I am currently at 100% of the people that I’ve told about Lemmy irl actively chiding me for having mentioned it to them. It doesn’t help that (1) Lemmy.ml is the #1 Lemmy instance in a Google search, and (2) that instance uses Local rather than All when you don’t have an account. If someone told me to consider joining Lemmy.ml, and that first couple of pages of content were all that I saw - especially just before any election in a Western nation - well then now I understand their reaction perfectly, as it is the correct one!?!?

Conversely, PieFed has a number of features that Lemmy lacks, one being the ability to actually block all users from an instance (rather than merely mute communities but not actual users on it - leaving them free to troll you in other communities, reply to your comments, trigger notifications, downvote your content, etc.). Since blocking lemmy.ml, I have had zero regrets, and enjoy interacting with Lemmy communities much better:-).

The real biggest problem that Lemmy has is lack of users and overall dearth of niche content - which ofc wraps back around to why would someone willing come here to be bullied just for being a mainstream centrist or even “leftist” by USA standards (Reddit is based in and its largest userbase is from the USA)?

Bullying is why Lemmy will never grow. That, and how the tools are somehow even more authoritian than Reddit - i.e. there is a modlog but no modmail, nor notification of a moderation event, instead the modlog simply says that a “mod” did something, if you go to the trouble to find out why nobody bothered to respond. And worse, on Lemmy.ml you’ll find yourself banned from communities that you’ve never so much as heard of, citing having broken a rule that seems not written down anywhere. The lack of transparency is very reminiscent of the spez.

Fortunately, PieFed and Mbin offer non-Lemmy options to the Threadiverse.:-)

Remind yourself as often as necessary: that’s entirely your boss’s fault. Nobody is perfect hence I know you made mistakes, you human you, but telling you one set of things to your face while spreading the opposite things to others is just such a dick move.

You have some kind of worth, so don’t let your boss gaslight you into believing that crap that he spouted. Even if some portion of it were true, you obviously can’t trust the source. Find a better source of judgement - yourself even if you have time to heal although it sounds like not, so someone else in the meantime.

Touch grass, seriously, it will help - both the nature and the exercise part. TV has its place too, especially in healing, but you’ll want more than that as you regain your confidence. The good news being that YOU are in control of that!:-)

(I am no psychologist tho, just my personal thoughts)

Practice, maybe therapy even if self guided.

That’s great!

I was just talking with an admin of Lemmy.zip who automatically puts up a community muting of HB for new users joining that instance, but not going so far as to defederate from it. So… that surely helps a little bit? Except when Hexbears brigade a community located on a different instance.

But the example I gave of a mod throwing out death threats to users involves lemmy.ml rather than Hexbear. Both instances are problematic in that regard, ML mostly for the admins and the mods that they choose to protect, while HB the subset of users that go outside of the instance to engage in trolling. In both, it is also entirely possible to have completely sane and normal conversations on the instance itself, which muddies the waters a bit, though the presence of sanity on occasion does not negate the presence of insanity on others.

And I was thinking of editing my comment but instead I’ll put it here, your own posts such as https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/1fmuk7o/post_to_address_the_usual_criticism_about_lemmy/ most definitely covers both the strong benefits as well as strong criticisms of using Lemmy, as well as solid solutions to the latter problems.

Lemmy has a well-known reputation as being a “Nazi bar”. e.g. as mentioned in this example post in r/RedditAlternatives complaining about toxicity on Lemmy, here is one of the comments therein (not from OP but as part of the overall conversation):

If their experience is anything like mine, it’s populated by mostly far left wing Americans who were banned from Reddit for being too extreme. I disagreed with someone about a topical left wing American position and received death threats. In fact I’ve never received that many death threats on Reddit. Lemmy is extreme.

Even if the threats came from Hexbear or one of the lemmy.ml mods who are allowed to make death threats against users without any repercussions, “we” still expose “our” users to such content when we federate with those communities. i.e., for exactly the same reason that we defederate from instances that share CSAM, if we really, truly, genuinely don’t like it when mods make death threats against users, then we need to put a stop to it - by defederating those instances that are known to do exactly that.

Otherwise we give our tacit approval, and moreover whenever we encourage people to join Lemmy instances, we willingly expose those people to this kind of content. Would you expose someone to CSAM, knowingly and without warning them first? Then why is it different when we can see the death threats, delivered by mods, who are not censured in any way, yet still encourage people to come here to Lemmy communities? Are we truly that desperate for content that we are so inconsiderate to them as to expose them to that without warning?

If you somehow have not heard of this yet and really don’t know what I’m talking about, a lot of details are offered in Discuss.Online’s (successful) Petition to defederate from hexbear.net, although that particular mod in question is from Lemmy.ml.

