It was a rather sombering thread, that echoed quite a bit of what I’ve been saying about .ml, the Triad, general toxicity of their Tankie “ideology” for months now.
I know @ptz@dubvee.org was speaking of general toxicity, but the Triad is a huge chunk of it, the culture they create…festers it. They comprise the bulk of the hostility, I’ve personally seen it over and over and over again. All the “Just go back to Reddit” or “just another lib Redditor refugee” comments for someone that dared to have nuance.
Hell, I saw hex users fucking cheering .ee’s shutdown because it was some sort of psyop/CIA/fed/lib/“They didn’t perfectly agree with me” instance. They call feddit.org a “Nazi Zionist” instance for the crime…of not wanting to be arrested and complying with German law…
I haven’t looked to see if they’ve started any “celebratory” posts about Dubvee yet and I also don’t really want to, if they’re there, I already know what they’re going to say in it -_-
Unfortunately, I fear the problem was far worse than I thought.
Ptz speculated that the toxicity has “metastasized”. And you know what? He might be right, it seemed to be a lot better off 2 years ago, now…now I feel we might be losing the battle against the toxicity and I don’t think PieFed will be enough. Complacency has set in
My hope was that with enough instances defederating from .ml and the rest of the Triad, it would be a tad easier to take down toxic Tankies, trolls and their alts. But, few wanted to burn the bridge with the toxic main devs’ instance and now it might be too late. (Cheers to @Illecors@lemmy.cafe and the lemmy.cafe instance, one of the few of note to actually defederate from the entire triad!)
Like ptz said and I fully agree with, this place started with promise 2 years ago, but it appears to be ultimately morphing into 4chan (or like I’ve been saying, Voat 2.0) after all
Oh well, I’ve got some thick ass skin so I’ll probably be here till the end, till the last sane instance shuts down.
I’ll see you there @dessalines@lemmy.ml
/Sadmemerant
Heck, maybe I’ll do a hail Mary and start an instance on a custom fork of lemmy with “normie proof” onboarding while dumping a few hundred in ADs (Maybe even on Reddit itself, HA!). I’ll flood this place with “normies” LMAO
Libs whining, time to get my popcorn 🍿🍿🍿
Libs crying about revisionists never gets old 🍿🍿🍿
It was a rather sombering thread, that echoed quite a bit of what I’ve been saying about .ml, the Triad, general toxicity of their Tankie “ideology” for months now.
A lot of what Patrick is referring to goes well beyond the ‘tankie triad’ (two of which are banned from most instances anyway).
Hell, I saw hex users fucking cheering .ee’s shutdown because it was some sort of psyop/CIA/fed/lib/“They didn’t perfectly agree with me” instance. They call feddit.org a “Nazi Zionist” instance for the crime…of not wanting to be arrested and complying with German law…
And yet all that happened was with lemm.ee shutting down, hexbear became more isolated because lemm.ee actually federated with them.
Outside of .ml, most tankies are despised across the fediverse.
TIL dubvee is shutting down.
The first time I found out that dubvee existed was when they banned me from all of their communities. And it sounds like they’re just being soft skinned instead of just defederating the tankie instances. I’d argue having tankie instances is a good thing. It keeps them contained and easy to block.
Yea, no, I know you and whatever ban was handed down was justly deserved.
It keeps them contained and easy to block.
It’s a failed theory, they all have alts upon alts, and block isn’t a block on Lemmy
You’re the same dude who took over the conservative forum on Lemmy.world and banned me because I was criticising an atheism post on there
I sure did, I nipped a transphobic comment before it devolved into a full blown argument.
You are the “pORn iS A SiN” “HOmOSeXUalItY MakES jEsUS CrY” user. You are one of the ones they are talking about that is “subtle” in their trolling.
It wasn’t a transphobic comment. It was a response to openly mocking people’s choice to raise their children Christian.
It was a response to openly mocking people’s choice to raise their children Christian.
It really wasn’t: https://p.feddit.uk/post/feddit.uk/31856602?thread=0.18336647#18336647
The premise of the meme is that’s it’s hypocritical to think that children can’t understand the ideas of being gay or trans, but somehow can decide to be Christian. Your response is mostly non sequitur and implies it’s actively dangerous to teach kids about gay people.
My comment was deleted. I misunderstood the premise. I was saying that teaching kids about Christianity at a young age isn’t bad, but teaching kids about sexual intercourse and in depth details about transgender issues is. There’s nothing wrong with teaching kids that “some people have two mums” at a young age, or when they’re a teen teaching them about sex ed and that people who have gender dysphoria exist and should be respected. (In fact, teenagers should be taught about safe sex. It lowers the amount of abortions, as well as children that teens aren’t prepared for.)
