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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: December 31st, 2023

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  • @[email protected]

    You deserve an explanation as to why your cross-post of this was removed from [email protected]: that instance has higher standards (though not quite Beehaw level) and we try to keep things “welcoming”, thus we made our top community rule #1 to “be nice”. And I felt that coming out swinging calling the whole country a “hellhole” went against that rule. I see that that is the top rule in this community as well, but I suppose there are differences in interpretation as to what that means.

    Options from here: You may appeal to the head mod @[email protected] if you wish, as it does not strictly violate the rules of Discuss.Online itself. And/or you could re-phrase the title. Or you could even make a post asking for clarification of the rules/expectations - although note that this was already done recently and by far people seemed to express distaste for all the politics stuff, so we try to direct that to [email protected] instead. I’ve posted there myself in the last week, almost made another post there yesterday as well, and I highly recommend that community for things such as this. In fact, their sidebar text says that they love such self-posts of commentary, as opposed to like “news”, and even “discussion of and disagreement about issues is encouraged!”

    So I get that you wanted to vent and discuss, and there absolutely are places to do that, I just wanted to protect the members of that community in particular from being constantly barraged with politics, bc as you seem to agree, dayum that shit gets old fast - it becomes overwhelming to so many of us to see all the BS that goes down almost daily now:-(. And maybe that’s one way that we can deal, by placing limits on how often we have to think about it each day:-).



  • I don’t feel like I’m being secluded

    You probably aren’t… yet, but you will become thus, increasingly over time.

    For the past half a year I have defended lemmy.ml, saying that its users are nowhere near as bad as hexbear.net or lemmygrad.ml (just… visit them, you’ll see fairly quickly what they are all about). And that much is still true - the users are quite often innocent.

    Though not 100% so, and now this with the admins, I will block lemmy.ml soon. I have already started blocking some of its communities, like all the politically-themed memes were simply not fun to keep appearing in my feed, unlike the many other meme communities scattered throughout the fediverse. I am missing out on basically nothing but contention, which has noticeably improved my experience of the Fediverse.

    Yes, I am throwing out some babies along with the bathwater, but I am okay with that. The point is to foster a sense of enjoyment and peace, rather than constantly argue with people who are not engaging in good faith to begin with. I left Reddit for good reason, and believe it or not I would have left it regardless of all of spez’s bullshit.

    Imagine my dismay when coming to the Fediverse, I make the mistake of ONE comment in chapotraphouse, and I got like a hundred replies of the most batshit insane, derogatory, bad-mannered and bad-faithed “arguments”, which lasted for WEEKS long after I stopped responding. I was being “dunked on”, which they LOVE, and which - apparently, much to my dismay upon finding out - is the literal purpose of that community. I almost left the entire Fediverse after that.

    Well, it did not help that I made the same mistake upon replying to a comment in some political community on lemmygrad.ml. It was those two events together that almost made me leave. However, fortunately for me Lemmy v0.19.3 came out just as I was mulling that issue over, so I blocked those two instances, and now I am as happy as a clam. Honestly this issue with Lemmy.ml is nowhere near as bad as those two instances. But it’s still not great, it still impacts people - e.g. it will impact you far more than me - and it will hurt all of us if we cannot recommend to irl people to come to the Fediverse, b/c they are likely to see that stuff and be put off by it. And therefore all the content that they may have offered for our consumption is gone along with it.

    An analogy might be: how much fecal matter is okay to appear in your food? We can spend a large amount of time curating our own experiences here to avoid that, but how likely is a non-Linux-using average person who might want to leave Reddit and come here to be even willing to do that, before they can start enjoying their interactions here? That “shit” demeans us all.

    That’s like saying all US citizens are awful because they live there.

    I suggest a different analogy instead. Crime in the USA in general has gone down substantially in recent decades, but let’s say that you wanted to walk the streets of NYC in the 80s-early 90s. It’s not “just b/c they are there”, but rather “crime is MUCH more likely to occur there, than other places”. If you choose to go there, you are making a probabilistic bet that you will survive the encounter. Maybe you will… or maybe your child will become Batman after you get brutally murdered in front of him, but either way, past some threshold it becomes a foolish bet to have chanced it, in return for what gain even?

    You and I do not get to decide upon the preferences of others. Many will leave Lemmy altogether, rather than put up with this stuff. I at least will block Lemmy.ml, but that leaves the newest and least aware and therefore most vulnerable people to still have to deal with it. In the meantime, we are conversing about it, letting people know about the problems that we all face, together.


  • It affects people who think that Lemmy.ml is the default instance, as it says itself and people say that any instance is fine to join.

    It also affects people in the batshit insane comments that come from people on that instance, like lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net, that occur with noticeably higher frequency than from other places.

    It also affects people on that instance who talk as if into a void with many people blocking their instance but they don’t even know that. And that effect will increase over time.

    It lowers traffic on the Fediverse, decreasing overall engagement, and drives people away from it altogether. It also lowers the likelihood that you can recommend to people irl to check out the Fediverse - when THAT stuff (e.g. defense of genocide) is seen it tends to turn people off who aren’t used to it or who are tech or culture savvy enough to know how to handle it.

    So it does affect you, I promise, even if not directly, and over the next few months will do so increasingly as your instance turns into more of an echo chamber than it has been in the past, as more people block it either individually or at an instance level.

    Agreed that many of the users are regular people who are just innocently getting swept up in all of this due to the actions of the admins. Just like users of Reddit were when spez did his power flex moves.

    You might want to at least make an alt somewhere else so that you get some experiences that your .ml account increasingly will start to lack.