A lot less annoying then endlessly filtering content by community and user
Personally I kind of don’t want everybody to be like-minded, because that becomes an echo chamber. What I’m after on Lemmy is people willing to explore subjects objectively, without beating the bushes for enemies or competing for upvotes.
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On the other hand, learning to deal with people you dislike is a useful skill. If everyone segregates themselves into opposing factions there will never be any progress.
Of course, I’ve personally blocked about 600 people…
My reply test to see if you blocked me
You are not blocked, because you are beneath contempt.
[jk]
Underrated benefit of Lemmy is that it isn’t infested with bots the way its larger counterpart is. Reddit has really turned to garbage.
Lower quantity of content here, but more authentic
Yes, most people will want to do this at a minimum with Lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml (actually most instances already have defederated with the second, but it doesn’t hurt).
Whats so terrible about lemmygrad.
You just demonstrated the issue with lemmyml
They think North Korea is communist utopia
What’s wrong with lemmy.ml? It’s a pretty generalist instance if you ask me. The only issue I have with it is that it doesn’t block obvious troll instances like lemmygrad or the one that’s even worse by default but you can do that yourself these days.
Lemmyml has a lot of tankies and other weird characters
Also they have a mod/admin problem. (Don’t you dare question the tankie rhetoric)
It’s full of tankies. Many of the mods of major subs such as politics or world news are tankies and will block anything remotely critical of Russia or China and censor anyone who says, for instance, that Ukraine has the right to take the fight to Russia. It’s definitely more covert than lemmygrad is, but after about 6 months there, it became abundantly clear to me that nothing good was coming out of that place.
I find Lemmy in general tends to lean quite authoritarian autocracy-ish; that feels more like a reflection of the general user base.
I don’t like that in the slightest to be clear but I do think it’s true.
Make a joke at russian or China’s expense on there, then please report back haha
The downside of that is the filter bubble or echo chamber effect. Question is whether Lemmy should be a fun experience for you or something to broaden your horizons a little
I feel like the term echo chamber gets thrown around a lot. Imo an echo chamber has to be highly specific. I wouldn’t classify every monolingual person as trapped in an echo chamber for example. I would also argue against to idea of having to be weary of creating your own echo chamber online. Use social media how you like, the solution to echo chambers is going outside and touching grass not forcing yourself to interact with every community on the internet.
It’s an echo chamber whether you think that’s a bad thing or not, only being exposed to one type of view point is what an echo chamber is. And people probably should be exposed to opinions they disagree with, but it doesn’t have to be constantly, and it doesn’t have to be when they’re already stressed or tired, for the sake of their mental health.
Very well put!:-)
Like most things, there’s a sliding scale. I block two instances (in my client) because of the high noise-to-signal ratio, and a few individuals who I find particularly obnoxious. I’ve never blocked anyone who I thought was trying to have a good-faith argument with me, regardless of their position. But I also don’t feel obligated to stand and listen to the MAGA dipshit shouting obscenities at minorities, either. Is it an echo chamber? No more than me not watching Fox “News”.
Although, Lemmy leans strongly left, and the instances are tankie ones; there isn’t a lot of right-leaning posting IME. I think this is a particularly difficult time for reasonable conservatives because of how their party has been co-opted by fascists. The instances I’m on doesn’t do a lot of defederating, but I know just by virtue of being on Lemmy, I’m getting a left bias.
Yeah I’m not sure that there are any real conservatives left. Like I would have thought that Liz Cheyney was one, but look what happened to her, despite how high-profile she was.
George W. Bush was even a progressive, funding schools and feeding homeless people etc. But then the Tea Party - Ted Cruz, Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, etc. - started taking over control from that old guard of actual conservatives, both fiscal and cultural (wouldn’t Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham qualify here as good examples?). However, before that process could finish, the Alt Right started up, with even moar-er(-est) “alternative facts” and literally neonazi propaganda, leaning heavily on the blatant racism components (rather than hiding behind “wish we could help but the budget you know…”). And now I’m not sure if what is here is even still the Alt Right or something else altogether.
