I feel like things on Lemmy were pretty chill several months ago, and that’s started to change.
People used to talk each other like they would talk to a neighbor. Now I get the sense that people have become quick to be negative, attack, and not be constructive.
Am I crazy in feeling like the vibe has changed?
The same assholes who were on Reddit being pieces of shit are here too.
It’s the internet, everything is reduced to being shitty within weeks of getting noticed.
The Eternal September found us 😭 But it was only a matter of time
I think it’s just a growing pain of the contradictions of Federation resolving themselves, mostly in the political sphere.
You have left-wing instances (lemmygrad.ml), center-right instances (lemmy.world), and right-wing instances (sh.itjust.works). Even if different instances defederate with each other, there will always be overlap instances (lemmy.ml being the biggest, but also lemm.ee, startrek.website, mander.xyz, programmer humor, etc.). And while individual users can block specific instances, this doesn’t prevent them from seeing and responding to their posts. Communists and Liberals and Libertarians, who each believe the others are literally as bad as the Nazis (and I’m not making a value judgement here - maybe some of them are right), are forced to interact with each other on occasionally political topics.
The hard right, unlike in Reddit, isn’t really a figure here - and moderators on Lemmy don’t know how to handle political disagreements where both sides are within the sphere of acceptable discourse.
I must be ancient here, because nobody has claimed this is like September 1993 all over again…
I am not that old but I know that reference. :)
It’s an election year and Trump is in the election.
A terrible and infuriating time. Brutal year ahead.
At least we had three years of rest, right?!??
Didn’t you guys have an attempted coup in that time?
xXX88Trump_The_Strongman14XXx personally assured me that was just a peaceful protest
Well, not exactly, that orange cockroach has been scurrying around this whole time.
Aggressive yes, and more people deliberately misinterpreting what you say just to feel smug. Also people that don’t understand that a Lemmy comment can’t have the exhaustive detail and context of a Wikipedia article, and they take any omission of such in a comment as ignorance by the op.
A couple days ago someone was trying to debatebro me I told them to eff off and that I wasn’t going to humor their bad-faith ass.
Was expecting to get hate for it but instead woke up to 20 votes on the comment. It’s awesome.
Kinda sounds like you’re the problem, to be honest.
Yeah, probably a little, but this same change was 1000x more noticeable like half a year ago when reddit banned third-party apps. I think it’s reasonable to lament the change, and I kind of miss the tight-knit community from the first three years I was here, but it’s still worth celebrating the platform taking off. Ultimately all you can do is be the change you wish to see in the world.
That said, if we start getting heavily astroturfed with bots and spam I’m going to be a little less zen about it.
That said, if we start getting heavily astroturfed with bots and spam I’m going to be a little less zen about it.
The spammers aren’t here in custom full-force software_dev_lemmy_bots mode yet, but when they come, moderation tool development will increase in effort tenfold.
The nation states are already using their “play Guess The Bot and lose” games. It’s the ones who post often and with clear lines in the sand you need to worry about. Problem is, there is a sea of regular people just like that.
Lemmy needs to go through a fork or three before it becomes viable to the mainstream. Currently Lemmy users produce much less legitimate worthwhile information on far less subjects than reddit, and even Quora shudder thinking about it.
Granted, I’ve only been here for about a week before reddit disabled 3rd party apps. Maybe the first 3 years were the golden years. I’m only speaking as to the bot infestation I see currently.
deleted by creator
I honestly don’t feel much has changed. There was perhaps a bit of a “new” feeling in the start and some excitement about the project, but I don’t think people have gotten more aggressive or anything.
But I think all this probably depends what circles you hang out in. Probably also depends on what instances you federate with.
It’s true that when lots of people join a place online, things can change. What I’m really noticing is that a lot of posts are just trying to get attention. They ask questions or say things that are pretty obvious.
It’s normal for places online to change as they get bigger, but it’s kind of sad to see so many posts that aren’t really about sharing cool ideas or having real conversations. Kinda like this one.
I feel the mainstream lemmy instances have attracted the reddit mob mentality where any deviation from the groupthink is treated as radicals or bots.
Only it’s pro socialism.
That’s because capitalism is an extreme right wing idea
People used to talk each other like they would talk to a neighbor.
You should ask a police officer how some neighbours talk to each other…
Yeah, definitely the vibe has changed. It’s kind of sad.
Hexbear federated
Yup, downvoted to hell on some heated topics. Looks like the commies are leaking and found in pretty much every instance.
One thing I love about lemmy coming in from reddit is that people don’t vote like sheep, so there’s lots of cases where your votes balance out. Meanwhile on reddit if you get even 3 downvotes within the first few minutes your comment is doomed to get slammed into the 50s.
At least in the communities I’m subscribed to and interact with, I’ve still seen it mostly be positive interactions.
