Lemmy is quickly becoming (maybe it always was) a self masturbatory exercise in anti-capitalist Marxist thought. Don’t get me wrong, we need to fight capitalism at every moment. This is THE moment.
However, what I’ve gleaned is that the discussion here cannot step away from theory into the realm of prescriptions. Because prescriptions would entail confronting the harsh reality of the real world and end the little intellectual amusement park that are the lefty anti-capitalist memes.
In other words, Lemmy is acting exactly as designed: a containment space for tankie and lefties to never have to contend with real world actions. Billionaires love spaces like Lemmy because if we ever move the conversation away from memes, thats when they start shaking. But they know exactly that won’t happen in places like Lemmy. The merry-go-round is just so much fun!
In a word: distraction. Alternately, the “circuses” in “bread and circuses”
Correct, but it’s sort of self inflicted because the high level discourse is what’s valuable here. Would you like to dissect the labor theory of value? You’re in the right place!
Given how much “guilluotine memes” are on here…
no, this is not a “billionaire platform”
The memes are distraction fodder. It’s like an amusement park so we never move into prescriptive discourse
My point is for how long? At some point it either dies out or becomes popular enough to attract that attention. And so I’m asking now, because we never did with the other sites, what can we do to prevent it. Because these spaces are running out rapidly.
Both are correct. I don’t see the Fediverse ever becoming as large as the billionaire platform for the precise reason that it isn’t run by billionaires with gigantic advertising budgets. As such, the Fediverse will not have the large numbers of users and hence, will be quieter.
That being said, the Fediverse IS an alternative to the billionaire platforms - especially for people who desire smaller, more intimate communities and - perhaps most importantly - controlled and governed by the people who use it.
as long as there are enough people and content here, why should we even care if everyone isnt here? I dont even want every idiot here.
Preach. I’m happy to only hang out with the sort of people who see the value in social media by the people and for the people. Sometimes it’s messy, some of us are kinda annoying, but it’s always going to be better than corpo shit.
I think we need to be okay with less users because the billionaire platforms use bots, anyways.
This.
One of the reasons that billionaire controlled tech platforms become so mainstream IS their ability to grow and spread, and eventually become de facto means of communication online.
This allows them to break out of the early adopter, technical space and spread to a wider audience
Let me rephrase then. What is there to protect the Fediverse from control?
The Fediverse is decentralized, which means that it cannot (or at least it would be very, very difficult) be shut down by anyone. On an individual level, any user is free to start their own instance or community with their own rules in place should another instance or community become undesirable. If there is something you don’t like or that is somehow stifling to you, start your own and make it the way you want it.
How is that going to protect the space?
I can start an instance right now. But that doesn’t mean it will have any kind of importance. If I can create new spaces, and let’s say it grows, wouldn’t the problems from the first instance just carry over.
So I’m wondering how this is a solution to safe guard against tech billionaires?
So I’m wondering how this is a solution to safe guard against tech billionaires?
Truth Social is Mastodon, its just not federated, either is Gab for that matter (thank fuck).
Bluesky needs a bridge and alas assholes keep making then
An instance doesn’t need to federate with others.
I’ve long surmised that the future of lemmy / activitypub is a fragmented one. Federation only works if everyone instances are participating in good faith. There are instances that are generally not federated with because they do not participate in good faith.
If at any point you feel that “billionaires” are encroaching on your experience, there will always be a next refuge.
How is that going to protect the space?
Because it isn’t a singular space. An instance that goes bad can be tethered from the rest of the wider network, and abandoned, leaving it on its own.
I can start an instance right now. But that doesn’t mean it will have any kind of importance. If I can create new spaces, and let’s say it grows, wouldn’t the problems from the first instance just carry over.
I don’t know what you mean by “problems with the first instance”.
Ok please humor me then here. Can you walk me through a situation where an instance would untether itself. One day lemmy becomes super popular. People notice it as a platform to get information on. Millions of views an hour. Peter Thiel is paying chinese click farms to post manosphere content in popular lemmy communities. Musk is linking “no kings 5.0” lemmy posts to his followers on X who are brigading the comments. The moderators of the most popular lemmy.world communities are Marvel executives and Billionare Pedophiles.
So now we abandon it and leave. What does that mean as far as protecting that instance from that same thing happening?
We’ve cut the hyrda’s head clean off. Now what? Do users all move to the new instance? Is all the bad from the first instance just going to contain itself to that instance? What protection is in place?
There has been instances already where instances have disappeared, been defereated, and or just failed to keep up with the new changes in the protocols we all call home.
People have migrated pretty quick to other instances, other communities, etc…etc…
For example I was on lemmy.world for a good year or so before piefed. And they are both excellent platforms! Jumping instances is actually really easy and you dont lose much.
Jumping instances, making your own, etc…etc… are things you cant really do outside the fediverse. You cant just spin up a twitter clone an expect it to interop with twitter outside giving massive $$ to API costs (and thats if THEY allow it). Here I have spun up my own lemmy/piefed/mastodon/gotosocial/peertube instances and communicated with people on the respective platforms.