I guess I’ve been here 2 years too did lemmy start out tankie or was it due to the migration? The lsc sub on reddit was a full on echo chamber
The legend goes that dessalines and Nutomic were unpopular and getting bans on Reddit and then set off to make Lemmy like 5-6 years ago to get away from Reddit
.ml is the flagship instance run by Lemmy’s developers, and that’s always been tankie.
I know people love to hate on ai but I think that might be the moderation tool needed. Make a bot that just liberally hands out bans and call it Stalin bot. The tankies would love getting banned by that.
Doesn’t work because the “ai” bot lacks consistency. Even those dum-dums using it for hiring, medical aid or tech support do so as a token practice and in turn the service is practically nonexistent.
It would be a great first filter for calls for violence. And u would give people opportunity for human review with failure costing a permaban.
I’ll repeat a few things I’ve been saying about this. To keep it
short:less verbose:What people call “toxicity” online relies heavily on irrationality, from the aggressor and/or the target. And politics raises the stakes of everything, so irrationality + political engagement is specially prone to generate catty behaviour, name calling, uncalled combativeness, and all that crap.
Now look at social media. You’ll see irrationals infesting every platform. Reddit in special encourages it, and most lemmings are from Reddit.
Why this matters: because I believe people here are focusing too much on .ml and Hexbear, without noticing the problem would still persist without them.
Indeed, without ml hexbear and grad those irrationals would spread without reason to other instances, turning everything into a cesspool. And luckily we have the tools to not engage with them, block them or outright defed from their host.
From the day those protests started Lemmy was far far worse than Reddit for anyone but further left progressives. I have fat more often been called a Nazi here for like warm takes. It’s a spectrum and Lemmy is definitely a far more toxic place then reddit is if you don’t agree.
yep yep! ive been called a nazi because I psoted about the Green Party lol
The Green Party is farther left than the Democrats. But people throw around nazi and fascist as some sort of insult, not even knowing the meaning of those words.
I know exactly nothing about the green party but like Jesus fuck you’d think leftists would have learned that’s an important word to stop diluting given many of us are living under a system slipping into actual full blown fascism and it’s an increasingly big problem globally
Its so painfully harmful to leftist causes to go around accusing your fellow leftists of being a nazi for not being your exact flavor of left. We all need to cut that shit out and grow some emotional and interpersonal maturity.
Thats because in generaly the “leftists” that occupy spaces like ml arent really leftists at all, they are anti-western idologues. You will very rarely see them posting about things left wing people tend to car about like workers rights, cost of living, housing or things like that. They are far more interested in geopolitics, especially on issues where they can make “west bad” posts.
While I understand your argument that their ideology is defined in large parts by other factors than political alignment, I do see them talk about those kinds of things, specially through the lens of demanding communism as a resolution to those problems, or calling for the abolishment of the class that facilitates those problems 😅
I saw some research about this recently let me see if I can find it, it was based on reddit communities but I think it applies to lemmy as much if not more.
ah here it is
ABSTRACT
Social media’s role in the spread and evolution of extremism is a focus of intense study. Online extremists have been involved in the spread of online hate, mis- and disinformation, and real-world violence. However, most existing work has focuses on right-wing extremism. In this paper, we perform a first of its kind large-scale measurement study exploring left-wing extremism. We focus on “tankies,” a left-wing community that first arose in the 1950s in support of hardline actions of the USSR and has evolved to support what they call “Actually Existing Socialist” countries, e.g., CCP-run China, the USSR, and North Korea. We collect and analyze 1.3M posts from 53K authors from tankie subreddits, and explore the position of tankies within the broader far-left community on Reddit. Among other things, we find that tankies are clearly on the periphery of the larger far-left community. When examining the contents of posts, we find misalignments and conceptual homomorphisms that confirm the description of tankies in the theoretical work. We also discover that tankies focus more on state-level political events rather than social issues. Our findings provide empirical evidence of the distinct positioning and discourse of left-wing extremist groups on social media.
can u break down what thats saying?
Now look at social media. You’ll see irrationals infesting every platform. Reddit in special encourages it, and most lemmings are from Reddit.
True, but on other social media, there’s millions of users and it’s a LOT easier to dilute the toxicity when a SMs D/MAU is being measured in the millions
Why this matters: because I believe people here are focusing too much on .ml and Hexbear, without noticing the problem would still persist without them.
Yea, but I really think .ml not being defederated from is causing a bit of a feedback loop encouraging similar toxic behavior in other users for their own, even non-Tankie, reasons
Generally, when you read a comment that makes you wonder just how dumb the person who wrote it is, it comes from one of those two places. At least they’re consistent?
Yea, but I really think .ml not being defederated from is causing a bit of a feedback loop encouraging similar toxic behavior in other users for their own, even non-Tankie, reasons
Can I just say that if instances start flipping from being lemmy instances to piefed instances, as is slowly happening, then lemmy.ml will potentially find itself more marginalised and the questions of defederation will happen. As it stands now, lemmy.ml is the foundational instance for the lemmy software and that is likely the primary reason why many instances won’t pull the plug.