Good to know!:-)

I mean, per bean yeah, but depending on the bean and on the egg…

Anyway eggs are delicious and most people like them, plus you use them in baking things like bread, cookies, cakes, and the like (beans don’t work for those purposes I believe).

And in the USA with the genetically modified chicken clones that never see outside a single day in their short brutal lifetimes, at like <15¢ per egg they were very affordable, although at $1 a pop not so much.

I’m not desiring to argue for a carnivorous diet and especially not against a plant-based one, just proffering explanation to the question (well, at least I took “Geez this country is really obsessed with eggs” as one - perhaps I was incorrect in doing so.)

They are (well, were) a cheap source of protein. Beans 🫘 are too but… well… you know!? 🌬️

You can read in my (successful) Petition to defederate from hexbear.net some stories not only about that instance but also some for Lemmy.ml, including an incident where a mod told a user that they (the mod) wanted to kill them (the OP), then double and tripled down on that thought, all entirely protected by the admins (discussed further here).

When I first considered leaving Reddit, this kind of thing gave me strong pause, and it was only the fact that Kbin.social also existed that got me even a toe-hold into the Lemmyverse. This despite me not caring about Mastodon and thus any of its Microblogs, which lead to me mostly interacting with Lemmy magazines remotely, though with different sorting metrics which did help a little for me to see content that was not merely highly upvoted by people using Lemmy (including hexbear.net, lemmy.ml, etc.) and instead prioritized more by like-minded people using Kbin, and then later Mbin.

PieFed goes MUCH further, providing not merely different voting metrics on mostly the same content but actual tools that even pro-authoritarian Lemmy users want (categories of communities, combined comments across cross-posts, hashtags, etc.), as well as people who want the opposite, it’s really extremely flexible.

And I think PieFed is the only hope for the Threadiverse to go mainstream. I’m not saying that I think that we necessarily will, or even that we all want to or should, just that if it were to happen, it won’t happen with Lemmy. I’m currently at 100% of people I’ve told about it irl actively chiding me for having so much as recommended it, which makes a great deal of sense only once you realize that (i) a Google search pulls up lemmy.ml as the top instance, (ii) that instance shows Local rather than All by default, and thus (iii) what someone will be exposed to is content making fun of Western society. Mainstream normal people don’t want that! I don’t want it either! We learn how to block it, but mainstream normal people don’t want to expend hours upon hours to make Lemmy usable - and by hours I mean like tens of, continually, as they keep swatting off the bullies, but there are always more.

The alternative would be to make better mod tools. Which on Lemmy are barely happening, extremely slowly. PieFed is still catching up to Lemmy in terms of base features though, e.g. there is a Preview option but only for posts but not for comments, and many Notifications point to things to read but then won’t actually show you the thing when you click on it (due to many reasons, possibly having been removed in the meantime, or being hidden by an auto-collapse or auto-hide feature, or you’ve blocked all the users from an instance but nonetheless notifications are still sent, etc.) - i.e. it still needs some polish. Hence in the meantime I am not recommending Threadiverse tools to anyone irl atm, unless they are already reading something here and then I recommend to check out PieFed:-).

A highly relevant post, particularly the part “Address the Elephants in the Room”. Just imagine, for a moment, if all the people who were banned from Reddit for being too toxic were to come over here? In that case you would get… Lemmy.

Yet we are here as well. It is an odd mixture. And it is why we aren’t really growing (well, barely) despite all the fuck-ups done by Huffman. Meanwhile e.g. Bluesky is really gathering people together! That’s the difference that listening to people makes: they go where there’s a nice environment, which addresses their concerns, in large part bc it makes them feel heard.

People most definitely don’t come to Lemmy to be heard. Well, to be more precise, they do not stay once they learn that it isn’t going to happen, without MAJOR efforts on their part to block a goodly fraction of the Lemmy userbase that will not control their own words, hence making anyone who does not enjoy listening to such need to put in the work to do that for them.

You put the nose and mouth into the…

You know what, I don’t think you really want to know!?! 😶

Wow, so fast, as too was the addition of PieFed in the first place, that’s so amazing to see!:-)

I’m going to have to stop saying that PieFed now has an app supported for it… bc now it has two (although really, only one, bc Interstellar is available on the App Store while Thunder’s support is still only on GitHub iirc).

That was exactly what I did, yes. In particular I did not like the placement of the notification icons below everything, wasting so much space and making everything so vertical when there was seemingly still an enormous amount of space leftover in the row above it, but then realized that this was very likely due to modification of how things looked on Mbin, and sure enough that was the case.

Which is fine, it just means that specifically the component adding in PieFed support is still very much in alpha, as stated:-). Interstellar looks pretty good using Mbin! Very reminiscent of Thunder to me. The polish for PieFed support will come more slowly over time I’m sure.:-)

You probably only needed the facts here and not also the explanation of the thought process that led me to do that sequence of actions, but in case it helped, now you have both:-).