I think if Ron Desantis had won the nomination things would be different, but as it is the entirety of the Republican party bows now solely to Trump, making it more about loyalty to him than about any particular policies anymore. i.e. should we say that the Alt-Right is dead, killed ironically for not being extreme enough for some of its most outspoken members, and now Republican party = Trump? JD Vance certainly is showing how that works, having once decried Trump but that was then and this is now. Speaking of, JD Vance seems to want us to call the current movement the New Right, which if they win, basically means (as best as I can tell) that Trump will not be a President but made into an actual monarch.
Completely agree, except that I’d amend that no real conservative politicians exist. I think there are a lot of real conservatives - you named several - but that simply can’t get elected with our current election mechanisms. Primaries need to be eliminated. Progress like adoption of RCV needs to expand. The electoral college needs to be eliminated. If we can make progress in these areas, it’ll let moderate conservatives to regain control of their party. And it’d let people stop arguing and being frustrated with having to vote for the lesser of two evils.
Oh yeah sorry, I took that as a given. Liberals != Democrats, especially on matters such as gun control where even conservatives (~90% of Americans want some, limited forms of gun control), and conservatives != Republicans. Ahem, sometimes politicians LIE to get elected!?!?!! (How you can tell: their mouths move 👄:-) So yes you are absolutely correct, I meant the particular brand of lie that is attempted to be sold to their constituents.
And some (politicians) I assume may even be real believers, but not the ones who end up making it into the halls of power. Hence while I agree with all that you said, I don’t think that it will ever happen. RCV would allow someone other than those who are willing to literally kill to get in power win, hence it won’t be allowed to happen. I mean, it already has started happening, but it won’t be allowed to get as far as being able to sway the election overall. Wow how I wish I was wrong!
Historically, no nation has ever survived having devolved into a 2-party system afaik, so I don’t hold out much hope for a long-term future. Especially since governments themselves are starting to take a back seat to multinational corporations that have more money, power, and ability to control things than the countries are allowed to retain. The EU is able to resist this, the USA refuses to for the most part but it can in a pinch if it wants, but who else could hope to?
After all, the wealthy control the very sources of news that we all consume, and if we don’t even know what’s going on, how can we make decisions - like what would they be based upon? Which ironically is why the open-source Fediverse made so many of us excited, to think about breaking free from underneath the control of the Almighty Algorithm. But then we accidentally walk into a community in lemmygrad.ml, hexbear.net, or some lemmy.ml posts and we begin to see the downsides to that - as this OP discussion is attempting to illuminate. Reddit at least allowed blocking of trolls, whereas if we want that here, we will need to expend the effort to make that happen.
Nicely put!
Reddit at least allowed blocking of trolls, whereas if we want that here, we will need to expend the effort to make that happen.
I don’t so much mind this, at least. It’s just curation, and I’d far rather have it in our hands than the hands of moderators or platform owners. Not that moderation isn’t useful, and hosting admins can still defederate - but giving users the ability to manage their own block lists, at the user, group, and instance levels, makes it less critical to have moderation, and makes moderation a little less prone to abuse.
Right! Except regardless of your wishes, “they” don’t seem to want for us to have that ability to block “them”. For a LONG time Lemmings begged, pleaded, and cajoled for the ability to make blocklists. The answer, as I see in the historical archives (hehe just older posts I mean:-), was always “just wait - we’ll implement this in 0.19”. Fast-forward to when that happened: it barely does anything at all.
A block of a “user”/account is iirc as full as it gets - I am not even certain that they can downvote you after that. A block of a “community” is likewise solid - those posts will not only not show up in your Subscribed feed, but even from your All one. However, a block of an “instance” merely blocks the communities from that instance, but the users themselves are still free to troll in other communities, free to reply to and ping you thus generating notifications, free to downvote you, and otherwise carry on almost as if you had done nothing at all wrt that particular instance. It is extremely weak.
Also I’m skipping over the details here but what little it used to do is steadily being rolled back so that it is even less effective than it was before (irt the generation of notifications). And since the developers of the Lemmy sourcecode are also the admins of Lemmy.ml, despite all the pitiable outcry from the users affected - there was one here just this week where an admin literally told someone to kill themselves, over a silly misunderstanding of something that happened inside of a video game - absolutely none of the largest instances will condone defederation from lemmy.ml.
And I get it: we are running their software. Abuse or no, we are the guests, and they are the masters of this Lemmy project. Yes it may be open-source, but if we want their future code releases, the boat cannot be rocked too awfully hard.
