CW: Homphobia. I've only seen one thread attacked by a bot so far. It repeatedly posted a loooong homophobic comment pretending to be a thoughtful and objective analysis of why gay men have lower life expectancy due to being "sExuaL" and apparently "DiSeAsEd". It posted the same comment multiple times in the thread and responded to multiple comments including its own with the same comment over and over again. Not super jazzed to see that crap here, hoping we can avoid a botpocalypse on the Fediverse.
I had to remember where I blocked that "user", it was over on my Kbin account. Here is the user if anyone wants to preview them and preemptively block them: https://kbin.social/u/dickusmungus/comments
No problem! I went back and looked through the comments and posts again and now I'm uncertain if it is actually a bot or just a really sick person acting like one. Either way, I've blocked them. I was on a thread about cookies missing chocolate chips of all places for that nonsense to show up.
It actually seems like a person when I looked but still the behaviour seems worthy of a block just to avoid that first 5 seconds of confusion if you stuble upon a comment.
Downvoting bot spam actually does help. Good UX should hide unconstructive comments anyway. Will there be trash? Yes, but it's more or less under control on Reddit because of user voting effects.
The real danger is in letting bots vote more than letting them comment or post. We're safe as long as humans can outvote the bots... but will that status quo continue? That’s our biggest existential risk.
This is also my first time being a mod, but for a small community, doesn't seem so bad so far. Take this advice with a huge grain of salt, I'm also a newbie:
Be a mod for a topic you actually care about and can contribute to
Delete any comments/posts that break the rules on your community
That's... kind of it? I haven't actually had to delete anything on my community yet, but it is tiny, so that's probably a factor.
Nah, I think they're just being mass-created. No one's actually spamming anything so far. You can see so on this directory of instances: https://the-federation.info/platform/73
If you scroll around you'll find some that have like 10k or 20k users and 11 posts at most.
I, personally, would prefer slower linear and more organic growth. I want people to be here because the want to come, not because they want to run away from somewhere else.
But I do acknowledge that there was not much discussion going on and was not enough content for my procrastinating habits, nor I could keep myself informed in current events.
Thou I have had lemmy.ml account for three years now I never heard of beehaw before this reddit wave started, so that might be on me.
While I am positive overall, I do not like that some bad habits from reddit are resurfacing here, mostly not being able to have different opinion without someone insulting you.
I hope there will be enough instances where discussion and difference in opinion will be nurtured and welcome.
I did run away from Reddit but I also want to be here because I have been a firm believer in the Fediverse. It is bringing net neutrality back. I'm here to stay!
While I am positive overall, I do not like that some bad habits from reddit are resurfacing here, mostly not being able to have different opinion without someone insulting you.
This is humans were talking about. Humans on the internet. This is inevitable and I wouldn't specifically attribute this to former reddit users. You have this on Twitter, you have this on Instagram. The "my opinion is the only correct opinion" sentiment is prevalent everywhere today. Sadly.
Many subreddits were fantastic about not tolerating insults or disrespect.
I expect the same here - some Fediverse communities will be a free-for-all with insults, some will be a welcoming place for people to disagree without getting insulted.
It's not anyone's goal to impose one set of rules of decorum for the entire Fediverse.
I have noticed this as well. I've made a few excursions back to reddit since it keeps loading old comments I haven't yet mass-deleted to my profile page, and on the two trips where I didn't immediately close the browser afterwards, both times I clicked on a thread and immediately saw some inflammatory bait, got a little annoyed, and then remembered "wait, I don't browse this shithole anymore" and came on back.
I'm not perfect, not even close, but I'm definitely trying to check how I say things while I'm here because I want it to stay this was for as long as possible.
I have a pet peeve around people saying "this." When they agree with someone. Idk why... I was hoping I wouldn't see that here but unfortunately it's cropping up.
My concern is that and a bunch of other reddit-isms flood the site. I don't mind redditors coming here but I hope the site can still have its own identity.
There are a few others:
"at least the is ok" on videos where someone gets hurt
"no shoes therefore dead"
"some ninja is cutting onions"
"sir this is a Wendy's"
Etc.
I mean this reddit post complaining about annoying phrases came out 9 years ago. 9 YEARS. And since then I continue to see so many of those and others.
That kind of stuff irks me a bit as well, but I think it's human nature. It's a form of call-and-response where people can show that they're apart of the community. Friendships are built on shared experiences, and those kinds of memes are instant shared experiences that are being used to build camaraderie. I think the reason it is annoying to users like us is because it feels watered down, like a free ticket in, instead of becoming a part of the community organically. I get both sides, so I don't actively try to stop people from doing it, I just ignore it.
