I feel like things on Lemmy were pretty chill several months ago, and that’s started to change.
People used to talk each other like they would talk to a neighbor. Now I get the sense that people have become quick to be negative, attack, and not be constructive.
Am I crazy in feeling like the vibe has changed?
Worth noting, the number of people who come here “to escape authoritarian moderators”. Nearly all of them were moderated for good reason.
You can see them jumping from Lemmy server to Lemmy server as they get banned from each.
Eventually, they’ll just set up their own instances so they can bother people with impunity.
And then we block that instance! Or it gets defederated.
It would be super nice if users could block instances.
Like, I have no desire to see anything from the furry instance.
It became a thing in Lemmy 0.19 - as long as you’re on an instance that has updated to that, it should be available to you. At the bottom of the settings page in the web ui, but if you use an app they might not expose that to you yet.
I think that came with version 0.19.1 specifically.
I hadn’t realized it had been implemented yet since I don’t use the browser. Thanks for the update!
You can on instances running .19 or newer. Settings -> Blocks -> then at the bottom is an option for blocking instances.
Connect has been able to do that from the get go. As well as individual communities within instances.
I think that’s coming (or is it implemented already!?)?
I totally thought that was in 0.19 but I haven’t actually seen that yet.
It’s under Settings -> Blocks -> then down at the bottom is the block instances option.
the 0.19 implementation is so half-assed I genuinely think the Lemmy devs just don’t want that functionality but expected quite a lot of backlash if they outright said as much, so they decided to implement something that ticks the box in the “wanted features” list without having any effect
afaik it only blocks communities and explicitly lets users from blocked instances through
Feel free to make open an issue to improve instance blocking. Or better yet a pull request. We are only a few devs with limited time, and hundreds of issues to work on.
no work in microblog tab
You’re describing Hexbear.
So there’s going to be a fediverse and a mirror fediverse?
That was always a risk of decentralized services, unfortunately.
The irony.
Indeed. And looking at the deleted post… definitely a power trip.
Removed by mod
Hexbear called me a troll for being further left than them. They thought I was an extreme caricature of a leftist for saying things like “xenogenders are real” and “slurs against disabilities are bad”. My presence was actually critically destructive because I had effective points against all their reactionary opinions that made it impossible for themselves to honestly call themselves leftists. Now it’s against the rules to like me on there. That’s how bad I was for them.
The thing that actually worried me a little bit more was people upvoting the aggressive comments to be top comments.
I was reading some thread over at [email protected] today, and a lot of stuff advocating for political violence were the top comments. Mods yanked it, but nevertheless, people were vibing with some comments about dragging people through the street. I felt like I was on X/Twitter.
Yeah, I think it’s a legitimate and growing problem. I think a lot of folks don’t realize, but since growth has slowed from Reddit more broadly, the people who feel they have been “unfairly silenced” are the fastest growing subpopulation around here. If I’m honest, I think the only real antidote is to reestablish growth from communities with kinder dispositions.
We don’t need to take from nicer communities, we need to build nicer communities. Right now there aren’t any left wing instances, which is a big problem. It was nicer back when lib.lgbt existed.
I was reading some thread over at !politics
There you go, that’s your problem. Political topics always gets heated and brings out the worst in people, no matter the platform. The first thing I did is block all politics (and general news + sports) communities, and it’s been a fairly pleasant experience so far for me, except for the odd troll or fanboy that shows up every now and then.
You didn’t block all politics. Everything is political.
YES, IT’S JUST FUCKING YOU, JESUS FUCKING CHRIST WITH THIS GUY…
Careful with the punctuation it makes you seem rather aggressive
No you. /j
What I found is that hot topics come with the season, in June/July about Ukraine, in July/August about Meta, in October/November about Gaza, in December about Biden. There’s been plenty of charged discussion on these topics, and internal Lemmy dramas.
However, one thing I see more often here on Lemmy than other places is people updating their comments, being willing to admit they’re wrong or that their comment came off as hostile, and open negotiation in general. Consider the near defederation of programming.dev and lemm.ee, it was resolved amicably to everyone’s benefit.
I also see people thanking others for softening their tone and being kind, to them I say, keep doing that and encouraging good behaviour and ettiquite online!
Strap in. It’s an election year
Every year is an election year somewhere.
Yeah but this is an AMERICAN PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION YEAR!!!
that’s like the super bowl of elections
Sent from my freedom phone motherfucker
Yep it’s time for the entire online world to suffer for 3 months
What the fuck is a superbowl
A really nice owl
You mean a brave patriotic eagle! America’s awesome upgrade to the bog standard owl.
My suspicion is that a lot of redditors migrated over here about 7 months ago when certain apps shut down, including myself. At first, they were polite in an unfamiliar environment, but they’ve grown comfortable and act out, or speak less thoughtfully, like they originally did on Reddit.
The 80/20 rule applies to toxic Internet behaviors as well, 20 percent (or less) of the user base is responsible for 80 percent of the toxicity.
