OpenStars

There is no reason that you should. Like magas though, they have a right to exist, yet I would prefer that that happen somewhere not near me.:-)

I am a bit OOTL - which ones went down? Things like Internet Archive & related to AnimeFLV? I presume new ones will come back though?

You probably do not know b/c reddthat has downvotes disabled, but people are downvoting your comment.

I find it the height of irony that your comment, which is relevant and contributes to the conversation, is receiving the "*I* personally do not like this idea" treatment.

A comment that aims to provide a more balanced perspective, to round out the discussion beyond "things should be the way that I am most comfortable with", and offering not only logical facts but very relevant personal experience.

~~Reddit~~ Lemmy can be so toxic sometimes. :-|

Sure!

Yes, my whole "spiel" there left out how my blocking lemmy.ml leavs out a whole huge swath of innocent bystanders who, exactly as you said, simply joined a large instance and had no concept of what was going on, plus back then it wasn't even happening yet to the extent that it is now.

Speaking of, a large number of instances defederated from hexbear.net, and in response it seems that a large number of people - the kind for whom "no means yes" simply created lemmy.ml alts to get around those. Thinking deeper about what that means and extrapolating forward implies then that if lemmy.ml were to ever be defederated from by a large number of instances as well, then those people would simply create alts on lemmy.world (or something) instead.

So it boils down to an ideological POV: must I be exposed to literally everything online with no way to have any filters (some people want this and that's cool), or am I allowed to curate my experiences? More to the point, some things such as NSFW content are really quite friendly on the Fediverse - so long as it is labelled, the people who want it can get it, while those who do not (for whatever reason - maybe they'd like to have it at home but they are literally at work and don't want that tension, so they turn it off?). Unfortunately, both (a) toxic people and (b) extremist content ("extremist" from the perspective of people in the western world, particularly USA - which granted is very much skewed wrt the rest of the world, but... it is what it is) are not labelled at all. Therefore new people walk right into it, see things that they do not want - much as if NSFW, or worse yet NSFL, were to not be labelled - and then leave the Fediverse. So I am saying: it would be good if things could be labelled appropriately, for the sake of maximum friendliness and welcoming.

But as it is, things are NOT labelled, or if they are, the labels are buried elsewhere. When I first switched from Kbin to a Lemmy instance, I made the mistake of replying to a content on ChapoTrapHouse on hexbear.net. I had no idea what that community was - it's whole purpose is to dunk on people!? - and I am not saying that the community should not "exist", but DAYUM! A warning would indeed have been nice. And now, I do not need such a warning personally - I KNOW - but every person that I tell about Lemmy irl, in the next conversation comes back with negative things to say about it, in how it has such extremist content. So they do not join, and this effect magnified by everyone in the mainstream lowers the overall amount of content across the Fediverse. Thus, this isn't about any one post, any one community, or even any one instance. Good fences make good neighbors. If people on hexbear.net or occasionally some on lemmy.ml disrespect others boundaries, then it makes sense to block them. Though I am having quite a pleasant conversation with you personally, and have done so with others from lemmy.ml. Overall though, on balance, I find it necessary to block that instance. Which I note barely matters - e.g. you replied to me here, and I got the notification for that, I could see your comment, you can see mine... this is the weakest type of "block"/"ban" that I have ever heard of, so much so that the name is really improper, as it barely blocks anything at all.

And no, they don't exist on every instance. Or yeah, surely they do, but not in the enormously large numbers that we are talking about here. I will preemptively say that I get a lot of batshit insane replies from lemmy.world too - so yeah, lemmy.ml is not the only one like that. However, the proportion of responses is different, probably b/c I (who lives in the USA) shares more ideologically in common with someone from lemmy.world. So perhaps they would go off on a rant against something that I say, but the "trigger" to make that happen is less likely to happen. I have not done a scientific study, with controls and such - I am just speaking of my personal experience, which I see is shared by a LOT of people across the Fediverse.

It sounds like you are just being counter-cultural, which I have done more than a little of in my life, so I support that. You seem willing to bear the consequences of that, e.g. you risked me not replying to you, although then I did so... hopefully that shows that the "judgement" of the .ml next to your name is not a firm yes-no but merely a slight bias.

