[This wasn’t the final straw, but it was one of a few factors that caused me to finally commit to the decision to shut down and leave this place and everything associated with it.]

While I understand the raison d’etre for YPTB, in practice, it’s largely a place for shitheads to spin narratives, throw out wild accusations/jump to conclusions, and harass mods.

I blocked / administratively removed it long before I started showing up there and only happened on a couple of posts recently because some shitheads decided to @ me to try to goad me (mentions from blocked communities still come through in notifications). That’s to say it’s not because I’m being thin-skinned here.

Word of advice: There are bad mods, sure, but most aren’t. If you don’t want more of the rational people burning out and bailing, then that community needs reined the fuck in to only verifiable information. Shut down any posts/comments that cherry-pick interactions, spin narratives about the mods or their rationale, present things out of context, and/or are “gotchas” where the OP goaded the mod into something (and often comes in presenting it out of context). And if people are frequent flyers to that community, maybe they’re the problem.

Allowing a place to harass mods (I know jordan lund gets a regular 15-minutes of hate) should be censure-worthy. You know damn well we’re all volunteers here, with lives, and are just doing our best to try to keep our spaces in order, welcoming, and fair to as many people as possible.

Lemmy, or whatever will replace lemmy, needs a more thought-out reputation and identity system

Agreed, but from my understanding, the lack of reputation system in Lemmy is deliberate. Which makes sense because it was conceived because the devs weren’t exactly popular on Reddit (or so the story goes as I understand it).

I may dive back in with Piefed at some point in the far future, but right now, and considering the demographic overlap, it’s not something I even want to think about.

And apologies for still shutting down despite the offer of admin assistance. After I thought about it, I just need someone who’s committed to the mission here rather than just helping to bail out a sinking ship (forgive the analogy lol).

If you need any DB exports, let me know.

Thanks. And same to a fellow “sane voice in an ocean of madness”. I think my instance was getting hugged to death last night, so things got slow and I just stopped responding until this morning.

I thought I could just defed and mass ban my way to a non-toxic low-toxicity instance, but between the .ee shutdown/exodus and other instances spinning up parallel Piefed instances around the same time, so many of the banned accounts came back with brand new alts.

Imagine spending 2 years tediously cleaning up a field of broken glass, finally thinking you’ve gotten the worst of it, and then someone comes along and kicks the trash cans over and you have to start all over again.

So true. Love that analogy.

This is a 2-year-old account that somehow I have never run across before … has not one but TWO danger / warning signs placed next to it

Yeah, user tagging was always a feature I had planned to add to Tesseract but never got around to. They wouldn’t have been crowd-sourced or otherwise shared, but it would at least let you flag users to keep an eye on and eventually block or report.

The problem with that, from an instance admin perspective, is that even though they’re flagged with a big “Warning: Highly Radioactive” sign , I’m still platforming them; the toxic waste is still on-site and out in the open. Everything they say and troll is still showing up under a domain registered to me, hosted by hardware, bandwidth, and electricity I pay for and visible to local users. That’s neither the look nor environment I want here.

I’m not saying I have to agree with everything that shows up on DubVee via federation (lord knows I don’t), but there are people and rhetoric that I definitely don’t platformed here because it runs counter to the mission I’m trying to achieve and/or is flat out illegal and could have black vans show up at my house.

And that account (I saw it in the replies and immediately banned them) is tame and just obnoxious compared to the extremism that’s become commonplace here and has pushed me over the edge and out the door.

And it makes sense, right? Someone who receives 10x more negative feedback than positive feedback is kinda ASKING FOR IT, r-r-right?!

Yes and no. Lemmy used to have scores/karma in the API, but the devs yanked that out in 0.19.0. Considering some of the disgusting things that get a lot of upvotes and how anyone who tries to de-escalate or talk sense gets downvoted to hell and called a bootlicker, it’s not necessarily a good indicator. Which, to be fair, the Lemmy devs kind-of mentioned when they removed scores from the API, so they were right (though for the wrong reasons).

