comfy

Hey, actually reading the article is cheating!

Just make your IP addresses pronouncable words like feed:deaf:babe:beef:cafe:: problem solved ez (working 2023!)

So hopefully Lemmy doesn’t catch on so will that those folks come here in force, too. For now at least, it’s much better.

At the very least, I suspect Lemmy, as a federated network, has more power to filter them. We saw years ago what happened when the Wolfballs bigots tried to join, they were eventually isolated by most other instances who continued to run without them. So as long as we can retain a situation where the largest instances actually take a solid stance against assholes and trolls and bigots, then it becomes much easier to make them all optional, shunned to register on the more liberalist permissive instances.

Seems like the average user on here is smart enough not to get caught up in that bullshit thankfully.

I wonder if it’s still early enough to give people taps on the shoulder - “don’t feed the trolls, friend”.

I’ve never understood the mindset that this social site is made up of a different mix of personalities than any other. It’s not.

On the other hand, this is often the case in small communities. Most Lemmy instances are general-purpose or large enough to have a typical mix, but I have been to a few sites which will moderate away any hostility whatsoever, and that does make the site unusable for some personalities. These kind of sites have rules like “No politics. No insults. No drama.” Toxicity isn’t inevitable, there’s nothing forcing community staff to tolerate mean people or mean outbursts, but it does take a mixture of design decisions and careful micromanagement which most communities, and especially most large sites, don’t bother with.

edit: and on the flipside, there are also communities where toxicity is expected and it’s amazing to see someone acting nice there, it might even be done as a trolling method.

But I will say that I’ve basically stopped checking my notifications because all of a sudden it seems like almost every time I go in there, I’ve got at least one insufferable, hostile, negative, etc response or message in there. It didn’t used to be that way.

I still check mine, but occasionally I’ll know I’ve said something that will have a hostile reply. Usually when I’ve asked someone to stop being hostile and inflammatory :)))

That’s one of the benefits of having a forum small enough to have a community. Troublemakers stick out like a sore thumb.

It’s not only about many people here being technical, of course you’re right that it plays a big part, and it’s also that the Fediverse is a rejection of for-profit, closed social media, so there’s a HUGE crossover between its users and the FOSS community (including Linux users) who really take strong issue to many things about Windows (and Mac) that Windows users consider to be normal. And with Lemmy especially, the initial userbase was largely anti-capitalists, since Reddit was banning many of their subreddits and was exploiting their users for profit with ads, blocking third-party apps, and bending to the demands of media companies and their owners. So plenty of people here are political about software.

Enough folks drank the coolaid,

You say that like the UK all sat down in a room and most of the country said “please censor me”.

with the only way to fully dismantle them would be to shutoff all access to the Internet

I don’t think this is true. It’s a bit complicated because there are ways to obfuscate the traffic, but generally speaking, I’d assume governments could track and block nodes just as easily as you can find them.

Tor is slow

It might trip you up for real-time things like gaming and you might take a while to download HUGE files, but it’s much faster than its historical reputation

and has a reputation of being used by pedophiles and drug traffickers

This is true for any privacy software. Encrypted chats, cryptographic currency, darknets. Even the internet itself has that reputation. Anyone trying to hide what they’re doing is likely to seek privacy tools. Reputation means nothing.

I’ve conquered the tabs demon (cleared on exit, anything actually important goes in a proper to-do app) and the downloads folder demon (…mostly). But will I ever conquer the Inbox imp?

There’s an infamous article on Foreign Policy about how /leftypol/ managed to do that with 8chan’s infamous /pol/ board, and I recall some people saying it got them out of GamerGate (a right-wing recruitment pipeline). In fact, I remember hearing there’s some lineage of that board from 4chan’s /lit/erature board. So there’s certainly truth that users can often be directed away from incel and alt-right spheres into something more social and constructive.

At the end of the day, 4chan, if taken as a whole rather than just the political boards, is largely a popular hub for alienated nerds (even the /fit/ness board). Not sure how much that’s stayed true over the past 10 years, but screencaps like this show it’s still a complicated place despite the edgy surface.

Did it show you a specific error/ban message?

Relevant context: https://lemmy.ml/comment/18395421

I like high quality communities, which cannot maintain quality without staff, and which would probably struggle to maintain any funding.

One example of a community I became a moderator for often had trolls occasionally show up and post obviously malicious content, and commercial ad spam. Due to timezone differences, these often took hours to be deleted by existing staff.

So it wasn’t about morality, righteousness, money or power. It was about me wanting to develop a community I cared about.

Edit: in a comment chain, you mentioned people who clearly moderate for other motives. They exist, I’ve seen them and helped get some removed in one particular community. Like you said, there are other motivators. Sometimes a community is so desperate for volunteers that they keep junk ones on-board, sometimes the admin personally likes them and enables their abuse, or sometimes the admin is too absent and no-one can kick the abusive staff out. And worse, if a staff team is toxic, it’s harder to bring good volunteers in.

It depends on the community. Larger general purpose communities tend towards that, the people who acknowledge you are typically people disputing a ban or who took it personally. On the other hand, for a Lemmy example, look at the admin Ada (and similar examples) who have reasons to regularly communicate their decisions and achievements and are clearly in line with their general community’s values – their community won’t have as many people crying about censorship because the community doesn’t pretend that they will tolerate bigotry.

Mods who just delete garbage posts (sometimes called “janitors” on other platforms) are typically faceless thankless volunteers, or abusive personalities powertripping. It’s a tough job, and someone has to put their hand up for it.

Where are the centrist and right leaning spaces? As far as I can tell, they’re almost completely empty.

haha oh no what a shame

It looks like lemmy.ml didn’t remove it, but their staff are certainly anti-ICE, plenty of posts there for weeks full of outcry.

I can’t see evidence that it’s banned. I’m on .ml and can see it just fine. It would be in the modlog if it were banned.

GOOD LUCK WITH THAT IM BEHIND SEVEN PROXIES