OpenStars

I am glad to have maybe helped, even if only in some small way.:-)

Uh oh, you pointed out a flaw. Expect goalpost shifting in 5... 4... 3...

You will lose that ability as soon as Lemmy.world upgrades past 0.19.3. My instance likewise had 0.19.3 until like a week ago, and ever since it "upgraded" to 0.19.5, I get notifications now from users from blocked instances. The developers of Lemmy seem adamant that people are not allowed to ban whole entire instances, which I find... ironic for... reasons:-).

It is hilarious to see that on every single "we should defed from the tankies" post, the tankies always show up to demonstrate for us all first-hand precisely why we should defederate from the tankies. Not b/c of their political views, but b/c of the abusive toxicity.

b-b-bUt SuReLy rUsSiA hAs NeVeR dOnE a GeNoCidE?!

Or ChInA eItHeR?!

The USA supporting Israel is... ahem, never mind, anyway it's not anywhere on the same class as Russia CURRENTLY and ACTIVELY being the very ones DOING the genocide.

Nobody is that dumb. Therefore that's beyond ignorance - that's sheer, willful obstinacy.

Oh that's so awesome! Mbin, Piefed, Sublinks, and even if Tesseract is currently running Lemmy (though I thought you mentioned wanting to switch it to Sublinks or something when that gets ready), it too helps mitigate some of the known issues. I do have enormous respect for the hard work and effort put into the Lemmy codebase... but I am even more excited to think about the possibilities of growth that lie ahead!:-)

There is only a singular instance in the entire Fediverse that blocks all of the big 3 including lemmy.ml, from what I can see: lemmy.cafe. And roughly a month ago it was still federated with hexbear.net - though that was due to a bug/oversight and when it was pointed out to the admin was immediately corrected. It is a tiny instance, with only 18 users per day or 44 per month, which leaves me wondering how "robust" it is - how long has it been in operation? How long would it expect to remain? (I recall instances such as dmv.social dying off with little to no notice, though that was due to the CSAM attacks that have since been mitigated by software).

I may switch to them regardless - they have some nice features (including a link for new users to check out !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca - so friendly and welcoming!!:-), though was waiting for the likes of Sublinks, Piefed, and Mbin to catch up a bit in case they would be better than any implementation of Lemmy. Anyway I've been busy irl lately and not wanting to spend time thinking about this.

I say all this in case my personal example could help illustrate: there are barriers to switching.:-) Though I don't know if everyone suddenly jumping onto that same instance would count as much of a "vote", and especially people not doing such shouldn't count as a vote in the opposite direction, either? Though I do take your point, ultimately we cannot control others, only ourselves, so it is our "fault" for accepting the way that things are now, rather than seeking to change them.

Also if it helps to add: many people feel that communities such as firefox@lemmy.ml that have ~2/3rds of all monthly active users for a firefox-specific community essentially hold hostage the content that they want to see, without an account that can interact with it. Ideally the politics would be separated from the non-political content - much like the NSFW tag + especially the settings button to filter out such if desired - allows us all to exist in the same space free of any conflict (barring the occasional outlier, which I've seen only like once or twice in the entirety of last year), however, people (such as users of those big 3 instances) refuse to label their politically extremist content, and do other things not in good faith like brigade even instance-specific communities (I can find an example if you like, also relevant is that the option to set them to "private" does not exist until... is it 0.19.6 iirc?).

So for some people, it is not enough to simply leave, they want to help migrate everyone out. By increasing awareness of the situation.

YSK that it is not length, but whether what you tried to say is agreed to by the admin of the instance or not. That is the crux of the dilemma here: that goes against the philosophies of the Western world about non-authoritarian control, which ostensibly so too does true communism, yet here we are: the USA is "doing genocide" and "is capitalist", yet neither Russia nor China are any of those things (in their minds). This makes them a "leftist" instance in the same manner that Trump supporters are "conservative" - which is to say, not.