I’m not saying the Fediverse is a lost cause (and if I am, then I hope I’m wrong), and I applaud the efforts Rimu and Piefed are doing to improve things. But the whole “censorship resistance” aspect of it is certainly working against it by way of making it effectively impossible to truly ban anyone. Like it or not, there’s a reason Reddit (and probably other platforms) does things like fingerprinting browsers/devices to enforce ban evasion. Here, you can troll all you want, call for violence, stir the pot, and then just hop to another instance and start again. This is a a feature, not a bug. 😡

I genuinely feel that instances were so preoccupied with seeing their own or Lemmy’s overall MAU counts go up that they didn’t stop to look at who they were platforming. Then there’s instances that flat out endorse violence so long as the admins agree with the target (cough midwest.social cough).

I used to post/comment in politics communities, but I’ve never been here with a political agenda and tend to block or ban those who are; I just want to stay informed with the facts. There’s just too many users, mods, and admins here who give extremism and shitty behavior a pass so long as the behavior is in line with whatever flavor of “leftie” the instance subscribes to.

And therein lies the problem (described better in another comment by ThePicardManeuver). People see this as a “leftie” platform and viciously enforce an echo chamber. Those who don’t pass the, quite often insane, purity tests get harassed:

• “Oh, you think X, so you must think Y” (where X = anything not 100% in line with an extreme, absolutist staement and Y = an absoltely insane leap in logic). And then proceeds to attack the user based on the faulty assumption that they said Y when they said X. Then other people pile onto that and futher attack as if the original person had said Y.

• “Patrick modded me because I was advocating violence, and I was, but it was against someone I think is a Nazi. So Patrick must be a Nazi and is over here creating a safe space for other Nazis”

• “I got banned for saying ‘Death to [blank]’ but I think [blank] is complicit in genociding, so the mods clearly support genocide.”

• “That’s such an enlightened centrist thing to say” and trying to discredit anyone who disagrees with their extreme take. e.g. If someone says “I agree with you in principle, but maybe take it down a notch” to which they reply “Oh, did I hurt the enlightened centrist’s feelings?” For those unfamiliar, the ‘enlightened centrist’ straw man argument is a false equivalence that posits that if the Right wants X and the Left opposes X, then the enlightened centrist would propose a compromise of ‘let’s just do a little X’. It is used to discredit anyone who is not fully in line with the person’s typically extreme take by falsely suggesting they support the thing.

And so on and so on. Even if Piefed had bright, flashing warning labels on all those accounts, not everyone would see them due to people interacting from different platforms, different apps/UIs, etc.

And Lemmy loves to dog-pile, so all those accounts have to do is plant the seed and then sit back and let the average Lemming’s overly-inflated sense of self-righteousness take over and amplify the harassment.

Why this kind of behavior gets a pass around here, I do not understand. But it’s common, it’s toxic, and needs to be addressed. It’s only gotten worse because it’s been allowed to fester and desensitize and futher radicalize people. (Again, see TPM’s comment in this thread for a clearer version of what I’m saying).

Take some of this rhetoric from Lemmy, remove the nouns, and it reads exactly like what you’d see on right-wing boards.

So yeah, I again applaud the efforts of Rimu and Piefed, but this is a people problem (the people doing it as well as the admins/mods who turn a blind eye, etc). Better tools can help, I agree, but they’re not going to fix the underlying problem without the people running instances saying “this kind of toxicity and extremism are unacceptable”.

Here btw is a link to it (https://dubvee.org/post/1516426): in case you need to send it to anyone:-D) Please rest and heal? :-D

Ah, thanks. That was almost exactly a year ago to the day. I remember writing that now, and can safely say in the last year, things have gotten worse. Much worse.

Thanks. You, too, are one of the positive constants around here. Wish I could just hand-pick all the good people and restart my instance, lol, but that ship has sailed.

The repo is archived now, but I merged in and released the work-in-progress branch that had a few bugfixes . It’s fully open source so anyone who feels like it can still fork it and pick up where I left off. https://github.com/asimons04/Tesseract/

Thanks. It’s been a ride, for sure, but I’m ready to get off.

I’ve had to remove [list of awful stuff] or advocating violence against various people perceived to have failed someone’s “purity test”, and much more

Yep, to all of that. In spades. From one to another, I do appreciate the work you do both modding and contributing to communities.

