OpenStars

All of those posts are mere hours old, and shown from an instance that has defederated from Hexbear and Lemmygrad. And even there, I definitely see calls for outright murder, such as this one, although here it was fortunately caught and removed by a mod:

A guillotine, or just tossing them in a nearby volcano would be cheaper.

That post was of very limited / niche interest though, with only 17 comments total. If you want to disprove my wording that "all" posts have such calls, you can easily find several posts with 0 comments, which obviously disproves my wording choice:-). And likewise those with 1-20 comments - among a community that often has hundreds (e.g. this post from just 10 days ago has >1500) - is low-interest.

This is why I avoided using "Hot", especially within a 1-day time period. But following your lead, I sorted by "Top Week", and was going to ignore anything from just the last single day, although all of the top 4 posts are older than that so that makes things easier. The top one could be a bit of a bad example but like in response to "Shoot 'em. Problem gone!" has "it is also a way to end conservatism… just sayin…" - but this one is much more likely to TRULY be a joke, in the spirit of that whole post in general, or at worst a venting of steam (although further down people are talking about "Solutions" that involve "electrowhatever or guns, which seem like the two bodies of knowledge a solution would come from." - note that guns are very ineffective tools to affect non-violent means of resistance or to destroy property, and chiefly are used to KILL PEOPLE aka "murder"). Another one there is literally "shoot the fascists", another is "if you need some tips on making firearms out of things easily lifted from home depo, I’m your man", others stop short of advocating outright murder but still do things inching towards that end such as "When do we start rounding up all the Faux execs and the on-air talent ... When do we start doxxing those that support Faux by watching Faux, and start getting THEM fired?" - granted it starts as "fired" but the reply immediately carries it forward with "And then those high profile people would start losing their homes and lives. I would celebrate that as justice served." The latter is admittedly a stretch to say advocation for actual murder directly, but it is like one millimeter indirectly removed from it so as part of this whole batch I will include it here.

So using your procedure, though skipping over posts that are less than or only a day old, I have added one more to the pile. We are at 4 out of 4 so far, or 4 out of 5 if you want to count the Hawaii one as a false positive. Moving on to the next one I see like "I would straight up start busting windows out of any vehicle with trump stickers." - which tbf is not murder, just terrorism/violence. So yeah, this one has no calls to murder that I saw. So this is 4 out of 6.

Next is this one - and I am getting tired so going to rush through this one. There are a BUNCH of comments describing guns like "He is saying arm yourself while it is legal, so you have weapons for when you need them to fight off bad people in designer uniforms… Roughly translated.", "2A for all. Time to resist in other ways". Again these are describing guns not infrastructure-destroying or people-convincing tools, but tools to involuntarily kill people aka murder. So this is 5 out of 7.

Certainly not 100% though, if that is your mark. Which would be fair on your part b/c my literal wording called for it by stating "it seems virtually impossible these days to read the comments in even a news post that does not include at least one call for murder of someone or another.", and my hyperbolic exaggeration is clearly false (in my defense I did not mean per-post but rather like "all the content that I read in a day will include at least one call for murder", but I did not clarify so that's on me). Again, any post that has 0 comments would already have disproven it, as too is any comment with very small number of comments or interest, etc. However, it still seems true that well over half of all the current most active or top weekly posts from News@lemmy.world contain calls for using weapons to kill people or the lesser version of at least celebrating death of "the enemy" however it may happen, even if depicted in cutesy pictures of cats frolicking. Separating aside any judgement of good or bad or neutral or "it's waaaaay more complicated than any of that", it is going to be a turn-off for some people.

Also I looked at meme communities again for Top Weekly and of course the top several posts are all about politics and news, though I am too tired to go through hundreds more comments looking for calls to murder in them as well, even in "memes" communities. It seems likely that they are there somewhere though? Also, we didn't even begin to go looking into the whole Gaza situation... or Ukraine/Russia, or any of the myriad others. I am confident that if you look, you will easily find it. Now in brand-new posts and not in the Hawaii one for sure, but such calls do appear here and there, around the wide Threadiverse.

This deal with Charlie Kirk has people on edge, although so too did Luigi, and the Presidential election, and so on.

Yes here's an example from today - I just sorted News posts by active and scrolled down to find a post with >100 comments on it:

6 hours ago one person said (referring to USA Vice President JD Vance, the subject of the OP)

Didn’t this guy get shot in the throat? Awful talkative.

And someone replied:

Not yet, unfortunately.

Neither received any downvotes, and the latter reply received more upvotes than the one I quoted above it. Am I wrong to interpret that the reply is suggesting that it is unfortunate that the guy has not yet been shot in the throat? Involuntarily in case I need to add that, i.e. not euthanasia but non-consensual killing aka what most centrists would call "murder" (although I am not wanting to debate whether other definitions such as "justice" might also or even rather apply).

Of course it could be a "joke", though isn't the recipient just as much the party who determines what a message means as the sender? If it is a "joke" (possibly as in "haha jk except not really"), then there are an enormous number of such, and have been for quite awhile now - especially "joking" about how Luigi needs to save people, joking about the fact that a second amendment exists in the USA, joking about how people can conveniently die in non-murderous ways e.g. their liver goes out (see the posts about the recent Steve Bannon announcement), and just overall about how death is a good thing so long as it happens to "them", the "other side" (again, I'm not wanting to get into whether it's deserved, just stating here that such is being discussed, since these topics relate to how centrists from Reddit would view the Lemmy platform).

