Obviously, the internet has always been a toxic place, (the phrase “flame war” has been around for decades,) but it seems to have gotten so much worse over the last few years. I used to think decentralization of the internet would fix the worst of it, but Lemmy seems to have gotten worse alongside the rest of internet culture, proving me wrong. How do we fix/improve this culture of toxicity?
Block .ml and don’t engage with .ml users And hexbear and lemmygrad
- Shun the toxic people. Block them and don’t look back.
- Seriously, block them. They’re still gonna toxic whether you’re there to observe it or not.
- Find a well moderated instance that isn’t afraid to show toxic people the door
- Block .ml, grad, hexbear, dbzer0, and quokk.au
- Block any other instance or person that centers itself around identity politics
- Block all the news/politics communities. Just get your news from actual news services. The comment section for most news/politics posts here is worse than an entire garbage dump on fire.And you’ll end up with like 3 federated users left which is basically my /all feed now 😑
Cool cool, nice to see us dbzer0 anarchists are finally being rolled in with the rest of y’all. Once all of liberal Lemmy has self-isolated, recentralized, and started monetizing; maybe then we can finally have some leftist unity “in exile?”
In the anglosphere, if you have the right opinions about the past you’re just someone who’s knowledgeable about history, mature and aware of the tragedy of human nature and shit and as long as you have a job it’s considered a charming quirk
But the moment you apply those lessons to now and start having the right opinions about the present, you magically become either a naive fool who’s attempts at change will surely only lead to further disaster, or an evil communist lich who is lying about caring for humanity, who simply loves death and craves power for power’s sake.
Liberals as a group were always only playfully gesturing at the idea of following the facts and science wherever they go to form your understanding of the world, but their understanding of the world is trapped in the amber of civic religion and thinly veiled victorianism, and they’re coping with the crumbling of their ideology irl by returning to 1950s medicine and declaring everyone who advances beyond them to be some combination of a chatbot, foreign, and mentally insane.
The worse they feel about things, the more anyone with a principled critique will irk them and get the tankie stamp
It’s nice to have you guys in the trioka though, I like reading a funny comment and seeing it came from one of you
Amber.
dbzer0 as an instance and Hexbear seem to have been getting on better over the last year or so, gradually!
Probably because the anarchists there stayed while the radlib “anarchists” moved to some other platform.
Yep, that would make sense!
It started a while ago, due to being too “tolerant to tankies”. Sorry, only left unity possible is with liberals of course. Vote
I’ve seen .world getting rolled in with us lol.
obviously they are terrible, they still are on lemmy!
Welcome to the revolution, fellow Tankie.
Aren’t they also rolling in blahaj?
Blahaj is pretty anti-communist, it’s usually just transphobia and homophobia that causes reactionaries to group them in with us.
Well that and the person saying block anything identity politics
Don’t you know that identity politics is everything I don’t like?
At least it’s consistent with their views on politics 😂.
why they now got them politics in my star wars and star trek
I’ve said this before but the main reason I dislike lemmy.world more than any of the other lib instances isn’t even because of their general political views, it’s how controlling they try to be over the rest of the fediverse. You cannot just lifeboat to here from Reddit one day and then try to take over the entire thing.
I know if I, for whatever reason, decided to start my own instance and try to become the main face of the fediverse that it wouldn’t go over well.
It’s stuff like that that makes me think the instance is run by actual feds. Their weird obsession with controlling all of Lemmy and trying to create a narrative about the “bad parts” of Lemmy so no one visits those places and learns about opinions beyond the western status quo is exactly what the US state department would want.
I once joked that they were the United States of the fediverse lol
Piefed was created to further that obsession w control; to remove dependency on lemmy developers.
Even have mods dedicated to the usa dem party lines
settler mentality
The memes of production community bans you if they find out you’re a ML lmao
I got banned for “voting while tankie,” lmao
Found out that mod thinks piefed is perfectly fine but the ml slur filter is a step too far…
Cognitive dissonance is common there.
