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?

  • @spaduf@slrpnk.net
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    5 months ago

    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.

      • Saik0
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        45 months ago

        Indeed. And looking at the deleted post… definitely a power trip.

    • GhostalmediaOP
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      6 months ago

      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.

      • @spaduf@slrpnk.net
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        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.

        • Exocrinous
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          15 months ago

          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.

          • @spaduf@slrpnk.net
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            25 months ago

            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.

            • Exocrinous
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              05 months ago

              Left wing people are disposed to helping others. Right wing people aren’t. Nobody’s cultivating left wing spaces where kindness is a habit.

          • @blackn1ght@feddit.uk
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            35 months ago

            Lemmygrad or ml aren’t left wing? The entire platform feels left wing as all anyone can ever say is how bad capitalism is.

      • @d3Xt3r@lemmy.nz
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        175 months ago

        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.

        • @Ilovethebomb@lemm.ee
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          85 months ago

          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.

        • Exocrinous
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          -25 months ago

          You didn’t block all politics. Everything is political.

          • @blackn1ght@feddit.uk
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            25 months ago

            No it’s not. You can have casual communities or gaming or sports communities that aren’t political.

            • Exocrinous
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              05 months ago

              Casual conversation, gaming, and sports are political.

      • @kromem@lemmy.world
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        115 months ago

        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.

      • @teawrecks@sopuli.xyz
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        105 months ago

        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.

        • Exocrinous
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          -35 months ago

          You have a problem with people being against the status quo?

      • @SorteKanin@feddit.dk
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        85 months ago

        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.

        • GhostalmediaOP
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          95 months ago

          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.

          • @SorteKanin@feddit.dk
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            105 months ago

            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.

    • Snot Flickerman
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      876 months ago

      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.

          • Mom Nom Mom
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            516 months ago

            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.

          • @seathru@lemm.ee
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            106 months ago

            You can on instances running .19 or newer. Settings -> Blocks -> then at the bottom is an option for blocking instances.

              • ShittyKopper [they/them]
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                6 months ago

                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

                • @nutomic@lemmy.ml
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                  205 months ago

                  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.

              • Mom Nom Mom
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                56 months ago

                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 🙂

              • @seathru@lemm.ee
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                76 months ago

                It’s under Settings -> Blocks -> then down at the bottom is the block instances option.

          • @Traegert@lemm.ee
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            76 months ago

            Connect has been able to do that from the get go. As well as individual communities within instances.

        • Snot Flickerman
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          36 months ago

          …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.

          • @psud@lemmy.world
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            45 months ago

            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

      • Exocrinous
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        -15 months ago

        Hexbear called me a troll for being further left than them. They thought I was an extreme caricature of a leftist for saying things like “xenogenders are real” and “slurs against disabilities are bad”. My presence was actually critically destructive because I had effective points against all their reactionary opinions that made it impossible for themselves to honestly call themselves leftists. Now it’s against the rules to like me on there. That’s how bad I was for them.

  • @robocall@lemmy.world
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    305 months ago

    My suspicion is that a lot of redditors migrated over here about 7 months ago when certain apps shut down, including myself. At first, they were polite in an unfamiliar environment, but they’ve grown comfortable and act out, or speak less thoughtfully, like they originally did on Reddit.

  • @CultHero@lemmy.world
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    165 months ago

    I just started a few days ago and already had to deal with a transphobic troll. Online is so toxic that I’m afraid eventually all social media platforms end up on trolls radar and they seek to destroy them. It’s a shame because they ruin social media for everyone including themselves.

    So many people lack a basic sense decency that they actually think it’s ok to cause harm to other people simply for their own amusement. It’s usually straight white american males too.

  • Dessalines
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    295 months ago

    We can absolutely do better than reddit on this one. If someone is breaking rule 2 (be respectful), report that comment and we’ll get to it as soon as we can.

    • @dylanTheDeveloper@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Are reports anonymous? I don’t want to report a user that breaks rules only for the offending user to be friends with an admin and get me kicked from a community as payback

        • @WanderingVentra@lemm.ee
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          That can be a good thing, too, to find out if someone is abusing the report feature, as was common on Reddit when people didn’t like someone’s comment.

      • Dessalines
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        65 months ago

        Reports are not anonymous, but they also aren’t public. Only visible to admins and mods of that community.