So, you can either block every user from that instance that you ever see, one by one, or… suck it up and take what “they” offer to you. Or find another solution.
But notably, I don’t want to just block users b/c of the moderation practices of the admins - it’s the users themselves that, trained within that echo chamber as to what they can get away with, troll people all across the entire Fediverse (unless they specifically defederate from that instance). From another comment I made elsewhere:
so e.g. I get to see Cowbee responding to people discussing tankie behavior with the “just trust me bro, no I refuse to share my references instead why don’t you hit me up in my DMs, hey why don’t you share YOUR references hrm, no I’ve never asked anyone to hit me up in my DMs in my life bro whutyoutalkinabout?”. As funny as it may be to watch, it does disturb me that “normies” as we are talking about in this post will be exposed to such, and have to learn first-hand what types of behaviors to expect from which servers that the admins of most instances will not defederate from.
I mean, personally I am not here to discuss politics or get the news. I’m here for memes and nerding out. All that real-world shit doesn’t vibe. I wanna laugh.
Exactly. I want to be able to mention the fashion lizard, the bisexual twink doctor, and his husband the suffering Irishman… And for people to understand who I’m talking about.
I agree, the filters here are great. I don’t mind the real world stuff but I filter your instance because I don’t want to see furry porn.
(Not trying to be snarky, your kinks are not any of my business, hence the filter. My comment is meant to be genuine.)
Bruh. It’s not an echo chamber to filter out literal Nazis and other stuff. Ain’t nobody changing their mind from “spirited” internet debate and I don’t need their garbage in my day.
What instance is “literal Nazis”?
I was speaking to the general practice of filtering in response to the echo chamber generalization, not the original post calling out instances. Personally I filter out porn instances because that’s not what I’m here for. The nice thing about the app I use is that I don’t see any posts from those instances but I can choose to see comments because people interacting on the posts I see are generally there for random reasons and are reacting instead of posting their whatever.
There are many that were defederated many months ago that aren’t even the common ones discussed. I forget some of their names but you can review the defed lists. They are beyond the pale, open open racism, calls for open violence, CP, etc. I’m not talking about some double speak, bad policy maga stuff, I’m talking about cartoons showing minorities as animals, cartoons of lynchings, etc.
The fediverse is a big place.
Edit who the fuck downvotes this
Fwiw, I see only 9 upvotes but 0 downvotes from PieFed.social. Meaning that your 2 downvotes must come from an instance that is defederated from by PieFed.social - likely hexbear.net if I had to guess. That is one of the downsides to not defederating from such places - you get to see and vote on a wider array of content, but they get to do the same to you as well, and unlike you, they may have their own priorities about how to treat such matters. e.g. I don’t think I’ve ever downvoted anything at all from my current account (except once accidentally, easily remedied!:-), and if the situation came up I would rather explain my disapproval rather than merely downvoting… but they may do things differently, hiding behind the relative anonymity of a vote to try to silence / lessen the reach of your POV.
So it goes. My question was more rhetorical. If someone takes issue with my identifying some instances that have that content, fuck em.
The existence of “echo chambers” is debated by scientists. It really doesn’t matter who you hang around with, you’re going to disagree with people.
The echo chamber is overstated: the moderating effect of political interest and diverse media.
Tweeting from left to right: Is online political communication more than an echo chamber?
You can listen to people try to convince you that Russia’s war is justified and that Tienamen Square never happened for a while if you want, then make up your mind and block them later ;-).
It was super fun to be gaslight by people while I was actually living in Taiwan but yeah, gets old after a while.
As is the default Lemmy experience isn’t a massive filter bubble in itself. I doubt hardly anyone here would want to federate with Twitter and Truth Social even though that would make your feel, in fact, less of an echo chamber. Hell, a huge number of inctances don’t even federate with Hexbear, Lemmygrad or Threads.
I think it’s pretty much impossible to fully get out of filter bubbles, but the only way to really get every view on everything is to be part of everything mainstream AND everything more underground. Personally, I don’t feel the need to associate with any other social media. I think toxicity differs from being exposed to a different point of view.
Reddit has had the problem for years that if you tried to make a point that slightly differed from the hive mind’s opinion, however eloquently you would put it, everyone would just pile on with their ‘akshually’ mentality and not even be open to any other viewpoint than their own.
