cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/45204357
Yesterday, I created my account on Lemmy.ml because I want to become mod on [email protected]. And I posted this comic on [email protected] It's SDV game cutscene where Shane a NPC go watch Sports game with you kiss you accidentily but It was part of that event also player kiss Shane(NPC) back. Here's video for more context. And someone claimed it have SA(Sexual Assualt) From Hexbear Ofcourse. So, I should delete it. I said it was a part of game cutscene. And If main player doesn't love the Shane(NPC) then they don't need to complete this event. And Just as a sarcasm I added Yeah we shoule delete this entire community because this game is Woke like Woke Detector Steam Group said. That user think I am some anti-woke dickhead something like that IDK. And tell me to Kill My Self. What I do now? I wanted on become mod on .ml because community was already well established. I message dessaline but I am sure he will not unbanned me. :(
Did I really did something wrong? I don't know If I really did something wrong.
Link for that comic if embed doesn't work.
Create one lemm.ee [email protected]
If you poke around inside HB, you will see them having these same conversations - I recall one, found by searching the keyword "(de)federation" where their admin was begging and pleading for them to behave. I might have restricted the search to whatever their announcement community is called, which I can usually find by sorting the local communities list by oldest. Anyway, their userbase obviously doesn't care.
This points to why normalization of toxicity is so incredibly dangerous: by not stopping it inside their own instance, they train people that that kind of behavior is okay. Now, of course the users are going to act the same way outside of it!?!?!? You cannot extract blood from a stone, you cannot expect a leopard to change its spots, you cannot (necessarily) expect civility from someone trained on 4chan, and by federating with them and providing zero means to block them, that isn't half as much their fault as ours. The likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Steve Huffman are all going to do their thang, but it's our choice to use the platforms that they provide.
Lemmy's 0.19.3 was supposed to allow user-blocking - older posts calling for user-level defederation were always told "just wait, it's coming". However, what little protection it did offer has since degraded further - the only thing is does is block communities for someone, not the toxic-AF userbase, and while it used to also block notifications from them, as of 0.19.5 the latter protection is already gone. At this point I expect it will never happen. Bc if it did, people would block Lemmy.ml too, and they can't have that.
Only the authority admins can choose to defederate from hexbear.net and lemmygrad.ml, and lemmy.ml too except who are we kidding that's not happening. Some instances have at least blocked certain communities such as ChapoTrapHouse, but obviously meander.xyz has not (https://mander.xyz/c/[email protected]), seeming to prefer to leave it up to each individual user to decide which users, communities, and instances to block - except again, you cannot block the latter, not without some kind of bot or doing the work manually for each individual user and community, plus any new ones that may be created in the future. And despite all the posts that seem to indicate otherwise, quite often we are prevented from even discussing the matter. In the 10 months since I made this account, I have only had 3 posts removed - all 3 for criticizing the admin practices on Lemmy.ml. What is allowed to be said is only the tip of the iceberg.
Watching Innuendo Studios' The Alt Right Playbook changed my thinking forever, helping solidify my thinking that while you can lead a horse to water, you cannot make it drink. I am not criticizing what you did here bc you weren't speaking for the sake of changing the actual HB's mind, but to breathe the light of knowledge into the dark corners of the situation, mainly for the sake of the rest of us who know nothing about that game and perhaps are too busy or otherwise not inclined to look up such details. FANTASTIC! But anyway, I now know that people who troll are not worth talking to.
So I'll probably move away from Lemmy, either to PieFed or Tesseract on dubvee.org or both, or lemmy.cafe seems quite welcoming and is the only fully Lemmy instance I've ever heard of that has defederated from all of the big 3 - and notably virtually nothing else (except threads.net), so it's like lemm.ee but without that source of toxicity. It also is running 0.19.6-beta.9, and has fantastic welcome messages on the home page - most instances refuse to update your sidebar content to help guide new users, inclined highly ironically lemmy.ml itself that just has a link titled "What is Lemmy.ml" that points to a post that has since been removed:-D. Both dubvee.org and lemmy.cafe are only run by a single admin though iirc, so seem less stable for the future.
Btw whether you are interested in joining PieFed or not yourself, I highly recommend reading this: https://join.piefed.social/2024/06/22/piefed-features-for-growing-healthy-communities/ - many of those thoughts that you and I discussed over a year ago about voting patterns, with trust based on reputation scores and sorting based on someone's pattern of behaviors, as we do irl, are fleshed out there. They might be great solutions to the problems, or they might be horrible ones, but either way it's an interesting read, and a step forward to making something actually happen!
