…sometimes it does feel like this.
most of the toxicity I’ve experienced on lemmy has been from established users so idk… but I should add that it’s way less toxic than reddit so far
It’s gotten pretty bad on the politics front lately. It’s like an entirely different community now compared to last year
I hope it dies down after the election but I’m not getting hopes up
The election was going to make the Russian bots start shit stirring, but what really got Lemmings at each others’ throats was the Palestinian genocide.
It kinda depends on the outcome. If Trump wins it’ll get substantially worse.
I make a point to just not open any thread that mentions US Politics.
Me trying to explain that I couldn’t care less about how much they hate fascism:
Impossible
Overall it’s less toxic than Reddit, as evidenced by how many people were lurkers there but here actually feel comfortable enough to open up and contribute.
I note that you are on Lemmy.World, which blocks some of the most well-known trolling instances. That indeeds helps a ton, though means that the experiences of someone who joined e.g. lemm.ee instead are going to be quite different.
Blocking is key. Once I started blocking some communities, my Lemmy experience got a lot better.
Well, most users here are former/current Reddit users, but somehow a lot of them think that it’s less toxic here.
Hey, we left cause of the enshitification of Reddit itself, toxicity of the users was always part of the package deal.
As a Reddit refugee myself,I can’t disagree with that. But I will clarify that there’s generally two kinds of Reddit Refugees, though:
- The kind that got fed up with Reddit and wants to be part of something better
- The people who were banned from Reddit and think this is some kind of safe haven to continue acting on their worst impulses that got them banned elsewhere.
The meme is largely referencing the latter.
to continue acting on their worst impulses
I feel seen.
As do I, mind you my worse impulses are just me being bloodthirsty. But John Brown was also somewhat bloodthirsty and I dont see anyone of deserving of life criticizijg him.
Idk who downvoted that initially for it’s just a little random moment to share that. Probably, it was them being impulsive too.
It’s not a big part of me, but I struggle to contain critique of something and it leads to both actual fixes\solutions for some things and bad things happening to me for speaking out in harsh and uncultured manner.
I came because Reddit’s a shitty company and due to the ban of 3rd party apps. Which group am I?
Meh. Maybe I’m just not in the wrong corners of the Lemmy fediverse, but honestly I’m not really seeing very many of the banned finding their way here. That was a huge problem in the cesspools like Voat, but for whatever reason it seems like Lemmy has mostly been spared, in my limited experience at least.
That said, yeah there’s a fair amount of blunt talking and general mild misanthropy, but frankly I almost welcome that as a change from the overmoderated sterility of corporate spaces like Reddit which have to think in terms of advertiser-friendliness.
Have you ever blocked anyone at all? Or a community, or perhaps your feed is always set to Subscribed? Most of us readily forget what Lemmy looks like to a day-1 account. It takes a bit of effort to clean it up, and if they don’t see the value in remaining then they won’t put in that effort to learn, rather than simply leave.
I have 9 users blocked, 10 communities blocked (mostly based on taste, not due to toxicity though), and 0 blocked instances.
Rawdogging Lemmy without blocking hexbear and the .ml instances… good luck!
You know, I’m well aware of their reputations and I’ve had a small number of encounters with users from those instances that I’ll charitably leave at “bad faith,” but by and large I don’t really bump into communities hosted on their instances or see overtly bad behavior from their users often.
I’m not trying to defend them or say it doesn’t happen (largely because frankly, I just don’t care one way or the other), but I can only be honest and speak to my individual experience.
That’s great! I really hope the fediverse can replace corporate slop social media, and I think people coming here and not getting turned off by those bad instances is key.
We often talk about toxic newbies, but sometimes we don’t pay enough attention to how we ourselves changed as a result. Make them feel welcome, and see how much Lemmy changes back.
If you (yes, you, reader) are new to Lemmy, have my wholehearted “Welcome”! Hugs on demand, cookies right there, make yourself comfy :)
Avoid politics-oriented communities unless toxicity is your thing. Start with any instance (most likely you chose lemmy.world as your starting point?), but explore others and what they have to offer. You can even be on several of them if that’s your thing! Enjoy!
I was here 2y before the exodus, it’s absolutely not just the newbies. Maybe some other -ies…
I for one welcome the shit out of the newbies, I’m thankful to have them and want more, and for them to bring their niche interests with them. They help filter some of the toxicity out.
yay cookie, thanks, i moved away because anytime i asked a question on any reddit subreddit by posting the question (as i should) it got spam downvoted to the point i became unable to make posts anywhere due to “low karma” : , ) (it was just a basic question and every comment under it and the post got spam downvoted for nor reason)
Luckily, here, while admins can see how many up- and downvotes you have, it doesn’t influence anything, and that’s by design; besides, it’s unlikely that any proper implementation of karma system is possible in a federated network for individual users.
Block instance and block community buttons are your friends.
