That’s literally how Lemmy got its start - from people who left Reddit not so much by choice, as later waves did, but rather by being so toxic that even Reddit wouldn’t put up with it.

Most people here strongly seem like they wanted a more leftist Reddit.

Bluesky as well, but for X.

The concept of an entirely new ecosystem, free of authoritarian control, escapes people.

Of course we do not all have to federate with one another and share content, but to infiltrate and deny their existence entirely… is just another form of control. The accusation becomes revealed as a confession, now where have I heard that before…?

At some point the division becomes not Left vs. Right but extremist vs. non. Though I admit to lacking a fully matured understanding there as to whether that is justified or not, it’s just that I am saying that this distinction exists.

In her defense, Lady Butterfly is the only one who has been willing to step up to moderate this community, and she is well within her rights to leave anytime she wishes, at which point locking the community becomes the only responsible thing left to do? You can’t just leave a community unmoderated - it would instantly become a source for spam that would be spread across the entire Fediverse, as unfortunately happened with many Kbin communities when Ernst fell ill, to the point where people had to defederate from the entire instance to avoid it.

So for her to not lock this community, someone would have to be willing to step up and do additional work, which so far nobody has.

PieFed has a number of options that support this, including:

1. showing the side-bar text below each and every single post
2. combining together all comments across all cross-posts regardless of which communities are involved or which instances those are on
3. combining together multiple communities into one “Topic” (provided by instance admin) or “Feed” (these are user-customizable and even shareable!)

The only down-side is that I think atm none of these are supported by its brand-new API, so apps like Voyager cannot take advantage of them yet, and are limited to the same experience that you have with just basic Lemmy, but even that is only a temporary issue as PieFed zooms ahead with adding new features practically weekly.

The issue is that at the moment, Lemmy still does not support this…

A note to think about for the future: at what point do we start treating Lemmy as the disabled cousin that needs extra assistance to do even the most basic tasks? I cannot think of a single concession that has ever once been offered to PieFed to “compete” with Lemmy - every single step that it has ever taken it has EARNED its reputation, both good and bad, for being new but (relatively speaking) feature-complete, and for adding new features at what seems like a break-neck pace, which I can only hope does not entirely exhaust its main developers, especially when the project still has so very little funding support.

If you are worried that Lemmy is too centralized, then perhaps move this community to a PieFed instance? PieFed helps to support decentralization, whereas migrating to any Lemmy instance merely postpones the issue to have to once again be revisited later on, when Lemmy is even further behind and PieFed even more further ahead than it is now.

I am glad that Lemmy exists. I am even more glad that PieFed does. I use both on a weekly basis. I hope both will continue to exist. But regarding the issue of “centralization”, as with nearly all other issues, one of them has a clear and definite edge over the other…

Fair, though worth pointing out that the choice to use CloudFlare is an instance-level decision, not a software-level one, and the PieFed software is still faster than Lemmy regardless of the choice to use CloudFlare. And this despite showing 5-fold more posts, iirc it was a roughly 25-fold speedup per post shown for the main page.

Good thinking!:-)

All of a sudden your edits went through - perhaps a delay caused by this same issue?

Also some related posts:

• another one reporting similar attack-like activities https://lemmy.world/post/36413045
• a month ago similarly https://lemmy.world/post/34310429

I presume they were attempting to clarify that the type of xenophobia that they most likely expected to see was directed at themselves due solely to their nationality.

But you could test this by making xenophobic comments against both, and see what happens. Then perhaps make an alt and perform in reverse ordering.

This is for Lemmy I presume (or also for Piefed or Mbin)? You’ve modified yours heavily though, I thought, which could complicate matters. I wonder if you are having those bot scraping issues that semi-recently (a month or so ago?) started increasing in frequency. So many instances now have a human detector before letting you in whereas before it was not necessary.

Part of it is not wanting to enable people to not even bother trying to do anything on their own.

But someone who at least tries? Oh yeah, sure I’ll help!:-)

Thank you for your kind words. Most people who felt that way would either just be angry, or at best uncertain so would not share, so thank you for your bravery to open up and be vulnerable.

