Hot take: none. Let information flow free. Take it with the good and the bad. Don’t lock yourself in an echo chamber.
i never understood this take. echo chambers aren’t inherently bad; forced debates are never good. communities are supposed to be places you go to feel comfortable not where you’d forced to debate or turn anything into an argument.
Exposure to other viewpoints is good. No need to debate. And if you’re on a large instance, you’ll see that. Not everyone thinks alike, there are shades of gray. Discussion is allowed to happen but intolerance isn’t tolerated.
The tankie instances ban anyone for even asking questions politely that they don’t agree with. It’s a total monoculture and I assume they’re mostly still kids, because everything is black and white and can be solved without any nuance at all.
Exposure to other viewpoints is good yes, but is it good when that exposure only ever gets you insults hurled your way from the people you’re trying to have a discussion with?
This is very close to the Nazi point of “just asking questions” or when they say it’s just free speech. Not saying you’re arguing it, but it is a very thin line.
What’s the line then? Why do people ban Nazis and not tankies? Tankies are authoritarian, they defend the massacre of Ukrainians, the Uyghur genocide, and other historic “socialist” atrocities. Why do we give them leeway? Are they skirting the line just enough? Are they intentionally using the optics of socialism to do so? Etc.
Keep in mind, just because someone blocks someone or an instance it doesn’t necessarily make the space an echo chamber. We don’t know if they live in a state or work in a place that is blasting Fox News 24/7. They may be very active on Twitter exposed to that sewage. Heck, the liberal point of view is quite a lot as is with the way they are defending Israel.
I assume they’re mostly still kids, because everything is black and white and can be solved without any nuance at all.
This is SO important. Remember that the “Dirtbag Left” a la Chapo et al. was created when the Alt Right was running rampant in high schools. Their goal was to attract young people to the left. Which is great! There’s a place for cringe edgy teens to feel like they can fight for a better world. But I’m really not looking to hang out with arrogant teenagers right now, and definitely not with their emotionally immature adult chaperones.
Even if the other viewpoint is that trans people should get shot or locked up and are members of a secret child sex ring? I don’t think I want that on my feed. I don’t want people that want to kill me on my screen while I shit
90% of the time it’s bigots who are upset that they’re getting deplatformed. The other 10% of the time it’s the incredibly idealistic or naive. Either way it’s a crap argument. You are under no obligation to endure verbal diarrhea, nor is it your responsibility to change the minds of the people spewing it. They shit the bed, they can lie in it.
Normal interactions with normal communities will be plenty of diversity, there’s absolutely no reason to engage with or listen to nazis. Right wing politics has mastered brainwashing, it’s dangerous to read that shit too often.
They’ve mastered brainwashing to conservative religious nutjobs and incels. Maybe young and naive teenage boys, on top of that. If you aren’t an idiot or a teen, you should be immune for the most part.
Not that I’m saying you should go out of your way to interact with Nazis. Unless the interaction involves punching.
Hot take indeed.
If the dog shits on the floor you don’t just start walking around it, you clean the floor.
Not a good analogy because then blocking the instance is like killing the dog.
yes I need to see the fascists masquerading as leftists otherwise I would be living in an echo chamber…
They’ll certainly bring up an actual good point from time to time, unlike actual fascists.
Mostly though you can negate the majority of their most obnoxious shit takes by blocking users.
But my instance isn’t federated with Lemmygrad and Hexbear as is so I can get away with that, and I don’t see “Genocide is okay if” takes in my feed.
They’ll certainly bring up an actual good point from time to time, unlike actual fascists.
and a broken clock shows the correct time twice a day doesn’t mean it’s useful to have it taking up space on the wall.
also they are actual fascists. in the chapo trap house community I literally got the reply “ukraine should be destroyed at all costs”
Thanks for the nuance. While I agree that tankies can be annoying, I think it’s stupid to compare them to fascists with the whole “red fash” thing. Just because they have some terrible takes of their own, it doesn’t make them fascist.
The worst of them do deny genocides, which is terrible, but they do it out of a habit of denying anything western powers claim actually happened. I imagine many of their members are trolls and contrarians, as well. Despite this, like you said, some of them have decent takes and not all of them are off the deep end, yet
Hexbear kind of pissed me off for a week. But I kind of like how nakedly transparent they are. Now, whenever I come across one of those threads, I see where its coming from and I relax. They’re just pro-russia regardless of if it makes sense. I don’t know what the Murica equivalent of Russia is, but they’re that
They’re anti US, not necessarily pro Russia. They support Russia in the Russia-Ukraine war because they think Ukraine is a US puppet state because the country wants to align with Western nations, and of course no nation on earth has its own agency and everything is the US’s fault. They’re pro anything that challenges the US and other liberal countries.