Yeah, while people can have their valid criticisms of the culture of various instances, we need to be extremely wary of the idea that the problem will be solved if we just isolate outselves from the folks we sit furthest from on the political spectrum. I’ve seen toxicity from folks on all sorts of instances, even if some have had more (though I’ve honestly seen more from some small instances other than the triad)
Literally every platform has toxicity, regardless of its political makeup. If we want to improve the culture of this space we can’t just scapegoat a couple instances (that to be fair, do seem to have big issues from what I’ve seen from other folks, though my interactions have mostly been cordial)
And leftist spaces seem to chronically struggle a lot with in-group fighting and toxicity because we’re all driven by our care for issues of moral importance- which often lets us justify being shitty to one another if we can frame someone as the villain in the story of an issue we care about.
I think creating a culture that is unwelcoming of anti-social, bad faith behaviour regardless of whether we agree with the stance or not would help massively. But that is a difficult thing to create structure around doing.
Just the amount of self reflection i’d expect from you. You are a toxic bully yourself.
I think it is worth differentiating between dubvee and lemm.ee on this topic. Dubvee seems to have been shut down mostly for personal reasons, and IMHO if the timing would have not overlapped with the lemm.ee shut down people would just consider it part of the normal churn of smaller instances coming and going.
On the other hand, lemm.ee was a bit of a special case. From the very beginning they invited a lot of “defederation is bad” type of people to their instance and were also one of the few larger instances that decided to keep federating with hexbear despite having first had experience with their toxicity. So to a large extend they set themselves up to alot of drama 🤷 In addition their technical setup was probably a bit overengineered, adding to the admin workload.
As an instance admin myself, I can’t say that things are overly stressful if you defederate the right instances and quickly ban alts of known troublemakers.
However, I agree that the feddit.org witchhunt was very toxic, and as a moderator of /c/europe@feddit.org I was also directly targeted. But it was clearly a very small number of people that instigated most of it. Discounting alts and throwaways it was probably a single digit number of people doing 95% of the harm.
Uh, I’m not sure if you read a different thread, but in his formal shutdown thread in !announcements@dubvee.org he was quite clear about it being about fighting against the toxicity. He basically got to a good point, but because of the .ee wake he had to start over.
But yes .ee was a special case, it was sad especially being the second largest instance. But a second instance shutdown in a month also citing burnout and toxicity is a red flag.
Now I’m worried if next week SJW or slrpnk is going to announce their shutdown due to toxicity
We (slrpnk.net) are only planning to move to Piefed due to technical annoyances with Lemmy the software. As I wrote above, the level of toxicity we see on our instance is really not so bad.
But is that from a “normie” perspective or from a regular Threadiverse user perspective? Because from a regular Threadiverse user perspective many have become desensitized I feel, and that’s also another aspect of the problem.
Because ptz has been operating on tamping down toxicity with the goal of it being attractive to the average user.
The Threadiverse will not actually achieve much without the “normies”
Maybe stop posting for a few days and go touch grass. You’re sounding hysterical.
Can you describe what you mean by a normie? I’m genuinely curious.
Is there a post on this anywhere? I’d consider moving to solarpunk to get off lemmy and away from the tankies, but when I tried the .world piefed instance it was incredibly slow.
Not yet. We are waiting for an upstream change that would allow us to import existing bcrypt hashed passwords from the Lemmy database.
In my experience Piefed is quite fast, maybe there was some temporary issue with the piefed.world instance?
It’s crazy that I’ve been on Lemmy for like 2 years and I think I’ve encountered direct toxic behavior only a handful of times. Obviously I’m aware of the trolls and problematic instances, but those can easily be blocked.
Am I the asshole?
Damn, you must have blocked a lot of stuff.
You can be the judge of that
Why did you block my true love 😭
So she’d have more time for you.
That is the worlds tiniest block list IMO. Mine is several seconds to scroll from top to bottom, which is inconvenient to add new blocked instances.
Do you browse your own subs, the local subs, or all? I myself am constantly cruising on “all” for the variety.
Usually “all”.
dunno, this seems a pretty chill instance and your experience mostly matches mine. There are a few knobheads I see around though (I started adding user notes and it’s amazing how any agro chat is always one of the same few accounts)
It was an old truism on Reddit that you could avoid 99% of the worst behaviour by just never going on /r/all or visiting the default subs. If you just visit communities you actually like, you have a much nicer experience.
It’s the same here. I subscribe to a bunch of communities I enjoy, and I browse Local on my home instance feddit.uk. I basically never go on the big All feed. And my experience is pretty tranquil; rarely do I see any trouble, and even more rarely trouble that the mods/admins can’t keep on top of.
