Social gating, too.

This is a lovely read, a lot of interesting and compact pondering. Cheers.

Yeah, precisely.

This is exactly what I’m talking about.

I get that.

That’s part of my motivation too.

My mental state is not great, and I too came here to avoid a manipulative bombardment of ragebait. Hence its frustrating to fund other users reposting it, especially when its misleading or straight up misinformation.

I thought most of us came here to escape that trap, but apparently not.

The structure is important, too. That ultimately colors the community, no matter how “free” it is.

I think Lemmy mirrored Reddit a little too closely. For instance, feeds are structured in a way so that popular and “ragebait” communities rise over niche interest ones, and starve the latter.

Piefed is better, and getting better, though. In some ways.

I don’t know why you’re being so thorny.

And why would I ever got back to Twitter or Reddit? They’re cesspools. What would make you think I’d ever touch them?

…This is exactly what I’m talking about. Its like if I don’t pass a political purity test, if I am not X level of explicit or hostile in every single post, I’m the enemy. Because apparently I’m not good enough for lemmy.

I can.

But as some point I worry about the health of the community.

I don’t want to invest my time in platform that shrinks into a one-topic pit. Been down that rabbit hole before.

…To be clear, I think Lemmy is okay now, but I worry about the trajectory.

I was not defending the tesseract dev, what they did is inexcusable. That app can burn.

I sympathized with them some, though. I get what they were trying to do in their head, on some level.

If you think the more extreme parts of Lemmy are representative of “everyone around you,” as in the larger public in my life, I don’t even know where to begin with that. We live in different worlds I guess.

I think Lemmy is radicalizing.

It’s not just Lemmy.ml either. I used to love dbz0, almost switched from lemmy.world, but now all the non-political content is withering away, and most of what I see is just absolutist, anarchist post. The admin is fine with explicit calls to violence against pretty much anyone.

And that’s fine. It’s their instance, they can their thing. But it’s so extreme I don’t even find satisfaction interacting with the instance anymore, like it’s a single community with one topic.

And I don’t mean to single them out. I have similar feelings from many instances, including Lemmy.world.

I’ve even seen some pretty extreme stuff on blajah, which I used to picture as a wholesome LGBTQ+ instance! Which I adore… until it’s not so wholesome.

What’s worse, Lemmy users don’t seem to care.

I’ll point out some off-topic discussion in a thread, and I just get piled on. Like, not every single Lemmy conversation has to involve statements about western imperialism or the futility of democracy or whatever, but apparently it does on Lemmy.ml, and it feels like it’s spreading.

That was more of a rant than I intended.

But I am concerned about this new internet place I like. I’ve seen one or two other Reddit clones wither away from political radicalization, too.

Yeah.

For a while, I came here with the attitude of “don’t block anything,” but the politics subs are just too much. It’s not that they post misinformation, but that it’s always at the absolute top of hot/new comments, drowning everything else out.

It still an attention drain for the whole Fediverse.

It’s zero sum: every eyeball on made-up garbage is a someone not engaging with authentic content. And from the looks of things, it’s draining a lot of attention.

It’s easy to say “just deal with it yourself,” and I do, but it’s still not good for the health of content I do see.

It’s definitely been a term for some time. I don’t know who invented it, but I heard it elsewhere.

I love it too.

Also, to add:

Information hygiene here is bad.

Every day, nearly every time I scroll the feed, some spicy headline goes past. When I go to look it up, it’s often completely made-up misinformation, or a warped ragebait headline, or a literally bot-written Tweet, yet it’s voted right to the front page.

…I thought Reddit refugees would be sick of this, and more careful/skeptical, but apparently not. I’ve even talked to some users who don’t understand the distinction between opinion columns and news.

And I had an argument with a mod, who had no problem with an LLM engagement farm Tweet as long as its “the right message.”

On the contrary, I think the impulse to check a user’s post history and judge them is a bad habit on Lemmy.

Take me. Scroll through my history, and you’ll probably peg me as a AI Tech Bro and a… closet neolib, maybe? I dunno. But if it’s along those lines, you could not be more wrong, on either count.

With the exception of extreme trolls (or moderators doing their thing), I think Lemmy’s culture of “purity checks” is poison to the platform. It turns communities insular, toxic, and angry like it does on Reddit, governed by takes that have nothing to do with the particular thread. It kills the focus of communities. It rewards conformance.

And this thread is a good example. I thought OP was raising some good general points, but digging previous comments up threw all that out the window. I’ve seen this happen in other threads, where a technical or fandom discussion devolves into unrelated, raging arguments on something I did not come there to read.

This reflects my experience, approximately.

Yeah… Lemmy/Piefed is a mixed experience for niche interests. I fear a set of “insulated hyper-political echo chambers,” to put it somewhat crudely, is not going to attract the masses from corporate social media.

It’s kinda my fault, though. I’m not putting enough effort in seeking out those niches, much less posting in them; it’s too easy to doomscroll.

I keep telling myself to dedicate more attention to “specialized” forums like HN or SpaceBattles or DPReview, but alas, my brain keeps failing me there too.

Lemmy: “China gov bad.”

Lemmygrad: Source!? Banned for racism.

Lemmygrad: “USA gov bad.”

Lemmy: Nods vigorously. Rambles in agreement.