They remind me of a bunch of teenagers trying to be edgy.
Would you say the same when someone is harassing you? Or how about if they were Nazis? Because keep in mind OP is just blocking them and not removing them from all of lemmy.
My hot take is: Depending on the individual, this may be a healthy and responsible thing to do. The outrage cycle that was established in commercial social media to “drive engagement” is very bad for our meat computers (shown in multiple studies). It is much healthier and more productive, at times, to block users, communities, and potentially instances (removing this ability, and forcing me to use their algorithm for sorting, is why I left Reddit, in addition to the harm caused to disabled communities).
Fuckin’ hilarious how quick tankies become obsessed with avoiding echo chambers when on their own communities they have a ban policy of "anything to the right of unironically calling Stalin Daddy."
To actually answer the question, lemmygrad.ml and hexbear will remove most of the redfash content, but you’ll still need to be vigilant for individual users to block. Also, blocking users doesn’t prevent them from posting on your shit, just stops you from being notified or being able to see it, AFAIK Boost doesn’t have defederation for individual users so you’d need to do that over browser.
This comment brought to you by the absolute right to curate who is in your social orbit, same as in real life ya platform obsessed whingers.
I’m downvoting you for not knowing the difference between communists and tankies.
And I’m neither.
Alot of things are a “cancer” on lemmy in my opinion.
My opinion on the subject is
I’m personally a believer in freedom of speech so If these extreme left wing folk want go go off galbanting about all that shite that’s all fine n dandy prehaps lemmy.world may benefit from being more pro freedom of speech prehaps not that’s not for me to decide it’s upto the instance owner
Also, blocking users doesn’t prevent them from posting on your shit,
Good… On a forum based platform it’s better to not restrict people’s ability to respond to things, as it can help combat people’s ability to block those arguing with them right after making easily counterable points to prevent decent comebacks
It’s a nightmare for harassment though, treating all blocking as a sissy snowflake shield renders it essentially useless for circumstances where the other user is really malicious.
In that case having a system like Mastodon’s that locks them out of Replying is better than simply covering them up. We can’t really rely on Instance admins to block all malicious users or defederate from all malicious platforms so there needs to be a certain level of protection from the user’s side.
I do think that Blocking and Restricting (preventing a user from interacting) should be different functions, you block communities and users because you don’t want to see them, but you restrict users because they are hostile, malicious, or make bad-faith arguments.
Nah, your right to keep debating ends when someone else decide’s they’re not a platform for further discussion.
No longer being able to reply to the blocker, and ideally not even being able to see the blocker is the ideal, and both the blocker and the blockee should need to agree to reopen contact for the block to go down.
Like a restraining order, stops the original blocker from raising and lowering it at will as a harassment tactic.
Remember blocking on Reddit? It made it so you couldn’t reply to anything in the chain. So if someone different replied to you you wouldn’t be able to reply to them even though they aren’t who blocked you.
Lemmy.ml is somewhat more neutral. In Lemmygrad you can sometimes have a discussion, but you will probably be downvoted. Hexbear is just toxic, it’s like Lemmygrad but for 14 year olds.
THAT makes sense why ani.social defederated from Lemmy.ml (I only subscribed to the anime instance since it had the largest user base)
Edit: the “.ml” anime instance is still the largest compared to everyone else. What a shame that we can’t move away from it
This was Ani’s side of the story: https://ani.social/comment/2199318
Lemmy.ml is run and was started by the developers of Lemmy. The developers themselves align with lemmygrad, however they try to keep their politics out of lemmy.ml for the most part. It’s debateable how effective they are with this, it probably ebbs and flows somewhat.
Moderation without informing you is common across all lemmy instances. Moderators have to go out of their way to notify you, there are no automated messages to go along with moderator action. However, lemmy has always had an open modlog, so you can see why you were moderated if you look it up. Note: sometimes I’ve had difficulty loading the modlog, particularly the instance modlog (where an overall instance ban would be), though community modlogs tend to load fine.