We cannot control others, only ourselves. New, mainstream people are far less likely to join Lemmy due to all the extremism and toxicity that we allow here, the (mostly false) mantra "you can just block it tho" aside, not everyone wants to treat their social media like they are installing Arch Linux btw.
So, I've hit [email protected], and found the admin asking people to behave:
Alongside this thread where they discuss federation or not, asking posters if HB should federate, and how. Voting results were mostly pro-federation through an allow list, but what's interesting is the content of the comments - or, rather, what is missing:
But in no moment they showed concerns towards the other side, like "no, our funposting would be misunderstood and create issues out there" or "those kids won't behave". As a group it was only looking at its own belly button. And it was always focusing on political views, never on behaviour.
(Owning libs would be fine and dandy if they didn't bloody assumed that everyone and their dog is one.)
I also found a few extra shitty things, like:
Yeah, user-blocking doesn't really work for this. It's a great way to remove random annoyances, but not a whole userbase that thinks that slacktivism and ignoring "the other side" is OK.
Dunno if this was a rec, but I'm watching it now. It's good stuff - first video and they were already spot on.
I'll probably stay in mander.xyz, but I've been watching PieFed from afar for a long time. I really like some features that Rimu is implementing.
~~[In case some HB user, full of gullibleness, is reading this: think on the purpose of this utterance. Spoilers: context.]~~
Oh, I missed a trick so here's another separate reply - I hope it is more informative and therefore interesting than annoying to do it this way, split up (but you may have already started reading and responding the other so... you might not read this otherwise).
One of the tricks that HBs - and also Magats - use is to say something, knowing full well that it is not true, but relying on the fact that others will simply go along with it. The lazy bc they won't bother to fact-check, and the authoritarians bc they don't want to cause controversy by arguing against their leaders. It's actually a useful tactic, I have to say, separately from how I may feel about it being attempted to be used against myself.
So I noticed how one of the posts that you linked - https://hexbear.net/post/280770 - did that (hehe, well actually all of them did, repeatedly, but I wanted to call up one item in particular; also they presented it in the largest font size possible, BUT I WON'T YELL IT AT YOU HERE! ... ah, anymore than that much:-):
So by again sorting the Communities list by Old, and this time it wasn't the oldest but still it was close to it, I found Lemmy.world's announcement community, and thereby this post: https://lemmy.world/post/2498330. It lists 8 links - 4 comments made by HBs on Lemmy.world and 4 posts made on HB itself. And then for good measure 4 more links to Lemmygrad.ml that Lemmy.world also decided to defederate with at around the same time period.
Now, I bet you can anticipate what those linked comments said, can't you? Here's one for clarity:
Yeah, well, anyway, at the time, Lemmy.world did provide the receipts requested, whereas HB demanded proof, then ignored said proof, then demanded more proof - and you can see where this is going. Despite how someone tried to deliberately cover up their own involvement - though importantly, only after they got called out for it by the entire Lemmy.world admin team.
My point is that I have never once seen someone from HB use a good-faith argument (or if I have, it has been so long that I cannot recall it). 100% of what I see from them is either the most inane BS, or at best neutral. I would most definitely go to the trouble of learning how to write a bot or Firefox add-in or filter rule or something in order to block such content, but that would only selfishly help myself. Unfortunately, every new person who joins Lemmy must discover this all over again on their own - it is not printed in the sidebar "hey, just so you know, HB spews BS".
And lemmy.ml is arguably all the worse for being more tolerable therefore more insidious to have to parse.
Anyway, I hope this was interesting. Sometimes, people on the internet lie - and the worst kind are those that tell you the truth, after having lied to themselves (i.e. can no longer distinguish between truth vs. fiction).
Yeah it is all so extremely obvious:
etc., though none of that is ever actually enforced, making it a list of "suggestions puh-lease", rather than "rules".
Speaking of voting, as a mathematician you will appreciate this one most of all: https://hexbear.net/post/1712067. Quick summary: they took a vote, then discarded the vote entirely. One of the results was 41 for remaining federated with lemm.ee vs. only 4 for defederation - that is 91% for, vs. only 9% against. And then programming.dev wasn't quite as close but it was still freaking hugely biased towards one side: 27 (58.7%) for remain federated with them vs. 19 (41.3%) to defederation. The difference between them being 8 votes out of 46 = 17.4% - which is nowhere close to a tie. Unless you are an HB admin I suppose and then:
This is... just... wow. >91% wanted to remain federated with lemm.ee, and 59% to remain federated with programming.dev, but screw the users - what do you think this is, a vote? Oh wait... :-(
And once again the comments in that post tell the REAL story. e.g. this one https://hexbear.net/post/1712067/4540345:
devs!!! They are turning away their own programmers who provide the site that they all use to shit onto each one with!?!?! And given how Hexbear predates Lemmy, I think they actually meant "dev", rather than "admin" - i.e. someone who did the work of modifying the code, which is all the more relevant given how it is in Rust, which is not an easy language to learn, even for someone starting off with extensive knowledge of C++.