In a nutshell we have more control to do what we want. If I dont like what piefed and rimu/others are doing, I can fork and make a mesa-piefed with flapjacks and other things. And it will work with lemmy.world day 1.
We have the power. Thats what makes us different.
for now.
in 5 to 10 years? who knows.
reddit was radically different in 2007 than it is in 2017, vs 2027. so is the entire internet at large. the majority of internet traffic is now mobile devices and it will probably even be a starker majority by 2037.
Ok please humor me then here. Can you walk me through a situation where an instance would untether itself. One day lemmy becomes super popular. People notice it as a platform to get information on. Millions of views an hour. Peter Thiel is paying chinese click farms to post manosphere content in popular lemmy communities. Musk is linking “no kings 5.0” lemmy posts to his followers on X who are brigading the comments. The moderators of the most popular lemmy.world communities are Marvel executives and Billionare Pedophiles.
I think this is so ridiculous as to essentially constitute fantasy. Lemmy.world, the largest Lemmy instance has about 40% of the active userbase (and declining slowly as a share of overall users) out of a pool of about 40k users. I don’t think that’s sufficient if Lemmy.world tried to cut itself off from every other network, they’d shed a lot of users who have people and communities they interact with outside of the main instance.
If Lemmy became popular, it across the instances would become popular. Not just one instance.
If for some reason a single instance did become hyperpopular and obnoxious to interact on, the lemmy software would still be accessible to rebuild another ecosphere elsewhere.
So now we abandon it and leave. What does that mean as far as protecting that instance from that same thing happening?
I’m not sure you know what an “instance” is. Can you tell me what you think an instance is?
they’d shed a lot of users who have people and communities they interact with outside of the main instance.
I don’t think they would…
There’s a weird idea that people need one fediverse account that federated with everyone they want…
If someone like .world, but likes an instance that doesn’t federate…
The absolute worst thing is they have multiple interfaces to flip thru. And especially since so many people use an app that lets them flip in an instance.
Maybe I’m just old, but I remember having like 20 different forum memberships and having to visit completely different websites.
It wasn’t a huge deal.
Defederation isn’t a deathblow, and having a couple distinct circles makes sense.
paying chinese click farms to post manosphere content
I block people, I block instances, I block communities. Problem solved. It looks like you’re stirring shit like an annoying russian agent that would love to stir shit.
You know what I’ll do after reading all the comments in this thread? I’ll block you because you’re annoying, and then the problem will be solved.
I think you should take a more constructivist approach - what we have now, rather than what we might have in the future. Currently we have a network of like 20 major servers, mostly federated with each other. If one of those servers becomes insanely popular and overrun with bots and garbage, the rest will simply defederate from it. From the perspective of users on those other servers, they’ve only lost 5% of the network they liked. From the perspective of users who were on the popular server before it went to shit, they now have to move servers but still have 95% of the old network as they remember it.
Do users all move to the new instance?
What incentive is there for them to move? By the very nature of hype explosions, they are exponential, and as such most users will have joined when it was already quite popular. They won’t remember the “good old days” of their server being federated, so for them it’s fine to be isolated on a garbage server, at least initially. I suspect if something like this were to happen, most other servers will also limit signups for some time, to keep the spirit of the network alive and growing organically.
User unfriendlyness.
Visually, Fediverse isn’t like reddit, instagram, or any other popular social media places.
You need to put in some effort to even browse it.
That anyone can run a node. I could put one in my basement.
Including billionaires or heritage foundation or Thiel. Also what would you do with this node? Significance matters right now. Numbers and engagement matters. The left have lost significance and engagement year over year. You can stand up a node but how does this safe guard our spaces from being over run?
I can defederate from those instances. Problem solved. So can you.
A lot of people really don’t understand federation…
And I think it’s because instances federate by default no matter what.
Like, there’s one instance that is a single person who believes they have multiple personalities. They have open signups but then ban anyone that signs up as “impersonating admins”.
.world federated with them, and even let them in the “admin only” matrix chat and let that person pretend to be a real admin who has real problems with actual users.
I legitimately don’t know if they’re aware, it’s just they federate with literally anyone by default, and that’s why they keep running into issues later.
But they exist still. My assumption here is it wasn’t always a shit hole. That the shit hole occurs when a few poor features of digital spaces are exploited. Vote manipulations. Moderation capture. Linking posts and communities by accounts like Libs of TT who brigade. And once you de-federate, what stops them from jumping to any other instances you enjoy?
Keep mind that Trump’s truth social is a Mastodon instance. But no one federates with it (by design; they never turned federation on on purpose). That doesn’t mean that other mastodon instances are made worse because it’s there.
So safe spaces for me, but not for thee?
You’re saying that because assholes have their own space, that we can’t?
Your point makes no sense. Do you understand federation and defederation? It’s not a tool of censorship. It’s literally the solution to the problem you’re complaining about.
Not sure what you mean here. I’m saying it is potentially not censorship proof and that we should be aware of that.