And that’s toxicity without even mentioning folks that would just say ‘no’ followed by hateful language.
I feel Lemmy is a far kinder, more balanced community where you can have a polite discussion about stuff. And OP is right, if a certain instance shows its users can’t behave or have such different views than your own, you can just make them go away and enjoy the rest of Lemmy.
I just hope those users don’t defederate from the rest of us so at some point they will have a more nuanced view of things.
I feel Lemmy is a far kinder, more balanced community where you can have a polite discussion about stuff.
My experience has been much closer to what you described reddit to be. Lemmy is extremely unwelcoming of differing opinions.
Disagreeing with your perspective is easy because it’s utterly misguided. Lemmy is a paragon of inclusivity, welcoming all opinions as long as they adhere to basic decency. The platform thrives on a diverse range ideologies, from anti-capitalist to anarchist, fostering a rich tapestry of debate and discussion. If you find it unwelcoming, maybe it’s because you can’t handle being called out for having incorrect views. ^(/s)
You’re free to go thru my comment history, find one with lots of downvotes and point out to me where I wasn’t ‘adhering to basic decency.’
Are you one of today’s lucky 10,000 in learning what /s means?
Damn those are actually some great thoughts imho - like https://lemm.ee/post/42493021. Fwiw I would have upvoted that one if I had seen it (I’m purposely not subscribed to showerthoughts, so I only see the ones that hit All).
Likewise, I see that Lemmy has a bit of a hive mind issue. At the same time it has an enormous toxicity issue, e.g. it is hexbear’s own self-stated purpose for existence, and they refuse to limit their “dunk” sessions to those who consent to such, continuing beyond the boundaries of their own communities and instance. So we simultaneously would enjoy greater diversity of opinions while at the same time we have too much trolling happening to make that possible.
By the latter I mean that modding efforts seem one of the primary limiting factors here - e.g. I used to be a mod myself for two small gaming communities in Reddit but there’s no way I’m doing that here. Reddit was far more toxic overall, but Lemmy has greater swings of both maximum friendliness (& that overall) while also significantly worse toxicity allowed in certain corners of the Fediverse.
Anyway, one possibility is that your posts merely went out to the wrong audience - as I said, *I* would have really enjoyed the aforementioned post, and upvoted and commented in it, if I had known it existed, and surely while those of us who enjoy such may be more rare than common across the Fediverse, we aren’t entirely non-existent either?
This is where having a larger userbase, to allow such niche interests to flourish more readily, could help. Then again, we already trend more towards deeper conversations than are possible on Reddit anymore, so maybe it’s doable here?
If you end up starting a community to put such thoughts into, I would love to join it?
It doesnt necessarily mean that importent things won’t be covered. I just don’t need fox news opinion about it.
Then you should pick a reputable paper like The Guardian and read a chronological RSS feed. Articles that don’t support Lemmys preexisting point of view don’t even get posted here.
They do. I’ve seen some - heck I’ve posted some. Sort a community by Controversial and you’ll see them.
If you had said “rarely” or “mostly” rather than “don’t even” then your statement would have been correct. As it is, you are using hyperbolic claims that are easily refuted by a handful of counterexamples, thereby turning people away from listening to your POV.
Maybe the solution is to either not restrict yourself to one platform or to be aware of the bubble.
I’m reminded of a quote that goes something like this:
I’ve been thinking about the free exchange of ideas recently and come to the conclusion that it isn’t an open market - it’s a potluck.
Everybody brings something to the table and you’re free to pick and choose the things that you want to try, but you’re not obligated to try everything. Just because Karen put a piece of shit on the table and calls it a sandwich doesn’t mean that you have to take a bite to know that it’s shit. Similarly, we are not obligated to take white supremacists and other extremists’ ideas and seriously debate their value. They’re shit and can and should be treated as such.
The beauty of a self-curated experience is that you’re free to engage with the things that you want and can ignore the things that you don’t want to deal with. The risk of people isolating themselves is simply a part of having the freedom to choose your own experiences, the same as the real world.
Personally, one of the reasons that I’m here is because I have no choice but to deal with right-wing extremism in my daily life, and I don’t want to deal with it online as well. Reading news articles? That’s fine, but I don’t want to see chuds screaming about DEI or woke or whatever in the comments.