It’s easy to become not quite numb but…acclimated(?) to that as just “words on a page” and swipe it away with the mod button, but when you step back, two things stand out to me:

1. A person said those things. A person typed those out and thought to themselves “This is a perfectly acceptable thing to say.” That’s scary.

2. The massive number of upvotes those attract and the score representing the number of people who saw that violent rhetoric and thought “yes, I like this. I agree with this”. That’s downiright terrifying.

If you want my theory, stuff like this…the fediverse needs normies … or else more reasonable people are going to burn out or feel pushed out by all the noise and toxicity

(Not cherry picking those points specifically, just shortening for brevity.)

Couldn’t agree more. I’ve tried to provide a “normie-friendly” space with my instance (based on my own experience here as well as feedback from some former Reddit colleages who briefly tried Lemmy and nope’d right out). But things have become so extreme here that I honesty don’t think any normie in their right mind would want to stick around and dilute the unhinged behavior. i.e. The toxicity has metastasized, and I don’t think there’s any going back.

I hope I’m wrong. I really do. Despite the animosity I have toward what this place has become, I still want the idea/concept of the Fediverse to succeed. But until admins, far and wide, start taking this extremism and toxicity seriously, start de-escalating this stuff from the top down, and forcing these unhinged people back to the fringe instances (which can be de-federated from), I just don’t see how this place is going to become anything but the next 4chan. Again, I genuinely hope I’m wrong.

the trolls seemed to switch their strategy, no longer remaining constrained on the Triad servers and instead appearing everywhere, by which I mean Lemmy.World, lemm.ee, sh.itjust.works, etc.

Yeah, they sure have. I had a handle on it for a good while, but when lemm.ee shut down, most of my bans were basically undone as those spawned anew elsewhere (.ee accounts made up a large portion of my issued bans). I found I just didn’t have it in me to go through that again; it took months to identify and ban the trolls, toxics, and extremists the first time.

And if that weren’t bad enough, other instances started spinning up parallel Piefed instances, so many of the banned accounts came back with Piefed alts. Combined with the .ee shutdown happening at the same time, it was just too much whack-a-mole.

Imagine spending 2 years tediously cleaning up a field of broken glass, finally thinking you’ve gotten the worst of it, and then someone comes along and dumps the trash can over and you have to start all over again.

The Threadiverse is simply in the process of becoming the next 4chan

I called that close to a year ago when I got the first whiff of the toxic atmosphere that was brewing. Can’t find (or rather don’t feel like finding) the post I made, but I said almost exactly what you said. I also said that if this place started to stink like 4chan, I’d pull the plug. And so I am.

You’ll still see them there, yes. But anything posted by a dubvee user (or lemm.ee or any instance that’s shut down) won’t have working images (the community icon/banner also won’t work). SDF may have local thumbnails for some posts, but there’s no guarantee I can make. Posts you’ve made should be fine since the images are not hosted on my instance (e.g. you should be able to crosspost them just fine).

Any new posts made to this community from there would only show up locally on sdf.org’s instance (since dubvee won’t be online to federate them out), but I’ve locked the community to prevent that kind of “islanding”

Jen’s not available, but I will say this from us both since I’m sure she shares the same sentiment: Thank you for helping to grow this community and the funny, insightful, and sometimes just silly contributions you’ve made. I also hope someone picks up the reigns and creates a replacement, but that’s not something I’ll be involved with (unless they would like to transfer the contents of this community over in which case I am willing to assist).

Lemmy and the fediverse entirely. I guess you could also say social media entirely as this was my last vestige of it.

Planning to re-join the real world and put my energy into actual positive things.

Thanks. That means a lot and back at you and the rest of the regulars at 10F.

TenForward is probably what kept me here as long as I have. It’s like a shining example of what this place could be, so props to you, @ummthatguy@lemmy.world , TPM, Stamets, Squid, OpenStars, and everyone who helps (or formerly helped) make that what it is. Everyone there is so supportive. They build each other up / build on each other rather than tear each other down. I meant what I said: It’s the only community I deal with that actually feels like a community. I truly will miss it and all of you chill Trekkies.