But speaking of admins, the admins themselves say things like:
THE OPPORTUNITY TO DUNK - not the opportunity to converse civilly will, not the opportunity to learn, to listen, to discourse, but TO DUNK.
And ofc the admins are not the only ones speaking thus - "Compromising the ability to spread leftist ideas to others in order to...", "They're reading what we're saying and the message is still getting spread. Our ideals are spread through interacting with people...", "you can't stop some users from seeing the ridiculous fascist takes", "Where do they think new users come from? They don't spontaneously appear from thin air they appear because other people are exposed to them in other spaces." - and here's one that literally uses the actual word "disrupt": "With Lemmy, it was about building something that was going to eventually create its own theatre-of-operations that disrupted existing ones, and hexbear was going to be connected to that so I could always justify it."
The only reason that Hexbear exists and is federated with any other instances at all, from the mouths of the very self-same admins that run it, is... again... "THE OPPORTUNITY TO DUNK".
So when e.g. Cowbee comes in, ignores 95% of what I say and hyper-focuses on one tiny little aspect, demanding that I show proof of all of my work, while not offering any for their own points and instead just saying "just trust me bro, and hit up my DMs where we can talk more" (but then forgetting I suppose that they said that, or presuming that I could not read it in the very self-same post, or more likely presuming that others would not take the time to do so, and then they claimed that they had never done such a thing at all, hrm........).
The Innuendo Studios series is absolutely one of the best series on YouTube that I have ever seen! I just presumed that you already knew of it, but yes if you haven't taken time to watch throuhg all of them, you absolutely would probably enjoy it! Everything he's done is amazing too, like the agency of protagony. Also the gamer-gate one, titled something like why is jack so angry, b/c it shows the historical development of those trends - but that was just a precursor to the ultimate one: The Alt-Right Playbook.
I see these same tactics played out over and over and over and over and over and over and over again by people like Cowbee, and it is just exhausting. I LOVED your take-down here, but that simply cannot keep up with the absolute TSUNAMI of bullshit that "they" are able to spew. It takes them two seconds to say something and move on, so even if it takes you only two minutes to reply, let alone two hours, then they "win". And either way they declare that they do so. As Trump is pretty much guaranteed to do so, if he does not outright win himself, in about one month from now.
So that's the thing: anybody can go in and read these comments, from the HB's very own mouths. The highly ironic thing is that they actually ARE behaving themselves quite well when they are out here!!!!! Compared to what they do inside there, that is. (have you seen the pig-poop link yet? ewww...) But who is going to spend that kind of time?! And yet, their messages are chosen to be spread all across the entire Fediverse, unless the instance takes the requisite steps to specifically defederate from them. Like a CSAM attack, this is a wave of hostility and more importantly childishness that festers inside their borders, but also explodes outwards to affect us all. Unless we go somewhere that has enacted defenses to keep it out.
At which point it becomes relevant that especially when they noticed that they were getting defederated from most of the major instances, and their admins chose to defederate even more other instances, many HB users fled to their alts, e.g. on Lemmy.ml. Even if those alts had existed prior to that, still, they became the new vehicle through which the HBs chose to spread their messages.
No wonder 100% of the people that I have told about Lemmy irl looks at me so oddly - one glance at the all feed, at the types of things coming out from like [email protected], and all the toxicity spewed from HBs and HBs under the guise of other alts, or others who were never on HB but act the same, is always enough to turn my irl friends away from Lemmy. And has finally done the same to me, now that places such as PieFed and Tesseract are available (but possibly would have been enough regardless).
To be fair, the voting there is just to probe the waters, the admins still want to take the final decision.
About users (incl. devs) leaving, it's worse in the context:
When r/CTH was banned from Reddit, I thought that it wasn't to blame - it's just that the Reddit admins wanted to throw a bone to the fascists, as CTH was in the same banwave as frensworld and clownworld. I mean, it's spez/kn0thing, we know that "umm, ackshyually, we don't hate you fascists. See? We're also banning some left-wingers! Please stay in Reddit, our dear fascist userbase".