Numbers and engagement matters
What does one do with numbers and engagement on the Fediverse?
Share ideas. Build community. Raise awareness. You build hype.
With enough numbers and engagement you can resist the spread of the right and push back.
- Everyone can create an instance (Well, at least anyone who can pay for a domainname and hosting, which is the basic requirement for every webservice)
- As default, instances federate with each other
- Instances that are bad neighbors get defederated
That’s it, basically. Even if someone bought up all instances and domainnames (which would require that server admins sell them, which i can’t see many doing, or else they wouldn’t run a fediverse service in the first place), there’s nothing stopping you from creating a new instance outside of the control of this person the same day. It literally cannot be simply taken over by, say, Microsoft.
Right, and I’m thinking this is not actually a solid way to protect fediverse from what is happening everywhere else.
We can all create instances, but there needs to be engagement for it to matter. I’m not looking at this from the point of view of “what can I do to enjoy my time on the internet while my rights are taken away and I’m told my sister should go to jail for wanting an abortion”
There is a pattern that occurs with seizing digital spaces. It starts small. They begin dog whistling in small communities. Not enough to get banned. Just enough to get reactions. Based off the reaction they target a few of the weaker ones. Whistles get louder. They link those to their influencers who post to their base. That base begin to show up and the community begins to fracture. Mods get overwhelmed. Ask for help to increase mod team. Some of the new mod team are the very people poisoning the community or are affiliated. The new moderators make it worse. Users begin to block or leave the communities. More dog whistles. More growth from the right until the community is captured. They move on to target another bigger community and are now using the first community as a pool to feed into the bigger one and turn it. So you can de-federate but nothing really stops the attacks. There is no real mechanism right now to guard against what has happened as far as I see it.
If lemmy were to grow as big as other sites, it will be just as likely to swing hard right unless something else is done.
If you’re wanting a planned in advance ideal solution, that’s not really possible, but people can collectively respond to problems as they happen and adapt, as long as they aren’t constrained from doing so.
I believe the pattern and tactics you describe are always going to be more effective on a platform controlled by a company like Reddit, because any efforts to counter them are ultimately limited by the agenda of the platform owners. There are people on Reddit trying to investigate and call out deceptive commercial spam, but when the spammers block them to prevent a response, set their post history to be unreadable, buy moderator positions, and admins only care about their own power and profitability (cutting users off from api etc), the deck is stacked against them. In the end it’s just not their website.
Ultimately this is an organizational challenge, not only a technical or platform design challenge. If the organization is a collection of users who generally want genuine non-manipulative interaction between real people, and the protocol is set up to make it easy for them to route around malicious attempts to usurp control, that doesn’t mean immediate victory over adversaries but it is a big leg up.
The “swing to the hard right” comes as soon as more normies arrive. There are basically two ways this goes:
a) badly behaved normies get the boot. comes with the side effect of keeping the cost for instance admins low and the work for mod teams small, but also means that we stay a niche. I have no issues with this.
b) normies come here and do as they always do. this is your scenario. Since normies - since they are normies - will simply swarm to single instances, as we saw at the API exodus, the rest of the fediverse will sooner or later defederate from those single instances if they aren’t able to keep their normie horde in check. This is fine, actually. If i really want to look at something only the normies are talking about, i can simply fire up my normie-instance account and see all i want.
Since we have a simple mechanism of keeping badly behaved instances in check, i cannot see how your scenario actually comes to fruit.
Both a) and b) only works for so long. We’re not talking just about users. We’re talking about coordinated efforts by group’s backed by financial support to slowly take over. I’ve seen them go so far as getting themselves onto mod teams. They have it down to a science mean if we’re not making them rewrite their books constantly then lemmy is just going to go the way of all other platforms.
What is there to protect the Fediverse from control?
Why do you think people want it to have no control?
4chan exists, people would go there if they want a lawless wasteland. Or that weird 4chan ripoff that gets spammed every couple months here. Plebbit? They change the name constantly
And there’s fringe instances where they claim to want that lawlessness, but look at their modlogs and they stamp out anyone who disagrees with them. So you can try an “anarchist” instance if hypocrisy is ok with you…
But your question is coming from a very unpopular perspective.
The vast amount of people want someone in control because otherwise it’s just a bunch of trolls who don’t have a choice if they use the big platforms, because they’re IP banned from there.
Fediverse will always have a way for the dregs to get in, so having someone with “control” is necessary. Otherwise normal people leave…
I think some time in the future we’re all going to wake up to the realization that the mods were the problem and a big part of why the right wing are growing while the left are dying out.
In the past couple decades the left has fumbled so hard they have completely destroyed themselves and their ideals with almost no sign of recovery for the next few decades.
we’re all going to wake up to the realization that the mods were the problem
No…
Because you can make an instance right now and be the admin with full control, and have it be the lawless wasteland you claim everyone wants.
You would fail just like all the others before you, because even if someone thinks they want that, they quickly realize they dont when they go somewhere like that.