I also am a big fan of dark humor, especially comedians that do it, then hearing the audience, pause to explain a little bit - the best ones, the absolute masters of their craft, are indeed super gentle about it.

But we are just people, trying to get by in life. I will leave the actual “judgement” as to whether it’s good or bad to you (while acknowledging my own bias in that I think it’s bad, for numerous reasons but one is the slippery slope where it pulls someone down the pathway ever further along, bc if one step is fine then why not two, and if two is fine then okay what about three, and so on), but in any case I think that either way the situation is compounded by it being “unexamined”. Whatever our beliefs are, they are best if they are TRULY ours, rather than just borrowed from others without a thought as to whether they fit our actual selves. Crowd-thinking is not any kind of thinking at all.

We have such PRIVILEGES, and we don’t like to think about that. Most of my closer friends online tend to be older gay men or trans people, who don’t like to think about how privileged they are to have experienced trauma that a traditional neurotypical person has not (mainly bc feeling suicidal, they would think along the lines of privileged=“good”, which it is not - what they experienced is not “good”, but it does make them “privileged” in terms of having traumatic experiences that allows them to understand things that others outright refuse to or perhaps worse are flat incapable of doing). Access to education is one such privilege. Ability to spend time reading is another. In contrast, a single parent of multiple kids in the USA hustling by working 2-3 jobs does not have such luxuries, and is all the more vulnerable to disinformation as a result.

And on the Fediverse, we spend a great deal of time blocking things that we do not like. We who enjoy fiddling with config files and trying out how they might change the outcome of a process - we are if not quite rare in the population then at least uncommon. Which is fine, but then we cannot delude ourselves - at least, not if we wish to remain honest with ourselves - that the stuff that we spent such enormous amounts of time blocking does not in fact exist.

People advocate for murder here constantly. Some might even mean it. If Russia or China or North Korea were not here trying to push agitation, then they are missing a great opportunity, imho - although fortunately (for them) useful believers will do that work for them, having already been converted on more popular platforms.

And then, as you said, there’s people just joking around. Which we DESPISE when we hear the right-wing people do it in our direction, yet we do it to them in turn. It’s natural though, and therefore lazy, and easy to fall into, without ever considering any other alternatives.

Whichever way you end up on this topic, kudos for taking the time to examine it and decide what you actually want here.

Anyway, it doesn’t really matter, it’s still not 100%

Correct.

doesn’t Reddit has a similar amount of call to violence today? Intuitively, one would think that if people are okay with reading those on Reddit, they would be okay with those on here too.

Hrm… you know what, maybe? I mean my first answer is most definitely no, bc Reddit fights hard to censor it, but beyond that, people find ways to convey the same meaning, so there is a certain sense to which your statement could be true? Perhaps I am thinking back to my / our experiences on Reddit from two years ago without updating it in my head to reflect modern times.

But then at that point I want to say no again, for several reasons. One, I do have to read some subs on Reddit bc the content is simply not here - and you go to where that is, and that concept will never change no matter how popular the Threadiverse gets - and I don’t see anything close to the levels that we see here. Then again, it might exist there, just not where I am looking?

However, two, people in r/Redditalternatives say that we are too toxic - which we are - and that as bad as things are over there, we are worse from what they see, and we also have less content. The only thing we have less of here that they like is fewer bots - although tbf we have those here as well, despite how most of us have blocked them and they tend to be properly labeled here (which I would argue makes 100% the difference - one that you know is a bot is not a problem, as it is not pretending to be a human).

All of this is far more complicated than I am able to say cleanly and succinctly - e.g. we do have a higher maximum here of extremists, and also it seems to me a much higher baseline level of it as well, but we also have kindness here, whereas there it seems mostly absent, and we have more intellectual discussions here whereas there the baseline level expectation seems to be either teenagers or right-wing trolls that everyone just seems to give up on keeping our and just accepts the fact that they are everywhere, in every sub, in most posts even though they get ignored.

