Just blocked lemmy.ml from my Lemmy account, and I swear to god it’s one of the best things I’ve ever done on this platform. My homepage feels actually clean now.
For the past few months I’d been seeing a lot of tankie posting and pretty much far-left propaganda on my feed. It got tiring enough that I finally checked my blocked-user list, and realized pretty much everyone I’d blocked was from lemmy.ml. So I just blocked the whole instance instead.
Saying this as someone who considers themselves a leftist: I used to think Lemmy itself was an echo chamber. Turns out lemmy.ml was the problem the entire time. Probably the reason I tolerated it for so long is that I agreed with a lot of what they posted, but like an oversaturated meme, I’d had enough. Browsing the platform was starting to feel way too tiring instead of fun, which defeats the point of being here in the first place.
The breaking point was seeing some dude post a “meme” implying North Korea and China are basically communist utopias and that the West sucks. I mean, the West does suck, but come on - you’re saying North Korea is the ideal the West should strive for? What the hell…
I’m on .ml and just don’t see this. I moved here from .world after the cat food ban. The stupidity burned too much for me to stay there. I’m unsubscribed to most of the lemmy communities where the political crap is, so maybe that helps.
Should i ask what the “cat food ban” was?
It’s a long story but basically after some stupid drama, lemmy.world banned discussion of cat food unless there was scientific evidence presented that the cat food was healthy for the cat. The drama had been about vegan cat food discussions in the vegan discussion group. Vegan cat food turns out to be a thing and appears to have enough approvals to be sold in pet stores, but people on .world wanting to talk about it should come over here to .ml. No I wasn’t a participant in the vegan group discussion itself. I made some posts in the surrounding drama thread that you can probably find in my .world profile from shortly after I joined.
??? I’m still confused.
Lemmy.world’s admin (not community mods but the actual instance admin) decreed that lemmy.world was going to be like Wikipedia, where anything controversial that you posted had to be accompanied by a research citation, more or less. The specific statement under dispute was that brand XYZ vegan cat food was ok to feed to your cat. A bunch of idiots howled “cats are obligate carnivores, hur hur! They can’t survive on a vegan diet! Mods, delete that comment!!!” and the site admin sided with the idiots. So I had to escape from the stupidity. Are you still confused? Btw the vegan cat food is perfectly fine for cats as far as I can tell. No I’m not about to go look for
diffslinks so some of those details may be garbled by now.I don’t think the citation policy was ever enforced on anything else, but anything that crazy is hard to forget.
.world also defederated hexbear because it didn’t like hexbear’s politics, but I’m a regular on hexbear’s covid community (which is pretty good and not that political) so I had to go elsewhere for it. I can still reach it from .ml but this convinced me that the federation model is a failure. There’s no giant Spez overlord who can censor you, but there are 100 petty instance admins who can censor you instead. I’m still on Lemmy to stay away from Spez though.
WHAT that is BONKERS
oh man, I forgot about that shit. I’m pretty sure I got banned from some communities for that.
🤷 I just blocked them back and moved on.