In the past couple decades the left has fumbled so hard they have completely destroyed themselves and their ideals with almost no sign of recovery for the next few decades.
This is bog standard low empathy thinking from the right.
You assume you’re a “silent majority” and everyone thinks like you, because you lack the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes
For fucks sake, voat is what you say people want, look into how even reddit maga enjoyed that once they finally found a place “free of moderation”.
Spoiler:
When they realized they couldn’t ban dissent and it wasn’t a safe place, they left.
You would fail just like all the others before you
Which is my point a little bit. But you assume it fails because people don’t want it. Leftist need to change to want it if they want to survive.
For fucks sake you’re all suppose to be leftist and you can’t even re-create a co-operative based approach to your digital space. But you’re all going to say “we need to universalize X, Y or Z” but when it comes to your cat post we need a hierarchical system where ultimate control is given to a select few faceless individuals??
There is no future for the left if you rely on moderation. Moderation will inevitably become the tool of tech billionaires to control our digital spaces. Being able to stand up new instances is not a defense to protect these spaces against that. The left needs spaces to disseminate information. Spread ideas and build momentum. The only logical conclusion becomes that the minute it is popular enough to be useful then it will also be popular enough to for the right to target. If lemmy does not develop ways to guard against control by a select few faceless individuals then it will go the way of reddit if not worse. Without spaces to grow, then the right will continue their trend of capture people of all ages to their ideas and principals.
The left needs space
And those exist…
You want a space
One centralized location where everyone is, and no one is allowed to do any moderation.
That will never happen, because no one wants to hang out with a bunch of Nazis and bigots, and that is going to be the one group who will abso fucking lutely show up in droves to a social media website with zero moderation and a leftist lean.
If you legitimately still don’t understand any of this, you’re gonna have to ask someone else for more help.
What spaces are those?
The decentralization is there, but in theory the owner of the largest node could defederate from everyone else, forcing users to leave the largest instance or put up with it? I genuinely don’t know which direction users would go, lemmy users are an odd bunch.
lemmy users who are ideological tend to just align with the ideology of their instance, and are happy to defederate from instances that don’t align with their political beliefs.
and i don’t really blame them. a lot of instances are tiny, but very active, and extremely toxic in their userbase. the majority of hate speech and hostility I get on the fediverse comes overwhelmingly from a small group of instances, which I eventually just blocked.
and it makes sense if an admin has their instance’s communities brigaded by one of these other instances, they should probably just block it entirely for the health of their instance’s users.
nothing. it’s at the mercy of the instance admins or those who host the instances.
if at some point they get bought up, or decide to collude, you won’t have any options.
they are also subject to the national laws in which their servers reside.
people forget, reddit started as a server in someone’s basement too in 2005. it was a start up, then it got purchased by conde nast in 2006, who started advertising it. i found reddit in 2007 as part of Wired’s website feed.
reddit was niche until the mid 2010s, it became a top 10 website in 2017-2018, and now is 7th most popular site on the internet, just behind twitter/x.
Exactly. This was my thought. I remember early reddit. It was amazing and we all said the same shit Being able to upvote and downvote posts meant anything could be posted and the community moderated. Then it all shifted. Voting no longer mattered other than to be smug and say you don’t agree. I look at lemmy and it seems like it took the moderator first approach. It took the worst parts of reddit.
If you don’t understand the distinction between voting and federation, perhaps toy need to do some more reading?
Nothing I said implied this. We’re all having a discussion here. I don’t think this type of lazy statement helps anything.
Billionaire Lemmy admins? Where do I get my check?
I don’t know your experience with being online but I’m telling you that what you said was said mockingly about other sites too and it turned out to be true
Getting mad at the people here just to have fun is about as useful as the people that come here just to stir up trouble. If people aren’t having fun here, people aren’t going to join or stay.
I post daily animal content. Anyone just scrolling can just scroll and click on cute animal and move on with life. But for those that want to read the posts, you will find ample opportunities of all varieties to get involved. As much as I’d like it to be different, everyone on here has their own reasons they can’t or won’t get involved, but a couple might. It’s gotten me to work at a rescue for 2 years now, and one or 2 others have DMed me saying they got involved with places I’ve helped them find, and a handful more have done things to make their homes more suitable to bring back animals or donated to places doing amazing rescue work. It’s not changing the world, but it hasn’t been pointless.
We’ve got some communities that I think are great, like Dull Men’s Club. Again, everyday activities, but it’s people doing small acts to make something better than it was. I’d love to have activists here teaching folks how to unionize, set up aid programs, etc, but the pool of those folks is very small. The news and politics communities we have do seem to be full of a number of very outspoken and angry people. It turns me off to participating in most threads. It’s not surrounding one’s self in an echo chamber or safe space, but most of us deal with enough IRL obnoxious people to want to do it more here. I read the article if it’s interesting and skip the comments. I’d probably like talking about a lot of the events with people here, but not if the same handful of obnoxious people are going to insert themselves into every thread, but that is what happens in a public forum. Until someone creates and mods better communities and has the patience to be trashed daily in Power Trippin Mods because it’s effectually impossible to ban people, this is what we’re going to have.