And yeah, calls for murder appear there - but they tend to be removed. And yeah, some of that content gets removed here as well, but as I showed links to, not all of it, nor even perhaps the majority of it, though depending on which community, on which instance, and which subject matter and in particular which mod (team) is looking at it.

We are definitely a den of iniquity. Perhaps Reddit is too. X/Twitter even more so. Bluesky seems far less so though, so maybe that was the source of that comparative thought process - some journalist who is editing Wikipedia in their spare time, so applying their personal bias to it, which is true but mainly in a highly narrow sense?

Perhaps the focus should not be on whether calls for murder exist - I’ve shown you, they DO, but that overall the Threadiverse provides tools to engage with content in enjoyable ways. Obviously engaging with controversial topics is going to bring up controversial wording, but someone can - as you do - block it easily. Reddit is too restrictive, and 4chan too open, but the Threadiverse provides a nice middle ground. It does require a helluva lotta work though, to understand how to make proper use of those tools. Or rather, Lemmy does, whereas PieFed makes it downright trivially easy with Topic Feeds and keyword filters and such (e.g. “guillotine” and “2A” and perhaps things like “, deserve it” and whatnot). Here at least you can make something work, whereas on Reddit you just can’t.

All of those posts are mere hours old, and shown from an instance that has defederated from Hexbear and Lemmygrad. And even there, I definitely see calls for outright murder, such as this one, although here it was fortunately caught and removed by a mod:

A guillotine, or just tossing them in a nearby volcano would be cheaper.

That post was of very limited / niche interest though, with only 17 comments total. If you want to disprove my wording that “all” posts have such calls, you can easily find several posts with 0 comments, which obviously disproves my wording choice:-). And likewise those with 1-20 comments - among a community that often has hundreds (e.g. this post from just 10 days ago has >1500) - is low-interest.

This is why I avoided using “Hot”, especially within a 1-day time period. But following your lead, I sorted by “Top Week”, and was going to ignore anything from just the last single day, although all of the top 4 posts are older than that so that makes things easier. The top one could be a bit of a bad example but like in response to “Shoot 'em. Problem gone!” has “it is also a way to end conservatism… just sayin…” - but this one is much more likely to TRULY be a joke, in the spirit of that whole post in general, or at worst a venting of steam (although further down people are talking about “Solutions” that involve “electrowhatever or guns, which seem like the two bodies of knowledge a solution would come from.” - note that guns are very ineffective tools to affect non-violent means of resistance or to destroy property, and chiefly are used to KILL PEOPLE aka “murder”). Another one there is literally “shoot the fascists”, another is “if you need some tips on making firearms out of things easily lifted from home depo, I’m your man”, others stop short of advocating outright murder but still do things inching towards that end such as “When do we start rounding up all the Faux execs and the on-air talent … When do we start doxxing those that support Faux by watching Faux, and start getting THEM fired?” - granted it starts as “fired” but the reply immediately carries it forward with “And then those high profile people would start losing their homes and lives. I would celebrate that as justice served.” The latter is admittedly a stretch to say advocation for actual murder directly, but it is like one millimeter indirectly removed from it so as part of this whole batch I will include it here.

So using your procedure, though skipping over posts that are less than or only a day old, I have added one more to the pile. We are at 4 out of 4 so far, or 4 out of 5 if you want to count the Hawaii one as a false positive. Moving on to the next one I see like “I would straight up start busting windows out of any vehicle with trump stickers.” - which tbf is not murder, just terrorism/violence. So yeah, this one has no calls to murder that I saw. So this is 4 out of 6.

Next is this one - and I am getting tired so going to rush through this one. There are a BUNCH of comments describing guns like “He is saying arm yourself while it is legal, so you have weapons for when you need them to fight off bad people in designer uniforms… Roughly translated.”, “2A for all. Time to resist in other ways”. Again these are describing guns not infrastructure-destroying or people-convincing tools, but tools to involuntarily kill people aka murder. So this is 5 out of 7.

