It seems the fediverse is continuing and growing again. Line go up is probably good!
https://fediverse.observer/stats&months=50
Total users are huge now.
There are many websites out there that pull data from the fediverse. So take that with a grain of salt. But anecdotally I am seeing a small rise in people using the various platforms as each get more mature and servers somewhat stabilize.
Reddit is an AI dumpster fire. There are still decent communities, but the glory days are behind it (the 20teens). Reddit circa 2012-15’ was peak. Now it’s an AI slop infested milquetoast facebook alternative. Damn shame. Hopefully the user base will finally realize the ship has sailed straight up it’s own corporate butthole, and seek alternatives, such as this one.
I checked just now and it’s still the same slop as when I abandoned it.
Feels like I haven’t missed anything at all
Fwiw this is mainly the most popular subs. The niche subs are much more chill, though still Reddit hence full of bot spam, influencers trying to pretend to offer organic content that was not bought and paid for, and people who overall are just spoiling for a fight (which if we are honest, the latter category used to include most of us here?:-).
Not that I am advocating for Reddit, mind you, just saying that you either have to go to where the content is - Facebook, Insta, Reddit, Xhitter/Bluesky, Tiktok - or else give up on knowing stuff altogether. Which if you are talking about like events in your local town, then at least Reddit seems preferable to the others?
Obligatory fuck spez, I’m just acknowledging that the network effect is real, yo.
Fuck all that, idk it’s good for kids to find stuff because they were literally born a few years ago, but if you’re an adult you should know those sites really exist to mine you for data and you can just reach out to someone directly if you’re interested in what they’re working on.
Yeah agreed. Honestly my main issue with Reddit is the algorithm and “doomscroll” effect. I don’t like how I felt after using Reddit and how addicting it was. I found myself feeling anxious, stressed, and tense after using it; it wasn’t good for my mental health. I used to use the third party apps because I could control my experience better, but we all know what happened there.
At least here I can add keyword filters and such to Voyager. And my favourite feature of Lemmy is that it ends. I can read all there is to read in the last 24 hours. I don’t get a repeating loop of content algorithmically selected to maximise my engagement. I don’t see anything outside my bubble by default unless I’m feeling like exploring in “all”.
Maybe if the “ability to turn off algorithm” law passes in Australia, I might return for some of the niche communities. But I honestly feel mentally healthier since quitting Reddit. Deleted my 15 year old account, no regrets.
Same. I noticed that I had become argumentative, even combative, and I got to where I would write out whole responses and then just delete them rather than send, knowing what replies I was almost certain to receive. It’s not a place for good faith discussions… at least, not anymore, and that was true even by the time of the Rexodus/APIcalypse.
Any social media - including the Threadiverse - can be addictive. Fortunately there is no real incentive here to do so, and many blocks in place to prevent it actually - like as you noted, limiting scrolling to pages rather than allow infinite.
Extremely unfortunately, niche communities don’t exist here and so you have to go to wherever those are. But I find myself lurking with no desire to engage, most of the time even in the form of voting. I like the OC but the system that presents it is distasteful to me, to put it mildly, and I find that extremely off-putting.
Endless nostaglia, “remember this?” posts
2014-2015, when r/conservative was pushed to the front page on the regular despite r/conservative banning over half of all people that post in r/conservative?
To be fair every political sub, and even the news subs, ban anyone who doesn’t conform to the echo chamber.
the right-wing subs had high engagement, that pushed them to the front page often.
and when they come here they will bring all their miserable drama-seeking nonsense behaviors with them.
Are you ready to get banned? Because that kind of talk will get you banned once they hold the reins.
You’re getting banned! And you’re getting banned! And you’re getting banned!
Want to read more Lemmy? Download the app and log in!
this made me laugh, from despair, but laugh nonetheless.
at least in real life I have the foresight to leave the premises when those folks show up to the party.
online I’m too optimistic to think people won’t actively misconstrue everything I type into an absurd parody of what I actually said. Only on the internet if I say “i dated a 14 year old when I was 15” am I told that makes me a pedophile and I’m promoting pedophilia, but apparently that’s how people think today.
On the internet we seem to have forgotten: good fences make good neighbors.