Ignoring 99% of what you said, while hyper-focusing on a single matter that they choose, asking you to provide your references yet not providing ones in turn (or more commonly by the more prepared ones, the references that are provided turn out to support your position even, if read properly or possibly even at all!!!) is a common tactic. Don't let yourself be distracted from whatever it is that you true goal is. You cannot win an argument against someone who refuses to engage in good faith. Moreover, by trying you simply give them a platform to continue.

Whatever you say, they declare "victory", and those who refuse to realize the difference... well, that's on them.

It isn’t a good faith argument.

This nicely summarizes enormous portions of lemmygrad.ml, hexbear.net, and a lesser though still quite sizeable proportion of lemmy.ml.

In short, we are trying to turn Lemmy into a Reddit clone, when it is a different toolbox with a different purpose.

Personally I think that people were just so burned out from leaving Reddit, that they just accepted whatever else they could find. Many did not even do that much - I have no idea where a great many of the content creators went, some seemingly went back to X, others from there onto Bluesky, but notably many seemed to have simply left social media altogether. And until this next USA election is over, that's probably for the best...

Anyway, I am saying that people no longer feel the desire to put in the hard work that it takes to moderate a community. Some very few seem to shoulder the vast majority of the work, but it is not spread out. And ironically, this wraps back around to the OP issue, b/c the presence of such toxicity is precisely the reason why (okay well tbf among the top 3 lets say) I, who was a mod of two gaming subs on Reddit, did not want to volunteer my time here. 99% of the effort ends up going to deal with 1% of the people, I am talking about the people for whom "no means yes", i.e. those who e.g. create alt accounts to get around bans and just keep going.

Also, the tools and infrastructure just aren't really here yet. e.g., what concept could be more foundational than "helping guide new users to how Lemmy works?" Do a little digging and you will be fantastically depressed to learn the state of affairs there. e.g. Lemmy.ml's sidebar features a post titled "What is Lemmy.ml", except that is a broken link to a post that must have been removed at some point. And that is the chief instance of Lemmy!? Lemmy.world's status is not much better, pointing to a neat Quick start guide, but so very many features (e.g. cross-posting, and in fact I only count a singular occurrence of the word "instance" in the entire thing). Notably, there is an entirely community to help people get acclimated to Lemmy, called !newtolemmy!newtolemmy@lemmy.ca (yes, that link is messed up, but I left it that way b/c this is how the webUI chose to expand it out - Lemmy is not polished, and is in fact broken in so many ways!), but have you ever heard of that community prior to my mentioning it here? Also nobody has posted to it in the last ten months except 3 posts from Blaze and I. We've asked instance admins to add this community - or some other one like it - to the sidebar of their instances but... crickets. (edit: though lemmy.cafe has it in their top banner, yay - that instance looks so damn welcoming and friendly!!:-)

Sadly, what I conclude from this is that this is still an alpha-level "experiment" in social media. I thought that we were at least in beta but... if so, it is quite low-level. We seem stuck in this downwards spiral where the people aren't willing to put forth effort b/c the infrastructure isn't quite fully here yet. Perhaps Mbin, Piefed, or Sublinks will offer greater hope?

Genuine question: HOW though?!? I've user-blocked the entire instance, yet I see those comments basically everywhere I go, plus they used to not be able to reply to me and have a notification sent to me, but now on 0.19.5 that seems to have been un-done. In no way is a user-block like a personal defederation.

Also, fully 100% (not making this up) of everyone that I have told Lemmy about irl has said that this issue is why they refused to join the Fediverse. As the number of alt accounts goes up (some of them mine) yet the total number remains mostly constant, that spells doom for us eventually.

And it is not fair to the users of lemmy.ml either, for the rest of us to see the instance they come from and immediately brace ourselves for an onslaught - thereby potentially misinterpreting what they say, just b/c their fellows are so arrogant and insensitive and we have come to expect that from them.

The whole "just ignore the cancer and it will go away" approach leaves much to be desired, imho. Feel free to do as you please, but that's not what I am talking about: you asked, and as a result now you know some (certainly not all) of the reasons why others may not wish to do the same.