I've seen the low-effort meme comments as well; I hated them on Reddit, and I hate them here. This topic had come up on Reddit many times over the years, and there's not really a way to combat it, from what I could tell. People with nothing to say still want to participate (e.g. earn fake internet points), and that seems to be a favored way do it.
Entomology subs like /r/whatsthisbug had a hard rule against comments like "kill it with fire", "nope", and "nuke it from orbit". It was explained in the sidebar, mods would actively remove the comments, and people would downvote them, but it barely made a dent. Scroll to the bottom of a post and you'd see the same stupid "joke" repeated over and over, verbatim.
These people don't even look at the other comments, they just drop their canned catchphrase and leave. This is why I like that we have to scroll to the bottom to comment here; at least the numpties have to put in slightly more effort, and hopefully they notice the comment has already been made 30 times. Ah, who am I kidding? Seeing the same comment probably reinforces their desire to post it.
The entire issue is lame as frig, wish there was a way to stop it. I know I'd be a bad moderator, because I'd just ban them.
it's not a bad idea. it does the following things that I can think of:
(as someone else mentioned) gives more content to another platform of the fediverse.
doesn't overwhelm lemmy/kbin instance runners with the needs of hosting video when they intend on hosting a software/platform that is mostly intended for text.
Generally positive, with caveats. Lemmy’s early adopters were driven by an understanding that Reddit was not a viable platform for self organization, free discussion and association. We knew this day would eventually come.
The current wave of bans and hostile takeovers occurring on Reddit is nothing new for the radicals. We watched them suppress the Blue Leaks, we watched them shut down r/CTH in the middle of the George Floyd uprising, we watched them coup r/PresidentialRaceMemes, we watched them purge r/GenZhou, a community focused specifically on revolutionary theory.
Reddit has demonstrated time and time again that it is happy to serve as an instrument of counterinsurgency. This comes as no surprise, with an Atlantic Council alum heading their content moderation policy.
As one of the most astroturfed social media platforms on the Internet, Redditors bring a lot of those problems here. They tend to behave like they are the smartest people in the room, just because there are a lot of them. They like calling other websites echo chambers, when they hail from the biggest echo chamber on the English speaking net. The conspiracies I’ve seen them spread about the Lemmy devs and contributors have been absolutely wild.
I have seen the conspiracies posts as well but assumed they were just reddit shill accounts spreading disinformation, no one I know has taken them seriously. It is interesting to see this point of view, especially the "this day would come" bit, for me I sort of knew something was wrong , but it is like your local pub slowly being taken over, you do not want it to be true so you ignore stuff you should not.
Those do not appear to be written by him, but will do some more digging. However open exchange of views is wise in my opinion even if they are those I personally do not agree with. Edit Rightly ho, although I clearly have not read all the material on display (openly public btw) it is obviously the repository of someone who is willing to explore the far left politically , but the essays that might be by him(some are not accredited) are not on the subjects you mentioned, those are accredited to others. Now this dev might or might not agree with this stuff, they might be a politics student I can not say but I doubt anyone has asked. I am not sure it is particularly relevant in this thread anyway.
I have read the responces , and I applaud the general tone of both sides of the discussion. I have to just say that without view exchange , and expressly with view suppression , those who feel suppressed become even more intrenched. I for one learned from the debate.
I mean, the devs haven't made it a secret about how they fully believe Chinese nationalist propaganda.
Not that it really matters though, since if any issues did come up, Lemmy itself would be forked with new devs "in charge" even if the original devs still continued most of the work. The lemmy.ml instance itself would be a different issue, though.
This is the real test of the fediverse. Can software written by a piece of shit like that exist without being influenced by their garbage political views?
I think it's possible and I like Lemmy to thrive but it's important to keep an eye out for tankies and to not close your eyes to the reality of who started this.
The guy goes through analysis, cites sources, and makes an argument that the death toll is inflated due to Western propaganda.
Is that really such a piece of shit opinion? Wrong or right, I don't think the author did anything wrong nor the dev by putting it in some sort of compilation. People are allowed to disagree on controversial topics.
Remember Noam Chomsky? He got so much hate back in the day when he defended someone's right to be a holocaust denier. It's as if you are not allowed to critically think about certain topics.
For example the Ukraine nazis thing. Ukrainians are not Nazis - but the Ukrainian military did official incorporate a neo-nazi paramilitary group. Just saying that is grounds for someone to claim you're a Russian shill. I really wish people were more open minded and rational in discussion.