When we feel like we are forced into platforming every single batshit insane ideology - like hexbears to name one, though your instance at least had the foresight to defederate from it early on - then we expose people to all the dregs that social media can offer to people.
Like, how can two adults converse with one another, when surrounded by children screaming their heads off - which is not “wrong”, but like… can’t there even be so much as one room where that level of noise is prevented?
Anyway, I agree that Lemmy’s blocking tools are vastly inferior to the task of trying to deal with the situation that you mentioned. The upcoming release of Lemmy 1.0 will help somewhat, by allowing mods to receive remote reports from other instances, but it still would need a LONG way to go - like e.g. implement a true instance blocking capability.
yeah well, that’s why the internet was better when it was mostly people of similar dispositions and beliefs.
Wait until they start paying the mods (which I’ve heard is in the works), who are already insufferable assholes.
You couldn’t have certain reddit subreddits here. For example, I follow r/Sverige which is the political right’s Sweden channel. And they talk about immigration as a major problem. How open would Lemmy be to discussions like that? It can’t even handle different opinions without defederation, downvoting and blocking.
No, i think Lemmy is good for memes and stuff but it can’t handle discussions that adults wants to have.
I don’t think there would be anything stopping them spinning up instances. It would be up to others whether they want to see their posts though.
I’m a leftie but I can handle having a conversation about immigration, as long as it’s mature, lucid and respectful.
Well then you’re in the minority. I do think it’s a problem that you can’t post what on most other platforms would be viewed as mainstream viewpoints without being threatened by censorship. And I do not agree with these viewpoints but at the same time, if the average person cannot post here without walking on eggshells, the fediverse will never be mainstream.
And I want it to be mainstream because fuck the tech oligarchs.
You can post racist drivel here, it will just be rightfully treated like it is.
What you can’t do on mainstream platforms is post leftist content, which you actually can here. Like Lemmy was pretty much invented because leftists got their comm banned from Reddit. They routinely censor us, like with Meta shutting down countless queer pages and spaces as of late.
Reddit is full of left leaning subs.
just because you lean left it doesn’t mean you are left. It means your ass is still squarely in the center. Being “Leftist” is to have the tacit understanding that the far right means to eradicate progressive thought by any means necessary, and that any threats of violence from “our” side are spoken from a place of self defence. The right does not want “discussion” to lead to compromise, they want it to lead to compliance. Besides, we’ve “been having the discussion” since the 1970’s and as every hostage negotiator knows: if you keep them talking, they aren’t acting. It’s a stalling tactic.
The fediverse is not a safe space, excepting a few instances like blahaj.
People can and should make instances for different philosophies but my concern is that any instance that doesn’t enforce leftist purity is going to be defederated.
People learning what the overton window is and that it can be very much different depending on the place you are in (i.e. instances in the case of the fediverse, but also to a lesser extend the fediverse itself) is a good thing in my view.
They’re not going to learn about it because most people who join the fediverse end up leaving and they don’t recruit anyone else.
The Overton window would be moved by people being exposed to far left ideas and finding them more reasonable than expected. But the community does a very poor job of doing that currently.
It’s far worse than that: after leaving they continue to talk about us, as someone might do for an unfaithful ex, trashing our reputation. We can be toxic AF here, with little to no warning labels about which spaces have what echo chamber policies in place; only people with extraordinarily thick skins can stand this space, especially for long periods of time.
I don’t quite agree. The people that leave silently (the overwhelimingly large majority) don’t leave as an active decision, but rather fail to come back because there isn’t enough interest (or nagging notifications).
And for people to realize their overton window is scewed to the right it is sufficient to be exposed to left wing ideas, no need to find them reasonable. The regular existence of these ideas in discourse is sufficient.
people don’t stay because reddit exists and that’s where the eyeballs are.
It’s probably worth remembering that censorship and moderation are two sides of the same coin.
And they’re not just used to silence viewpoints (like you’re saying about the Fediverse) but also an absence of it is exploited to keep people addicted to ragebait and jealousy (mainstream).
I think it’s a fundamental problem of social media as a technology tbh, and we’d be mostly better off without it.
the majority of fediverse content is already ragebait and echo chambers. it’s been that way for well over a year IME, and it’s escalating day by day.
the problem is people who love ragebait and echo chambers don’t see them as such, they see them as the one true reality and are incapable of acknowledging other perspectives on the world exist, and anyone who doesn’t share in their raging is evil and bad and tacitly supports the evil bad people.
and i won’t even go into the victim complex mentalities that dominate most communities here. the second you suggest anyone has agency over their lives… except a hostile and violent reaction or your comments being reported as hate speech.
