I feel like things on Lemmy were pretty chill several months ago, and that’s started to change.
People used to talk each other like they would talk to a neighbor. Now I get the sense that people have become quick to be negative, attack, and not be constructive.
Am I crazy in feeling like the vibe has changed?
Worth noting, the number of people who come here “to escape authoritarian moderators”. Nearly all of them were moderated for good reason.
I also don’t think the presence of places like hexbear are doing us any favors.
You can see them jumping from Lemmy server to Lemmy server as they get banned from each.
Eventually, they’ll just set up their own instances so they can bother people with impunity.
And then we block that instance! Or it gets defederated.
It would be super nice if users could block instances.
Like, I have no desire to see anything from the furry instance.
It became a thing in Lemmy 0.19 - as long as you’re on an instance that has updated to that, it should be available to you. At the bottom of the settings page in the web ui, but if you use an app they might not expose that to you yet.
I think that came with version 0.19.1 specifically.
I hadn’t realized it had been implemented yet since I don’t use the browser. Thanks for the update!
You can on instances running .19 or newer. Settings -> Blocks -> then at the bottom is an option for blocking instances.
Connect has been able to do that from the get go. As well as individual communities within instances.
You can do this with certain apps, like Boost!
Or Connect (Android)
Huh, I guess I haven’t tried it recently, because that’s what I’m using.
I think that’s coming (or is it implemented already!?)?
I totally thought that was in 0.19 but I haven’t actually seen that yet.
the 0.19 implementation is so half-assed I genuinely think the Lemmy devs just don’t want that functionality but expected quite a lot of backlash if they outright said as much, so they decided to implement something that ticks the box in the “wanted features” list without having any effect
afaik it only blocks communities and explicitly lets users from blocked instances through
Feel free to make open an issue to improve instance blocking. Or better yet a pull request. We are only a few devs with limited time, and hundreds of issues to work on.
It’s under Settings -> Blocks -> then down at the bottom is the block instances option.
If the apps don’t have instance blocking yet, the webui does (in 0.19)… I haven’t tested it, but it’s there, at the bottom of my settings page 🙂
0.19.1
This is possible on kbin.
…and then they spin up a new instance with a new domain…
Domains are unfortunately fairly cheap and it’s not impossible to get a different IP assigned to a server box.
I don’t mind costing them the effort or $10 for a new domain
Incidentally I have several domains with DNS provided by freedns.afraid.net, which allows sharing domains. Everyone who asks for a domain under any of mine just seems so very sketchy. Now I have to worry if they’re a nazi looking for a new domain to get banned
no work in microblog tab
So there’s going to be a fediverse and a mirror fediverse?
That was always a risk of decentralized services, unfortunately.
And the other one is the one with opposite facial hair
Removed by mod
Isn’t that basically what basedcount is?
I’m unfamiliar with it. Would you be so kind as to explain what you mean?
This guy
From the siderbar:Avoid Censorship. Stay Based.
The thing that actually worried me a little bit more was people upvoting the aggressive comments to be top comments.
I was reading some thread over at !politics@lemmy.world today, and a lot of stuff advocating for political violence were the top comments. Mods yanked it, but nevertheless, people were vibing with some comments about dragging people through the street. I felt like I was on X/Twitter.
Yeah, I think it’s a legitimate and growing problem. I think a lot of folks don’t realize, but since growth has slowed from Reddit more broadly, the people who feel they have been “unfairly silenced” are the fastest growing subpopulation around here. If I’m honest, I think the only real antidote is to reestablish growth from communities with kinder dispositions.
We don’t need to take from nicer communities, we need to build nicer communities. Right now there aren’t any left wing instances, which is a big problem. It was nicer back when lib.lgbt existed.
Right now there aren’t any left wing instances
Bro what
Also it doesn’t have anything to do with political distribution. It’s an issue of habit and disposition.
Left wing people are disposed to helping others. Right wing people aren’t. Nobody’s cultivating left wing spaces where kindness is a habit.
Removed by mod
deleted by creator
People like to fetishize revolution.
Even offline I have friends that talk that kind of way and just reveal themselves as being poor students of history.
I was reading some thread over at !politics
There you go, that’s your problem. Political topics always gets heated and brings out the worst in people, no matter the platform. The first thing I did is block all politics (and general news + sports) communities, and it’s been a fairly pleasant experience so far for me, except for the odd troll or fanboy that shows up every now and then.
Lemmy.nz also defederated Hexbear, which helped a lot.
Technically they pulled a “you can’t fire me, I quit” and defederated first, but whatever.
Yea, they tend to do that, think they did the same with blaahaj. Pretty funny tbh.
You didn’t block all politics. Everything is political.
No it’s not. You can have casual communities or gaming or sports communities that aren’t political.
Casual conversation, gaming, and sports are political.
