It was a rather sombering thread, that echoed quite a bit of what I’ve been saying about .ml, the Triad, general toxicity of their Tankie “ideology” for months now.
I know @ptz@dubvee.org was speaking of general toxicity, but the Triad is a huge chunk of it, the culture they create…festers it. They comprise the bulk of the hostility, I’ve personally seen it over and over and over again. All the “Just go back to Reddit” or “just another lib Redditor refugee” comments for someone that dared to have nuance.
Hell, I saw hex users fucking cheering .ee’s shutdown because it was some sort of psyop/CIA/fed/lib/“They didn’t perfectly agree with me” instance. They call feddit.org a “Nazi Zionist” instance for the crime…of not wanting to be arrested and complying with German law…
I haven’t looked to see if they’ve started any “celebratory” posts about Dubvee yet and I also don’t really want to, if they’re there, I already know what they’re going to say in it -_-
Unfortunately, I fear the problem was far worse than I thought.
Ptz speculated that the toxicity has “metastasized”. And you know what? He might be right, it seemed to be a lot better off 2 years ago, now…now I feel we might be losing the battle against the toxicity and I don’t think PieFed will be enough. Complacency has set in
My hope was that with enough instances defederating from .ml and the rest of the Triad, it would be a tad easier to take down toxic Tankies, trolls and their alts. But, few wanted to burn the bridge with the toxic main devs’ instance and now it might be too late. (Cheers to @Illecors@lemmy.cafe and the lemmy.cafe instance, one of the few of note to actually defederate from the entire triad!)
Like ptz said and I fully agree with, this place started with promise 2 years ago, but it appears to be ultimately morphing into 4chan (or like I’ve been saying, Voat 2.0) after all
Oh well, I’ve got some thick ass skin so I’ll probably be here till the end, till the last sane instance shuts down.
I’ll see you there @dessalines@lemmy.ml
/Sadmemerant
Heck, maybe I’ll do a hail Mary and start an instance on a custom fork of lemmy with “normie proof” onboarding while dumping a few hundred in ADs (Maybe even on Reddit itself, HA!). I’ll flood this place with “normies” LMAO
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There’s a lot of bumpiness involved with setting up the fediverse and not every instance, frontend, project and app will work out in the end. The fediverse is relatively young compared to Facebook. Though as we venture further into our journey the sharper we become.
It’s crazy that I’ve been on Lemmy for like 2 years and I think I’ve encountered direct toxic behavior only a handful of times. Obviously I’m aware of the trolls and problematic instances, but those can easily be blocked.
Am I the asshole?
It was an old truism on Reddit that you could avoid 99% of the worst behaviour by just never going on /r/all or visiting the default subs. If you just visit communities you actually like, you have a much nicer experience.
It’s the same here. I subscribe to a bunch of communities I enjoy, and I browse Local on my home instance feddit.uk. I basically never go on the big All feed. And my experience is pretty tranquil; rarely do I see any trouble, and even more rarely trouble that the mods/admins can’t keep on top of.
dunno, this seems a pretty chill instance and your experience mostly matches mine. There are a few knobheads I see around though (I started adding user notes and it’s amazing how any agro chat is always one of the same few accounts)
Damn, you must have blocked a lot of stuff.
You can be the judge of that
That is the worlds tiniest block list IMO. Mine is several seconds to scroll from top to bottom, which is inconvenient to add new blocked instances.
Do you browse your own subs, the local subs, or all? I myself am constantly cruising on “all” for the variety.
Usually “all”.
Why did you block my true love 😭
So she’d have more time for you.
echoed quite a bit of what I’ve been saying about .ml, the Triad, general toxicity of their Tankie “ideology” for months now.
Sorry, how is his post at all about the ‘triad’?
Frankly, I think it’s the constant attempts at instigating flame wars that I find to be so grating, not the users with opinions I find distasteful. I have no idea what ptz’s specific experience was like, but seeing a prominent anti-tanky crusader project their personal vendetta onto this announcement is the kind of shit I find myself constantly rolling my eyes at.