Also, you should bear in mind the difference between instance admin and community moderators - a community moderator is allowed to run their community as they see fit, within the rules of the instance (like reddit was supposed to be). If a moderator wants to ban you, they may have every right to per the instance rules, even if they have no good justification or you didn’t break any rules.
Certainly, the hexbear admin are just as bad as the hexbear moderators, and will throw bans around for dubious reasons while protecting their own committing the same offence. Lemmygrad moderators seem a little less eager to ban, but they’re still looking for any excuse. I haven’t had any encounters with lemmy.ml moderation though, but I wouldn’t consider the place a dumpster fire - that title firmly belongs to hexbear.
One good reason to keep lemmy.ml is simply to keep up with lemmy back-end development.
And attempt to engage in secondary unused communities? A lot of the most active communities are on it, you are just asking for your home page to be either way too filtered or a wasteland.
I’m sorry, I’m confused. You said Lemmy.ml is run by the same people as Lemmygrad.ml but if you click either of those links, you can see the admin list. Not one user is the same. Do they have different accounts, or what? Do you have some kind of citation for this?
Yes indeed but despite their more extreme beliefs compared to the average lemmings, they are quite lenient and accepting with lemmy.ml. I wouldn’t call the devs insane, solely for the fact that they gladly welcomed all the Reddit immigrants despite that they get numerous hate posts about their ideology.
Just to clarify, I’m just a normal libcenter guy, not an extremist.
I’ve had multiple bans from Lemmy.ml, they are anything but neutral. The best way to cop a ban is to make a comment arguing with their point of view that people actually agree with, they hate that.
They’re also some of the most insufferable people on the Internet.
Were they bans from lemmy.ml, or from specific communities within lemmy.ml? I’ve only had a ban from !worldnews@lemmy.ml
Edit: Actually maybe it was for the whole instance lol, not sure, I hadn’t noticed I was banned for 2 weeks anyway.
Edit2: Seems it was just the one community, I was commenting on other lemmy.ml communities just fine. However the modlog doesn’t say which community I was banned from. Generally, the modlog should contain more information.
Not even remotely close to 2/3, and it’s the whiney and annoying chunk anyway. I don’t want to “not engage”, I want them out of my feed.
seconded. lemmy.ml has afaik the biggest interesing communities for FOSS, privacy, Memes, etc.
FOSS, privacy, Memes, etc.
Aka whining about YouTube ads, paranoia, and communist whingeing thinly veiled as humour.
No big loss.
I don’t block instances. I block communities and users. An instance is too large a group of people. They’re not a monolith. Some people on hexbear are garbage and some are not. Some topics encourage jerks, some do not.
At a point the garbage to quality ratio gets too high to do that. Yeah, I’m sure some decent folks get blocked when you block a whole instance, but there’s plenty of other people in non shithole instances to more than make up for it. I just use whichever method is most efficient at cleaning up my feed at the time.
unpopular opinion time: hexbear isn’t that bad. I’ve had to block a few communities, but I do that with any instance. I’ve had to block more on hexbear, but it’s not a ton. I’ve had to block more people on hexbear than other instances, but it’s not that bad. I appreciate their different viewpoints. I don’t like echo chambers and I learn a lot.
I have a similar experience. However, I feel that they have been getting a bit more argumentative in the last months (or maybe the argumentative voices are getting louder). I really appreciate how aggressively they defend our trans brothers, sisters, and enbies but, there seems to be a lot more focus on “dunking” than community building or discussions. Also, they’re at times quick to pull out the torches, rather than clarify and not always successful at preventing leftist sectarianism.
That said, by blocking problematic or unhealthily rage-inducing communities and users, I tend to get on alright in about 90% of interactions and learn a bit, from time to time, even if it’s not what’s intentionally taught (the commonality of historical revisionist takes in sectarian topics, for example).
The most correct answer possible.
I might switch front ends just for this feature.
I’ll never block hexbear tho <3 luv my spicey leftie friendos
(Even though they more often than not seem to hate my guts XD)
hexbear users aren’t as repugnant. simple as.
lemmygrad is proudly ignorant and not even interested in honest discourse.
Hexbear, meanwhile, will actually engage in a discussion, make concessions, provide actual evidence for their claims.
I can actually learn shit, useful shit, from Hexbear. Lemmygrad is a vacuous hole where information goes to die.
Hexbear users are also, generally, more fun to talk to, have a better sense of humor.
Lemmygrad users, meanwhile, have demonstrated to me a pattern of being joyless hate-geysers.