        It’s a tradeoff, anonymous report abuse was a big problem on reddit that I didn’t want to replicate here. If the admins or mods aren’t trustworthy on your server, you should pry move to another one.

    • @Pratai@lemmy.ca
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      -105 months ago

      The problem is, most of the pro-socialist posts don’t get removed when I report them for rule 2. I’m certain there’s a bias here.

      • @Urist@lemmy.ml
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        95 months ago

        Maybe you should take care to follow said rule yourself? Looking through your recent comments in this thread it seems more to me that you are going in hard with bad takes and get hurt from getting dunked at. The question is really: Do you consider yourself respectful when you use ignorance to spite leftists?

      • @FiskFisk33@startrek.website
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        Being pro something you are against does not break the “be respectful” rule.

        You really shouldn’t go around trying to silence people with different opinions than you.

      • davel [he/him]
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        5 months ago

        For the first time in a liberal’s life, your viewpoints are being the least bit challenged. Must be awful, we socialists can’t imagine what you’re going through.

  • @Sombyr@lemmy.zip
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    275 months ago

    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.

  • @corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca
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    145 months ago

    People used to talk each other like they would talk to a neighbor.

    Careful. I’ll correct my neighbour’s spelling, too . :-)

  • @SorteKanin@feddit.dk
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    175 months ago

    I honestly don’t feel much has changed. There was perhaps a bit of a “new” feeling in the start and some excitement about the project, but I don’t think people have gotten more aggressive or anything.

    But I think all this probably depends what circles you hang out in. Probably also depends on what instances you federate with.

  • @CitizenKong@lemmy.world
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    155 months ago

    A lot of people are having a hard time right now. Try to be the change you want to see and react kindly and rationally would be my advice.

  • @TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.ml
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    105 months ago

    Reddit exodus effects. Reddit did not have the best kind of people on the internet. It just has had a bit more tamed 4channers.

    Also, it is way too clear how there is political animosity that practically threatens real lives of non-white people, or ruins their job/career lives, in the current situation that went from Ukraine side picking to Israel apartheid support vs opposition. All this as we came from COVID pandemic, horrific mental health and fucked up socialising abilities.

  • @ElderWendigo@sh.itjust.works
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    5 months ago

    I posted a cookie recipe in response to a cookie meme, got roasted for not converting baking units to science units. So yeah, people are getting kinda aggressive.

  • ProdigalFrog
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    5 months ago

    At least in the communities I’m subscribed to and interact with, I’ve still seen it mostly be positive interactions.

    • @Omega_Haxors@lemmy.ml
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      25 months ago

      It’s been my experience that it’s a couple problem instances where most of the toxicity comes from.

      • ProdigalFrog
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        25 months ago

        If you’re talking about the two that I think you are, I agree. I suspect my pleasant experience is due to my instance defederating completely with those, which is pretty swank.

      • Exocrinous
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        -15 months ago

        I’ve seen toxic behaviour supported by mods on Hexbear, Beehaw, and Blahaj mainly. World is also pretty bad.

        • @Omega_Haxors@lemmy.ml
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          • Hexbear: Similar to lemmygrad they have their strong convictions, but don’t have the maturity to back it up.

          • LemmyWorld: Users are a mixed bag but the admins seem dead set on turning the place into a nazi bar.

          • sh.itholefor.nazis: The only thing you need to know about these guys is they have a c/ for conservatives

          • feddit de: Literally every user on this instance is dead set on reminding you that Germany never underwent denazification

          • discusstchncs de: same story but to a much less extreme extent

          • lemm ee: The owners don’t really moderate and its users reflect this fact. Universally unpleasant userbase.

          • @TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.ml
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            35 months ago

            From my experience I think tchncs.de is fine, and lemm.ee is a victim of large userbase. You have few iffy people on slrpnk and sopuli at times, but things like that are best ignored.

            As long as the political takes do not start to become obviously stupid or have evil moral intent, a basic level of the hot takes should just be ignored. One needs to tolerate a bit of this stuff just for mental exercise and to “know the enemy”.

            • @Omega_Haxors@lemmy.ml
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              I still remember that clash I had with an ecofash on slrpnk. Thankfully they were quickly taken care of but even some of the gold star instances can have problem users from time to time.