However, if I'm reading those two comments right, that is clearly false. CTH → Hexbear was already tailored to cause trouble to other communities back in Reddit; this tendency only continued in the Fediverse.
And unless it has a target, its users will fight each other, even if they're all leftists and consider each other leftist, so they can't even pretend that they're just dunking libs.
[from the other comment]
The alt-right playbook that you linked mentions it, under "changing the goalposts".
[And before some casual reader tries to distort this into the horseshoe "theory": nope. I'm talking here about rhetoric tactics that you see regardless of political views. It's just that the alt right loves it, and HB happens to love it too.]
It's kind of funny how it remembers me Marx's The 18th Brumaire - specially the first two paragraphs. As if the .ml admin team (and Lemmy devs) were mimicking what Reddit did as trying to create something new, but being bound by the already existing circumstances so they're forced to replicate how the Reddit admin handles users:
...and as a result .ml ends as the farce for Reddit's tragedy.
That kind of voting "strategy" might best be described by the keyword "gamble", as in it could pay off or... it could backfire. This was public. We all saw what they did. They dangled the whittle "vote" in front of their users, then they snatched it away. That's a "power move", as in someone flaunting their dick size just to show off - worse, a tiny one, while daring someone to talk back. The emperor has no clothes, etc. THAT level of insensitivity is on full display.
The enemy of my enemy is not always my friend. Two lefts do not make a right. 1+1 != 1.9, nor 2.1, but precisely 2, the former two answers revealing how it is possible for both to be incorrect even if in opposite ways - and then other answers such as 2i, e, -100000, and "your mother" are examples of still more ways to be wrong, although oddly enough "two" could be correct, depending on whether the rules are flexible enough to recognize such.
Flipping to lemmy.ml, I have enormous respect for those code developers having offered their skills to release that for the entire world to use. Kudos. But running an instance is a different skillset - and yet, back when other instances were not yet a thing, they offered that too, to help lemmy get off the ground. Kudos again. Though power corrupts, and over time... Anyway, just b/c something started off one way does not mean that it must continue forward indefinitely - the word for that might be "stagnation", or even "inflexibility" to adapt to changing circumstances.
I agree with all of what you said, except how things appear twice. I think rather than people refuse to learn from history, and therefore mandate that it be repeated, far more often than twice. e.g. Rome fell, now USA is the new Rome, and it will fall too, whereforth who will step up to the plate next? (after a few hundred to a thousand years time ofc, to allow time to forget) Humans are so incredibly stoopid - or at least I know that *I* am - and we love to fall in love with ourselves and our latest bright shiny idea, as if it had never been tried before.
Not that I am blaming the founding fathers of the USA - far from it, b/c (1) it was an experiment, and (2) it actually did work out well all across the wide world. However, it was a piss-poor implementation, which if it was to have been considered as worthwhile then steps should therefore have been taken to have made it more robust. But fast-forward to nowadays, facing up against things that it has never really had to contend with before - chief among them a level of foreign aggression that costs the actors so little, yet yields such enormous dividends; but not far behind is the incredible stupidity that already lies within and is totally separate from that, especially seeing as how it predated it by hundreds of years - and I honestly fear that it cannot stand against such an onslaught (especially this 2-pronged assault) for too much longer.
So in my view what we need to do is WAKE UP. A fire is in the building and we should do things about that. Secure our valuables (e.g. children), identify an exit (if there is one), and the like. But then in the face of all of that, to listen to the likes of HBs... wow, just wow, uh... no. I would leave social media altogether rather than put up with the likes of that. Except when I made my account I did not know. And also it took me months to figure out the extent of the problem, e.g. that it includes lemmy.ml too. And also I did not want to simply leave, without telling others first of my findings. And also Kbin had fallen, long may Mbin yet live, but others were rising up to take its place - and while Sublinks seems perpetually not yet ready, PieFed is looking mighty fine these days. I can be free, not just keeping lemmy.ml at arm's length, but fully and entirely free, from all that bullcrap. Though I am certain that it will not be perfect either - it lacks a lot of the polish that Lemmy has for instance, and yet even there it has things that Lemmy does not, e.g. I've asked questions and seen changes made in (not even tens of) mere minutes! Which itself could lead someone to ask... why wasn't it made already?:-P But anyway that's a far cry from begging to be able to defederate from the toxic userbase on lemmy.ml, and a year later we seem further from that goal than ever before - almost as if there is resistance to providing such a feature...
I'll focus on the disagreement, OK?
