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 here 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 wrist 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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It does have a bit of a echochamber (defederation and moderation) problem, i agree. We should look out for that.
How does Lemmy.zip have an echo chamber / defederation issue?
If it does, this is the first I am hearing about it, and I find it of great interest.
If not though, then why does it bother you that other people may have made a different choice than what your instance has done?
Uhm, more generally, not only lemmy.zip. Most of lemmy is more left-leaning + tech, while more conservatives might feel more welcome with the (defederated) tankies. This can be a problem, with fueling extreme views.
Most of Lemmy is also white and male in addition to being left-leaning and tech focused. We really could use more diversity across the board here.
There are no ads here, and no corporate Algorithm to contend with, plus everything is entirely freely offered. If we were more welcoming to mainstream normal folks, people would be outright flocking here.
In fact, people have checked us out and even made accounts, but at least half the people that came here have since left, often self-reportedly after remaining here for at least one or multiple years. We are driving them away in droves. Possibly we do not (collectively) want them here.
What we “need” (in order to survive) vs. what will actually be done are entirely separate matters.
mainstream normal folks
Everyone who isn’t white and male, you mean?
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?
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.
What is degrowthing? Never heard of it before
All explained on !degrowth@slrpnk.net
What searches have you attempted?
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, or a literally bot-written Tweet, 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.
And I had an argument with a mod, who had no problem with an LLM engagement farm Tweet as long as its “the right message.”
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 upon paragraphs of unimportant, irrelevant shit. Please wake the fuck up. This is so stupid and has me in loss for words. With how much people hate AI on here I thought they would at least knew how to spot one. Actually 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.
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.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.
…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
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.
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 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 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So, you’re a debate bro who argues Syrian refugees increase crime and terrorism, trans women in sports and children accessing trans healthcare are legitimate issues, and support Israel and claim there isn’t a genocide.
You say shit like “So many hypersensitive thin-skinned vacuum-cleaner owners! Perhaps they’re projecting their insecurities because deep down they know I’m right.” and argue intolerance that people don’t support your terrible viewpoints?
You’re peak fucking reddit mate.
To me the good of the Fediverse is that it highlights dishonest people like yourself.
hahaha oh boy
…The fediverse is not magically immune from it… …ditch all politics…
the magical free-speech experiment launched by idealistic commies of course collapsed in an authoritarian heap almost immediately
the commies just wanted a place to dictate where they couldn’t get banned
but everyone still says “look reddit bad”
Holy cow that comment history. Geez. Yeah. If this is who is complaining about the Fediverse as an echo chamber then we must be doing something right.
On the contrary, I think the impulse to check a user’s post history and judge them is a bad habit on Lemmy.
Take me. Scroll through my history, and you’ll probably peg me as a AI Tech Bro and a… closet neolib, maybe? I dunno. But if it’s along those lines, you could not be more wrong, on either count.
With the exception of extreme trolls (or moderators doing their thing), I think Lemmy’s culture of “purity checks” is poison to the platform. It turns communities insular, toxic, and angry like it does on Reddit, governed by takes that have nothing to do with the particular thread. It kills the focus of communities. It rewards conformance.
And this thread is a good example. I thought OP was raising some good general points, but digging previous comments up threw all that out the window. I’ve seen this happen in other threads, where a technical or fandom discussion devolves into unrelated, raging arguments on something I did not come there to read.
Yeah god forbid we judge people by the things they say, right?
Counterargument: I don’t want to engage in good faith with a bigot.
It hardly needs to be said, but the problem is many people here define “bigot” as “someone who doesn’t agree with me”.
Said dude who wrote this shit:
And it is at least partly because of a radical overreach in policy demands over the last decade by the “T” in LGBT. It has generated an inevitable backlash that is now hurting the other letters in the soup, of which I am one.
Maybe it’s you who are the problem, at least sometimes?
Good someone went to the trouble of digging that up. A link would have been useful. I stand by everything I have ever written, otherwise I would have deleted it.