I got banned as a troll for pointing out their mods love of attacking left
Honestly there were always arguments on the internet, but far and away the most peaceful time in my memory was the time of tens of thousands of independent forums and/or websites that profilerated up to ~2010.
You could just like a thing, blindly wander into a community about it, and spend your days, weeks, years talking to similar, friendly people in personable ways. If you got into arguments, mods just banned you for causing ruckus in their quiet corner of the internet. I find the nameless ‘talking to the masses’ that all social media does is the issue.
Humans thrive on making interpersonal bonds, and to speak to the same person twice online is borderline impossible today. Hexbear probably straddles the middle-upper limit of an enjoyable community size in that you will repeatedly interact with the same people over months or even years. But once you lose that person-person accountability, you inevitably become a pile of ragebait and nothing else.
That’s why IRL community groups inevitably have an upper limit before they federate into subgroups - a sea of voices talking over each other doesn’t really achieve much of an enjoyable atmosphere, and overall lends itself to sensationalism.
Surely nothing toxic about telling people to block multiple whole communities because of identity politics or whatever. The lack of self-awareness holy shit
…And you’ll end up with like 3 federated users left which is basically my /all feed now
For some, this would be cause for introspection. For reactionaries, it’s just an unfortunate side effect of having to block all of the ‘wrong’ people.
Everywhere I go smells like dogshit. I really need to work out a large list of people to block.
EVERYWHERE I go smells like SHIT!
Must be those DAMN TANKIES that keep POOPING in MY pants
How does this person expect to live in anything but an online echochamber? Do people not realize how inundated they are with propaganda demonizing the Bad Countries?
I had a talk about waves of internet culture with my nephew a few years ago. He said, “yeah, remember back in 2017 when meme culture was just a bunch of gore and shock content?” And I told him, “I was seeing a lot of shock content in like 2011. I think it’s more about your algorithm, where you’re hanging out, and how you relate to those spaces, rather than any broader trends about how much gore there is at any given time”. And I could see his wheels turn for a minute until he just said, “well shit”
Maybe someone needs to have a similar conversation with OP if their internet experience is so toxic
Yeah, didn’t gore content peak in the early 2010s with those cartel execution videos?
Neither hexbear nor lemmygrad are even federated with .world. I joined .ml because it was federated with both but was not sure I’d miss out on useful tech communities from the largest instance (.world). Hardly see anything worth engaging with there anyway, I think it has actually gotten worse.
.world preemptively defederated from Hexbear when the instance was about to move into the main lemmy fork
preemptively defederated
“as a last resort”, of course
Looking at my last posts, seems I mostly post here anyway even for tech things. Blahaj memes are good, shame it got defederated but it’s more understandable
I check it sometimes and it’s just…so dull
I wish these racist, ziontist loving, Republican-raised liberals would just admit they’re Trump supporters and shut the fuck up already about their plans for total Fediverse conquest
We get it, you don’t want to see a single opinion that would offend your rich daddy’s sensibilities which your trust-fund ass pretends not to hold
These motherfuckers actually believe an ideology based on State Department press releases is somehow normal or remotely sane, nothing is more tiresome and revolting than fascists with an identity crisis
I am kind of torn on this issue. On the one hand, yes if you block all political content, instances you might disagree with, then you’re going to end up with a very quiet feed.
The Fedi could really use some more casual content. Our media discussions tend to be short and not very deep, but we also don’t have a pro-consumerist hype culture. We dont have enough concentration of people from any cities to have vibrant locals communities (not even huge cities like LA or NYC, London, Berlin). Even the tech/programmer communities are pretty anemic in content and discussion.
(I guess there’s a fair amount of queer and trans stuff as well, that’s good but is in a way the exception that proves the rule.)
Obviously I don’t want hype-driven consumer culture, but it does often feel like the only thing we do a lot of around here is politics and memes about politics.
the only thing we do a lot of around here is politics and memes about politics
At least for me, that’s what I came here for. But I’ve never been a Social Media person anyways.