Certainly not 100% though, if that is your mark. Which would be fair on your part b/c my literal wording called for it by stating “it seems virtually impossible these days to read the comments in even a news post that does not include at least one call for murder of someone or another.”, and my hyperbolic exaggeration is clearly false (in my defense I did not mean per-post but rather like “all the content that I read in a day will include at least one call for murder”, but I did not clarify so that’s on me). Again, any post that has 0 comments would already have disproven it, as too is any comment with very small number of comments or interest, etc. However, it still seems true that well over half of all the current most active or top weekly posts from News@lemmy.world contain calls for using weapons to kill people or the lesser version of at least celebrating death of “the enemy” however it may happen, even if depicted in cutesy pictures of cats frolicking. Separating aside any judgement of good or bad or neutral or “it’s waaaaay more complicated than any of that”, it is going to be a turn-off for some people.

Also I looked at meme communities again for Top Weekly and of course the top several posts are all about politics and news, though I am too tired to go through hundreds more comments looking for calls to murder in them as well, even in “memes” communities. It seems likely that they are there somewhere though? Also, we didn’t even begin to go looking into the whole Gaza situation… or Ukraine/Russia, or any of the myriad others. I am confident that if you look, you will easily find it. Now in brand-new posts and not in the Hawaii one for sure, but such calls do appear here and there, around the wide Threadiverse.

This deal with Charlie Kirk has people on edge, although so too did Luigi, and the Presidential election, and so on.

Yes here’s an example from today - I just sorted News posts by active and scrolled down to find a post with >100 comments on it:

6 hours ago one person said (referring to USA Vice President JD Vance, the subject of the OP)

Didn’t this guy get shot in the throat? Awful talkative.

And someone replied:

Not yet, unfortunately.

Neither received any downvotes, and the latter reply received more upvotes than the one I quoted above it. Am I wrong to interpret that the reply is suggesting that it is unfortunate that the guy has not yet been shot in the throat? Involuntarily in case I need to add that, i.e. not euthanasia but non-consensual killing aka what most centrists would call “murder” (although I am not wanting to debate whether other definitions such as “justice” might also or even rather apply).

Of course it could be a “joke”, though isn’t the recipient just as much the party who determines what a message means as the sender? If it is a “joke” (possibly as in “haha jk except not really”), then there are an enormous number of such, and have been for quite awhile now - especially “joking” about how Luigi needs to save people, joking about the fact that a second amendment exists in the USA, joking about how people can conveniently die in non-murderous ways e.g. their liver goes out (see the posts about the recent Steve Bannon announcement), and just overall about how death is a good thing so long as it happens to “them”, the “other side” (again, I’m not wanting to get into whether it’s deserved, just stating here that such is being discussed, since these topics relate to how centrists from Reddit would view the Lemmy platform).

These kinds of things are likely to get Lemmy banned from the USA as the authoritarian program proceeds forward, but that is a separate issue from centrists (including those who think of themselves as leftists, not realizing what that means when recalibrated on a more global scale) and most especially conservatives (e.g. in the USA, that are currently using Reddit) feeling welcomed here.

So anyway that was the first such post that I examined. The next post has even more egregious and obvious comments, such as this one, from a whole week ago so at this point seems extremely unlikely to be removed by a mod and even if it were, it has already long served its purpose:

As always these pussies will have a big whinge then back down.

Please just make it legal to kill Nazis again, I’d do it for pay if we could claim a bounty on the hides.

(And then s whole discussion ensues about just how okay it is to kill people. Other more… “circumspect” comments to that same OP include such things as “The 2nd amendment works for all sides.”

So far this is 100% of the first 2 posts I have examined, so let’s move on to #3. Yup, I immediately spot this really cute picture of a cat depicting someone being beheaded, in response to the statement “the aristocrats!”, itself in response to something deleted by a Moderator. So this makes 3 of 3 posts, still a perfect 100%. And I did not have to reference anything from any tankie instances (where the frequency is surely much higher), or anything removed or likely at this time to ever be removed by a moderator, one even having been from a week ago. Seriously, calling for shooting/beheading/otherwise killing “the enemy” are extremely common here. You have undergone extreme efforts to avoid seeing it, I understand, but it does exist, and new people visiting here can notice it, not knowing to expect this level of vitriol. Tbf even Reddit these days is exploding with calls to Luigi people, they just work much harder to repress it - which I am not saying is a good outcome, my only interest here lies in explaining what is, not what should be.