This reminds me of Innuendo Studios’ latest offering (yes Ian Danskin is sharing some videos again!) Why Don’t You Respond To Criticism?.
Yep. See also: sea-lioning, the gish gallop, and a myriad of other tactics used by the far-right.
Also, another of my favorite quotes:
I’m not doing homework for you. I’ve known you for 30 seconds and enjoyed exactly none of them.
Self-curating my social media experience is self-care.
Hahaha absolutely yes! That series is hands-down my absolute favorite of all of YouTube, which is really saying something next to the likes of Kurzgesagt and Crash Course series. Also Ian Danskin’s other videos like the agency / protagony one - chef’s kiss! 😘
Doesn’t this lead to potential echo chambers though. If I go and block all content I don’t like, how can I have ideas that challenge my beliefs?
Not everything has to have an opposing perspective, where’s the opposing community for knitting? Tearing?
Probably purling.
I wouldn’t pull that thread if I were you.
Some people don’t come to social media to have their beliefs challenged and that’s okay.
There are some instances that lean in specific directions, but there are also several that are kind of just melting pots. For the most part I don’t need to use blocks too frequently, but there are definitely some spaces/users that I find are too hostile that it gets in the way of their intended messaging. But then, that line is going to be different for everybody.
I just sort of picked a server at random when I singed up. Turned out to be a cool place, but I am sure that is true for most instances.
I kinda did the same. Except I went for .ml and folks would call me a tankie for no other reason. Got kinda boring so I switched to another.
I think it attracts a certain type of person to Lemmy in the first place; someone who would have probably used the original Reddit back in the day
Idk what this means but yeh
That explains the age demographic
And what we’ve learned about trump cultists is that echo chambers are fabulous.
So far I find it to be nonsense. Call the US a terrorist nation for couping democratically elected leader in favour of dictators for over a hundred years, get downvoted and banned by amerophiles. Call China or Russia terrorist nations for literal genocide, wars and international strongman bullying, get downvoted and banned by tankies.
Can’t say retard because that’s a slur but idiot is fine despite it meaning the absolutely same thing, also calling someone slow but in french is also fine.
People are so hardcore pro priphacy would literally rather see child rapists go free and child porn platforms stay online, than to have to tolerate the police scan outgoing connections for a specific IP for three days.
Lemmy feels more and more like extremist echo chambers without any actual discourse or exchange.
the US a terrorist nation for couping democratically elected leader in favour of dictators for over a hundred years
Is this really true?
Yeah CIA likes to overthrow foreign governments, some democratically elected, and destabilize nations. They say they don’t do it anymore but who knows. It’s pretty public knowledge.
Edit: I live in America and it’s like that thing where you can talk shit about your own family.
I meant the “for over a hundred years” part specifically, I bolded it but it’s not as noticeable as it should be.
oh yeah for sure. Dude they orchestrated a coup and took over Hawaii in the like 1800s.
Plus I think there was fuckery in Latin America even back then.
The Monroe Doctrine has been a guiding principle of American geopolitics since its conceptualization in 1823, whether or not America has had the power to necessarily enforce it.
The goal is clear, the Western Hemisphere is America’s property to do with as it pleases and interference will not be tolerated.
Just the history of Haiti alone and the Banana Wars in general proves the point for at least 100 years.
People are so hardcore pro privacy would literally rather see child rapists go free and child porn platforms stay online, than to have to tolerate the police scan outgoing connections for a specific IP for three days.
This does not make sense. If police suspect a crime and have valid reasons for surveillance, nobody would have an issue with it warrant was obtained.
Privacy crowd is pretty clear, we are not here to enable crime. But we will not tolerate police state for a fake feeling of “security”
Can you provide some context what you are actually trying to say here?
Sure. Happened at .org and exactly how I told it. Police monitored all outgoing connections of all users of a certain provider over three days, waiting for someone to connect to a certain IP. Lead to the catch of the operator of a giant child porn site on the darkweb as well as several of his accomplices.
People complained about the breach of privacy and overreach of government. Not a joke.