Very agreed. People don’t really make “I did a thing” posts, which is sad because that’s usually the best content. Unfortunately, due to the nature of leftist living in a fascist society, it’s not entirely safe to reveal things like living location, interests, posting photos, etc.
And beanies
“How do you create an echo chamber? People are slightly rude to be when I support genocide.”
How to reduce toxicity on Lemmy? Idk, stop recruiting on
they’re blocking quokk.au now? damn just one more instance and we have a hexagonal six
Lemmy.world is going through an interesting evolutionary process. It’s generally the first one people join, and then they realize it stinks (for different reasons), so they leave. Over time this filters their user base to become more and more reddity as only the most reddity users stay behind, like an online social experiment to see what reddit island would have looked like.
One hundred percent. I was on Reddit for a decade and had a curated sub list I aligned with and participated in. When the API changes happened and the app I used shut down, there was no way I was going to download the official app just to see ads and suggested/sponsored content. I took one look at .world and saw that the most redditiest redditors were also flocking there. So I joined Lemmygrad and was extremely happy with my choice.
The funny thing is that I still need to get on Reddit from time to time, and it’s really normie now. Sure it’s lib as ever, but the culture is much, much more mainstream than even a few years ago. That was probably Reddit’s goal, but I think it’s funny that they essentially orchestrated an exodus all their most insufferable users to .world. Going to .world is like a time machine to 2013 r/all.
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The funny thing is that I still need to get on Reddit from time to time, and it’s really normie now.
I remember someone going, “I use Reddit now because it’s like normal now.” irl. They were incredibly dismissive about the “boycott” over spez, mostly thinking of them as a bunch of loser cranks.
Credit where credit is due, a bunch of them were losers who joined the bandwagon of leaving Reddit. A lot of the concerns I saw around that time on Reddit were that the site was becoming “toxic” and “political”. I don’t really think most of the people that left Reddit left because of any principled coherent stance. They perceived the site changing to be more advertiser friendly as a direct attack on their beliefs. Beliefs that 99 times out of 100 were misogynist and/or racist. Those are the losers that made a new home on .world.
What is truly incredible is how many people on Hexbear were saying exactly this would happen due to their policies. Truly a shocking turn of events.
In a short word, yes.
Reddit was once good enough to join, but is now bad enough to leave. Could be from the IPO, API scandal, or other period. Thus, we have Reddit’s more ideological crowd, but not the ones who are interested enough in the structure of Lemmy.
Lemmy.world provides a generalist, non-committed community that they believe will replicate “earlier” Reddit, though the nature of federation means the people with more niche interests already joined a different server.
Lemmy.world attracts, therefore, terminally online radlibs with no specific interests.
~2 years ago (looks like a deleted post, found the comment by searching for it)
I’m sure others have said similar even earlier than I, just remembered this being something I also predicted.
You know, I never really thought about it, but that “no specific interests” thing is really what is so offputting about a lot of redditors. They are only interested in the social capital that social media upvotes gives and don’t express an opinion or share an experience for fun, but so they can get more upvotes. Their obnoxiousness is a byproduct of their unpleasant and empty existence, not the cause of it.
Yep! It’s not that they are formless, but they are formed in a neutral way embodying whatever is culturally dominant. Humanity is a social animal, and Lemmy.world as a subsection is for those that specifically love the flavor “general, non-descript.”
Me going to .ml when I saw them talking about russian people.
That’s funny, considering some of the most prominent posters on quokk.au are radlibs that lie about communists, and cape for Nazis by ignoring pograms and lynchings to suit their narrative. You’d think that would be right up the anti-communist’s alley.
I mean world hated them before due to how anti genocide they are. So not at all surprising they’d now be cutting them off
I was surprised to see that one on the list; most of the time I go it’s full of libs talking points.
Never mind the Tankie triad, FEAR THE TANKIE DODECAHEDRON
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Personal grievance mixed with rampant anticommunism.
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Its just anarchist.