OpenStars

There could literally be some Reddit shills there, or "useful" people who somehow are still holding on tooth & nail to the Reddit name - some people are just like that - and actually I am glad that those have not migrated over to here, even purely to do trolling:-).

But there are a lot of centrist, middle-of-the-road people, as well as right-leaning people too, who could add their voices here and contribute to the ongoing conversation - b/c not everything is about politics (even if so many people try to turn the conversation towards that here, and I am guilty of that as well; yet gardening, woodworking, knitting, etc. - not everything needs to bring it up consistently).

There is so much that we could do to make this place more "welcoming" for others. And I see you doing that tirelessly, so thanks!:-)

They are always on r/RedditAlternatives steering people towards the Fediverse too, along with a few others. Unfortunately most people there are resistant, and the heavily leftist-leaning nature of the content here turns a lot of people away (many instances including reddthat.com do not block either hexbear.net or lemmygrad.ml by default for new users, so all those posts promoting literal violence against e.g. landlords show up immediately in their All feeds), but it is still awesome to see them trying!:-)

Personally I think the technology will need to be improved first - e.g. adding content labels such as Mastodon already has (and everything else these days except Lemmy) - before we will see wider acceptance, especially since there are a lot of centrists who nonetheless contribute niche content that otherwise will not feel comfortable here and thus remain on Reddit, or a lot of people simply swear off social media altogether. But damn, if we do succeed it will in no small part be due to their constant efforts!:-) 🥰

The problem with "equal voice" is that those who are okay to resort to unethical behavior - like spinning up 1000 bots - can "win", over those who constrain themselves to more ethical routes, of speaking or voting one-by-one. Obviously nobody is perfect, but game theoretical analysis shows us that the more unethical someone allows themselves to be, the more they can "game the system" - which DOES work, at least in the short-term.

iirc, blocking someone also prevents them from downvoting you. Though I'm not positive that that works when you, as an individual user, block an entire instance. So if there was lets say 10 people that follow you around downvoting literally everything that you do, blocking them would mean that either you would have put a stop to that, or else they would have to spin up additional bots to continue - which at least forces them to put in additional effort. Unless its an instance user block, in which case you no longer get notifications from their replies, but you can still see their comments, reply back to them, I think vote in either direction, etc. b/c that kind of blocking basically does very little to separate you away from them.

It seems to me that posting is inherently an unequal activity, compared to voting, b/c whereas when we do the former we expose ourselves to criticism, but others who use solely the latter can hide behind anonymity when they vote. Thus the system inherently is not "equal" at all, unless we could either post anonymously, or else if we could see who is doing the voting. I might not even mind if I got 40 down-votes, all from hexbear.net, lemmygrad.ml, and lemmy.ml - I probably would wear that accomplishment as an achievement with pride:-) - but in that case I would want to know that that is the case, as opposed to 40 downvotes from non-brainwashed masses.

You are correct that it is not in the OP wording itself, but it came out as part of the discussion i.e. it is in the comment section if you want to read through that.

It is now getting significantly harder to find the comments I saw originally as lemmy's UI decides now to hide comments by default, bc there are so very many on that thread, but to get you started, one is https://lemmy.world/comment/10461570, and another is https://lemm.ee/comment/12369094.

Even if the former issue was the result of that new feature being tested out on Lemmy.ml first (and perhaps having bugs causing issues with the mod log), the other issue remains that the modding in such occurrences is accused of being rather... "over-zealous". As in why remove someone from a meme community, if they merely made a comment about China in a political community somewhere else on the same instance? What does someone being (potentially) incorrect in their facts have to do with being able to interact with people in a meme community that they have (reputedly) never commented in even so much as once? (presumably they must have interacted with it somehow, according to the wording of the new mod feature, so probably they did vote)

But after I blocked hexbear.net and Lemmygrad.ml, I started to forget that all of that was even there, though I internally made a kind of automatic mental block for Lemmy.ml too (like WHAT!? oh nvm it's from them...). I shouldn't forget though, that that is what a new user would see... thus it would be quite unfriendly for me to bring fresh meat to the fascist audience for their amusement.