You read my mind. It’s the same feeling I got when a reddit sub would degrade into a toxic circle jerk, and I’d have to unsub. Except it feels like it’s a lot of lemmy communities lately. I feel like I can’t respectfully disagree with anyone without being met with ad hominem attacks. I don’t think something like changemyview could survive.
Also reminds me of those anti-moderate subs, which is a sentiment literally synonymous with radicalization. I’m all for free speech, I would just rather they state whatever take they have with a calm, measured demeanor.
You have a problem with people being against the status quo?
Well remember that any instance you federate with also gets to vote. If you feel like votes aren’t matching your values, perhaps you should try an instance with more of the “aggressive” stuff defederated.
Possibly, although those instances also have less content. I remember starting out with a BeeHaw account like many of us here. Trade off was often less content, no ability to create your own communities, but less people lashing out at each other.
Beehaw is very selective though (and that’s fine). There is a middle ground between lemmy.world and Beehaw though.
But you said elsewhere that you go on American political communities. I’m not American but from what I’ve seen, it is hardly surprising that those places would be toxic. I think at this point, arguing US politics online seems like a lost cause. You’re probably better off discussing politics IRL.
You think Beehaw isn’t aggressive?
The irony.
Indeed. And looking at the deleted post… definitely a power trip.
Removed by mod
Removed by mod
Removed by mod
YES, IT’S JUST FUCKING YOU, JESUS FUCKING CHRIST WITH THIS GUY…
Careful with the punctuation it makes you seem rather aggressive
Suck rocks you worthless git!
How dare you make the obvious joke before I got a chance to make it! You supreme overlord of feigned fury! Fake raaaage!
I was busy and couldn’t make it to the comment section in time, you two comment sniping chodes deserve to be interrupted by someone knocking on the door then lingering until you finish when you’re taking a poop
Friend, this is 'MURICA. You just don’t stand on someone’s doorstep unless you want to get shot.
Jesus Christ, the stereotype of American gun owners waiting for any excuse they can get to lynch someone really is accurate.
…sadly, yes.
Weep for rational US citizens.
Strap in. It’s an election year
Every year is an election year somewhere.
Yeah but this is an AMERICAN PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION YEAR!!!
that’s like the super bowl of elections
Sent from my freedom phone motherfucker
What the fuck is a superbowl
A really nice owl
Can I pet it?
Only if you twist your hand all the way around like an owls head before you pet it, otherwise the owl won’t recognize it as a friendly entity and will bite.
You mean a brave patriotic eagle! America’s awesome upgrade to the bog standard owl.
Yep it’s time for the entire online world to suffer for 3 months
3 months? Ha! Try a whole year. American election season, baby!!!
deleted by creator
Internet’s gonna internet.
Blocking still works though.
It’s almost always a small amount of people causing problems.
I still get some ghost replies occasionally, but it’s never going to be anything worth reading. Most of the toxicity comes from reply chains they start as well, so you’re not missing out on any constructive conversation.
deleted by creator
More exposure in news and media. More asylum seekers from reddit.
Definitely. A few months ago, there basically weren’t any crytpo-bros on Lemmy. Now any time I say anything negative about crypto, about six of them jump out of the woodwork to give their big long spiel on “the useful use-cases for NFTs” which I just roll my eyes harder every fucking time over.
It’s mainly you just have more trolls and aggressive people because we’re beyond the initial group who was actually looking for more community. Admins/mods do a pretty good job of banning trolls, but not until after they’ve shitted up the place for a bit, usually.
Also, the nature of Lemmy means that someone who gets banned for spamming an article just goes and makes an account on a different instance and then just goes and makes the same post in the same communities literally minutes later.
Popularity is rising, the bad actors are coming. Oh well.
Now any time I say anything negative about crypto, about six of them jump out of the woodwork to give their big long spiel on “the useful use-cases for NFTs” which I just roll my eyes harder every fucking time over.
This seems to correlate with the sudden rise in promotion of the Brave browser I’ve been seeing here.
Yeah I don’t trust anyone using that pedo browser. If I see that shit on their desktop they’re not getting a second date.
Anyone here seen the folding ideas video?
It’s a quality video, but I bowed out about halfway because I was already familiar with about 90% of the stuff he was discussing.
Great source for anyone looking for a good breakdown of the whole situation.
I usually just point to this quote from NFT co-creator Anil Dash:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/nfts-werent-supposed-end-like/618488/
But the NFT prototype we created in a one-night hackathon had some shortcomings. You couldn’t store the actual digital artwork in a blockchain; because of technical limits, records in most blockchains are too small to hold an entire image. Many people suggested that rather than trying to shoehorn the whole artwork into the blockchain, one could just include the web address of an image, or perhaps a mathematical compression of the work, and use it to reference the artwork elsewhere.
We took that shortcut because we were running out of time. Seven years later, all of today’s popular NFT platforms still use the same shortcut. This means that when someone buys an NFT, they’re not buying the actual digital artwork; they’re buying a link to it. And worse, they’re buying a link that, in many cases, lives on the website of a new start-up that’s likely to fail within a few years. Decades from now, how will anyone verify whether the linked artwork is the original?
