I think the extremist politics on here drive people away. I don’t even tell anyone I use Lemmy because of that.
Hexbear is obviously the worst, but Lemmy.ml is also openly spreading propaganda.
This is pretty much my beef with Lemmy.
The fact that the development team is also the ownership and administration of the instance spreading propaganda is just absolutely insane to me.
Vote logs just show them supporting the extremist behavior.
Not just the politics, but the news threads I feel have degenerated into ragebait topics with shallow conversation. I used to find a conversation or 2 a day to participate in, but now I don’t want to touch many news or politics threads.
I see where you come from, my usual advice to new joiners is to block hexbear and to avoid news and political communities
It’s hard… when a user blocks an instance, the propaganda still shows up when the offending users comment on other instances.
Does it? I thought it muted every user of that instance
A mute is not the same as an outright block.
Muting effectively just means you don’t see the instances posts, but you can see the users comments if they are federated with your instance. For example, I have kbin blocked, but I can still interact with kbin users - when they reply to my comments or posts, which they can still do, I simply just don’t get a notification for it.
Dessalines doesn’t care about stuff like this. Beehaw has been asking for proper moderation tools forever and effectively just told to get fucked every time.
Beehaw is still using version 0.18.4 which will soon celebrate its first birthday. We made countless moderation improvements since then, but of course Beehaw won’t get those if they refuse to upgrade.
I see. I guess I just don’t go to communities hexbear is interested in
.ml is basically just as bad.
Most instances are totally defederated from Hexbear. They’re not my problem at all. My problem is literally the development team and their willingness to not only accept but further the cause of propaganda through their instance’s curated biases.
Hopefully Piefed / Mbin / Sublinks will catch up soon
Not just spreading propaganda, actively censoring anything critical of their Chinese overlords as well.
Yeah, it’s a malicious instance that shouldn’t be federated.
The constant spam of murica politics, linux evangelists and the lack of niche communities have almost made me stop using lemmy. Almost because there just isn’t any alternatives.
I blocked those two topics a while ago. Feed has improved
How did you block politics?
By blocking related communities
People who don’t want to be here, leaving, isn’t necessarily a problem until their absence begins affecting the level of activity.
As long as the total user count keeps growing, that means new people are trying out Lemmy, which should mean new people who actually want to use it, are finding it.
That that is currently happening more slowly than the rate at which people are leaving the platform, isn’t cause for alarm IMO.
Lemmy doesn’t need a billion users, it needs enough to be worth using if it’s something you want to be using, and it does.
Stuff like the Reddit API drama put it in front of a lot of new people, and I think even brought it up to critical mass in terms of user activity. But except for something like that happening again, the only “fixes” I can think of are small and slow ones.
Stuff like spreading knowledge of the fediverse through word of mouth. Or purchasing ads for it with your own money.
I’ve also been playing around with the idea of creating activist stickers that “advertise” federated social media, to place in public around my city.
I’ve thought about doing stickers too but I’m not sure if I’d want to do it for a local community rather than a specific instance.
Might need to be both, with how the fediverse is structured.
Overall since November, its been trending upwards. Given the big spike in March, I think its only natural some people realize they didn’t want to be here in the couple months that follow.
Also there’s bit of a controversial topic lately that has made a certain demographic feel like this place is about as unwelcoming to them as much of the internet.
Also there’s bit of a controversial topic lately that has made a certain demographic feel like this place is about as unwelcoming to them as much of the internet.
Genuinely asking, is it about the bear? I saw a post about it in !unpopularopinion@lemmy.world the other day, I felt sorry for women who encountered such toxicity
That is what I am referring to. And the broader attention it has brought to the topic of misogyny in general, even when bears aren’t really the topic of discussion. From pull request discussions to discussions about misogyny vs misandry, it seems like a lot more popular topic lately.
pull request discussions
Interesting, do you have any example in mind?
I was thinking of this thread: https://lemmy.today/post/10838644?scrollToComments=true
Thanks!
The bear thing? Yeah, its stupid, but its based in ignorance of bears. You can educate without being toxic. Its tough to do in an internet comment section though.
Natural growth is better than surge. Lemmy will eventually be the defacto. Reddit will do something stupid and people will star pouring in.
I’m usually on that side, but I’m afraid we might just go down to 30k, 20k then snowballing to a very small number that would just kill the platform
I’ve been a bit concerned as well. I had gotten to know a fair number of regular commenters, but I haven’t seen probably half of them recently.