In all examples provided by Marx, the "farce" was fully aware of the "tragedy". Including the "main character" of the book, Louis Bonaparte - he was Napoleon's nephew, he clearly knew how things went in the French Revolution. And the .ml admins are likely aware of how rules are enforced in Reddit.
So it isn't like people don't learn from history - it's more like they can only replicate it poorly, as it's what gives them some reference, even if the conditions around them change. That also applies to the .ml admins; even if they were the ones implementing modlogs and federation, since their reference is Reddit, I think that they never took into account the contradiction between their opaque rule enforcement and the modlog, or trying to control what a userbase says versus federation.
I have some good news for you: I've seen lots of programmers saying that Python is considerably easier to learn and read code for than Rust is. As such, feature parity and "polish parity" might come sooner than later.
I'm personally hoping that new PieFed instances pop up, and that some Lemmy instances get converted into PieFed instances. I'm also grateful to the Lemmy devs, and I relate to their desire to have an instance where you don't need to struggle every single minute against the same old anti-communist straw men; but they're awful at community building, and yet so many instances are giving .ml a pass because they don't want to hamper Lemmy development. They won't get that pass if PieFed gets stronger, it'll give them two options - improve their community or see .ml shrinking and Lemmy slowly being replaced with PieFed.
Worse than the modlog entries are the direct database manipulations that didn't even show up in the modlog. The Lemmy devs said that it was due to a bug as the new version was coming out and... we all decided to take them at their word, bc what else can/should be done? It is notable then that at least there is transparency enough for entries to make it into the modlog - bc there are other ways.
Absolutely! I've wondered if I should take the time to learn it myself even. I know C++ and Unix, but probably wouldn't have all that much time to volunteer to the project regardless, though you are absolutely right that lowering that barrier should do wonders for such! And even just feature requests and pointing out issues that don't work will help.
I thought similarly about Rust too, but long ago decided that I did not want to have any communication with people who act like that - I've been burned by that before, even learning several new languages (WikiMedia syntax + their odd "template" structure that is a whole other language + Cargo database querying that is yet again distinct, especially as it differs substantially from true SQL), but still walked away from everything bc of the toxicity of the people in charge, e.g. calling a single back-and-forth collaborative edit session an "edit war" and then locking the page. At the end of the day, Lemmy is "theirs" to do with as they please, and that is that. Short of making a fork, or an entirely separate implementation of the ActivityPub protocol, the situation isn't really salvageable.
Also, any instance on the Fediverse needs some work to get it more fully integrated into the wider whole - e.g. apparently nobody on PieFed.social has been a member of this community here that we are talking in for the past couple of months. I have seen similar issues with [email protected] where posts existed on my instance but were all months old. All it takes is one person subscribing, and then about a day for the posts to catch up and sync, but apparently that had only been true in the past and then wasn't any longer, perhaps after some update. Unless something goes wrong - e.g. I made a post from my StarTrek.website account, to a Star Trek community on Lemmy.world, and even two days later it still doesn't know about all the comments and votes yet, though it is known that lately such activities wrt Lemmy.world are getting jammed - and it should be fixed in 0.19.6. So anyway it's not like Lemmy works perfectly and PieFed does not - they both have their issues, many of which are solvable easily by those who know how. Even short of editing the codebase.
Admiral Patrick, who developed Tesseract and admins dubvee.org, has publicly stated wanting to replace the Lemmy backend on his instance with Sublinks, whenever that comes out. However, I haven't even heard of any updates on the project for like half a year. In contrast, when I mentioned some small issues to the PieFed developers, some of those issues were fixed even before someone else told me that it was not currently that way - THAT is a FAST fix! - and some other issues were bumped up to higher in the priority queue. The are active, not only with PixelFed and Loops, but PieFed as well, and it is looking pretty spiffy already. It wouldn't allow me to send messages yet - that's fair I suppose, for a new account to avoid potential for spam - but I see that you have an account there too! If you can still access it, check it out!:-)
Re-reading through some old threads without HBs (my instance does not defederate from them either) or e.g. Cowbee from Lemmy.ml, it makes such a difference! Even the less contentious Lemmy.ml users still have a substantial amount of "snark" to them - no that's not the right word bc I actually like that, but some form of toxicity I mean, like "hey, I'm just asking questions here!" (No, you're really not!), which isn't always obvious to spot immediately, but whenever I do it is virtually always either from someone on HB or Lemmy.ml (or Midwest.social but that's rare enough to not want to block).
I do think a lot of people will end up migrating, either to PieFed or Sublinks. The USA political season is coming up in the next several weeks...