It’s sad I can’t recommend Lemmy to most people I know. I think about not posting here anymore from time to time, but the platform is a good size for me to handle my audience, and there are a ton of really great users here. My content doesn’t pull in the angry crowd typically either. But as a whole, we got a lot of anger, misplaced or not, being the first things new folks are going to see. I’m not huge into the memes or comics a lot of the time, but people generally are going to react much more positively to that than more anarchy/communist rage posts.
the problem is the angry commies, etc. are the most prolific and aggressive users. if your funny meme gets any decent traction… they come storming in because they see an opportunity to push their propaganda and bully people.
not a day goes by here where I am not told I am an ignorant capitalist facist, or worse. often in a community or post that has nothing to do with any of that.
Oh, I hear you. I just scolded all the bloodthirsty folks on the post of the hunter getting killed by the elephants. I await that massive downvoting, nevermind I’m one of the few (only?) wildlife rescue people on this platform. The dude seemed innocent and law abiding and well liked in the local community where he was savagely killed and people here are cheering.
It’s also getting pretty sketchy with all the Israel comments. I’ve always been pro-Palestine, but every day the comments seem to be a little less anti-Israel colonialism and more to the Jews secretly run the world and all Jews support zionism side of things. There is so much gatekeeping in the news and political groups here. I really hesitate to participate anymore, which is a shame compared to how things felt at the API Exodus.
I felt pretty far left before I joined up here. I might still be. I was interested in anarchism and communism before spending so much time here. Now I’m not anti that stuff, but yeah, I don’t need to hear any more about it right now. I’ll keep doing my own thing over here and I’m fine being unaffiliated with a label on what my beliefs are.
Everyone was so scared of being a bad mod, but mods are what keep us from getting to where good users move out because the ones that chase them out while not technically breaking community rules do their thing. It’s a thankless job, and that’s why I have no desire to be one, but I am forever greatful for good mods.
Yeah, on certain hot topic issues there is no clarity or perspective, just blind rage and hate. And if you try to inject and perspective or context on them, well you get threatened, reported, and your comments will be removed.
My issue is that there were Nazis in my park recently holding a rally. A lot. Last year they were on over passes. Marching in streets. Women are arrested in democratic countries now for things that we thought were personal rights. People are disappeared by the government and people cheer it on.
So I like cat pictures and having fun. But is that what leftist should be focused on right now?
I’m asking to find out where people are with all this. Is lemmy a last bastion in a digital world that is mostly captured by right leaning billionaires who will inevitably come for us or are we just going to have fun or like 5 more years and then when its much worse go “oh fuck yea would have been cool to fight back when we had the tools and time.”
I’m just worried we’re giving a limited window of opportunity that is quickly closing.
I largely agree with you, which is why I decided to participate in this post. I felt you were just losing the focus a bit from the frustration you came in with and from some of the people arguing with you here.
Like you said, I’d love to see more community building and the growth of actual movements here, but I don’t know if that can be done on a generalist platform. I’ve got 6000+ subscribers here, and like I said, I’d say maybe a dozen of those users have actually been moved to do something. I don’t begrudge the ones that are just “cute pic!” and move on with their day. If this was a comment section on www.progressiveleftycauses.com, I could be mad, but that’s not what this is. I think it’s important to maintain realistic expectations for a social platform. Everybody can easily jump in with a joke or a complaint, but getting strangers to do stuff is really hard. Hell, I can’t even get most people to actually reply with “Great pic!” It just is what it is.
There’s still nothing stopping you or I from pushing out agendas here. But that also goes for the jokers and the party crashers. I do agree that this platform may lose the inertia to become a practical haven for progressive causes as its major purpose, but it can always still support some of that.
I do appreciate that and you’re right about losing focus. I get a little bent out of shape over some of the more ignorant comments from people.
I get not wanting to begrudge the “Cute pic” people but everyday I just don’t get it. What are people on the left doing. It’s just so sad to me to see what it’s become that I don’t know what future it holds and that sucks. This is a lefty space and its just the realization that this is it. It’s what is left and people don’t even see it or care. They can’t be bothered.
I have a lot of anger from going on any other digital space and seeing outright racism and sexism and just horrible shit that is now so common. And I come to lemmy and people keep promoting the idea of just ignoring things that irk them.
NO action. NO fight. Just block and move on.
Wouldn’t that be just what the right would love for us to do? Block them instead of challenging them. It makes me realize the left may be dying not because we did our best and fought and actually tried but instead we willingly gave up and convinced each other to as well.
For me, Lemmy is the last nail in the coffin in a digital frontier that highlights this. I don’t even know if people know how bad it is because most people here just block and avoid things they do not like since they are the “cute pic” people.
In a world where numbers and engagement matter most, how do we not partially blame them especially when the “cute pic” people are avoiding the world because they hate the situation but they’re just not willing put up with it enough to push back like others.