This will probably become an ever-worsening problem because there’s no way to ban anyone from the fediverse entirely. We might someday need something like adblock or spam filters to reduce noise.
There’s an xkcd for that.:-)
You’ll find that anywhere. Not just on the Internet, either. Literally, everywhere.
tfw somewhere between the sacred silence and sleep
Hopefully the absence of an algorithm pushing engagement at all costs will dispel some of it.
I ended up getting permabanned from reddit for saying that Lebanese people don’t blame all their problems on Israel, just the the problems they do deserve blame for.
Head over.to Hexbear and say you like south park or something. You’re welcome.
I may be crazy, but even I’m not that stupid.
wait it’s bad to like south park now?
found the libertarian
lol no
Stone and Parker are pretty notorious for leaning “libertarian” (liberals that like weed)/enlightened centrist in their messaging.
Hexbear obviously has thoughts on the matter, but it’s not like they’re the only ones that have noticed their long list of shit takes over the years.
eternal “eternal september” september
All I have to say is fuck Reddit mods.
People will be toxic no matter what. I don’t think making prospective new users feel unwelcome is a good idea when we’d like to see some growth.
It’s kind of a game of balance to me
We should make sure toxicity remains unwelcome, but new users should be welcomed without negative expectations. Otherwise, we either make all newbies feel like they don’t belong, or turn Lemmy into another Reddit, which would also alienate users since this is what they fled from.
I have no problem with people sharing their opinions on Lemmy.
just as long as they aren’t wrong.
Wrong, n: Disagrees with me
Are we growing though?
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats shows MAU (monthly active users) decreasing - we are now at 43k, last month was 45k, the month before 47k, etc. Total servers also decreasing - now 540, was 552, 579, etc. Overall posts and comments are slightly up though - so we’re seeing increased activity from fewer users, rather than an increase in actual users. One could argue whether we’re truly “decreasing” vs. merely flat, but either way I don’t see us increasing.
And 3 of those users are myself, all active and only 2 of which I had a week ago, speaking to how alts are most definitely a thing. Also, federation issues especially staying in sync with Lemmy.World may be causing people to shift instances (or to leave entirely?). If so that would be a good thing bc 0.19.6 promises to help address that. (Although in my case, I wanted an instance that allows custom blocks of any instance I choose without needing to rely on an admin team, and that isn’t dependent upon the Lemmy codebase.)
For one thing, people might be turning away due to the upcoming USA election, in which case depending on who survives that, they could return? But every person I’ve ever recommended to check out Lemmy has looked at me in disgust and actively chided me for having recommended it when they see some of the political extremism here. e.g.:
Whenever I go looking for examples of such I usually find it in 0-60 seconds, by going to Lemmy.ml and browsing by Local.
Your instance is doing wonderful work keeping such out - I wonder if that image will even render for you:-). But overall, across the wide Fediverse, people are not willing to put up with such, and seem to be leaving us overall rather than find some other way to deal with whatever it is that was bugging them.
And with such trends, and the way we treat normies, I don’t see us ever going mainstream. Maybe PieFed and Sublinks, along with Mbin and ofc Tesseract on e.g. dubvee.org will help turn that around? That would be so nice?:-)
Btw what will we call ourselves then, if it does - will we still be “Lemmy”/Lemmings, or just general Fedizens? Either way there’s great hope for the future, but also a lot of work to do to reach that point.
I wasn’t really looking at the MAU stats when I made this; it just felt like it’s been more actively lately (both good and bad). Unfortunate the numbers are actually trending downward.
For one thing, people might be turning away due to the upcoming USA election
Possibly. I’ve gone into self-imposed
socialmedia blackouts during election season many a time. Sometimes you just need a break.Whenever I go looking for examples of such I usually find it in 0-60 seconds, by going to Lemmy.ml and browsing by Local … people are not willing to put up with such, and seem to be leaving us
Yeah. I have felt for a while that
mlbeing the official or at least de facto flagship instance is doing more harm than good. I’m not going to tell them how to run their instance, but I am sad and frustrated that it seems to turn so many people away under the impression the whole fediverse is like that.I’m cool with Fedizens 😀.
Yeah like to label it as “A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers” seems not entirely… complete in its description.
Blaze is doing amazing work advocating for Lemmy on r/RedditAlternatives etc., and these days recommends Lemm.ee, one of the largest instances that also defederates from virtually nothing so that very little to no content is missed by the user. On the other hand, some content users very much would rather have been presented to them as opt-in rather than have to opt-out of it. i.e. if one of the major things that instance does is to make fun of the capitalist democratic Western society, then it is perhaps understandable if - regardless of truth or falsehood - people, especially normies, living inside of that same capitalist democratic Western society do not appreciate the jokes? Especially those calling for literal murder, or when an admin there tells someone to kill themselves. Duh, of course people are going to be turned away by such.
At this point it’s like a rite of passage, to learn how to become a responsible Fedizen: learn who and how to block (not necessarily in that order:-).