Federated social media is built to facilitate community between people of different preferences, and it’s exactly this constant crusading that’s likely to extinguish it. You think you’re on a mission of purification but it looks more like you’re extinguishing what little enthusiasm there was for lemmy to begin with. Defederation is absolutely a tool for moderation, but making it your entire mission to push for it in every space you participate in is itself a suffocating cancer.
Let people decide for themselves what instances they want to commune with and stop pestering the entire platform into reflecting your personal tastes.
If anyone thinks this is turning into 4chan or even worse, voat, you seriously have not experienced either of those.
Or even Twitter these days.
If you put an average person in here with a minimal idea of what 4chan is, what would they say this place is like?
When they inevitably get scared off because some .ml users were going off ranting about how such such article about NK that got posted was actually western propaganda and that “NK is all good actually”, what do you think they’ll tell others?
This isnt about me or you, we have thick skin and can deal with the BS toxicity and have even become desensitized to it so it doesn’t seem that bad
But we are not the average person and if we want the Threadiverse to succeed and maybe even threaten Reddit a bit, we need the normal users
I’ll take someone claiming that a post about North Korea is western propaganda over someone that is trying to explain, how supporting genocide is somehow the right political choice.
I feel like the people that feel an over presence of “tankies” on instances that aren’t ml, hexbear or grad, are confused that the fediverse is notably more left-leaning than what they are used from reddit, Twitter or other corporate social media. Being exposed to maybe not being that “lefty” after all and more of the right side of the political spectrum here, seems to rub them the wrong way.
Here’s a screenshot of the !worldnews@lemmy.ml As you can see, on the “tankie instance” News positive for Ukraine is getting the upvotes and stuff positive of Russia is getting the downvotes
If you put an average person in here with a minimal idea of what 4chan is, what would they say this place is like?
What is that supposed to argue? That someone random might be ignorant?
But we are not the average person and if we want the Threadiverse to succeed and maybe even threaten Reddit a bit, we need the normal users
That’s all well and good, but we’re still, nowhere near 4chan, voat or even Twitter. Claiming that lemmy is “just as bad as voat” is nonsense and just serves to make people like me dismiss their opinions as someone ignorant and exaggerating.
I hope you’re right
It was a rather sombering thread, that echoed quite a bit of what I’ve been saying about .ml, the Triad, general toxicity of their Tankie “ideology” for months now.
A lot of what Patrick is referring to goes well beyond the ‘tankie triad’ (two of which are banned from most instances anyway).
Hell, I saw hex users fucking cheering .ee’s shutdown because it was some sort of psyop/CIA/fed/lib/“They didn’t perfectly agree with me” instance. They call feddit.org a “Nazi Zionist” instance for the crime…of not wanting to be arrested and complying with German law…
And yet all that happened was with lemm.ee shutting down, hexbear became more isolated because lemm.ee actually federated with them.
Outside of .ml, most tankies are despised across the fediverse.
I usually don’t get bothered by people on the Internet, but holy fucking shit how I was absolutely going crazy over the fact that people unironically shill North Korea.
I’m Korean. We are under constant threat of shit balloons and missiles. They punish people and their family members for trying to leave the country. How can one possibly look at that and say, “Yep, that’s fine”?
It’s more ugly that they are also implicitly saying that you, as a Korean, should just become the plaything of Kim Jong Un. That really you should actually just become a puppet of them.
Said safe and sound somewhere from a bedroom in the USA.
B-b-but on the other hand, someone got a splinter somewhere in your country, so… you know… bOtH sIdEs SaMe?