Maybe I watch too many movies, but the more politically active I plan to be, the more my online presence will fall in line with the “cute pic” people. The internet is for cat pics, surveillance, and shouting into the void. Real change needs to happen outside now.
This kind of floors me because I may have said similar years ago, but lately I think the digital space is the most important frontier we have right now. Like everybody is planting their flags on different lands. There’s only so much to go around. It’s why these tech bros are all spending billions on it. But the left seems to have volunteered to sit out and ignore its importance. I don’t know why
This is a lefty space
Is it? Which lefties? People dogpile on the ML creators all day, every day. Personally, I’m mostly okay with the M and hate the L from my understanding of each. But they still decided to let us all hang out here.
I want change, but I’m nearing 50 and not in great physical shape. There’s only so much revolution I can do. I try to educate the public on things I think are important and to try to get them to internalize value in the things that they might want to protect for future generations. Fundraising, logistics, and mobilizing aren’t my strengths. I don’t know many people that could do that stuff really well. Lots of us are here because we’re fairly introverted and are here having these conversations anonymously with strangers. If being revolutionary was easy, we’d either be in a lot less (or a lot more) turmoil than we’re in now. Most of us can’t make it our whole “thing.”
We could and should be doing more to speak to what kind of voices we will or won’t tolerate here in the communties though. I’m getting some heat for defending the big game hunter even though I don’t agree with what he stood for, but I feel people were pushing a lot of internalized anger at the system onto this random guy who seemingly did nothing ethically wrong. I could have shut up and moved on, but this is a topic I feel I understand more than the average person here and was willing to call them out on their indecent behavior even if it means they’re going to hate me or think less of me now. There’s plenty of people they could wish harm upon and while I’m not the type to join in, there’s a number of people I could name where I wouldn’t be sad if they were gone, but this guy seemed fair innocuous in the grand scheme.
Lemmy is far from the last chance we have. Three years ago, 95% of us didn’t have this, but we still tried to do our thing somewhere else. Piefed in providing great opportunity for those that still want to interact with Lemmy without some of the baggage. And more apps and forums will continue to pop up. You can always start an old school forum as well with myBB or what have you. That may be a better style of platform for something like what you want to see anyway since it’s more specific, but at the same time, it narrows the audience potential greatly. While I don’t necessarily support or condemn what cowbee, for example, promotes, I think the way they can appear in tangentially related posts and have a prepared means to unobtrusively yet powerfully share their beliefs to potentially receptive people is a solid example for others looking to do something similar. Keep looking around, see what works and what doesn’t, and keep going for what you believe. You can do it here, somewhere else, all of the above, whatever. Be passionate and be helpful and receptive and you will get people to listen to you. It may not be to the extent you want very often, but we gotta take the wins we can get. Stay strong, and try to stay positive.
people here would rather just call each other Nazi over disagreements in leftist doctrine. they are not seriously interested in political activism, or exercising their political rights.
in fact the predominant message I see here is that voting and participating in politics is stupid and pointless. and you encourage others to participate in meanignful ways, like in local politics, where you do have legitimate power, people just call you names and say you are a fascist because any participation is supporting facism, or something.
apparently sitting around pirating stuff on your linux PC and posting about how awesome that makes you is the only way to fix society. throw in a internet debating on why your version of leftism/anarchism/communism is the only good one and all the other ones are closeted facists, and you have about 80% of the predominant lemmy userbase.
But hey I’m a just a fascist who votes, participates in my local community, and uses a windows/mac PC and subscribes to netflix and spotify, so clearly I’m the one who is destroying all that is good with the world. And I also subscribe to universalist humanitarian principles, so I’m an imperialist apologist or something.
Well, I havent seen any bots or weird AI comments, Id say not yet.
I see these on a daily basis.
good news is usually the account is banned within 24 hours of appearing and spamming it’s weird nonsense.
Maybe i need to read more and better
you probably just don’t notice it. typically it’s not obvious unless you look at the account history and can see them spamming their stuff to multiple communities in a short time and otherwise making weird incoherent or provocative nonsense.
The admins are pretty good about detecting and banning it though.
When Lemmy first popped up the amount of Onlyfans bots was a problem. Like day one. It’s an inevitability which is my point.
There is no space left for leftist. So 2 possibilities exist. Fediverse will grow and eventually attract attention of people in power. At that point they will capture it like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, Vine everything else. Or Fediverse does not grow, its boring and instead dies out leaving no leftist spaces. The consequences of either is the capture and control by right wing who keep shifting the whole culture right.
But reddit is SO left!
Also: lame about the bots, they drown real small sellers struggling to make a living.
What?
Alternative, if you like your Platform not enshitified. I do.
we’re just building another platform full of very angry people flooding the platform with their negativity and extremist views, and shouting down anyone who doesn’t agree with their angry world view.
if you compare the lemmy and reddit front pages, they increasingly look similar. just lots of pettiness, political anger, and dad-joke level memes. we’re also starting to see a core group of power users on fedi who post their agendas and tend to flood out content posed by more casual users.