Good but then do not bother people with your “bigot is a meaningless word nowadays” when you say such hateful shit. That’s just pathetic.
I have never written anything “hateful”.
If you don’t want to be judged by extremely toxic takes, don’t post them.
That is the same as saying “no disrespect” then immediately saying some extremely disrespectful shit . Sorry you deservedly lost all credibility in my opinion.
I don’t know if the original poster posted those takes, but if they did they deserved all the blame. I mean there are literally thousands of hours of unedited video shopping the genocide. To even try to say it didn’t happen means you’re a troll a shit box.
Thank you for expressing perfectly the points I didn’t have the energy to make myself. It’s a comfort to know that there are other people here who still believe in free expression and enjoy hearing opinions they don’t necessarily share.
PS: But judging by the upvote tallies, we’re outnumbered about 3 or 4 to one. I have no idea how democracy will continue to exist if this is representative of the offline world.
PS: But judging by the upvote tallies, we’re outnumbered about 3 or 4 to one. I have no idea how democracy will continue to exist if this is representative of the offline world.
You’re judging the resilience of democracy based on upvotes and downvotes?
Free expression goes two ways, dude
Free expression does not mean no push back. You shouldn’t complain about someone calling you out because they don’t agree.
However, I don’t like it when people get banned from communities for disagreement. Unless you spam, or do not engage in a good faith argument (both of which are noise, not signal) you should be allowed to post.
I have literally never complained when someone disagreed with me politely. I love debate. I don’t like rudeness, insults, mockery, brigading, and all the rest of the litany of social-media toxicity.
Get a thicker skin. The world is not designed to cater to your specific sensibilities. Taking a shitty opinion and gussying it up in pretty language isn’t some magic spell that makes you immune to push back, and the fact that some people are less than polite doesn’t invalidate their response.
You want to be able to push buttons with your edgy “it’s just a debate bro” opinions while being spared impassioned responses. Too fucking bad, bro. Either man up and get thick enough skin to wade in the water or stay the fuck off the beach.
This comment makes my point. I’m arguing that federated social media would be a more pleasant place, with more interesting contributions, and definitely a wider demographic profile, if less of the comments were aggressive and profanity-laden like this one.
I’m not sure the majority of us want to make this a more pleasant place for people who express the ideas you do. You’re free to express them, but you’re not free from criticism.
And you’re fucking wrong. We don’t need the sterility of traditional social media because that only existed in the first place to be advertiser-friendly.
You aren’t better, more correct, or more valid because you play the respectability politics game, you’re just bitter that the game isn’t as effective here without the incentive of advertiser-friendliness to wield as a cuddle.
Either grow up and learn to meet people where they are instead of expecting people to play by and cater to your personal preferences, or fuck right off.
Charlie Kirk got exactly what he deserved.
Luigi was a hero.
I was waiting for this comment. Since others won’t bother checking, here’s the fact-check.
who argues Syrian refugees increase crime and terrorism
Incorrect.
trans women in sports and children accessing trans healthcare are legitimate issues,
Correct.
and support Israel
Correct. I support every sovereign country’s right to exist.
and claim there isn’t a genocide.
Incorrect. Literally no opinion because it’s unfalsifiable.
On the vacuum cleaner, I was totally right and stand by my based take.
Its a sovereign country that is the colonization of an existing people’s home 😅
Its a settler colonialist nation trying to build an ethnostate in someone else’s homeland, and currently doing so by overt ethnic cleansing 😅
If any state is a legitimate one then all you have to do to legitimize any settler colonial state is set up a government and all of a sudden you’re allowed to be there and murder or displace all the other inhabitants, and any attack on you by those colonized people facing the wholesale destruction of their society can be claimed as self defense 😅
I mean almost every single country was established the same way. The only difference is Israel is doing it now in modern times when we should know better.