That said, I do still have my .world account, and I’m not quite sure what to do with it. I’ve stepped down as mod from all the communities that aren’t just me, but until I figure out what to do with those, I haven’t deleted that account. Maybe I’ll mothball it and pop in and say hi once in a while.

Thanks. I just wish some more instance admins would express this perspective and maybe we could address the problem. Sadly, I think it’s been allowed to metastasize to the point of no return. I could be wrong - I hope I"m wrong. I still want this concept to succeed, but I just cannot see that happening in its current state.

Until then, I’ve done all I can do on my own.

Thanks, appreciate it.

I’m curious, will this be the end of Tesseract too?

Yes, unless someone wants to fork it and maintain it. I’m done with Lemmy and everything associated with it. https://dubvee.org/post/3790890

Thanks. At this time, I have no plans to return in any capacity (though if I do, it might be on my spiritual guide instance Beehaw).

The only problem with Piefed is…it’s the same demographic as Lemmy and thus is going to have the same toxicity problems. It may make it easier to sweep it under the rug but it doesn’t address it at the source.

My honest, no-longer-gives-a-fuck-what-people-think, opinion is that instance admins across the board need to take a much, MUCH harder stance against toxic behavior if the Fediverse is to succeed and not collapse into a cesspit singularity. No more slaps on the wrists, temp bans, etc. I’m (all too) aware there’s a revolving door of shitheads, but the behavior remains the same and they often get to fly under the radar after putting on a fake mustache and hat and coming back in.

I’m as upset as anyone about the state of the world, but I’m a functional adult capable of expressing myself without every second comment being “guillotines, Luigi, violence, violence , revolution!”. I’m on the spectrum, though classified as “high functioning” but I learned a long time ago that neurodivergency is not an excuse for toxic behavior. I mention that only because it’s a common excuse that gets thrown around, and i don’t buy it for one second.

You and many other good people, yeah, I’m gonna miss. I’m also gonna miss TenForward terribly; it’s one of the very few communities that actually feels like a community. But, unfortunately, I gotta do what’s best for me and that’s get the hell away from this place.

Thanks. I just can’t run this place alone; not without someone else sharing the same vision/mission I’m trying to achieve. There’s too much toxicity that I don’t want to platform and not enough me or fucks-to-give to handle it all. This was a long time coming, honestly, and I regret not doing this sooner.

Beehaw was always my guiding light in many ways for what I wanted to do here (plus or minus a few things), so I may pop up there later on down the line as someone with no responsibilities. But for now, I want to part ways with this place entirely and spend more time in the real world (time I’ve denied myself having to be responsible for this dumpster fire lol).

I’ll still be on Matrix, so feel free to give a shout once in a while and let me know what’s currently bugging you.

Thanks. And yep. This started as a fun project 2 years ago and it turned into a nightmare. Best thing I can do is leave.

Thanks for being one of the sane ones lol.

I’m not going to claim that I haven’t had my own bad moments, but those didn’t really start until the toxicity crept in. I normally feel bad about it when my composure slips, and I wind up beating myself up over i

Same.

Thanks. Yeah, we’ve been “Beehaw-lite” since inception. I wanted to be general purpose with a good mix of content but also have a mission and guiding principles, so I looked at what BH was doing and modeled off of that.

FWIW, Beehaw recently updated to 0.19.11 or 12, so all the apps should work now. For a long time, they were stuck on 0.18.4 because they were planning to move to a different platform, but I guess that’s a ways off (or plans changed) so they updated to the latest Lemmy.

I’ve actually been contemplating moving my account, and if you get the help you need, I’ll probably move here because of your goals with the instance.

If we’re still here in a month, you’re totally welcome to! lol

You’ve described my experience here exactly. The fist 6-12 months here, during the API exodus, were amazing. The people who were here were here because they wanted to be here.

After that, it’s like it just filled up with all of the people too toxic to be platformed everywhere else, and the good/nice people got chased off or completely drowned out. I was determined not to let them win, but I feel like I’m swimming in what used to be a clean lake but is now a toxic cesspool. I’m all for fighting the good fight, but I also know when a retreat is warranted.

Thank you for being one of the dwindling voices of sanity around here.

I’ve got one person added to the team now, and I’ll see how that goes, but I am not optimistic that is going to be enough.

Thanks. Promoted