It’s been my experience that it’s a couple problem instances where most of the toxicity comes from.
I’ve seen toxic behaviour supported by mods on Hexbear, Beehaw, and Blahaj mainly. World is also pretty bad.
If you’re talking about the two that I think you are, I agree. I suspect my pleasant experience is due to my instance defederating completely with those, which is pretty swank.
Lemmy.ml users are the worst by a long shot. I hear they’re mutants who live underground!
Had an account there. It was permabanneed for telling someone on Hexbear that their meme responses were childish. Ever since then I just block that entire instance from my feed.
Yes I can agree, I am on the way to becoming a T-9000 cyborg humanoid warmachine.
Well i’m here to put the allegations to rest: I do in fact live above ground.
You’re right, and you’re on one of them.
Oh yeah i’ll add ee to the list. I knew I was forgetting someone.
Which ones, if you don’t mind me asking?
Any of the .ml domains are cesspits to some degree, ironically enough.
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Hexbear: Similar to lemmygrad they have their strong convictions, but don’t have the maturity to back it up.
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LemmyWorld: Users are a mixed bag but the admins seem dead set on turning the place into a nazi bar.
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sh.itholefor.nazis: The only thing you need to know about these guys is they have a c/ for conservatives
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feddit de: Literally every user on this instance is dead set on reminding you that Germany never underwent denazification
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discusstchncs de: same story but to a much less extreme extent
I’m only gonna comment on Hexbear and you’re completely wrong. They do have less patience with libs comming there saying shit, but everytime that happens, there’s always people actually engaging and backing up all of their claims. It’s not only dunking.
It’s usually buried under the dunking but I think that’s because hexbear doesn’t have up and down votes, so they have to comment to make their opinion known. It leads to a lot of annoying brigading looking behavior on comments, but at least their good comments tend to be pretty good. Sometimes it’s not worth digging through all the sarcasm, pig poop balls, and picture posts to find it, though lol.
Remember that time the World admins removed the rules against discrimination from their terms of service and got rid of the code of conduct? Racism was legal for a while there.
.ee is my favourite instance because I trust the average user more than the average admin.
To be fair anything is a step up over LW’s antimoderation.
Antimoderation seems to be the norm on Lemmy. For example, I was banned from Beehaw for being “pompous”. I have narcissistic personality disorder, and being pompous is a symptom. It’s a disability that interferes with my ability to display humility. I was being nice, kind, following the rules, doing what I was told, trying to resolve problems peacefully, and the admins said I was pompous and banned me. NPD isn’t a disability when it comes to kindness, morals, ethics, or prosocial behaviour. But I can’t turn being pompous off, any more than I can turn being weird off as an autistic person.
From my experience I think tchncs.de is fine, and lemm.ee is a victim of large userbase. You have few iffy people on slrpnk and sopuli at times, but things like that are best ignored.
As long as the political takes do not start to become obviously stupid or have evil moral intent, a basic level of the hot takes should just be ignored. One needs to tolerate a bit of this stuff just for mental exercise and to “know the enemy”.
I still remember that clash I had with an ecofash on slrpnk. Thankfully they were quickly taken care of but even some of the gold star instances can have problem users from time to time.
Give it 2-3 more months, and we will have a better consensus on how Lemmy will stay for a while. I think the most important part has been solved, that being Lemmy becoming a defacto valid, sane, non-conspiratorial and non-fascist alternative to Reddit that does not need to act like a “safe space”, retaining some open discourse qualities.
In all honesty, I do not want the whole Lemmy to become a singular 100% leftist echo chamber entity, but have instances that also broadly cover the spectrum outside of rightwing lunacy. Richer discussions allow for bidirectional flow of ideas, and it is pretty much established that people eventually start to like too many leftist ideas, even if not all. I have worked for 3 years to help refine and grow Lemmy, and the more established it becomes as anti-capitalist/corporation Reddit alternative, the lesser those shithole Reddit clones and private spaces get to grow (ones where rightwing, Western nationalist, anti-LGBT, pedophilic and hateful elitist LARPer narratives flourish the most). Private spaces should be for personal and sensitive conversations, confidential stuff, or people like activists, dissidents and professionals.
I’m extremely confident that at the very minimum Lemmy will be a nice little hangout spot, but it’s seeming like it’s going to be far more than that from what i’ve seen so far. It really is unique in that different types of shittiness is isolated within instances which means people will converge where they should be and problem groups will naturally DNI with each other leading to minimum conflict in the long term.
What really makes lemmy special is its true freedom of speech approach. And actual freedom of speech, not just nazis talking over marginalized people or single individuals controlling the conversation through their star power alone. You can make a random post, good, or bad, doesn’t matter, and you’ll actually be able to get organic traffic on it. I mean for god sake I made a crappy joke about cutting the mold off of cheese and growing marshmallows on trees and it got the attention that it deserved (which, to be fair, wasn’t much)
Mastodon barely anyone will see you unless you already have a following, and that sucks. You don’t really have to worry about that here.
