approach makes it very difficult to deal with bad faith actors.
More than a few extremely bad trolls/people that were banned from Reddit for very good reasons have infected Lemmy over the past few years.
I remember when I first got here, there’s ALWAYS the innitial shock of “what IS this place???”
Once I figured out what this place was, I asked what I thought was an obvious queation.
“If people can interact with the same communities from different instances, wouldn’t it be easy to just make a new account on a new instance? The name might be the same, but the instance is different, so it’s a different account. And since anyone can host an instance, what’s not to prevent someone from hosting hundreds or thousands of instances with the explicit intent on being malicious?”
When I asked that two years ago, I was told by several members that would never be an issue, since instance owners can defederate with instances.
Which I don’t think solves the problem. It seems to me in a cat and mouse game here it’s not the admins who hold the advantage. Seems like the troublemakers hold the advantage.
Because everything the admins have is reactionary. They can only ban after the troublemakers cause trouble. But then they’re back in 10 seconds.
The admins aren’t paid. The mods aren’t paid. It seems to me if troublemakers wanted to shut everything down they would do it with a coordinated attack. Having thoussnds if not millions of bots all at once overrun the human mods.
Eventually the mods and admins would have no choice but to shut down. Too little resources to keep up with the work of running a popular instance.
And thats kind of what happened with lemm.ee. Not trolls per se, but a lack of resources. They ran out of money and resources to host an instance, and that’s without the traffic of overwhelming trolls.
Yet when I said this, I was told I was wrong. Yet here we are. Now you have 1 troll who manually makes account and is banned. Makes account, gets banned. Makes account, banned again.
Thats ONE troll, who honestly seems like he’s doing it for his own amusement rather than malicious intent.
What happens when there’s a much larger concentrated troll attack?
The only way I can think of to actually solve that problem is a whitelist, and that’s a thousand times more work for unpaid moderators and will produce the echoiest of chambers
The other reason that lemm.ee shut down was its intentional choice to open itself up to all-comers. Hexbear, Lemmygrad, incels for whom no means push forward harder, all are welcome come right in. Obviously it became too much for the mods to keep up so they quit, thereby leaving the task of moderation to their instance admins, who also subsequently quit, and therefore shut down the entire instance. You can correctly say that it was toxicity that killed that instance, but the other side to that is that they were the ones who opened themselves up to that choice.
As the subscriber numbers for the entire Threadiverse continue to fall (now at ~35k monthly active users, down from the post-Rexodus peak of ~55k), there may be some lessons in there for us all to learn from. I am not entirely certain but perhaps one is that while echo chambers are bad, the opposite of that (a cacophony of shit takes, like 4chan?) is exhausting and arguably equally bad, just for different reasons. It turns out that when nobody filters what you have to say in any way, a lot of what gets said under those conditions ends up being not worth hearing, objectively speaking (in the sense that people leave rather than stick around to hear it).
The people who left reddit to join Lemmy aren’t representative of the average reddit user. They consisted of a fraction of a percent of the userbase and generally were the type to be calling out bad information hygiene. It might surprise you, but everyone who ever used reddit doesn’t behave in the exact same way or value the same exact things. Tbh, I think the information hygiene was much better here shortly after the API exodus, and it has slowly degraded again over the past few years.
Btw I never heard information hygiene before but I’m going to keep using that, it’s a great term.
It’s definitely been a term for some time. I don’t know who invented it, but I heard it elsewhere.
I love it too.
Though /all is more intended for discovery, not as a “frontpage”, no? Subscribe to some interesting topics, block offensives?
Now that i think about it; yeah, “hygiene” is mostly left to you. But i think that’s kinda expected of a emancipated(?, mündiger) person, the alternative being, the instance deciding what you should see. Also, there’s a mechanism to hide bots? Voyager has it.It still an attention drain for the whole Fediverse.
It’s zero sum: every eyeball on made-up garbage is a someone not engaging with authentic content. And from the looks of things, it’s draining a lot of attention.
It’s easy to say “just deal with it yourself,” and I do, but it’s still not good for the health of content I do see.
I was baffled when the other day a bot decided to show up in !buyeuropean@feddit.uk posting a very clearly vibe coded project that aggregated companies self made claims, which we all know is the best source! It currently sits on 300/15 vote ratio with comments being thankful for the “research” they have made. https://feddit.uk/post/52795270
The internet is either dead or im getting crazy. Like, what are we doing here? They are even getting upvotes on em dash riddled comments with paragraphs on unimportant, irrelevant shit. Please wake the fuck up. This is so stupid and actually had me in loss for words. Thought people on here with how much they hated AI would at least be able to stop one. Zero media literacy.
The message has been corrected 3 times already in response to user feedback and changed its whole style of handling corrections at least once - that is highly unusual (next to unheard of) behavior for a bot? Maybe someone ran the initial text through an AI for cleanup but that’s a far cry from being a clanker themselves personally.
As for the project itself, I did not need to look all that deep to notice that it found several brands that were improperly labeled, at which point I can well understand people upvoting at least a partial solution as being better than nothing being done about the situation at all.
Its fairly normal actually. Projects like Open Claw can be let loose on the web and because of the openes of the fediverse they don’t have many obstacles in doing so. I also do not believe there is no human at all behind it, but what ever triggers it does not check what the ouput of it is. There so much 0 information filler text and the common AI structure that I do not think it was just used as “cleanup”.
I do not see much value in a partial solution if I do not know what is correct and I end up having to look it up myself anyways. Its just a waste of water. It might be a good list to start from but the information can never be trusted doesn’t matter how much tokens you invest.