All common NFT platforms today share some of these weaknesses. They still depend on one company staying in business to verify your art. They still depend on the old-fashioned pre-blockchain internet, where an artwork would suddenly vanish if someone forgot to renew a domain name. “Right now NFTs are built on an absolute house of cards constructed by the people selling them,” the software engineer Jonty Wareing recently wrote on Twitter.
Meanwhile, most of the start-ups and platforms used to sell NFTs today are no more innovative than any random website selling posters. Many of the works being sold as NFTs aren’t digital artworks at all; they’re just digital pictures of works created in conventional media.
The limited number of bits in the blockchain is a massive limitation on doing anything functional outside of bookkeeping with the crypto on the blockchain. It’s the most fundamental aspects of NFTs and it has been broken since Day One.
This is such a useful comment that I’m bookmarking this. I know that NFTs are flawed tech but I struggle to explain it well.
NFT’s are like those companies who will offer to sell you a square foot of scotland so you can call yourself a lord.
I strongly suggest bookmarking the article as well, since that’s where the quote came from.
Solid, I will.
Man one of them was trying to bring their crypto bullshit here and I fucking ripped their ass a new one. It’s probably still sore to this day.
What are you on about? If anyone is interested, read my comment history
Edit: if we store the shitty pictures on blockchain, literally nothing changes, except a big and bulky blockchain. “I can just save the picture lmao” will still be the answer… Are we supposed to store every software on blockchain too? I don’t think it’s viable
This article too is flawed
Positive and negative are qualitative and measures in this case.
Subjective ones at that.
deleted by creator
People have been asking this for as long as I’ve been on lemmy.
It depends a LOT on which instances you interact with. It’s a challenge of the fediverse in that every person has their own unique experience, some bad others good.
Why don’t you shut hell up nerd
The vibe has gotten much more negative, to the point that I don’t really want to post anymore. I came here in early June with the Reddit API stuff, and was shocked at how communal it was. It actually got me to start posting again (I hadn’t posted on Reddit since the early to mid 20-teens because it had gotten so toxic).
My last three posts (nothing inflammatory) have gotten flamed. Someone actually hunted me down based on my post history and I had to take the time deleting most of my old posts.
So from my perspective it’s not just you. I’m back to being a lurker.
Maybe, but you’re still awesome.
Awe shucks. Thanks. Right back at ya.
No you. /j
What I found is that hot topics come with the season, in June/July about Ukraine, in July/August about Meta, in October/November about Gaza, in December about Biden. There’s been plenty of charged discussion on these topics, and internal Lemmy dramas.
However, one thing I see more often here on Lemmy than other places is people updating their comments, being willing to admit they’re wrong or that their comment came off as hostile, and open negotiation in general. Consider the near defederation of programming.dev and lemm.ee, it was resolved amicably to everyone’s benefit.
I also see people thanking others for softening their tone and being kind, to them I say, keep doing that and encouraging good behaviour and ettiquite online!
Law of probability. The more people join, the more of a chance someone will say some stupid shit.
Also: SUCK MY BALLS
Thank you for translating that into Manbird
THE MOON HIDES FROM ME
Lost among the “internet sucks now, it used to be better” discourse is that the old internet was heavily moderated. The laissez faire parts of the old internet were known as the seedy corners of the web. Social media and its modern derivatives like lemmy take on that latter philosophy.
It’s no wonder it’s chaos every where. The libertarian tech bros have really impressed their world view on everyone. So the prevailing philosophy is these “digital town squares” should be absolute free speech zones. Except town squares in real life do not work like this anywhere. At least not in most liberal democracies. In real life there is bureaucracy. There are police, fire, ambulances. There is the simple matter of neighborly social contract. You cannot go into a real life town square and do whatever you want. You cannot just up and fight strangers, engage in lewd acts, set up encampments or what have you without permits. In the same way internet requires structure. Counter intuitively it used to have a lot more of it on account of sites being run by a real human being. Not the mega conglomerate investor groups feeding off ad/engagement profits.
Those users unfamiliar with the old internet yet pine for the good old days would have hated it. Power hungry mods is a meme as old as the internet itself. It’s a necessity of the internet. Hardly anybody gets banned for being an asshole anymore. Sometimes (often more like) people need to be forced offline so they can go outside.
Trigger warning on this. Can’t get the spoiler thing to work at all.
Definitely not imagining it.
Since I first joined I went from having nice conversations with strangers about the weirdest things, never having a single negative interaction, to nowadays saying I think women deserve a baseline level of respect and being told I should die giving birth to a rapists baby.
To be fair, the dude who said that did get banned from the instance I’m on for that, but it happening in the first place would have been unthinkable to me a few months ago.thats something a complete idiot would say