You forgot Lemmy.ml which is a combination of all your examples.
Really? Even the ones with nazis in them? Really would like to see you justify that one.
EDIT: Oh you’re one of those anticommunist nonces. Okay, discarded.
lemm ee: The owners don’t really moderate and its users reflect this fact. Universally unpleasant userbase.
This is categorically untrue. You can find our administration policy here, and we frequently ban users for breaking our instance rules. At most you could make the claim that we are lenient when it comes to things like heated arguments, as we often give warnings or temporary bans to users in such cases, but on the other hand, our “no bigotry” rule is very strict, and violations have consistently resulted in permanent bans.
We of course don’t screen all posts and comments which our users write, so we can only respond to reports, but I assure you that our admin team is constantly going over and responding to the report queue (which is a big effort, and clearly a thankless job).
By the way, I just want to point out that we have ~3000 active monthly users on lemm.ee, I find it very unlikely that you can make an accurate universal judgement about such a huge group of people.
That’s what the owners of feddit de said too and it didn’t stop their users from constantly leaving harassing messages on anything left of hitler. In fact, it was one of your members leaving a shitty comment that spurred me to add ee to the list, it wasn’t even included initially.
EDIT: You do realize that modlogs are public right? I went through them and was less than impressed with what I saw. It seems your idea of “moderation” is to remove when people call you on your shit, which is especially convenient that someone just so happened to call out that your conservative c/ (why is there a conservative c/!?!) is being run by an actual pedo. So yeah, sums up what I expected from you guys.
I am not really interested in discussing this with you, as you already have an opinion about lemm.ee and seem intent on spreading false rumors about us. I’ve learned several months ago that no matter how much you give to people for free, there will always be users demanding more, so I don’t think there is any chance of you being interested in what I have to say. I am just responding here, so other users who may end up reading this thread don’t come away with the impression that what you are saying is true.
First of all, no user has ever been banned from lemm.ee for criticizing the admin team. Our admins have banned nearly a thousand users in the past ~7 months (just think about that for a second - that is a massive amount of bullshit our volunteer admins have had to wade through in the span of less than a year), and indeed the mod log is public, so you can easily check the ban reasons, which are consistently related to violations of our basic instance rules.
If any moderation team on any of our communities does not follow our instance rules, then such communities are closed. We have in fact had to do this several times before with some conservative-type communities, mainly because they wanted to push the ideas that some people, based on their identities, are less valuable as humans that others. The current conservative community on the other hand is consistently moderating based on our instance rules, and they have incorporated the no bigotry rule into their community rules as well. If this ever changes, then we will take action, just as we have done previously.
Regarding the allegations against one of the mods, I’m not sure if you’ve seen the event they were referencing, but I think it’s safe to say that this event was extremely misrepresented by the accuser. In any real cases of CSAM, lemm.ee has taken drastic actions. We have purged, banned, defederated, reported to authorities, we have implemented some technical safeguards, and we will continue to take action like this in the future as well.
Let me just finish off by saying that we are a volunteer team giving up our time for free. I realize that users want admins to be perfect and moderate exactly in line with their preferences, but we are humans, we miss things, we make mistakes, and we can not possibly be available 24/7 or read every single piece of content posted by other lemm.ee users.
Letting it get just bad enough that it doesn’t cause problems for you isn’t how anyone should moderate. You have to be proactive and get rid of problem users before it gets to that point, make it clear that isn’t welcome, which is something your instance has routinely failed to do.
Also for the record I know that you’re full of shit when it comes to the owner of conservative c/ not being a pedo because conservativism is at its core a pedo ideology, just like all right-wing ideologies; it always comes back to child abuse with those types. CSAM attacks don’t happen in a vacuum, they happen when you foster the kinds of people who are into that shit and you make them feel welcome, which is exactly what your “we’re going to do the bare minimum of moderating” is attracting.
I’ve already made it clear that i’m not going to fold to any of your tricks, and you’ve made it clear you’re aware you’re wasting your time on me, so why you even bothered to besmirch your reputation by even engaging in the first place is beyond me, but definitely speaks to the lack of experience and borderline negligence that you carry about. I sincerely hope shit gets better for you and the mod team and hopefully an actually competent moderation policy can go a great step in ensuring you never have to deal with more attacks going forward, because that shit fucking sucks and nobody should have to go through it. I hope whoever did it is rotting in a jail cell and that’s coming from a prison abolitionist.
Oh and BTW just going forward, don’t tell someone whose complaining about your instance members being harassing little shits “nuh-uh disinformation” unless you’re prepared to get a fatal dose of all that fermented spite unleashed right into your face. Making it about you is the single worse thing you can do in that case and really tells everyone in the room where your priorities are.
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