(logic is not their strong suite, so much as loudly repeating something until people stop arguing back, at which point they declare victory, feel emboldened, and push even further)
Honestly, I got banned from that instance after down voting several posts I disagreed with, which is what down vote is there for, and dude told me to fuck off in the notice like I was running a script or something. I don’t personally care, but I also have zero sympathy for someone on the internet being that sensitive or heavy handed. Probably didn’t deserve whatever toxic nonsense they’d been exposed to, but still, based on my interactions with em, good riddance.
The dubvee shutdown posts makes some valid point, but I disagree on a few others.
The communities I’m in are mostly safe from toxic users
- !movies@piefed.social
- !casualconversation@piefed.social
- !wholesome@reddthat.com
- !lego@piefed.social
- !football@sopuli.xyz
I avoid news and politics, that probably helps a lot on that regard
This might be a call for mods to keep an eye on reports, and for users to post and comment on well moderated community. !fedigrow@lemmy.zip can help.
It’s sad to see Admiral Patrick go, but it’s not all doom and gloom.
Reddit keeps enshittifying (DM shutdown, UK age verification), we might see new people come here soon.
I avoid news and politics, that probably helps a lot on that regard
Honestly, same. As an ML user (this is my UK alt), I never really saw any of toxicity described by so many others, but I guess I just learned early on to put my filters up and have been living in my own bubble within ML.
If a place gets toxic, I tend to just leave instead of doubling down, and that I think is a pattern that might be alien to some because how reddit used to function: you couldn’t just leave reddit politics-wise because the frontpage literally hammered you with it, so you’d have to stand your ground and fight until users or mods waded in. But here? You can leave lemmy politics-wise because the frontpage is either your subs or local posts filtered through your block lists.
I’m very happy in my bubble, and it does genuinely confuse me when someone says “oh, you’re from ML, are you?” and I think “yeah… and it’s mostly quiet, just the way I like it”
Yeah, as long as you don’t engage in current world events there. You will likely not bounce of the alternate reality bubble they’re trying to build. And even then the majority of the most toxic ones on the instance or off the instance. Are a rather small slice. They just unfortunately happen to be in charge of most of it so they have an outsized impact.
you couldn’t just leave reddit politics-wise because the frontpage literally hammered you with it, so you’d have to stand your ground and fight until users or mods waded in. But here? You can leave lemmy politics-wise because the frontpage is either your subs or local posts filtered through your block lists.
How is this different from Reddit? Reddit has a user feed that consists of communities you’re subscribed to and lemmy’s All is the direct equivalent to r/all, i.e. Reddit’s front page, and you could also block communities (at least with Reddit Enhancement Suite, not sure if that’s a feature of the Reddit itself). The main difference is the existence of instances and their Local feeds. Note that it’s been a while since I used Reddit beyond looking at Reddit posts that I found in web searches, might be that the feeds don’t work like I remember them anymore.
I feel the same way, and do the same thing. News and politics will be toxic almost anywhere on the internet I feel like. And I guess general meme communities might too since the subject matter is often news and politics there as well.
Yes, definitely.
I only keep !funny@sh.itjust.works as it’s usually actual funny content and not political messages (whatever the stance) hidden behind memes
!gaming@lemmy.world has been pretty innocuous, and I also like the ADHD and autism memes. But that’s it for me. And I never browse /all, only Subscribed and Local.
I occasionally browse /all to find new communities to subscribe to. Just don’t go to the posts/comments
I don’t want to block half the Fediverse, and I don’t want to make myself spiral into despair by inadvertently exposing myself to depressing news so I stay off /all.
For finding new communities I use stuff like
!newcommunities@lemmy.world !communitypromo@lemmy.ca !trendingcommunities@feddit.nl (RIP)
UK age verification
Isn’t that an issue that literally all platforms that are active in the UK have to deal with, unless they are exclusively doing content that is considered appropriate for children? Or did Reddit do something that is extra-bad?
Not an expert, but from what I’ve heard, if you don’t allow NSFW content you don’t have to comply ?