It’s always the same people being awful here, if you are taking notes, you can quickly identify the worst posters on this platform after a week. People always complain about how they are unfairly banned by reddit moderators, but you have to remember, sometimes the bans are really justified.
I think the ony real (and unpleasant) solution is to moderate very aggressively whenever there is bad behavior (although, I must add, permanent bans should be rare and reserved for extremely bad behaviors)
That really is the case. Back when I went to war with feddit de for constantly leaving shitty comments I was surprised at how few people I had to block from that instance before the abuse stopped coming my way. Now that you mention it, 20% of the population sounds about right.
As long as you are able to differentiate between bad language (skills), cultural differences, and bad behavior. On Reddit that’s basically the same. Many things may sound harsh, but are often just expressed frustrations, voiced in an imprecise way. And often, nuance is lost in translation. Many foreigners aren’t used to nuance like Americans are.
Many Europeans won’t hold back. Like, you tell your neighbor that he’s an idiot directly to their face. Out of love; how else would they know. Apparently, none of their friends told them. Poor fellow. Just an example. I’ve learned that Americans won’t do that, for whatever reason. they would just call them idiots wherever they are not around, and keep smiling. ;)
I apologize if these include me.
As we in the US loom towards the election I am getting more and more raw and worried about it. And with that my fear brings out screechy obscene me. That is one of my fear responses that I lose the handle on a lot.
So please forgive me. I will try to avoid political threads as we ramp up to either the end of American democracy or the continuing gerontocratic oligarich republic.
I feel the same way. I’m not sure if it makes it better but you’re not alone.
Lost among the “internet sucks now, it used to be better” discourse is that the old internet was heavily moderated. The laissez faire parts of the old internet were known as the seedy corners of the web. Social media and its modern derivatives like lemmy take on that latter philosophy.
It’s no wonder it’s chaos every where. The libertarian tech bros have really impressed their world view on everyone. So the prevailing philosophy is these “digital town squares” should be absolute free speech zones. Except town squares in real life do not work like this anywhere. At least not in most liberal democracies. In real life there is bureaucracy. There are police, fire, ambulances. There is the simple matter of neighborly social contract. You cannot go into a real life town square and do whatever you want. You cannot just up and fight strangers, engage in lewd acts, set up encampments or what have you without permits. In the same way internet requires structure. Counter intuitively it used to have a lot more of it on account of sites being run by a real human being. Not the mega conglomerate investor groups feeding off ad/engagement profits.
Those users unfamiliar with the old internet yet pine for the good old days would have hated it. Power hungry mods is a meme as old as the internet itself. It’s a necessity of the internet. Hardly anybody gets banned for being an asshole anymore. Sometimes (often more like) people need to be forced offline so they can go outside.
TL;DR - A millennial goes on a tangent about the good ol’ days.
I remember being permanently or temporarily banned as a kid/teenager with simple messages like “go outside”. Mostly for being too rude or annoying, or edgy. As teens and kids often are.
Idk if it’s a thing on Lemmy, but I’m all for extended temporary bans for simply repeatedly being a dick to others.
The “old internet” for me was something like 2006-2012. And I agree, people who pine for it probably couldn’t hack it in 2024, it was racist, it was homophobic, and threads went off the rails with people giving unsolicited advice on how to please your gf, but it was fun, it was dynamic, often complete strangers behind phpBB nicknames felt more real than your closest friends on Instagram do now.
I yearn for those days. Not because I particularly want to deal with racist, homophobic idiots, but because I miss the dynamic internet before mega social network sites. I miss the nuance, people knowing each other on forums and whenever someone who’s known in the community would post something that on surface level is banhammer-worthy per the rules, the community would talk it out and the hammer would fall when people call for it, not always strictly adhering to the rules. And yes, that did produce the power-hungry mods. But it’s not like much has changed.
I feel like I’m going off on a tangent. I just miss the randomness.
I recently had a chat with a new colleague about how you can’t joke with a lot of Zoomers about race/nationality/sex because they don’t perceive nuance. I think it’s a cultural thing imprinted by the internet content coming from America. We’re both from Eastern/South Eastern Europe and people don’t immediately get their panties in a knot over offensive jokes because they realize that a racist-sounding joke does not make the person racist. And I feel that’s the state of the internet now too, and it’s ok, but I miss the sharp edge that it used to have.
thats something a complete idiot would say
😝
I FART IN YOUR GENERAL DIRECTION!
I bite my thumb at you, sir! And at you, as well, sir!
YOUR MOTHER WAS A HAMSTER AND YOUR FATHER SMELT OF ELDERBERRIES!
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More exposure in news and media. More asylum seekers from reddit.
Definitely. A few months ago, there basically weren’t any crytpo-bros on Lemmy. Now any time I say anything negative about crypto, about six of them jump out of the woodwork to give their big long spiel on “the useful use-cases for NFTs” which I just roll my eyes harder every fucking time over.