Yes, though isreal is perhaps more completely commited to building an ethnostate than many countries have been, at least to my knowledge of history. Which granted, I don’t know that much. I’ve been trying to learn more
No. Not all settlement has been like this. This kind of systematic land grab is a recent phenomenon. It’s not comparable to the vile conquering and pillaging of the older times. It’s worse.
I think you need to review your history. Not what you learned in high school.
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.
It wasn’t me, but looking at your moderation log and the messages in question, I would have called it “islamophobia and downplaying neo-nazi crimes” and banned you just the same. Others are welcome to have a look at those messages and judge for themselves 🤷
Yeah their mod log is wild, and only amazing they haven’t been banned from more.
I guess that’s what they meant by stopping politics?
They can also look at the whole post I wrote to clarify what happened, which is linked.
Everyone is the hero in their own story, and sadly Islamophobia is widely spread with people that call themselves “liberals”.
Everyone is the hero in their own story
Pot, meet kettle.
Except that it wasn’t me who banned them. I am just looking at the modlog and their own explanation of what happened.
I know you didn’t ban them. But you’re also considering yourself the hero in your own story when you go around Lemmy criticizing people of an extremely similar political viewpoint as yourself for not being left-wing enough and intimating that they are Islamophobic if they make any criticism of Muslims whatsoever. Seems like a self-defeating MO to me but what do I know.
Ironically, it’s fairly similar to people who claim that any criticism of Israel is equivalent to anti-semitism. It’s possible to criticize behaviors, groups, and/or cultures without being hateful towards them. Quite frankly, if you read Islamophobia from the two removed comments in the modlog, it says a lot more about you than OP.
This is a complete misrepresentation of what happened. Did you even read the messages they were banned for?
The full story is that the mod admitted banning me not for what I wrote but for what they thought I meant. That’s just outrageous.
What I actually wrote was (1) a factual correction to some comment downplaying the scale of the jihadi terrorist problem a decade ago, and (2) the anodyne observation that we cannot just dismiss as illegitimate the concerns that voters have about the effects of immigration.
I don’t know why you’re so keen on sullying me, to the point of alleging that you’ve looked into this when you obvious haven’t. I’ll keep things civil and leave it there.
https://sh.itjust.works/modlog?userId=203917
The two comments at the bottom.
Edit: Okay, I see it was a whole thread and those were the only two comments that got removed for whatever reason. I still don’t think I’m misrepresenting anything but I don’t really care to argue about it.
Great post. I’m frequently reminded that 40k people is so much more than it seems as I consistently encounter users who have been here and quite active for 3 years and yet I don’t recognize them.
That ban from c/Europe is a badge of honor in my book. One of the nice things about the modlog is that anyone can quickly verify whether bans or comment removals are justified according to their own perspective. It shouldn’t always be as necessary as it currently is, but with people on Lemmy constantly throwing around accusations of bigotry, nazism, genocide denial, etc, its quite useful to be able to quickly view a user’s moderation history. Honestly that might be the most useful feature that Lemmy has, aside from the ability to federate.
However, I do have one minor quibble with your post.
for me this was quite a shocking confirmation of the intolerance of a certain section of the (mainly US) left.
To ascribe your banning from a European community on a European server because of an opinion on a European situation to the US left is quite unreasonable. Also, the mod who banned you appears to be German. This is one of my pet peeves about Lemmy, that Americans always seem to take collateral damage in the most random threads lol. The Lemmy user base is significantly more international than the reddit user base in my experience, and thus the anti-American attitudes that seem quite common outside of the US are frequently exhibited here.
I don’t know that there’s anything that can be done about it, but I do know that it’s unproductive to blame Americans from the outside looking in. I mean it’s unproductive to blame average people for the actions of their government anyway, but it’s especially annoying coming from people who don’t even live here and often lack a lot of context and empathy with their angry rants. None of this applies to you personally btw, but I’m just saying it for the record.