Listening to instance admins, I just don't know why they refuse to see those campaigns of brigading as you described happened to you (can you prove it btw, like if the account still exists, and you find a way to view downvotes - does Mbin let you? I tried but maybe it needs a login to do that and it appears greyed out to me without one...), and they say things like "they don't affect our users" (bullshit, you just perfectly described a situation that I suspect happens all the time where it does), and basically act like bullying and intimidation is not a thing that exists in the world. Like, if you ever say anything to anger someone on lemmy.ml, then that's your fault and you deserve whatever comes your way after that!?

Tbf, there are instances - e.g. reddthat.com - that disable downvotes entirely. But I don't want to simply become insensitive to everyone else's disapproval around me - rather I want the system to work properly so that I am only getting disapproval from people who I either respect or at least are neutral, i.e. not fascists who abuse the system bc they are allowed to by inattentive admins.

If there was an instance somewhere that had defederated from the Big 3 Axis powers - hexbear.net, lemmygrad.ml, and lemmy.ml - I would likely join it, and promote it, and recommend Lemmy to people irl again. Otherwise, I will either leave the Fediverse if it gets too bad, or far more likely simply block lemmy.ml but then only enjoy the Fediverse privately rather than as something I am allowed to share bc of how poor and off-putting the initial user experience is.:-(

It is extremely sad how heavily this aspect hinders our continued growth - even if Reddit does something annoying like finally kills off old-reddit for good this time, are people really going to want to come here, so that instead of being exposed to the right-wing propaganda over there, they can be exposed to the fascism-disguised-as-leftism over here? Fascists are controlling everything, everywhere!?!? But we were supposed to be different, here. At least that's what we told ourselves.

Fascism is quite capable at achieving its goals - seeing as how it is not limited by any of that pesky "morality" that slows others down.

Possibly a good comparison could be memes@lemmy.ml vs. the two alternatives mentioned in the OP - I really wanted to keep the former, but politics kept creeping in and just made the experience un-fun so eventually I blocked it all. I thought perhaps the mods were simply lazy, I had little idea of the systemic issues across lemmy.ml altogether.

If you hear of an instance that has defederated from them, I would be interested to know. Otherwise, this OP at least seems to be helping prepare people for that eventuality even if not yet happening now.

Thank you very much for sharing that history - that really helps me understand why people are not taking this seriously. If they "feel like" they have heard it all before, then they give their rote responses from the past, not realizing how things have changed.

And too there's GIGO, where people that should have been banned were banned, but it's still not a terribly persuasive happenstance to convince people who cannot handle the subtleties involved between the outcome vs. the method by which it was arrived at.

Google at one point was not evil, and people warning us not to put trust in them to make Android were solidly ignored. Apple, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, all of it was the same. And look at us now. FAAFO. Well, now we're seeing firsthand some very few glimpses of how bad it could ultimately get, for those companies.

But for lemmy.ml we are still in the early stages, where people are saying "but they write the code" (irrelevant), and "they aren't evil" (we have proof, NOW), and "the Fediverse is still too small, let it grow first" (a horrible idea - for one thing it won't grow as much this way and for another if it did then having so many communities held hostage on that instance would be even more difficult to fix than now). Oh, and another one I hear quite often is "lemmy.world has problems too", which I'm not even going to dignify with a comment about. But the big ones are "only the admins are bad - not the users" (partly true but not entirely and quite frankly... if YOU want to ignore all the warning signs then that doesn't mean that *I* should be forced to stay behind with you as well - particularly when user-level blocks are NOT the same as instance-level ones); and "but some of the biggest communities are there" (I mean, so what, go back to Reddit if you want that but... okay it is a more fair objection tbf).

I doubt many places will defederate lemmy.ml right now... but on the other hand, I see preparations paving the way for that to happen by removing the existing roadblocks, most notably https://reddthat.com/post/20197120. Though that too will require more than a little effort reaching out to each and every single community group of mods to begin the discussion about moving their communities, one by one. This fight against authoritarianism will be long, costly, and may never truly be won - e.g. even if Lemmy.ml gets defederated, the users of hexbear, lemmygrad, and it may simply hide out as alts elsewhere? - but it seems to me to be worth fighting? Though I may need to find at least one instance that actually does defederate from those Big Three Axis powers to use in the meantime.

Thank you 🙏 for your own efforts in combating these (mal)practices.

Worse, you will be surrounded by them on all sides, as others don't bother... :-(