These kinds of things are likely to get Lemmy banned from the USA as the authoritarian program proceeds forward, but that is a separate issue from centrists (including those who think of themselves as leftists, not realizing what that means when recalibrated on a more global scale) and most especially conservatives (e.g. in the USA, that are currently using Reddit) feeling welcomed here.

So anyway that was the first such post that I examined. The next post has even more egregious and obvious comments, such as this one, from a whole week ago so at this point seems extremely unlikely to be removed by a mod and even if it were, it has already long served its purpose:

As always these pussies will have a big whinge then back down.

Please just make it legal to kill Nazis again, I'd do it for pay if we could claim a bounty on the hides.

(And then s whole discussion ensues about just how okay it is to kill people. Other more... "circumspect" comments to that same OP include such things as "The 2nd amendment works for all sides."

So far this is 100% of the first 2 posts I have examined, so let's move on to #3. Yup, I immediately spot this really cute picture of a cat depicting someone being beheaded, in response to the statement "the aristocrats!", itself in response to something deleted by a Moderator. So this makes 3 of 3 posts, still a perfect 100%. And I did not have to reference anything from any tankie instances (where the frequency is surely much higher), or anything removed or likely at this time to ever be removed by a moderator, one even having been from a week ago. Seriously, calling for shooting/beheading/otherwise killing "the enemy" are extremely common here. You have undergone extreme efforts to avoid seeing it, I understand, but it does exist, and new people visiting here can notice it, not knowing to expect this level of vitriol. Tbf even Reddit these days is exploding with calls to Luigi people, they just work much harder to repress it - which I am not saying is a good outcome, my only interest here lies in explaining what is, not what should be.

Which one?

Which instance defederates from all of the tankie instances, and is not already overloaded i.e. Lemmy.world? Also, the name "Lemmy" has tankie implications that most Redditors flee from - hence why so many of us came first to Kbin instead.

Since none such existed, I helped create one by petitioning Discuss.Online to defederate at least from hexbear.net, even though doing so with lemmy.ml is a lost cause. It was successful, and now you can recommend it if you like.

Although America has imploded now and I no longer recommend any USA-based servers, even to people based in the USA themselves (as the average Redditor tends to be).

Though PieFed gives me much stronger hope for the future of the Threadiverse. People still need to set up blocks for instances like Lemmy.ml and politics communities if they want to avoid toxicity though. And even then, it seems virtually impossible these days to read the comments in even a news post that does not include at least one call for murder of someone or another. People have strong opinions, and want to vent! Therefore, highly ironically, leaving no space existing where someone can discuss politics or even news (or for some reason even memes?!) without the toxicity. I am not being a Karen here bc I am telling nobody what to do - only reflecting what I see.

Beware of unearned knowledge.

You "lose" 100% of the battles that you choose not to fight.

Besides, people here are reporting that the content is already gone. Even if it comes back, it likely will bounce around back and forth but not return to this same state, so this was transient.

Even so, it seems not wrong? "toxic or abusive content being common in the Fediverse", regardless of how precisely that is measured, seems entirely accurate to me. YOU (and I) may choose to block such content, in part by being on an instance that enacts this choice for us, but that does not mean that such does not exist. Head on over to Chapotraphouse@hexbear.net to get a taste of what the Fediverse offers. It does exist, and while Lemmy.World defederated from it, so many other instances including Lemm.ee did not. Or Lemmygrad.ml.

It is so easy to forget about what was shoved under the rug, but the Fediverse is more like 4chan than most of us care to admit. Just because there are no Nazis currently standing in your little corner of a Nazi bar does not mean that you can invite your Jewish friends over to walk (safely) through the front door.

The Fediverse can be quite toxic. So much so that I've entirely stopped recommending it to people irl. We need to be more acceptable to people if we want to change our image, not just pretend that we are fine.

A very concise description, wonderful! 👍

Yes I meant the on-site one developed by Reddit, but agreed that the centralized nature lends itself towards searching by Google.

Although the other way opens up a huge can of worms since every large, general-purpose instance will - due to the nature of how the ActivityPub protocol works - have basically all of the content of the entire Threadiverse. Or as near to that as it works for a first approximation anyway, e.g. someone deciding to index all content appearing on "Lemmy.World" would get all the memes, movie discussions, etc., missing chiefly things like piracy and anarchy and other things that LW has decided to ban. It won't be "correct" in the sense of attribution to the OP, but once someone found their way to the content housed on LW they are but a click away from getting to its original source anyway. So from that standpoint, Google indexing I would naively have thought would not be all that difficult? Except for the increasingly niche content that isn't federated with the largest instances, which is perhaps desirable anyway to not expose mainstream normies to content calling for e.g. actual murder in response to world events (such as occurs routinely on e.g. Hexbear).

A safer, sanitized version of the Threadiverse that is searchable by anyone works to all of our advantage, I would believe?

Yeah anything that involves comments doesn't work so well - either them specifically or the combination of them and posts. And tbf it does retrieve the results of the query, it is only the sort options that fail miserably.

I've used Lemmy now for >2 years and the excuse that "it's still in development" has very much worn thin when no changes at all have been made to this or so many other issues with it.

At least the search function is still better than Reddit's! (Obligatory and reflexive fuck spex:-P)

Meta did try to make "Threads", but (a) it failed miserably and (b) use of that term on Lemmy predates Meta trying to steal it. We don't need to let them define us! And all the more so if there's no better word - the next runner up in polls iirc is Forumverse, but people vastly prefer Threadiverse.:-)

Welcome fellow human! Ah... I mean "kid", yes, we are just ~~going to kill all sentient lifeforms~~ "kidding" around here, certainly nothing for the authorities to get involved in, move along! :-P

A true Fedizen right here. Also Threadizen?