Pushback accepted. You’re absolutely right, in the main case I mentioned the community was (technically) German and the mod was German.
Alas, there were a bunch of other incidents on other communities that left a really bad taste in my mouth and in the end convinced me to avoid literally anything even slightly politics-adjacent on Lemmy. To be clear: I have totally mainstream political views, I don’t regret anything I wrote anywhere (I would have deleted it otherwise). Anyone is free to look it up and argue back if they (or I) can be bothered, but we all know that this is unlikely to be productive (to put it politely). The de-facto impossibility of genuine debate on anything even slightly controversial does feel like a serious failing of social media. Discovering all this up close has unfortunately been a part of my experience here.
Yes, and it’s not like the US far left isn’t extremely intolerant, that’s absolutely a true statement. But I feel similarly in terms of how I try to use Lemmy. It’s hard to gauge how much of the toxicity around political topics is exclusive to the Lemmy userbase, and how much is just an unavoidable failure of social media in general. Our specific flavor of extreme left wing toxicity is pretty shocking when you first encounter it, but it’s really no different than the more mainstream types of political toxicity you would encounter on reddit. Instead of worshiping Trump they worship Xi and Putin, but the unwarranted aggressiveness and complete detachment from reality is similar.
One of the nice things about the modlog is that anyone can quickly verify whether bans or comment removals are justified according to their own perspective.
Not really. Most of the time it’s like "So-n-so got banned Reason: "
So you click the context to see whats happened, and the thread is deleted. So you can’t even see what was said. You only see the topic title.
Or if the whole thread isn’t deleted, you just see “Comment deleted by mod”.
But if the comment was removed, it usually has the transcribed comment directly above the ban reason in the modlog.
However, you are right that the modlog is still very limited and could be much more functional. There are ways to remove posts and comments without them appearing in the modlog, usually by banning the account entirely with the content removal box checked. Then it will show the ban, but all of the removed content is simply gone. It’s a thorny problem to solve to be fair, because people have also used the modlog in an abusive manner, so it’s kinda important to have the ability to actually nuke really bad stuff without it reappearing in the modlog.
Also if you try simply scrolling through the modlog it’s obvious that a bunch of stuff is randomly omitted and completely unclear why. It’s only really useful to check the histories of specific users or mods, because you can sort that way and everything for that particular user seems to come up properly.
Banned: Rule 1
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.
So a good time apart from the usual cestpools of life: political and news communities.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nice feedback :)
I also share the similar experience. As long we stay alway from politic the fediverse is much more nicer.
Unfortunately that is exceedingly difficult to do. Everything here wraps back around to it - it’s in practically every community regardless of whether they were ostensibly for sharing memes, comics, or even discussions on “Fediverse” matters.
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.
Yeah. Federated social media is even more prone to this effect than centralized. This is the single reason why I believe Lemmy can’t possibly become anything meaningful on a global scale. It is a purgatory built in the image of long dead websites where we all wait for the rotting corpses of old media to wither away.
Lemmy seems structurally much better for this, as different instances can independently prune their list without needing one true culture to grow. If people want their social media to be a clubhouse rather than a gladiatorial arena, that’s fine. Go find the spaces that accommodate your preferences. Lemmy supports it.
But what about the problem of trolls just continuing to create new instances to circumvent bans and defederation? Is there really a solution to this beyond hoping we don’t reach a critical mass where this becomes a real problem?
In my experience most trolls just do low effort trolling, so simple interventions can quash a lot. While some people do get so into social media they make multiple alts for ban evasion, it’s much easier for mods to ban an account than for the troll to make it so after a few cycles they’ll just get tired of it.
And if there’s an instance so open that people can automate account creation so that trolling is just as easy it’ll probably get defederated.
That seems to be just hoping for no critical mass though. If it ever grows large enough, you’ll definitely get people willing to put the time in to disrupt things for their own entertainment.