This is what people want. a year or two ago, lemmy was very different, but as it grows more popular it reflects more populist viewpoints and pushes more bait-content that is entirely about emotional reactions and bias confirmation.
You can’t platform or technology away human beings natural propensities for ignorance and rage.
The reason the early internet had less of it was, well, the early internet was much harder to interact with and it was largely text-based, and it was mostly full of positive tech enthusiasts who thought they were going to solve all the world problems with with the internet. Now the internet is dominated by content that is largely pornographic in nature, desired to stimulate the lowest most base desires, and it’s predominantly short-form video and image based, which even the dumbest people can understand and relate to, and overwhelmingly rewards negative feedback loops.
The Fediverse’s small size makes it easier for social bubbles to form, IMO. Though there are two elements of its design that improve things slightly over Reddit; user blocking doesn’t disrupt the blocked user from continuing to participate in discussion, and both upvotes and downvotes are visible separately so you can tell when a comment or post is genuinely controversial.
This depends upon the communities you follow. And you have the choice to NOT follow them. I only read the communities that I subscribe to (instead of sorting by ‘all’), and it is very rare that I encounter the garbage that you’re describing.
echo chambering yourself isn’t healthy or productive. it just makes you ignorant about what is going on around you.
I am not interested in protecting my feelings and surrounding myself only with people who reflect my own beliefs back at me. I’m interested in diversity and understanding other points of view, even those I disagree with.
for me knowledge is the antidote, not ‘positive vibes only’.
If subscribing to one’s own interests is an ‘echo chamber’, then all of us are guilty. If you are going to immerse yourself in ‘diversity and understanding’ by dunking yourself headfirst into the totality of the human condition without any filters whatsoever…well, you get what you deserve, I guess.
You’re standing on a beach with your back to an oncoming tsunami as if your pleasant view is going to last forever.
You know, I think people have many different interests and reasons for why they use social media platforms. Some are just hobbyists and use it for those purposes and thus curate and control a feed that emphasises their interests. Is that bad?
No. But it’s bad if they insist and harass other people who don’t use the platform the same way they do, or deny/refuse to acknowledge other types of users and problems exist, just because they have curated it out of their experience.
It’s not any different than a white person claiming the cops never bother them, so clearly this BLM thing is totally made up nonsense and these silly black people should stop complaining about police profiling and brutality towards black people.
People generally, really really struggle, with the concept that other people are different than them. For whatever reason, they seem to view other people’s differences, and difference experiences and concerns, as THREATS to themselves, and respond with hostility, often under the ‘let me help you you ignorant fool’ guise.
I mean, i block those people frequently, but man they exist in abundance here. Far more so than in my most of my reddit experience, but similar to my reddit experience from 2020-2022 when my post about my cat sitting on my porch got me banned for inciting violence, because outdoor cats are all mass murders and I am also one if I let my cat on my porch.
I don’t think this is happening though. I think you’re boxing at shadows.
more or less. this is precisely why so many people thought Trump would not be elected and were shocked he got elected twice.
they were living in a bubble world totally ignorant of how the other half of their country was living. including most of the media. they also systematically deny the problems in this country that fueled the rise of the alt-right and the expansion of hate-group, again because they live in a cultural bubble where these problems don’t exist.
those of us who were paying attention to how other people live, think, and vote, were not at all surprised at his victories.
Just so I’m getting this straight,
Being in control of your feed = “echo chambering yourself”.
Looking at everything = “very angry people flooding the platform with their negativity and extremist views”.You do you.
No. you’re not getting it straight.
your interpreting my comment into a false dichotomy.
people here are simply pissed that i’m acknowledging the existence of a userbase that is problematic. that userbase would be here regardless of my blocking them or not. because of them, they dont’ exist because of their own highly curated experience and self-selection into an echo chamber communities.
and this is because… those echo chamber users are the very same people.
they are practicing three monkeys philosophy, if they pretend to not see it, it doesn’t exist. if someone tells them it exists, then that person is the evil person. if someone points it how and shows it to them, they block that person because they can’t acknowledge it’s existence or the existence of anyone who would acknowledge it.
Not everyone is using this platform for news and political opinions. Some people are here for hobbies and general entertainment. It’s not “echo chambering” yourself if you are filtering out content that is not relevant to your use case.
yeah but you don’t get to do that for other people.
that is where the dispute here seems to be.
i acknowledge a certain issue with the users on this site broadly speaking, and the reply is ‘well you are just stupid if you don’t block yourself off from ‘negative content’’.
like, if you are only here for hobbies and etc, why are you in this community? because you’re going to encounter stuff outside of that here. and if that is upsetting or disturbing to you, then you should self-select out of it. rather than try to harass and browbeat other people into compliance with your use of the site.
some of us are here for news and politics and viewpoints outside of our own on a plurality of topics. we don’t see their existence as a threat to own own inner peace or whatever and celebrate diversity of opinion and perspectives outside of our own.
i mean anyone can block me, that’s cool. i block people too. But thinking these people, ideas, and communities ‘disappear’ just because you don’t see them is straight up delusional… and yet folks in this thread are claiming this is the ‘only way’ to use this site. it isn’t.