New subs are still joining the community, but it’s still low participation. The big communities still seem to be growing steadily, but it’s not necessarily bringing the positive attitude that initially won me over to Lemmy.
Indeed.
By the way, thank you for your work on !superbowl@lemmy.world
Of course! I’ve got to be the change I want to see after all.
Lol, no it won’t.
Stop harassing and brigading people who support Israel.
Stop turning every thread into discussion of how much liberals are genocidal fascists.
I am of the opinion that we should not, in fact, welcome genocidal fascists.
If you disagree with the majority opinion on this matter, you may create or join an instance which does not federate with the majority.
Most who support Israel aren’t fascists, they are just wrong and not getting the correct information.
Why would anybody join lemmy when the second largest server has a private discord server that they coordinate doxxing campaigns from?
Why would anybody join lemmy when the second largest server has a private discord server that they coordinate doxxing campaigns from?
What ? Is that Lemm.ee ? https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy
.ml, from what I was told.
Damn, that sounds very bad. Any evidence on this?
Just what people have said before. I don’t have a discord and I blocked the server early on.
We could stop implying that everyone who uses Windows is a moron…
Spotted the Windows user
Yep, you sure did!
But then how would I get my kicks in the morning?
(I use
random.choice(linux_distros)btw)Why does it seem like this function always returns Arch?
Maybe fix the problem where a lot of users can’t post half the time they’re on
OKAY I didn’t think this was unique to me. I seem to have been muted for pretty innocent stuff? I have been muted at least 6 times. The posting bans have lasted anywhere from a couple days to a couple weeks. It’s very frustrating when you type out a well thought-out comment, click to submit, and it never posts. 😑 I try to select all & copy my comment before I submit.
If I know some mod has muted me, I just comment ‘A’ on random posts to see if I’m allowed to speak again. If it doesn’t post successfully, ban remains in effect. 🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄
It almost has to be a muting ban of sorts, because I can’t post on my main but on a secondary I can post just fine. I haven’t left Lemmy (yet…) because I’m not going back to Reddit & aside from this, Lemmy is a decent substitute. Lemmy has been really frustrating, trying to be a member of the community. Forced into being a lurker six different times by some anonymous coward(s). Not knowing when your ban will be lifted.
If my theories are correct, I’d like a little more transparency in the process. Who issues the muting bans, WHY, and when the talking ban will expire. It can be a simple, private direct message. “Butthurt Bob has muted you for: hurting his fee-fees. Butthurt Bob’s ban will last 6 days.”
Both of you seem to be on Lemmy world, is there a technical issue on their side?
About your last point, you should be able to see exactly that in the modlog (orange button in community sidebars)
That is potentially an excellent point I haven’t considered; my alt was on Lemmy.zip . Idk.
I am a Sync user, idk, if it happens again (which it probably will!) I will do some digging.
All instances and communities have public modlogs, that display all moderator actions, the mod that did them, and why, if they provided a reason (I always do).
Thunder recently got support for accessing them, but you can always find them in the webUI in a browser.
Some of the dropoff is likely due to college being out for the northern hemisphere summer, and just less people online due to the nice weather. Reddit sees a similar seasonal change I believe
Wait until reddit shoots itself in the foot some more.
The Valve strategy.
The problem is that the average user on Reddit doesn’t give a fuck about the ways the platform is shooting itself in the foot, because it’s still functional, has a critical mass of users, and is still the de facto online global discussion forum.
Lemmy doesn’t serve the function well enough because there are not enough of a variety of users driving niche topics. It’s the same dozen topics I see every day. Star Trek memes, Linux discourse, data breach reports, stupid bullshit about Musk, incredibly biased political content and straight up propaganda; it gets extremely tiring to see the same stuff over and over knowing that’s just what the current userbase enjoys discussing. It also doesn’t help that the development team tacitly endorses the extremist propaganda spreading behavior on their server. You can go check mod and vote logs and see the development team actively encouraging all of this destructive behavior across the fediverse.
Star Trek memes, Linux discourse, data breach reports, stupid bullshit about Musk, incredibly biased political content and straight up propaganda; it gets extremely tiring to see the same stuff over and over
Agreed, it’s tiring, that’s why I recommend blocking all of these.
Then stuff like !gardening@lemmy.world or !map_enthusiasts@sopuli.xyz starts to show up
Okay but the thing is, I like most of the Star Trek memes, Linux discourse, and data breach reports, as well as tech and environmental news.