It’s mainly you just have more trolls and aggressive people because we’re beyond the initial group who was actually looking for more community. Admins/mods do a pretty good job of banning trolls, but not until after they’ve shitted up the place for a bit, usually.
Also, the nature of Lemmy means that someone who gets banned for spamming an article just goes and makes an account on a different instance and then just goes and makes the same post in the same communities literally minutes later.
Popularity is rising, the bad actors are coming. Oh well.
Now any time I say anything negative about crypto, about six of them jump out of the woodwork to give their big long spiel on “the useful use-cases for NFTs” which I just roll my eyes harder every fucking time over.
This seems to correlate with the sudden rise in promotion of the Brave browser I’ve been seeing here.
What are you on about? If anyone is interested, read my comment history
Edit: if we store the shitty pictures on blockchain, literally nothing changes, except a big and bulky blockchain. “I can just save the picture lmao” will still be the answer… Are we supposed to store every software on blockchain too? I don’t think it’s viable
This article too is flawed
Man one of them was trying to bring their crypto bullshit here and I fucking ripped their ass a new one. It’s probably still sore to this day.
Positive and negative are qualitative and measures in this case.
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Trigger warning on this. Can’t get the spoiler thing to work at all.
Definitely not imagining it.
Since I first joined I went from having nice conversations with strangers about the weirdest things, never having a single negative interaction, to nowadays saying I think women deserve a baseline level of respect and being told I should die giving birth to a rapists baby.
To be fair, the dude who said that did get banned from the instance I’m on for that, but it happening in the first place would have been unthinkable to me a few months ago.test, spoiler test
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The syntax is a bit confusing. You need to leave the first “spoiler” untouched. You can delete the second “spoiler” to set the title, and then replace the three underscores ___ with your text:
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Edit: Looks like most apps don’t support this and this spoiler markdown only works in the browser.
agreed there is a definite influx of misogynistic incels lately. Feel like I’m spelling out how women are human beings a lot more than I ever had to here before. Conversations are more on the de-evolutionary side.
There’s no need to debate misogynists here. Downvote and report them and we’ll ban as soon as we can.
This. Most of those guys probably got banned on reddit and drifted here and they’ll do the same after getting banned here. No point in wasting brain cells arguing with people who can’t think for themselves about right and wrong.
I feel like a very high percentage of posts and comments here are just “Americans bad.” And as an American, even though the things they are complaining about don’t apply to me specifically, it makes me feel very unwelcome.
It’s a bit on an echo chamber. The world is frustrated with us. But if you are in another country as an American, you’ll be judged more by your actions usually. In my personal experience most people still understand that there’s 2 Americas and a little bit of humility and humbility is all it takes to be seen as more than a red hat and a flag.
I intend to make “humbility” a word in my corner of the world.
Well, I’m an American and right now our country is going down the shitter and it’s important to call out the fascists that are taking us there. Does that shit apply to me specifically? No. Does that mean I ignore it? Fuck no.
Maybe you should grow up and accept valid criticism.
Yet it is stupid to ignore the progress we made despite the political climate. The No Surprises Act and Inflation Reduction Act come to mind. No amount of people saying “lmaooo american healthcare HAHAHA” is actually going to fix our healthcare, and repeatedly focusing on the bad without the good just represents a lack of understanding of actual issues.
Maybe you should grow up and stop seeing the world as black and white.
Well I do think it’s good to call attention to it. Before the internet, Americans just accepted their shitty status quo. Now that we have people shaming us showing their better life across the pond, I think it will help to slowly move the needle towards showing people that life can actually get better.
We can absolutely do better than reddit on this one. If someone is breaking rule 2 (be respectful), report that comment and we’ll get to it as soon as we can.
Are reports anonymous? I don’t want to report a user that breaks rules only for the offending user to be friends with an admin and get me kicked from a community as payback
Reports are not anonymous, but they also aren’t public. Only visible to admins and mods of that community.
It’s a tradeoff, anonymous report abuse was a big problem on reddit that I didn’t want to replicate here. If the admins or mods aren’t trustworthy on your server, you should pry move to another one.
No, the mods of the community can see who sent the report.
That can be a good thing, too, to find out if someone is abusing the report feature, as was common on Reddit when people didn’t like someone’s comment.
I haven’t noticed, but some people say they are feeling political tensions, and…
The year 2024 is notable for the large number of elections, with 7 of world’s 10 most populous nations (Bangladesh, India, United States, Indonesia, Pakistan, Russia, Mexico) voting; countries that are home to nearly half of the world’s people will hold elections in 2024.
From the Wikipedia complete list.
I guess everyone is just a little worried about national and international elections.
This is the first I’ve heard this perspective. It’s worth keeping in mind the remainder of the year. Thanks for that
I’d say things look progressively grim in the world even outside the elections being another possible source of problems. I used to not know what anxiety was, now I can only wish I still didn’t
