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…
Experimenting with blocklists is fine and how you find your comfort zone on Lemmy.
I once made an experiment in which I blocked lemmy.world - not out of spite, but to just see what the rest of Lemmy has to offer. Turns out, quite much!
Still, too many niche communities are hosted on .world, so here I am again.
I tend to agree that the majority of communities are hosted on 3 major instance’s its a concern that makes it difficult remove any of the 3 or 4 mega instances regardless of policies or practices.
I see many saying just boycott or block .world but, a decent source of communities im in are listed there. I know it’s against the spirit of fediverse but I don’t see that changing any time soon.
It’s an inherent problem with having both users and communities on the same instances, and just how humans tend to operate in general in that we automatically gravitate to others and clump together.
I think it was @rglullis@communick.news who was saying that in an ideal world there would be two types of instances, one for users and one that only served as hosting space for communities. That way you could block or defederate user groups without losing access to entire communities.
Of course, we’re way past the point where reorganization into a structure like that is feasible. But it’s interesting to think about.
Thank you! At least I don´t feel so alone now. :)
I am still optimistic about it. It will be impossible to make one huge push in this direction, but slowly people will come to realize that this is the most sensible approach. For example, I’ve noticed that !nba@nba.space started to get more activity because !nba@lemmy.world is considering moving out of LW, but are spending a lot of time debating over a lateral move. If only they had accepted when I first invited them to join as mods from the topic-specific instance, this would’ve never been an issue.