Unfortunately, all of that stuff is literally inherently political, so you end up with massive biases depending on who is posting. We can’t just divorce the concept of data breaches being carried out by state actors. We can’t divorce Musk from the tech world (or the world in general) no matter how much we want to. We can’t divorce the intersect between the trade and manufacturing conditions of China with the impact it has on the transition to renewable resources and electric vehicles.
If I start blocking everybody with a political bias I will have blocked literally all the major contributors on the platform. Everybody posting en masse has some kind of agenda, and that’s usually fine. I enjoy seeing most of schizoidman’s posts, but I know his bias is clearly towards the Chinese, as the majority of his posts clearly frame them in a positive light, with some of the content literally just being propaganda. If I block him, I block a considerable amount of EV news coming into the site, biased or not.
It’s just not feasible to avoid politics here, unless you basically don’t want to use the platform.
Thank you for your comment.
That’s interesting, because I’m not blocking people, I’m blocking communities. A few examples:
You get the idea. So then, even if someone has a very strong political opinion, I don’t miss their posts on !gardening@lemmy.world
There is also a problem with feddit.de for a couple of months now, one of the bigger instances on the fediverse. People are leaving, some are opening accounts on other servers. That didn’t help at all…
They posted today on !dach@feddit.de that they were organizing to retake this.
I wish them good luck, and I hope they succeeded. Feddit.UK was also there a few months ago, hopefully people like @Emperor@feddit.uk took over
It’s a flaw in the fediverse concept. Federation is great, but if you have a big server run by a freelance admin who decides to take some time off without notifying anyone people will search for a more reliable solution. Or just go back to reddit.
This is called the “bus factor”. Any instance run by a single admin is extremely fragile.
Otoh, if one server is having issues, it’s pretty trivial to swap to another. Whereas if reddit is down, it’s down. No getting around that. If Lemmy.today is down, I can just swap to another server without issue (except being treated as a sus person just because my account says it’s new).
Except the communities created on that instances all suffer. There were some popular ommunities on feddit.de that are now wastelands.
How are communities affected by such outages? Do they stop federating, but people can still see what other people from their own instance post?
You can’t upload pictures and the web interface stopped working weeks ago. You can only make text posts via apps. Why would anyone make a post on that instance?
Can’t you also post from other instances? I see new posts on !europe@feddit.de all the time
If you can at least post text, you can at least tell people where to migrate to. Doesn’t seem like that big of an issue, but not being able to migrate all of the post history (AFAIK) is unfortunate (hopefully something is done to fix that shortcoming).
I can see at least one feddit.de community via web browser, so do you meant just the feddit.de web interface stopped working, but people on other instances still can see it? Or is it broken in ways other than simply being able to see the posts?
Federation makes sense for a Twitter replacement. Not so much for a Reddit replacement. I get the feeling that we are at an end to the experiment. Eventually, people will realize that we cannot replace Reddit with a Fediverse based solution.
So many instances block Hexbear and others. We are well on the path of creating separated communities, just with the added headache of having to police federation. Not to mention the problem of power users and out-of-control mods, which federation makes worse rather than solving them.
Ultimately, I think a real Reddit replacement will have to think hard about fixing the fundamental problems of this form of social media, rather than attempting to use buzzwords or cool new ideas.
We are well on the path of creating separated communities
We might, but compared to what it was when those very distinct group of people stumbled upon each other, it wasn’t really pleasant either.
A potential scenario might be a few groups of federated servers
- hard left: hexbear, lemmygrad, lemmy.ml
- servers that block the first group, because they think it’s better: e.g. blahaj
- server who will federate with everyone: lemm.ee, reddthat, etc.
And I guess it’s okay. People can move their subscriptions in two clicks anyway, it’s easy to change instances
Again, that doesn’t solve any of the fundamental problems of a Reddit-clone.
Anyways, our opinions don’t matter. If I’m right, the communities we’re on will quietly fade away.
A lot of users being centralized on Lemmy.ml doesn’t help, lot of toxicity comes from there and you can’t just block the instance unless you also want to lose a lot of content in your feed
Most of the .ml communities have a .world equivalent that is usually more active, but I see your point
This is definetly something to keep an eye on, for now I wouldn’t say this means much
In the original thread there is a discussion of those numbers which suggests they are wrong, which would fit with the fact that all other metrics are trending upwards.
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