Tbf, this is done by extremists on both sides, hence seems a function more of extremism than of anything else.
Moderation should be done with a light hand.
the problem is people confused moderation with their personal opinions and feelings.
they can’t separate the two concepts out, and they act emotionally, and hypocritically.
i cracked a joke once about a popular tourist destination, and got banned from the sub I posted it in… because the mod just visited said destination… basically because I ‘hurt their feelings’. and they openly admitted to it when I asked why… and the other mods all agreed it was a perfectly fine reason to temp ban me for a ‘bad attitude’.
that was 2019. and things only got more insane/worse in that sub and every other sub. got banned a few times in my local city sub for… supporting the mayor that I liked. reason my comments were removed ‘they were sexist/racist’ and I was like ‘how can supporting a non-white female mayor be sexist and racist?’ and banned…
and well, the world has followed suite. nothing makes sense anymore, and everything is twisted and misconstrued by insane people and other insane people believe them and anyone who tries to point out is demonized as ‘the enemy’. folks don’t even pretend anymore to care about objectivity or truth, and if they are ever referenced they are now no longer ideals to guide us, they are ‘oppressive tools of the colonialist patriarchy’ for the leftists, or ‘destroying traditional values’ by the rightoids.
A little power corrupts a lot.
Pretty much. Not everyone is like this, but most people are petty tyrants to themselves, and extend that to others.
It’s always shocked me how many people… can’t self regulate without threat of abuse or punishment, and they project that into the world. Whether it be religion or the government, or whatever. Which tells you a lot about who they really are deep down. And often is how abusive people justify their behaviors. “I wouldn’t hit you if you didn’t make me do it.” type of shit.
yep. you can’t believe in pragmatic sensible middle grounds without being told you should die or get PMs about how they are going to rape you.
Like… what if we had limited and legal and sensible immigration policies?
No, that’s facism and you’re a nazi and you support genocide… lol
and all these dimwits preach how ‘tolerant and loving and accepting they are’ of other people… except they aren’t. they are the nazis they claim to hate so much, and their ‘standard’ is ‘well i’m justified in my violent and rage as long as anyone who is ever right-wing exists’ and will tell you how how that isn’t an extremist position, how they the ‘paradox of tolerance’ means they are the ‘good guy’ fighting the ‘bad guys’.
that said i’ve seen some good discussions of the paradox… but all the good thoughtful takes get down voted and the ‘but we have to kill the nazis’ takes get upvoted. because on lemmy being thoughtful and debating and trying to understand things makes you a nazi. just like doing so on any right wing only space makes you a mentally ill leftist.
fuck u, u got cooties
(just trying to hit all three points :) )
on lemmy it’s more the lefties who call you names than the righties.
should be fun when it’s both… but by then you will start getting banned because both will report you to mods/admins for ‘harassment’
already had a couple of incidents the past few months where someone told me to kill myself, I reported i, and my comments were removed as the ‘harassing’ ones. blows my mind, but that’s how reddit became a few years ago.
disagreement is seen as assault, and legit threats and violence are seen as an appropriate response
I’ve got you tagged as “aggressive responder” so maybe the mods had a point?
Yep, TubularTittyFrog is one of a handful of accounts that I recognize as regularly commenting something reactionary, rude, or ignorant. Usually all three, and then they get angry when people disagree.
my kindergarten teachers used to send to the principle’s office for ‘asking too many questions’.
turns out a lot of people get really mad when question what they say and 100% believe them at their word… and even angrier when they can’t articulate what they mean with any specificity beyond empty buzzwords.
Lemmy is full of wannabe intellectuals that have no idea what they are talking about and yea, they think it’s ‘aggressive’ when you call them out on their bullshit takes, and supremely angry when you point out how deeply hypocritical they are. and their reply is usually ‘go kill yourself’.
I dunno anything about the specific thread. I’m only highlighting that maybe it’s a sign to reflect on how you communicate with others on here, since it’s not an isolated incident. It’s possible to question people without hurting them or using harsh language.