              • @TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.ml
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                -15 months ago

                Give it 2-3 more months, and we will have a better consensus on how Lemmy will stay for a while. I think the most important part has been solved, that being Lemmy becoming a defacto valid, sane, non-conspiratorial and non-fascist alternative to Reddit that does not need to act like a “safe space”, retaining some open discourse qualities.

                In all honesty, I do not want the whole Lemmy to become a singular 100% leftist echo chamber entity, but have instances that also broadly cover the spectrum outside of rightwing lunacy. Richer discussions allow for bidirectional flow of ideas, and it is pretty much established that people eventually start to like too many leftist ideas, even if not all. I have worked for 3 years to help refine and grow Lemmy, and the more established it becomes as anti-capitalist/corporation Reddit alternative, the lesser those shithole Reddit clones and private spaces get to grow (ones where rightwing, Western nationalist, anti-LGBT, pedophilic and hateful elitist LARPer narratives flourish the most). Private spaces should be for personal and sensitive conversations, confidential stuff, or people like activists, dissidents and professionals.

                • @Omega_Haxors@lemmy.ml
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                  I’m extremely confident that at the very minimum Lemmy will be a nice little hangout spot, but it’s seeming like it’s going to be far more than that from what i’ve seen so far. It really is unique in that different types of shittiness is isolated within instances which means people will converge where they should be and problem groups will naturally DNI with each other leading to minimum conflict in the long term.

                  What really makes lemmy special is its true freedom of speech approach. And actual freedom of speech, not just nazis talking over marginalized people or single individuals controlling the conversation through their star power alone. You can make a random post, good, or bad, doesn’t matter, and you’ll actually be able to get organic traffic on it. I mean for god sake I made a crappy joke about cutting the mold off of cheese and growing marshmallows on trees and it got the attention that it deserved (which, to be fair, wasn’t much)

                  Mastodon barely anyone will see you unless you already have a following, and that sucks. You don’t really have to worry about that here.

          • Kras Mazov
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            35 months ago

            I’m only gonna comment on Hexbear and you’re completely wrong. They do have less patience with libs comming there saying shit, but everytime that happens, there’s always people actually engaging and backing up all of their claims. It’s not only dunking.

            • @WanderingVentra@lemm.ee
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              35 months ago

              It’s usually buried under the dunking but I think that’s because hexbear doesn’t have up and down votes, so they have to comment to make their opinion known. It leads to a lot of annoying brigading looking behavior on comments, but at least their good comments tend to be pretty good. Sometimes it’s not worth digging through all the sarcasm, pig poop balls, and picture posts to find it, though lol.

            • @Omega_Haxors@lemmy.ml
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              Really? Even the ones with nazis in them? Really would like to see you justify that one.

              EDIT: Oh you’re one of those anticommunist nonces. Okay, discarded.

          • Exocrinous
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            25 months ago

            Remember that time the World admins removed the rules against discrimination from their terms of service and got rid of the code of conduct? Racism was legal for a while there.

            .ee is my favourite instance because I trust the average user more than the average admin.

            • @Omega_Haxors@lemmy.ml
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              To be fair anything is a step up over LW’s antimoderation. They wanted to be reddit and I think they succeeded in the worst way.

              • Exocrinous
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                -15 months ago

                Antimoderation seems to be the norm on Lemmy. For example, I was banned from Beehaw for being “pompous”. I have narcissistic personality disorder, and being pompous is a symptom. It’s a disability that interferes with my ability to display humility. I was being nice, kind, following the rules, doing what I was told, trying to resolve problems peacefully, and the admins said I was pompous and banned me. NPD isn’t a disability when it comes to kindness, morals, ethics, or prosocial behaviour. But I can’t turn being pompous off, any more than I can turn being weird off as an autistic person.

          • @sunaurus@lemm.ee
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            lemm ee: The owners don’t really moderate and its users reflect this fact. Universally unpleasant userbase.

            This is categorically untrue. You can find our administration policy here, and we frequently ban users for breaking our instance rules. At most you could make the claim that we are lenient when it comes to things like heated arguments, as we often give warnings or temporary bans to users in such cases, but on the other hand, our “no bigotry” rule is very strict, and violations have consistently resulted in permanent bans.

            We of course don’t screen all posts and comments which our users write, so we can only respond to reports, but I assure you that our admin team is constantly going over and responding to the report queue (which is a big effort, and clearly a thankless job).

            By the way, I just want to point out that we have ~3000 active monthly users on lemm.ee, I find it very unlikely that you can make an accurate universal judgement about such a huge group of people.