Which one?

Which instance defederates from all of the tankie instances, and is not already overloaded i.e. Lemmy.world? Also, the name “Lemmy” has tankie implications that most Redditors flee from - hence why so many of us came first to Kbin instead.

Since none such existed, I helped create one by petitioning Discuss.Online to defederate at least from hexbear.net, even though doing so with lemmy.ml is a lost cause. It was successful, and now you can recommend it if you like.

Although America has imploded now and I no longer recommend any USA-based servers, even to people based in the USA themselves (as the average Redditor tends to be).

Though PieFed gives me much stronger hope for the future of the Threadiverse. People still need to set up blocks for instances like Lemmy.ml and politics communities if they want to avoid toxicity though. And even then, it seems virtually impossible these days to read the comments in even a news post that does not include at least one call for murder of someone or another. People have strong opinions, and want to vent! Therefore, highly ironically, leaving no space existing where someone can discuss politics or even news (or for some reason even memes?!) without the toxicity. I am not being a Karen here bc I am telling nobody what to do - only reflecting what I see.

Beware of unearned knowledge.

You “lose” 100% of the battles that you choose not to fight.

Besides, people here are reporting that the content is already gone. Even if it comes back, it likely will bounce around back and forth but not return to this same state, so this was transient.

Even so, it seems not wrong? “toxic or abusive content being common in the Fediverse”, regardless of how precisely that is measured, seems entirely accurate to me. YOU (and I) may choose to block such content, in part by being on an instance that enacts this choice for us, but that does not mean that such does not exist. Head on over to Chapotraphouse@hexbear.net to get a taste of what the Fediverse offers. It does exist, and while Lemmy.World defederated from it, so many other instances including Lemm.ee did not. Or Lemmygrad.ml.

It is so easy to forget about what was shoved under the rug, but the Fediverse is more like 4chan than most of us care to admit. Just because there are no Nazis currently standing in your little corner of a Nazi bar does not mean that you can invite your Jewish friends over to walk (safely) through the front door.

The Fediverse can be quite toxic. So much so that I’ve entirely stopped recommending it to people irl. We need to be more acceptable to people if we want to change our image, not just pretend that we are fine.

Boss: don’t spend any time on it, just vibe code a solution.

You: sure, I enjoy receiving a salary, what could go wrong?

Yes I meant the on-site one developed by Reddit, but agreed that the centralized nature lends itself towards searching by Google.

Although the other way opens up a huge can of worms since every large, general-purpose instance will - due to the nature of how the ActivityPub protocol works - have basically all of the content of the entire Threadiverse. Or as near to that as it works for a first approximation anyway, e.g. someone deciding to index all content appearing on “Lemmy.World” would get all the memes, movie discussions, etc., missing chiefly things like piracy and anarchy and other things that LW has decided to ban. It won’t be “correct” in the sense of attribution to the OP, but once someone found their way to the content housed on LW they are but a click away from getting to its original source anyway. So from that standpoint, Google indexing I would naively have thought would not be all that difficult? Except for the increasingly niche content that isn’t federated with the largest instances, which is perhaps desirable anyway to not expose mainstream normies to content calling for e.g. actual murder in response to world events (such as occurs routinely on e.g. Hexbear).

A safer, sanitized version of the Threadiverse that is searchable by anyone works to all of our advantage, I would believe?

Yeah anything that involves comments doesn’t work so well - either them specifically or the combination of them and posts. And tbf it does retrieve the results of the query, it is only the sort options that fail miserably.

I’ve used Lemmy now for >2 years and the excuse that “it’s still in development” has very much worn thin when no changes at all have been made to this or so many other issues with it.

At least the search function is still better than Reddit’s! (Obligatory and reflexive fuck spex:-P)