For what it’s worth, I had a really rough time in my entire school life as well. I also tend to ask questions and point out inconsistencies, rather than “going with the flow” or accepting things at face value. I ended up with a 30% attendance rate, for various reasons. The difference here is that most people don’t have the authority to retaliate to disobedience, other than using strong words or downvoting me.
Personally, I often run into people on here who want to “argue semantics” rather than the spirit of the argument. They have their dictionary out and are ready to endlessly debate the definitions of every word in a comment, while also refusing to actually read what I wrote properly and misquoting me out of context to look bad. It’s not fun or interesting, and language isn’t as important as they think it is. I used to get mad at them for arguing in bad faith, but now I just disengage with them or tag or block them if they’re really bad.
People’s perception they are being ‘hurt’ my internet comments is entirely the problem.
And the problem is in themselves.
And those are the same people who think nobody should ever be able to question them, and are apt to response to violence and rage and insults.
There is no ‘civil’ way to challenge someone who is emotionally distrait at the existence of people they don’t like existing… and that’s what drives so much of the online hate discourse. They want to exterminate the bad feelings and think they can do so by exterminating the bad people.
Rather than… exert or develop any emotional control of themselves… they think that is hate speech if you suggest that. It’s ‘ableist’ now to suggest that people are responsible for their own emotions and reactions.
I can count the number of mature arguments I’ve had on reddit on one hand. I frequently compliment the other person for being so decent.
i remember having arguments like that on reddit on a daily basis. but that was a over a decade ago.
and sadly i keep thinking i’ll be able to find that again… but it won’t ever happen.
the only discussion about immigration should be “If you don’t like immigrants, then stop supporting foreign policies that make their countries of origin shitholes, so they don’t want to leave in the first place.”
Oh no! but that might mean BROWN PEOPLE have (GASP!) “agency!!!” (Clutches pearls and faints)
Nothing is stopping you from making a community and then banning people until it is sufficiently echo-chambered for you. ML or Hexbear might even welcome you.
I personally know several expats living in Sweden. I’m pretty aware of both sides of the discussion. From the outside, it comes off mostly tone-deaf, but with some real points around failing to integrate immigrants. There’s also a significant amount of FUD and interference trolling, riling people up.
For people living in Sweden, it’s a hotbed of controversy as the places you consider safe are changing around you.
Would anti-immigraition accepted in open arms in lemmy general social forums? Absolutely not.
But if you want your own echo chamber, there are places that would allow it.
Was that a response to me? I definently don’t want to own the discussions. I just said people want to discuss it and Lemmy is not a good place for it.
People will discuss it on reddit. It’s fine. :)
About Sweden, yes it’s a “hotbed” to say the least, the same as in Europe overall. Its not popular with massive immigration but since we can’t discuss that here, let’s not.
If you want random people across the world to validate Sweden’s distaste for immigrants, no, you won’t like the outcome here.
Again with the validate. :) Do you get your opinions validated here by random Lemmy users?
About immigration, why can’t people dislike immigration by muslims for example? It’s happening all over Europe and im actually curious why you and others think it’s an opinion people shouldn’t have. Is it because you don’t care about the culture in your own country?
Is it because you don’t think it changes the culture of a country, or that you are fine with the changes?
Good luck with all that, gonna block ya there bud
Yeah you better do that. :)
There are few instances claiming that they will do less strict moderation and defederations.
However I haven’t check those instances myself yet.
any specific ones for lemmy?
Sh.itjust.works is one I think in terms of not defederating.
A big issue with not doing moderation is it pretty much leads you to becoming a Nazi bar and getting defederated by others.
(・_・;)
FWIW, I joined that instance because it had the only RWBY community I could find.
(Also love the FLCL avatar)
It really sucks how many instances defederate over nothing
We already had the discussion on “immigration” and “undesirables” and other right-wing dogwhistles in the 1940s. Didn’t end too well for them. The problem is, we have forgotten the ancient texts.
Ancient texts about…?
People will obviously have opinions about immigration
The kind of immigration we had in the 40s was way different than the one we have nowadays though. Come to Italy and you’ll see what l mean. You would be scared to walk alone at night.
Careful, your colours are showing.