Per the UK definitions, the concept of “NSFW” is deranged. I made a post on what Reddit is supposedly going to do here.
NSFW content as they define it? It’s one thing to allow porn, but e.g. tumblr had a whole thing about banning transition timelines (AFAIK including ones that only had clothed pictures) and many consider any kind of sex education inappropriate for children. Plus the whole issue of violence and gore, which is a common theme in the news.
I have little faith about the UK being reasonable about this. And AFAIK it’s not enough to ban certain types of content, they also have pretty steep requirements for how fast a website has to moderate it if users post disallowed content, with hefty fines if you don’t comply well enough that would immediately bankrupt many smaller sites depending on how it’s enforced.
I’ll repeat a few things I’ve been saying about this. To keep it
short:less verbose:What people call “toxicity” online relies heavily on irrationality, from the aggressor and/or the target. And politics raises the stakes of everything, so irrationality + political engagement is specially prone to generate catty behaviour, name calling, uncalled combativeness, and all that crap.
Now look at social media. You’ll see irrationals infesting every platform. Reddit in special encourages it, and most lemmings are from Reddit.
Why this matters: because I believe people here are focusing too much on .ml and Hexbear, without noticing the problem would still persist without them.
Yeah, while people can have their valid criticisms of the culture of various instances, we need to be extremely wary of the idea that the problem will be solved if we just isolate outselves from the folks we sit furthest from on the political spectrum. I’ve seen toxicity from folks on all sorts of instances, even if some have more (though I’ve honestly seen more from certain instances other than the triad)
Literally every platform has toxicity, regardless of its political makeup. If we want to improve the culture of this space we can’t just scapegoat a couple instances (that to be fair, do seem to have big issues from what I’ve seen from other folks, though my interactions have been mostly cordial)
And leftist spaces seem to chronically struggle a lot with in-group fighting and toxicity because we’re all driven by our care for issues of moral importance- which often lets us justify being shitty to one another if we can frame someone as the villain in the story of an issue we care about.
I think creating a culture that is unwelcoming of anti-social, bad faith behaviour regardless of whether we agree with the stance or not would help massively. But that is a difficult thing to create structure around doing.
Now look at social media. You’ll see irrationals infesting every platform. Reddit in special encourages it, and most lemmings are from Reddit.
True, but on other social media, there’s millions of users and it’s a LOT easier to dilute the toxicity when a SMs D/MAU is being measured in the millions
Why this matters: because I believe people here are focusing too much on .ml and Hexbear, without noticing the problem would still persist without them.
Yea, but I really think .ml not being defederated from is causing a bit of a feedback loop encouraging similar toxic behavior in other users for their own, even non-Tankie, reasons
Yea, but I really think .ml not being defederated from is causing a bit of a feedback loop encouraging similar toxic behavior in other users for their own, even non-Tankie, reasons
Can I just say that if instances start flipping from being lemmy instances to piefed instances, as is slowly happening, then lemmy.ml will potentially find itself more marginalised and the questions of defederation will happen. As it stands now, lemmy.ml is the foundational instance for the lemmy software and that is likely the primary reason why many instances won’t pull the plug.
Generally, when you read a comment that makes you wonder just how dumb the person who wrote it is, it comes from one of those two places. At least they’re consistent?
Indeed, without ml hexbear and grad those irrationals would spread without reason to other instances, turning everything into a cesspool. And luckily we have the tools to not engage with them, block them or outright defed from their host.
From the day those protests started Lemmy was far far worse than Reddit for anyone but further left progressives. I have fat more often been called a Nazi here for like warm takes. It’s a spectrum and Lemmy is definitely a far more toxic place then reddit is if you don’t agree.
yep yep! ive been called a nazi because I psoted about the Green Party lol
The Green Party is farther left than the Democrats. But people throw around nazi and fascist as some sort of insult, not even knowing the meaning of those words.