Don’t get too down. You’re like literally my hero here. Piefed needs some work still but I’ll put up a vote to move 3d printing to piefed.world when it gets sorted enough. I REALLY wish someone would implement the option in the Lemmy API to disregard down votes completely (alexandrite - lookin at you). The negativity when I am already having a bad day or week or month is often a very big deal to me that causes me to go elsewhere. I’m especially ostracized by people that are insane about AI negativity. I can now prove quite a bit about my ramblings and explorations, but that is a pit of stupidity here so I go elsewhere to talk to others about it. I’m okay with the mixed group and people of various ages and backgrounds. It is the lack of respect for people of all levels and backgrounds by others in how they interact that I do not like. Just be positive. IMO if downvotes must exist they should only exist for those that post regularly. I upvote all kinds of stuff, many times just to counter some negative fool. I’ll upvote almost anything just to say “I’m happy you’re here and a part of this place because it is a little more wonderful with you here,” - even when I have no clue or interest in some niche scope. The world can be a terrible negative place, but your one choice and vote in this life is to be a part of the solution or a part of the problem. Fuck the problems; be a solution. What could I do to help you? – seriously digital neighbor friend.
Hey i didn’t know about the 3dprinting instance. Neat clicks
In the linked post, I can definitely agree that a lot of people here seem to be arguing in bad faith, and Ive seen it from various instances, not just the tankie traid (although I won’t deny they are a part of it). For myself, I dont know how to tell the “subtle” trolls apart from people who are really just misinformed. I dont like assuming everyone knows everything and is purposefully trying to get a rise out of me. I do know I sit and think before I post, and sometimes I’ll write a post or a comment, and sit on it and end up deleting it because I feel it isnt worth having to interact with someone who could be trolling, but I feel like I still end up arguing with people who are as the OOP put it, arguing in bad faith, talking in absolutes, and calling for violence. I dont really know how to approach it because I do use reporting sometimes, although 9 times out of 10 it feels like nothing comes of it. Just a shitty situation.
For myself, I dont know how to tell the “subtle” trolls apart from people who are really just misinformed.
Based on my decades of experience anyone who could be described as a ‘subtle’ troll is just misinformed people. So many people expect everyone to know everything they do that malicious intent is assumed when anyone disagrees with them that accusations of trolling are tossed out like cheap bubble gum at a small town parade.
If a ‘troll’ seems subtle, just assume they are misinformed!
If anyone thinks this is turning into 4chan or even worse, voat, you seriously have not experienced either of those.
If you put an average person in here with a minimal idea of what 4chan is, what would they say this place is like?
When they inevitably get scared off because some .ml users were going off ranting about how such such article about NK that got posted was actually western propaganda and that “NK is all good actually”, what do you think they’ll tell others?
This isnt about me or you, we have thick skin and can deal with the BS toxicity and have even become desensitized to it so it doesn’t seem that bad
But we are not the average person and if we want the Threadiverse to succeed and maybe even threaten Reddit a bit, we need the normal users
I’ll take someone claiming that a post about North Korea is western propaganda over someone that is trying to explain, how supporting genocide is somehow the right political choice.
I feel like the people that feel an over presence of “tankies” on instances that aren’t ml, hexbear or grad, are confused that the fediverse is notably more left-leaning than what they are used from reddit, Twitter or other corporate social media. Being exposed to maybe not being that “lefty” after all and more of the right side of the political spectrum here, seems to rub them the wrong way.
Here’s a screenshot of the !worldnews@lemmy.ml As you can see, on the “tankie instance” News positive for Ukraine is getting the upvotes and stuff positive of Russia is getting the downvotes
Here’s a screenshot of the !worldnews@lemmy.ml As you can see, on the “tankie instance” News positive for Ukraine is getting the upvotes and stuff positive of Russia is getting the downvotes
Would you like to check the modlogs next?
If you put an average person in here with a minimal idea of what 4chan is, what would they say this place is like?
What is that supposed to argue? That someone random might be ignorant?
But we are not the average person and if we want the Threadiverse to succeed and maybe even threaten Reddit a bit, we need the normal users
That’s all well and good, but we’re still, nowhere near 4chan, voat or even Twitter. Claiming that lemmy is “just as bad as voat” is nonsense and just serves to make people like me dismiss their opinions as someone ignorant and exaggerating.
I hope you’re right
Or even Twitter these days.
Honestly, I got banned from that instance after down voting several posts I disagreed with, which is what down vote is there for, and dude told me to fuck off in the notice like I was running a script or something. I don’t personally care, but I also have zero sympathy for someone on the internet being that sensitive or heavy handed. Probably didn’t deserve whatever toxic nonsense they’d been exposed to, but still, based on my interactions with em, good riddance.