The kind of immigration countries like Italy face today is exactly the one they asked for: Europe raked Africa and parts of Asia (not to mention the Americas) with colonialism and imperialism for centuries, extracting produces and value for the shareholders while leaving behind famine, plague and war. The least they owe the African and American peoples is to take them in, the same way they took everything else from their lands.
If not that, they should work to restore what they took or destroyed, in terms of not only economy but also society.
I don’t agree with your vision. I agree with the fact that some European countries stole resources from Africa, but Italy in particular didn’t rake pretty much anything: Italy didn’t have big colonies until Mussolini tried to build his own empire after 1930, without much success anyway; they only made some mess in Libya and in the Horn of Africa, which are not even the places all those immigrants are coming from.
Plus, the real problem is that there’s somebody else currently raking Africa: it’s China.
Since China is coming out of poverty, they need somebody to take advantage of, and they decided to “colonize” Africa. Not real colonization like Europe did in previous centuries, but a silent control of their economy, slowly buying their politicians and their natural resources extraction companies.
I don’t think that the right reparations for what Europe did in the past is welcoming all kinds of immigrants with no control whatsoever.
First, indiscriminate immigration leads to ghettos and poverty, and a lack of integration.
Second, so many immigrants is the perfect way for far right wing parties to win elections, by appealing to the base instincts of people. Even worse now, because Russia is directly financing both far right wing parties and misinformation campaigns in general.
bold of you to assume there are any adults here.
Someone start it on the ML Lemmy :D
Doesn’t matter how open ‘the fediverse’ is or not to a point of view if the admin of your server are happy to have it, it will exist here. Especially when we’re talking raw numbers like this, they should all be piling into the same bucket, if we’re measuring fediverse. But as I say this I wonder what the definitions they’re using are.
For instance very different views are expressed on Truth Social, which I’m led to believe could connect to the fediverse, but choose not to. So I wonder if those numbers are included, i expect not because they’d not be connected as a fediverse participant by my understanding.
The point is, other people don’t have to put up with it in their corners of the fediverse if they don’t. This is the freedom of choice benefit that a network like the fediverse has over a centralised platform like fb, reddit, or even BlueSky. This is a fundamental difference in levels of control that makes the fediverse such an exciting project.
Its not necessarily the case that each individual user has full control of these settings, although they mostly do, and if they set up and maintain their own instance they absolutely will. But it is the case that a user has greater control to a point where its practically individualised, and if there were a case where some greater disconnection is warranted the admins aren’t some amorphous presence that travel between dimensions unseen, they have a presence in their servers and have a level of accessibility thats unheard of in previous forms of social media. Theres also a community of admins, who can learn and build off each other, which is beneficial in a cooperative-competition kind of way.
Anyway, you probably already knew all this. I ended up finding typing this out was a fun exercise to appreciate for a moment what this network is actually delivering to a couple million people.
it’s fine to allow users to block what they want, or downvote it, or block other users.
the issue is when admins and mods basically want use their own to systematically remove anything they don’t like, and then claim they are the arbiters of truth justice and all that. it’s the hypocrisy.
it’s also when non-hostile ideas are expressed, and viewed as hostile and violent by the damaged people who are emotionally allergic to anything that isn’t already in their comfort zone.
You’re talking about behaviours, i’m talking about structures. The structure of the fediverse, gives users the option to disengage, find their own spaces.
No one admin has control over this thing, no one mod controls a whole subject. They at best can control a popular community on that subject. They piss people off, people can find another server, another mod very easily. They can even import all their old data with fedibridge, i’ve bever tried that though.
Take world news as the subject.
The fragmetation of multiple world news communities across multiple servers is good. Think of each of those world news communities and their mods as bringing a certain framing to the subject, their own biases even. Then you can equate them to the world news sections of different newspapers.
In the old days you had The Atlantic, The Tribune, The Sun, The New York Times, etc. Now we have c/worldnews.beehaw, c/worldnews.lemmyworld, c/worldnews.aussiezone, and a plethora of others, with comparatively low barriers to entry than news papers.
Yes the base articles are often the same, but the comment threads are different, and the base articles selected are different. So the articles being the same is not really too different from The Atlantic buying in from a news provider like Reuters.
We don’t want that kind of stuff here. Those people aren’t welcome. There are plenty of nice people we can welcome instead.
I know. :)