I know exactly nothing about the green party but like Jesus fuck you’d think leftists would have learned that’s an important word to stop diluting given many of us are living under a system slipping into actual full blown fascism and it’s an increasingly big problem globally
Its so painfully harmful to leftist causes to go around accusing your fellow leftists of being a nazi for not being your exact flavor of left. We all need to cut that shit out and grow some emotional and interpersonal maturity.
Thats because in general the “leftists” that occupy spaces like ml arent really leftists at all, they are anti-western idologues. You will very rarely see them posting about things left wing people tend to care about like workers rights, cost of living, housing or things like that. They are far more interested in geopolitics, especially on issues where they can make “west bad” posts.
While I understand your argument that their ideology is defined in large parts by other factors than political alignment, I do see them talk about those kinds of things, specially through the lens of demanding communism as a resolution to those problems, or calling for the abolishment of the class that facilitates those problems 😅
I saw some research about this recently let me see if I can find it, it was based on reddit communities but I think it applies to lemmy as much if not more.
ah here it is
ABSTRACT
Social media’s role in the spread and evolution of extremism is a focus of intense study. Online extremists have been involved in the spread of online hate, mis- and disinformation, and real-world violence. However, most existing work has focuses on right-wing extremism. In this paper, we perform a first of its kind large-scale measurement study exploring left-wing extremism. We focus on “tankies,” a left-wing community that first arose in the 1950s in support of hardline actions of the USSR and has evolved to support what they call “Actually Existing Socialist” countries, e.g., CCP-run China, the USSR, and North Korea. We collect and analyze 1.3M posts from 53K authors from tankie subreddits, and explore the position of tankies within the broader far-left community on Reddit. Among other things, we find that tankies are clearly on the periphery of the larger far-left community. When examining the contents of posts, we find misalignments and conceptual homomorphisms that confirm the description of tankies in the theoretical work. We also discover that tankies focus more on state-level political events rather than social issues. Our findings provide empirical evidence of the distinct positioning and discourse of left-wing extremist groups on social media.
can u break down what thats saying?
Just the amount of self reflection i’d expect from you. You are a toxic bully yourself.
I think it is worth differentiating between dubvee and lemm.ee on this topic. Dubvee seems to have been shut down mostly for personal reasons, and IMHO if the timing would have not overlapped with the lemm.ee shut down people would just consider it part of the normal churn of smaller instances coming and going.
On the other hand, lemm.ee was a bit of a special case. From the very beginning they invited a lot of “defederation is bad” type of people to their instance and were also one of the few larger instances that decided to keep federating with hexbear despite having first hand experience with their toxicity. So to a large extend they set themselves up to alot of drama 🤷 In addition their technical setup was probably a bit overengineered, adding to the admin workload.
As an instance admin myself, I can’t say that things are overly stressful if you defederate the right instances and quickly ban alts of known troublemakers.
However, I agree that the feddit.org witchhunt was very toxic, and as a moderator of /c/europe@feddit.org I was also directly targeted. But it was clearly a very small number of people that instigated most of it. Discounting alts and throwaways it was probably a single digit number of people doing 95% of the harm.
Uh, I’m not sure if you read a different thread, but in his formal shutdown thread in !announcements@dubvee.org he was quite clear about it being about fighting against the toxicity. He basically got to a good point, but because of the .ee wake he had to start over.
But yes .ee was a special case, it was sad especially being the second largest instance. But a second instance shutdown in a month also citing burnout and toxicity is a red flag.
Now I’m worried if next week SJW or slrpnk is going to announce their shutdown due to toxicity
We (slrpnk.net) are only planning to move to Piefed due to technical annoyances with Lemmy the software. As I wrote above, the level of toxicity we see on our instance is really not so bad.
Is there a post on this anywhere? I’d consider moving to solarpunk to get off lemmy and away from the tankies, but when I tried the .world piefed instance it was incredibly slow.
Not yet. We are waiting for an upstream change that would allow us to import existing bcrypt hashed passwords from the Lemmy database.