My experience of trolls getting bored was from Reddit. It’s so easy to ban them and filter out fresh accounts that practically no equation of troll vs. moderator effort would ever be anything but a waste for the troll. There was one guy who set calendar reminders to flame us in modmail every 90 days or whatever when the longest mute expired and it was just amusing. He set up all this infrastructure and typed out a big flame message and we just hit a single button.
Only truly automated trolling would be meaningful, and that requires a home instance that doesn’t put in restrictions or hurdles in account creation. Which will quickly become obvious as an attack vector and then defederated. And federation of new instances can be restricted so they don’t get to just unleash hell. I’d be more worried about actual DDOSes than a troll storm.
I’m sure there are fake accounts flying under the radar here now, and they’re a big problem on Reddit, but trolling is easy to manage.
Sadly, a conclusion I’m leaning towards as well. In theory this system should allow an even greater mixing of ideas than Reddit and its ilk, there’s no central authority determining which subjects are forbidden. But it seems we just do that to ourselves anyway, and since each instance and each community are so much smaller than Reddit it’s much more effective. The same “single giant impersonal central authority” thing that’s a downside of Reddit also means that it’s easier to seamlessly encounter everything that is allowed under it.
I don’t really know how to fix this since it seems like most people literally want it to be this way. We don’t like having our views challenged, it’s comforting to look around and see that everyone agree with you.
I will add that challenging someone’s viewpoint respectfully is quite a different thing from a lot of what goes on in this social media environment.
it’s comforting to look around and see that everyone agree with you.
True, and personally I find it a bit of a mystery. The norm for a “discussion” is a thread stuffed with “me too” comments where everyone agrees with each other. What are people getting out of this intellectually? In practice it seems that many people are not using social media to exchange ideas at all, they’re doing it mainly to affirm their membership of this or that tribe.
I’m eagerly looking forward to more silly, niche communities. Communities like /c/pigeon@mander.xyz & /c/stick@sh.itjust.works are wonderful examples of people providing genuinely human and silly fun content. It shows there’s an actual community, not just nerds advocating for Linux.
I do find a few things annoying about the federation system, like opening links directly to lemmy.world on my desktop an having to surgically recreate the link on my instance if I want to interact with it at all. I figure it’s part of the growing pains and we will find interesting ways to solve it.
Still, I feel so much better using this platform. I feel like contributing isn’t just padding the Reddit admin’s pockets and being used to fuel AI models. Y’all are a much more chill group anyway. I’ll keep posting my food here.
Communities like /c/pigeon@mander.xyz & /c/stick@sh.itjust.works
The !communityname@instancename format works better, it’s more universal to other platforms/apps. !pigeon@mander.xyz and !stick@sh.itjust.works
I do find a few things annoying about the federation system, like opening links directly to lemmy.world on my desktop an having to surgically recreate the link on my instance if I want to interact with it at all.
You can copy paste the URL into you instance’s search box.
But I do think we also need this feature https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/2318
You can copy paste the URL into you instance’s search box.
But I do think we also need this feature https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/2318
Since I use my phone for Lemmy 100% of the time I sometimes forget what a massive issue this is. A feature like that strikes me as critical.
Fwiw, PieFed has had it for many months. It is not uncommon to wait for a feature for >5 years in Lemmy (like moderator reports federating between instances) so if it is truly “critical” for you, there is a way to get it right this instant. I don’t know of any PieFed instances in Sweden but there are some nearby.
I’m happy with my instance, with my admins and with my /local feed. And with Lemmy at large. It is not a feature that’s critical for me (I am unaffected as I only use my phone for Lemmy anyway).
But thank you anyway!
you should comment on my Github feature request to bump it lol
I agree about universal links, but I’d also highly recommend Lemmy Universal Link Switcher plugin. There is also a similar one for Mastodon.
Thank you for contributing and for this introspective analysis, but thank you most of all for writing it yourself and not using a random word generator to do it for you. It’s a rare treat to read human prose these days.
Thanks, I appreciate that.