            • @Omega_Haxors@lemmy.ml
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              That’s what the owners of feddit de said too and it didn’t stop their users from constantly leaving harassing messages on anything left of hitler. In fact, it was one of your members leaving a shitty comment that spurred me to add ee to the list, it wasn’t even included initially.

              EDIT: You do realize that modlogs are public right? I went through them and was less than impressed with what I saw. It seems your idea of “moderation” is to remove when people call you on your shit, which is especially convenient that someone just so happened to call out that your conservative c/ (why is there a conservative c/!?!) is being run by an actual pedo. So yeah, sums up what I expected from you guys.

              • @sunaurus@lemm.ee
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                25 months ago

                I am not really interested in discussing this with you, as you already have an opinion about lemm.ee and seem intent on spreading false rumors about us. I’ve learned several months ago that no matter how much you give to people for free, there will always be users demanding more, so I don’t think there is any chance of you being interested in what I have to say. I am just responding here, so other users who may end up reading this thread don’t come away with the impression that what you are saying is true.

                First of all, no user has ever been banned from lemm.ee for criticizing the admin team. Our admins have banned nearly a thousand users in the past ~7 months (just think about that for a second - that is a massive amount of bullshit our volunteer admins have had to wade through in the span of less than a year), and indeed the mod log is public, so you can easily check the ban reasons, which are consistently related to violations of our basic instance rules.

                If any moderation team on any of our communities does not follow our instance rules, then such communities are closed. We have in fact had to do this several times before with some conservative-type communities, mainly because they wanted to push the ideas that some people, based on their identities, are less valuable as humans that others. The current conservative community on the other hand is consistently moderating based on our instance rules, and they have incorporated the no bigotry rule into their community rules as well. If this ever changes, then we will take action, just as we have done previously.

                Regarding the allegations against one of the mods, I’m not sure if you’ve seen the event they were referencing, but I think it’s safe to say that this event was extremely misrepresented by the accuser. In any real cases of CSAM, lemm.ee has taken drastic actions. We have purged, banned, defederated, reported to authorities, we have implemented some technical safeguards, and we will continue to take action like this in the future as well.

                Let me just finish off by saying that we are a volunteer team giving up our time for free. I realize that users want admins to be perfect and moderate exactly in line with their preferences, but we are humans, we miss things, we make mistakes, and we can not possibly be available 24/7 or read every single piece of content posted by other lemm.ee users.

                • @Omega_Haxors@lemmy.ml
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                  Letting it get just bad enough that it doesn’t cause problems for you isn’t how anyone should moderate. You have to be proactive and get rid of problem users before it gets to that point, make it clear that isn’t welcome, which is something your instance has routinely failed to do.

                  Also for the record I know that you’re full of shit when it comes to the owner of conservative c/ not being a pedo because conservativism is at its core a pedo ideology, just like all right-wing ideologies; it always comes back to child abuse with those types. CSAM attacks don’t happen in a vacuum, they happen when you foster the kinds of people who are into that shit and you make them feel welcome, which is exactly what your “we’re going to do the bare minimum of moderating” is attracting.

                  I’ve already made it clear that i’m not going to fold to any of your tricks, and you’ve made it clear you’re aware you’re wasting your time on me, so why you even bothered to besmirch your reputation by even engaging in the first place is beyond me, but definitely speaks to the lack of experience and borderline negligence that you carry about. I sincerely hope shit gets better for you and the mod team and hopefully an actually competent moderation policy can go a great step in ensuring you never have to deal with more attacks going forward, because that shit fucking sucks and nobody should have to go through it. I hope whoever did it is rotting in a jail cell and that’s coming from a prison abolitionist.

                  Oh and BTW just going forward, don’t tell someone whose complaining about your instance members being harassing little shits “nuh-uh disinformation” unless you’re prepared to get a fatal dose of all that fermented spite unleashed right into your face. Making it about you is the single worse thing you can do in that case and really tells everyone in the room where your priorities are.

                  EDIT: and there go the downvotes, well I think that’s a good of a place as any to cut the thread.

  • @Yerbouti@lemmy.ml
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    115 months ago

    Comming from Reddit, I find it really peaceful, but IDK how it was before. Except for the people at Hexbear who bullied me for liking South Park. The socalled “dirtbag left” is basically the proudboys pretending to be far-left.