We’re on the same page. The people who don’t get it I dont’ think ever will. But I’m glad I"m not the only one seeing how damaging and counter productive for us to think it’s ever a good idea to go around blocking anything we don’t like.
What a positive and hopeful message!
it’s not a message, it’s a description.
Just like with Reddit, you get the front page you choose, reflecting your own interests
But the places with the most content are places that are all reddit lite. Very safe well moderated communities. It’s like lemmy is a place for people who thought r/pics was too spicy. As the OP said, people here are very confrontational avoidant. And that isn’t good because we need to be confrontational if we ever want to build a place that can build left leaning communities. If we don’t, if we ignore the world right now, it is only inevitable that this place will also be gone. And this may be the last space we have for a long time after that.
after being here for almost 5 years, I haven’t seen much of that, because I’m not looking for it-- but if those are the places you seek, as I’ve said, those are the choices you make. stop blaming others for your own choices.
this place wasn’t made for you, specifically. you sound like a spoiled child when you complain that it’s not exactly as you like and make no effort to use it as intended: to customize the experience to your liking. and when you make bad faith arguments complaining that there is content here you don’t like (especially when you seem to be seeking it out), you’re not fooling anyone.
Now you attack me personally? Shit argument. You sound like the child here. I’m here to discuss the platform. Keep to that.
I didn’t make any personal attacks, but making a petty and hypocritical argument hardly makes your point, although it does prove mine
You are sticking your head in a hole in the sand, and blaming other people for not doing the same.
Why does it upset you that others talk about things outside of your personal experience? Or you feel the need to tell them to curate their feeds in the same way you do?
Again, you are the type of user I’m talking about. Perhaps that why you find my comments disagreeable and think I should ‘solve’ the problem by just ignoring it’s existence. Not everyone wants to stick their head the sand. I am interested in what is going in in the world around me. I’m sorry that offends you.
now you’re just writing random insults because you can’t back up any of your claims after I pointed out that your arguments make so sense.
no, i get the homepage the algorithm forces down my throat, despite my interests.
which is why i don’t use reddit or other social media platforms anymore.
your attitude is precise what i am calling out. I saw words you don’t like, so you want to dismiss it with personal attacks, because your petty need to dismiss and attack a viewpoint on things that makes you uncomfortable and doesn’t agree with your beliefs. for you ‘positive’ is things that only reflect your per-existing beliefs and biases, you’re just isolating yourself from the wider world.
lol, there’s no “algorithm” forcing anything. You see what you subscribe to. Stop blaming others for your own choices.
And pointing out that you’re wrong isn’t “a personal attack“— but calling me names because you don’t like that is. If you don’t care for that, perhaps you should think before you speak.
that’s not how the internet works dude. you are clinging to a belief that simple isn’t true.
but that’s pretty common on here, just like on reddit or real life. people cling to untruths because it makes them feel better or superior or something. Like using Linux is some form of social liberation or something… lol
But it is how the fediverse works dude. you really shouldn’t talk about stuff you don’t have at least a basic understanding of, at least while being as condescending as you are currently.
Lmao, like I need some Rando on Lemmy to tell me “how the Internet works“
Grow up kid
There is no “algorithm” except if you sort by all, you get all, sorted by timestamp; if you choose “subscribed”, you get your subscribed communities, sorted by timestamp (both subject to “interesting” sorting when federation glitches out). It’s not like facebook or twitter where the “algorithm” is programmed to maximize engagement.
There was no personal attack in the completely true statement that in the fediverse, you get the front page YOU yourself choose, starting with choosing where you create your account because it defines what other servers your home instance connects to for federation.
Your understanding of the technical basis of the fediverse is lacking - and this is not a personal attack, it is what you publicly demonstrate.
Its the message people need here though. What are people here for?! Fucking bean posts, moth content?
Its like we’ve been given a Ferrari but we only use it to go get groceries.
Lemmy hasn’t grown more popular in the last year really. It’s fairly stagnant currently.
I can confirm this. Lemmy started 6 years ago, and the “programming” communities are still an empty desert. I know I (and we all) could submit more posts, but it hasn’t really changed since the beginning. Sad but true, but I still prefer this compared to reddit.
user activity is far more than it was a year ago. seems like the people that have joined more recently post a lot more.
Is it? It’s slightly up. It is a up a little bit more if you include Piefed.
I’ve been on fedi for 2.5 years. the past six months have seen a huge uptick in activity from my experience.
a year ago posts were rarely seeing 100s of comments. now dozens of posts per day are getting that.
i’ve also seen a ton more spam, AI content, and bot activity.
I don’t think the data plays this out.
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats Lemmy has fallen by 10k in a year. Of course Piefed has increased it by about 6k, so it’s a net decline of about 4-5k.
that’s users. that’s not the volume of what they are posting. those are two entirely different metrics