If you believe someone is wrong, explain why you think so instead of just attacking them like you are doing here.
Noam Chomsky is generally pretty smart, but he has some blinders. I am actually shocked to hear he would entertain this, as a Jew who was in his teenage years during the Holocaust. Was he doing the bone-headed ACLU “Even Nazis deserve the right to free speech” thing? If this is his position, I actually disagree with him.
The thing about the Holocaust is that there is a rigorous consensus that it took place, and that it was the worst atrocity in modern history. This is supported by anthropological evidence (the physical sites and artifacts where the exterminations took place), meticulous records recorded both by the perpetrators and the victims, the oral history of its survivors and their offspring. There are many well known people alive today who can name relatives who perished in the Shoah (Bernie Sanders and Norman Finkelstein, off the top of my head). My father met Eli Wiesel personally when he was in the hospital receiving medical treatment.
This is a very different case from the kind of academically discredited lies we see originating from the “Black Book of Communism,” which starts out by counting all the Axis KIA as victims of Communist brutality, and which ignores the now-available information revealed by the opening of the Soviet archives 30 years ago. If you apply the logic these people use for the Chinese Revolution to the US Civil War, you would come away with the conclusion that Abraham Lincoln murdered one million Americans and that the abolition of slavery was one of the greatest mistakes in history.
Marxism is supposed to be the eminent critique of all which exists, but the typical dork from Reddit who knows nothing at all about Chinese history except for Tank Man and thinks 1.4 billion people are just brainwashed subservient lemmings who need a white savior to come fix their country isn’t the person I care to talk to about it.
“Even Nazis deserve the right to free speech” thing
I'm sure he would say this. But in this specific case it's more of a question of not having any topic be off limits. I know there's a lot of emotions towards the holocaust and anyone who questions it is immediately labeled some sort of neo-nazi (and 90% of the time, that's what they are). Chomsky firmly believes in the Holocaust, because like you said, he experienced it. He's a Jew in his 90s.
But consider a world where you canno make an academic or scientific inquiry into a topic because "the issue has been resolved". What kind of world is that? He was defending a researcher who did an analysis into the Holocaust and came up with significantly different figures. Basically claiming the death toll was inflated. Which is, to the best of the research I've read, entirely incorrect. Something like 6 million people died in the Holocaust and there is plenty of evidence to show that.
But again, the point isn't whether the researcher was wrong or right. It's just that we can't set the precedent that certain topics are "finished" and can't be modified anymore. Because at that point we're not doing science or research - we're falling victim to ideology. Keep in mind the guy he was defending was getting charged with a crime since this was Europe and they have certain laws about Holocaust denial.
So we bring it back to the Lemmy devs. The article I read (I didn't read them all) was an analysis of the death toll of the Mao period and claims the figures were inflated. Does someone posting a link to this or otherwise sharing it make them a "genocide denier" and a "CCP tankie"?
This immediate lashing out when experiencing "wrongthink" is something I think is so toxic and dangerous to having serious discussions about sensitive topics. The more you study these things, the more you realize things are never black and white. There aren't good guys and there aren't bad guys. Or rather, maybe everyone's a bad guy. But I think you get my point.
I’ll start off by saying, I am going to quote-reply a bunch of things from your comment. Don’t take it like I’m trying to be a debate bro and own you online. I actually think your comment is quite constructive.
Something like 6 million people died in the Holocaust and there is plenty of evidence to show that.
Six million Jews. This figure excludes the Roma, LGBT, Neurodivergant, Communists, Anarchists, partisans, and prisoners of war. The total figure lands somewhere around 10-11 million, at least according to the US Holocaust Museum.
But consider a world where you canno make an academic or scientific inquiry into a topic because “the issue has been resolved”. What kind of world is that? He was defending a researcher who did an analysis into the Holocaust and came up with significantly different figures.
In abstract, I completely agree with this, but we live in a world where the reactionaries have more money than God to churn out this sort of self-serving analysis, and debate subjects which ought to be settled. We live in a world where government and think tank employees get paid to spend eight hours a day revising history on Wikipedia while volunteers and academics have to worry about keeping a roof over their heads. We live in a world where we’re still debating the right to abortion in the year 2023.
As such, I am much more interested learning the lessons of the triumphs and shortcomings of the masses of people who fought against this evil than I am about debating whether it was really even evil to begin with.
To repeat myself, I have never heard about this take from Chomsky, and I’d be interested to learn about it in detail. I assume it is actually benign because there are a significant amount of people who criticize Chomsky from the left and I have never heard them mention this.
