Unpopular Opinion

I find that if you avoid the political and news forums and some of the meme forums, you avoid 90% of the assholery that exists on Lemmy. But that’s true for Reddit as well and I think is probably just a truism about the internet in general.

It’s not really the people, I think, that is the problem; it’s that people feel strongly about politics and when they have the anonymity and disconnection of the internet to free them from true social accountability, we express ourselves in increasingly overconfident and arrogant ways, which obviously pisses other people off and creates arguments. In other words, the internet is ideal for festering toxic debating environments. Our psychology just wasn’t meant for it.

There are two keys to success for an internet community:

• limit the conversation to a circumscribed subject
• have decent moderation

This has not changed since the 90s. It's the reason that any community devoted to "world news" or "politics", whether it be here or on the R-site or anywhere else, is destined be a train wreck whereas one on "gardening" or "classic BMWs" or whatever will generally be pleasant.

Fair-minded moderation is what turns a cesspool into a merely unpleasant hangout, or a decent community into a great one.

IMO the gold standard for a successful community is clearly Hacker News, which (logically) combines a well-defined purpose with top-notch moderation. Rather than just deleting comments and handing out bans, the moderator there intervenes in discussions to push them back on course, often in a plaintive manner that appeals to people's good sides. The positive results of this approach were even the subject of a feature article in the New Yorker.

This is a not a technical problem as much as a human one. Restrict the bounds of conversation, then take a smart approach to moderation. Success will follow.

At this point, i’m having a decent time here but I also have a decent block list, an instance blocked, and another mostly blocked.

I don’t mind the commies too much, since I’m an ancom, though I have argued with them on my previous main account a lot, and it did get exhausting since some communities dogmatically support specific arguments that have been proven wrong a hundred years ago or are based on strawmen, or fundamental misunderstandings, or on viewpoints that haven’t been mainstream since the 1800s.

Lemmy has changed a bit since I joined when reddit announced their api changes. It used to be more radical, but I’ve seen a lot more centrists and center left folks join, and I think the mixing of that has caused a fuckton of drama.

Though I don’t see a lot of insults anymore. I’ve been insulted a million different ways, but since march or april I’ve seen a reduction in people calling me a slur or people calling me a fascist or trumper even though my position is to the left of theirs. I remember being insulted incessantly after October of last year.

I tend to be careful where I reply with political talk (AKA not on .world or most hexbear communities) but the non political communities are wonderful. I fucking love the queer communities here (even on hexbear) and the open source communities are also great.

I just hope the toxicity drops to what I remember around June or July of last year once elections end.

Must be a different Lemmy you're talking about. My experience has been nothing like that and generally quite positive.

Violent agreement

had an account on another server banned for saying this.

Everyone here is very disagreeable. .

.world is by far the worst for ignorant shitheads.

I’m not excluding myself , but I put opinions from a different perspective and just get slaughtered.

This is my 4 account

There is indeed a LOT of bitchy pedantry on here. I'm not sure it's worse than other platforms, because this is the only one I've been using for a while now. I block very aggressively and that seems to help.

Sorry you're not having fun on Lemmy, I do get it. For some reason reddit keeps failing upwards and we're not getting the influx of users I was hoping for. I'm still hanging in here but participating less and less.

blocking the .ml instances helps, a lot. I made the recent mistake (twice!) commenting on Lemmy.ml. over there, anything NOT praising Russia, NK, or China is hated. they're pretty smooth-brained and not worth arguing with. same with lemmygrad, same with hexbear. I'm fairly new to federation, and that was a big learning curve for me. a lot of the Europe or US based instances are way more open to hearing opinions and conversation, so I'd start there.

I see your instance is federated with both Hexbear and Lemmygrad. Going to gesture vaguely at that being the root of your problem (or at least > 90% of it).

Blocking instances helps, but you'll still see users from there in the comments and in other communities (not on the blocked instance). Some UIs will hide users from blocked instances. I know Tesseract does (I wrote it to do that), but others might as well.

My experience here has been pretty great after getting my blocklist and feed curated.

Sorry to hear.

I see you from time to time on [email protected], hopefully you don't hate people there, we try to keep it nice.

Feel free to join [email protected] if you want a more laid-back experience.