No, your reasoning, understanding of a topic and way of talking is just dumb. Get rid if that paranoia of everyone bullying you. Don’t go into threads of your political opposite and then be surprised to get flogged. Don’t brush of everyone disagreeing with you as “they are all the same and equally bad”. Stop ignoring authoritarian abusing power and wake up from you fantasy dream world where you believe this doesn’t happen. Once you’ve given up some of your rights, it’s really hard to get them back. No one is defending pedo platforms, it’s about our lifes and knowledge that these surveillance tools will fuck up normal people. It just takes one stupid vote to get the fascists into power and a whole country can move into a dictatorship. If you fail to see this, your very naiv and need to study more history content.
You’re not wrong in criticizing the US, people who look at them objectively should obviously see the many flaws. But as with guns , the US is very patriotic and it’s difficult to argue against. But getting someone to realize and fix their own bias is another difficult topic.
How do you filter out an entire instance as a single user? I was just trying to figure that out the other day, but it didn’t appear possible.
Not sure how to on desktop but I use Connect and it’s in the menu options of posts. Super easy to block individuals, communities, and instances.
Account Settings - Blocks - Instances
Ah, thanks. I had to scroll down a ways because my individual community block list was large enough to push that one out the bottom of the page I guess.
Note that that approach doesn’t actually block the users from that instance, only the communities.
To block user content leaking through that block, there’s apps like Connect or Sync, or the Lemmy alternatives PieFed and Mbin, which additionally offer a number of advanced features that Lemmy does not have such as Categories of Communities (but you’d have to switch instances to access those).
Apparently I earned a site wide ban from lemmy.ml, but their posts keep showing up here. Annoyingly, apparently when you get banned the “block community” button is hidden, so you have to add each community you want to block individually. So just blocking the entire instance solves my problem.
You were not the first that this happened to - they’ve even kicked out mods without any warning (and literally told people to kill themselves), nor will you be the last. At this point it seems to be a right of passage that people must go through, bc it is administered by the Lemmy sourcecode developers so very few instances seem to want to risk pissing them off.
Blocking especially Hexbear alone solved 90% of my issues with toxicity on the Fediverse, and blocking Lemmy.ml brings that up to like 99.9% - there are trolls elsewhere ofc, just like there are some people who might have been worth talking to on Lemmy.ml, but overall it acts like a spam filter that much improves my happiness here.:-)
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Almost everyone is on Lemmy.world, so… I don’t know. Don’t think they made a choice. People who are not on Lemmy.world made a choice at least.
Should I be concerned about being on lemm.ee?
Not sure if a third is everyone
I think a bit the opposite: I’m really worried about the trend to give people only information they care about. I think it’s essential to be able to have information about everything. Of course there will always be stuff you don’t care about but having it automatically filtered out is dangerous in my opinion. In GAFA-powered social networks, you are only given pieces of information about your own opinion, you never have something that make you question yourself about your opinion. The power of independent and open media like Lemmy is to not rely on such biasing algorithms.
Lemmy has a mod problem honestly. Legitimate options get censored while the echo chamber is promoted.
There’s a nuance here that you’re missing - self-curating your social media experience is vastly different from the algorithm hellhole that is the modern corporate social media landscape. You can filter out any dissenting opinions or facts, but you can in real life, too. And like in real life, it takes a lot of active effort to get to that point. Whereas the algorithm will do that for you without you even knowing it.
I’d say that self-curated social media is like going off to college or moving to a new city while the algorithm is like living in the town you grew up in. I grew up in a very liberal state, but there were about 3 non-white kids in my entire high school the year I graduated, and it wasn’t until I was introduced to Tumblr in college in the late 2000s that I first heard words like “transgender.” And Tumblr is the most self-curated social media that I’ve ever seen. Back then, you couldn’t even follow hashtags - just people. So your front page was exclusively people that you followed and the posts that they reblogged from people that they followed.
You don’t have to use filters, just like you don’t have to subscribe to subreddits on Reddit. You can just use the default front page if you are afraid of tailoring it to your tastes.
Yep. I just raw dog All for the past 6 hours most of the time. The only communities I’ve blocked are the most active German ones because I don’t speak German.
This is the way. Although I also block e.g. sports and hexbear - I already know that I don’t want any of that.
Are you me
I just raw dog All for the past 6 hours most of the time.
Doing my part!