So we bring it back to the Lemmy devs. The article I read (I didn’t read them all) was an analysis of the death toll of the Mao period and claims the figures were inflated. Does someone posting a link to this or otherwise sharing it make them a “genocide denier” and a “CCP tankie”?
In general, I think the Western audience knows absolutely nothing about this history. This is not limited to the layman Redditor, but large swaths of academia and the fourth estate as well. It would be fascinating to see what answers you’d get if you asked a random Washington Post or Wall Street Journal reporter to explain what happened in the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution with no notes. This is the standard I choose to hold the developers against. I am pretty sure Dessalines has the history pinned down much more accurately than the average American propagandist.
break
In general, I agree. The parameters of discussion on the big social networks are very heavily controlled. The largest communities on Reddit, like r/Politics, r/WorldNews etc. are extremely single-minded. Some places like r/AskHistorians tend to be a bit better.
don't worry this is the type of stuff i go on reddit for I'm glad there are people willing to go into long form discussion here
so ultimately I think we have to agree to disagree a bit here although I respect your opinion. You're absolutely right that there are organizations out there, both governmental and billionaire funded, that astroturf the shit out of the internet ( and you didn't mention AI like chatgpt, which will make this problem exponentially worse since it will become increasingly cheaper to astroturf).
I agree that I'm not personally going to debate a holocaust denier - they can more or less get fucked. I just don't think they should be sent to jail or otherwise censored. And this more or less lines up with Chomsky's beliefs. I'm a huge fan of him and I am 100% behind his free speech absolutism.
Here's what he had to say to critics of his decision to support the holocaust denier
Let me add a final remark about Faurisson's alleged "anti-Semitism." Note first that even if Faurisson were to be a rabid anti-Semite and fanatic pro-Nazi -- such charges have been presented to me in private correspondence that it would be improper to cite in detail here -- this would have no bearing whatsoever on the legitimacy of the defense of his civil rights. On the contrary, it would make it all the more imperative to defend them since, once again, it has been a truism for years, indeed centuries, that it is precisely in the case of horrendous ideas that the right of free expression must be most vigorously defended; it is easy enough to defend free expression for those who require no such defense. Putting this central issue aside, is it true that Faurisson is an anti-Semite or a neo-Nazi? As noted earlier, I do not know his work very well. But from what I have read -- largely as a result of the nature of the attacks on him -- I find no evidence to support either conclusion. Nor do I find credible evidence in the material that I have read concerning him, either in the public record or in private correspondence. As far as I can determine, he is a relatively apolitical liberal of some sort
I think the line that sticks out to me the most is- that it is precisely in the case of horrendous ideas that the right of free expression must be most vigorously defended
It's likely all this will change as the user base grows. However there are some distinct advantages.
Having instances focused purely on certain topics or ethics makes it so you can join the communities that align with your ideas. while all these communities federate having a home base that aligns with your ethics is important. Also if any particular instance becomes overly trollish there is the option that your instance can defederate from them. While this is not ideal having smaller instances with a more homogeneous community means that it will be easier to lobby for things like that than a monolithic service.
people at the moment are focused on building something that is community oriented and that people will want to use. Right now we have mods, power users, tech enthusiasts, and community leaders mostly. We don't have a ton of trolls yet. This will change but I think we can adapt to it.
There is a sense of comradery. People are dusting themselves off after the collapse of a former community of bolstering each other. This will wear off. however hopefully by then the service is robust enough that people will have found their new communities and groups that they jive with.
This is kinda random but till know i always saw "camaraderie" which i guess is more of a French influence spelling, but TIL comradery also an allowed way to spell it! Also ya I agree w you PLUS there seems to be less bots than Reddit atm
The community size thing is going to be interesting as the space grows. The fact that there are functionally infinite name spaces means that "politics" doesn't just get to become the default politics discussion space for everyone wandering into the place. Lemmy.ca/c/politics can be a very different place than Lemmy.ml/c/politics, which will be very different from lemmy.world/c/politics, which will be very different again from beehaw.org/c/politics.
And you can suppose that everyone will just use the biggest one by default, but I don't think that's necessarily true. The biggest subreddit got that way predominantly because of their name, and there's a good chance that people'll see their local one first, not the biggest. Or that they'll see multiple of them, and end up engaging with multiple communities before they realize what's going on and settle on the one that suits them best.
There will always be a biggest, but there can be a larger number of smaller, lively communities because they don't need to take on names like "r/truepolitics" or "r/onguardforthee" (which is a so very discoverable and intuitive r/Canada alternative).
We'll have to see how the dynamics play out over time.
asklemmy
Hot
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.