Just blocked lemmy.ml from my Lemmy account, and I swear to god it’s one of the best things I’ve ever done on this platform. My homepage feels actually clean now.
For the past few months I’d been seeing a lot of tankie posting and pretty much far-left propaganda on my feed. It got tiring enough that I finally checked my blocked-user list, and realized pretty much everyone I’d blocked was from lemmy.ml. So I just blocked the whole instance instead.
Saying this as someone who considers themselves a leftist: I used to think Lemmy itself was an echo chamber. Turns out lemmy.ml was the problem the entire time. Probably the reason I tolerated it for so long is that I agreed with a lot of what they posted, but like an oversaturated meme, I’d had enough. Browsing the platform was starting to feel way too tiring instead of fun, which defeats the point of being here in the first place.
The breaking point was seeing some dude post a “meme” implying North Korea and China are basically communist utopias and that the West sucks. I mean, the West does suck, but come on - you’re saying North Korea is the ideal the West should strive for? What the hell…
I won’t block anyone even if they’re straight up assholes because even a broken clock is right twice a day and I actually have learned some information that was true from them.
That being said though the ones who say North Korea is a utopia and USA is fighting a proxy war with Russia through Ukraine (true) but that Russia giving drones and military equipment to Iran isn’t the same thing and that isn’t a proxy war or that Mao was some sort hero of the people (I could definitely go on from here) those people are idiots and its very easy to look up anything they say and see that its complete bullshit.
I’m still not gonna block them. Hit them with an “Ok” and move on with your day. As soon as you pull out the graphs or cite multiple sources they will just ban you so there’s no point in fucking with them. Until they post on here from North Korea and prove us all wrong, you can easily disregard any of the bullshit they say.
That said the ONE person I have ever blocked on Lemmy was someone who posted a cartoon picture of a little kids butt on the self hosted community. I still don’t understand what that was about and I not only blocked them but reported them for that too. But other than child stuff, I probably won’t ever block anyone even if they’re complete assholes.
I need to push back on one point. If you don’t want to block anyone, then fine that’s your choice, but while it is true that “even a broken clock is right twice a day”, it is also true that despite how a clock can still be useful (being decorative, or a memento holding a past memory), yet it is still useless as a clock, i.e. time-keeping device.
Other people have their particular preferences too, and for those who want their time on the Threadiverse to be enjoyable, and happen to not enjoy arguing with trolls, it makes sense for some people to block Lemmy.ml.
I wanted to clarify since it sounded at first like you were arguing against OP complaining about the whole situation. Sorry if I misunderstood - I guess this whole thread has gotten quite charged so people are on edge as a result.