In my experience Piefed is quite fast, maybe there was some temporary issue with the piefed.world instance?
Aye quite possibly, there’s a pinned post about it on their front page so its possible its taking a bit of a load battering. I’ll keep my eye out for your instance then.
But is that from a “normie” perspective or from a regular Threadiverse user perspective? Because from a regular Threadiverse user perspective many have become desensitized I feel, and that’s also another aspect of the problem.
Because ptz has been operating on tamping down toxicity with the goal of it being attractive to the average user.
The Threadiverse will not actually achieve much without the “normies”
Can you describe what you mean by a normie? I’m genuinely curious.
Maybe stop posting for a few days and go touch grass. You’re sounding hysterical.
Absolutely agreed. I’ve ran in to some decent people in .ml, but the tankies are ridiculous. Decent instances need to defederate to both remove their trash extremely biased content and to force those goons to make alt accounts and live under sane peoples’ rules if they want to interact with more normal people.
.ml has/had a lot of entirely normal people as a lot of people went to it before and during the reddit exodus and set up communities there, myself included.
Then they should migrate or make an alt.
A lot of them have since left. If they choose to inhabit a Nazi bar though, that is entirely their choice? But I should have the ability to have my own choices too, and not shift the Overton window by having to be on an instance that federates with them.
The point is that, like me, they may not have noticed. If you only subscribe to communities of interest and dont browse everything then you may not ever even notice. I only found out because I wanted to switch instance and after switching i saw how hated .ml was by accident.
After all these years…?
Well, then it sucks for them to have to find out this way, but I do not want to allow such hostages to change my own determined path forward.
That said, PieFed, but crucially not Lemmy, allows for TRUE blocking of all users from an instance. Lemmy has something that is called that but surprise surprise, allows users to DM you, reply to your messages, thereby generating notifications, vote on your content, etc., and so is the absolute weakest “block” I have ever heard of (I am trying politely to say that it is a sham, and is no “block” at all). On PieFed though, any user that individually wants to defederate from an instance can do so - which is a game-changer (enticing me to join PieFed.social long before it was fully ready, since that one feature alone made it worth my while, in comparison to e.g. leaving the Threadiverse entirely b/c I was just so very tired of all the BS that I kept having to put up with everywhere).
They won’t, I think many are testing the waters with PieFed for an ultimate move over, but I have a feeling for the ones that matter *cough* .world *cough* it would likely be a months long process, that ultimately will arrive too late.
https://piefed.world/ already exists and people can import their subscriptions from Lemmy. Not sure what more you expect them to do? Shut down their Lemmy instance?
Well defederating from .ml would have gone far dessalines being butthurt about it be damned, but at this point, idk probably wouldn’t matter anymore
Wish I could easily block all .ml communities (not the comments and posts that .ml users make on other instances, I want to be able to downvote and report them if other non-tankie users can see them).
You can. Just block the instance.
(not the comments and posts that .ml users make on other instances, I want to be able to downvote and report them if other non-tankie users can see them).
That’s how instance blocking works at the user level right now. It only blocks communities on the instance, not users.
Oh, that’s unexpected! Thanks for the correction.
Unfortunately I think some of this perception is an example of the echo chamber problem of social media.
If you’re in the politics and news echo chambers you see horrendous toxicity all the time. But if you’re in hobby groups and interest groups that have nothing to do with politics it’s generally not toxic in my experience.
I’m in both and there are loads of positive and kind communities and people around. I fear the moderators in particular have an understandably skewed view as they have to trudge through the toxic shit every day and protect a lot of the rest of us from it.
I think there is something to be said for more defederation of entire instances where toxic cuktures are allowed to thrive, even if they also happen to host more positive communities too. Those communities need to move and the priority for the Threadiverse tech needs to be enabling movement of communities as easily and painlessly as possible so the toxic areas can be left to fester on their own.
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