That’s never going to happen. The admins of Lemmy.ml are the actual developers who make the Lemmy software, so there is huge resistance to doing things that will offend them.

There was a software project aiming at making a non-Lemmy Reddit replacement. The main dev got sick and basically the project (Kbin) died, though spawned a fork called Mbin, which afaik has barely been improved since.

Though you may want to check out PieFed, even entirely aside from all of this. The set of features that it has been developing and the speed that they are added is nothing short of astonishing! Btw I am writing to you on Lemmy from PieFed right now.:-)

Lately, it just sits on the loading screen with the big icon and never goes past it, no matter how long I wait. Force closing and restarting the app doesn’t help. I checked the Google Play Store and there are no new versions. I have not tried restarting the device itself yet. Clearing the cache does not help.

Ah, but clearing all data does restore functionality. Until presumably it will break once again? I don’t know the trigger, but fwiw I only logged in as Guest to preferred.social. I did switch back and forth a few times to compare the look of Mbin vs. PieFed on it - perhaps that caused corruption in the app somewhere.

The Alt-Left is my own phrase for people who act identically to the Alt-Right (as described in e.g. Innuendo Studios’ The Alt Right Playbook - gish gallop, didoing, pyramid thinking, controlling the conversation, etc.), just on the “left” side. The more traditional term is the (much more?) pejorative “tankies”. There are several communities that discuss these events - one entirely dedicated to tankies in particular is [email protected], but as the abuses are rampant you will also see it in [email protected], [email protected], etc.

This graphic depiction may also help:

This will explain SO MUCH why so many people are site-wide banned from communities that they have never even so much as heard of, citing a rule that makes no mention of anything that their supposed offense is. Once you realize that the reason that Lemmy was created was bc Reddit banned the code developers, you will see why they created their own Reddit 2.0, which in many ways is somehow even more authoritarian than Reddit itself is. e.g. here we have a modlog, but there is no modmail, nor a notification of a moderation event, and the modlog simply says it was done by a “mod”, so you have no idea who to ask for clarification, or to appeal the decision - all you are left with is the “choice” to go somewhere else (or…?).

Mind you, instance owners are very free, and mods likewise have a great deal of power subject only to instance admins, but individual users not so much - not even the right to be notified that your content was removed (sounds similar to shadowbanning doesn’t it?).

OTOH, software is software, and so we are here as well, trying to find some way to talk that isn’t owned by a corporate entity.

Here’s a highly relevant post: https://lemmy.world/post/21055894, see also it + the comments in the OG cross-post it was from (its first link).

If it helps to add: ditch the analogy about the Fediverse being like email, for the level of understanding that you are seeking. Instead, consider it like a bunch of ships (hehe, free traders and… otherwise), each passing messages around.

When A posts to C, A knows about it, but more importantly everything connected to C also knows about it too. A copy of the message has been shared with all the partners. So yeah, thus B knows about it too, despite the lack of direct connection to A.

Although then when B sends C the downvote action, A is not told, bc of the defederation. So everything connected to C and B knows about the downvotes, with the exception of instances that have disabled downvotes entirely, and those who ignore all messages coming from B, plus those who likewise ignore all messages coming from A.

Where it starts to get tricky is that defederation does not have to be symmetrical, although ideally it always would be. In theory, and it has most definitely happened, messages sent from one instance to another can definitely be influenced by an asymmetrical pattern of defederations.

I wouldn’t worry as much about Alt-Right conservatives here - they tried but couldn’t get a foothold, and after being defederated from all instances eventually collapsed internally, and went to Truth Social.

Here, we ironically have much more to worry about from the Alt-Left that uses identical patterns of behaviors, just ostensibly on the “left”.

Just use the search function and sort by Top All Time and you’ll find everything you need. But if it helps, here’s my own (successful) Petition to defederate from hexbear.net on Discuss.Online, making that USA instance safer to recommend to aid people fleeing Reddit. You can click the links and read with your own eyes examples of those admins being caught lying to other admins, and one case of a mod tripling down in saying how they wanted to kill someone for a simple misunderstanding of a scenario in a game (although do such details matter in the slightest?) - that one was on lemmy.ml though. And btw in case it helps, How do I block users from an instance of my choice? (TLDR: it’s super difficult, not really entirely possible without jumping through some rather hefty hoops, but with enough effort or sacrifice of freedom of other choices it is possible).

That would definitely help you give it a thorough look - I haven’t been able to even get the app to run for me since yesterday, but when I did look it was VERY much still alpha, and yet quite promising for all that:-).

I kinda like the PieFed web UI though… but, it does make the platform more welcoming to people that refuse to use a web browser for whatever reason and demand an app so, I guess I’m glad that Interstellar is doing this?

In addition to the Thunder app support as well, ofc!:-D