So about down-votes: personally I want to receive down-votes, if people do not enjoy receiving my comments. That is helpful feedback, and helps guide me to submit future content more in line with people's receptivity. The problem comes when the down-votes are from people that I do not respect. An example would help here: let's say that I submit a youtube video for my favorite hard rock band to a tiny niche community, specifically for hard rock music, and let us further say that people downvote it for these reasons: (1) they do not like the music - fair; (2) they do not like youtube - okay... I guess... still fair; (3) they do not like hard rock music at all, but saw my post while browsing "All" - these people are not Subscribed to this community, and are improperly abusing the system of down-voting away from "this content is not a good match for this community" to "I do not (personally) enjoy this content". The latter type would be much better handled by blocking that community entirely - but people refuse to abide by the rules, and maybe do not even know what they are, if they are new. Oh and also (4) I managed to piss off a troll, who then goes to my Profile and down-votes literally everything they see, until they get tired of hitting the "Next" page (ironically I don't think this has happened to me, which I would expect given my instance-bashing behaviors, but I have seen others where it has, mostly those who post in more political communities).

As you said, yes the creation of the hive mind. IF people would use it properly, then it would not be that way, but again, people refuse or are not able to so... here we are.

And one reason for that is that we have so few developers - Rust is a very hard language to learn, and those devs I suspect are prickly to work with (given their moderation practices on lemmy.ml, mass-banning people from communities they've never even heard of, so would they similarly reject someone's actual code, not based on the integrity of the code but rather on some offhand remark that they make even on some other instance, possibly even taken out of context?). I have ENORMOUS respect for the Lemmy codebase that has been developed so far... but I also wish that it could move forward more quickly. Maybe Mbin/Sublinks/Piefed will do so, as they are written in languages that more people already know.

Also there are enormous barriers to running a personal instance - CSAM attacks to name one, hardware and especially network bandwidth to name another - but what it would take would be for someone to spin up their own instance, and try out a new system of voting. Nothing really is stopping anyone from doing so except... it's hard. Otherwise, beggers cannot be choosers, so we wait for an actual developer to do something. And in the meantime we talk about a subject that we find of interest, but it won't lead to any changes. Probably. Maybe - though also, maybe not, b/c perhaps one day there will be a poll put out by the developers, and with enough people answering that, we could ask for a change that we would like to see in the code? :-)

Hopefully they'll work on stuff like this - but I don't know their prioritization.

Oh absolutely that is correct - once you've "blocked" something, you cannot then interact with it later, as it is a rather hard cutoff. I suppose you want to see something like a "remove from my feed" - basically a "hide this community from me until I want it" - rather than an actual, full-on "block". Which is notable then that e.g. a user block of an instance is even softer than that, allowing you to see and reply and receive replies from people (though you don't get notifications for those, unless they specifically tag your username). So community blocks are harder than people would like, and instance ones are softer, so they really aren't hitting the sweet spot in-between.:-)

Yes, I suppose I want that too - a "community hide" option, rather than full community block:-).

And that is all that matters, to them, forever moving forward 🤮.

Example 1: when one side wants to bully the other, but the latter does not wish this, how do you solve this problem? Defederation it is then.

Example 2: when someone claims that the Tiananmen Square massacre did actually happen, that user gets blocked from all communities, including those they have never heard of, on lemmy.ml. This is not so rare - and this is straight from the Lemmy developers themselves, i.e. a feature not a bug. It does no good to pretend otherwise.

Example 3: when people refuse to label their kiddie porn properly, others must label it for them, or risk getting into trouble themselves, bc regardless of what some other website chooses to host, the federation model says that if your instance federates with it, then it is content that you are sharing as well. Though actually, I find the Fediverse mostly friendly in how it labels NSFW content, yet it refuses to label toxicity in a like manner - e.g. the brigading attempts organized on hexbear against other communities on different instances. If only a label could be affixed to Chapotraphouse, like "beware ye who choose to enter here...":-).

I find your comment extremely biased towards your own POV and desires, but overall there is much more subtlety and nuance in interpersonal connections, e.g. sometimes women choose the bear, and rather than say that it is "silly", it might behoove people to listen to why that choice may have been made?

One thing you can do there is to take advantage of federation and jump to an instance where you are not logged in, which will then display all of the comments. On the web UI, the multicolored Fediverse icon works fantastic for this purpose, as it will jump straight to the comment that you want to see (although the hidden ones would be below that, or perhaps you would rather go to the post itself).

e.g. for me, I am reading your comment at https://discuss.online/post/12642239/11643668, but the multicolored button would take me to https://sopuli.xyz/comment/12447782, which I do not have an account on hence nothing under that would be blocked for me there.

Unless they're too big to fail, and especially if they are too big to jail, e.g. Facebook, Google, etc. Or if they correctly judge the stupidity and malleability of their audience e.g. Reddit, X, etc.

For them, for now.

So what happens when pleasing the investors becomes the only priority?