Yep, yep, and yep to all of that, and some of it I’ve said for over a year and was dismissed with “just give it time”.

The Lemmy network in general is comprised of a lot of people who are here (I’m sorry to say) because they are too poorly socialized even for reddit,

I’ve always referred to that as the “elephant in the room fediverse”. But yeah, I fully agree that’s definitely a major contributing factor to the current environment. I even made a joke post about it the other day: https://dubvee.org/post/3789665

I still believe a critical mass of more ah, well-adjusted people can improve the culture, but that day gets further and further away as long as the existing culture remains in the state it is in.

Like I said in my shutdown/meta post, I want the concept of the fediverse to succeed. I really do. But exactly as you just said (and others have said and I have said), the more well-adjusted people need to arrive in a critical mass, and I don’t feel there’s an environment here to welcome them let alone attract them or entice them to stick around. Maybe that will change. I hope it does, but I’m not optimistic enough to stick around and find out.

I do feel we started out on the right foot back in mid 2023, but as we’ve grown, we’ve just turned into a refuge for people who have proven too toxic to remain anywhere else.

At the end of the day, aside from the people like you, ValueSubtracted, and other friendly faces names I’ve come to enjoy seeing around these last couple years, I’m going to miss the idea of this place far more than the place itself.

Thanks, you too, and the understanding is appreciated.

Definitely looking forward to spending some real quality time in meatspace lol. Time without the constant pings of reports or pings in the admin chat for this troll or that troll or this spammer, or some dickwad @-ing me in YPTB because I modded their call for violence and therefore I’m a bootlicking Nazi 😂

This place had such potential, lol…until it didn’t.

Take care.

Right, but we had the opportunity to be better here.

While Lemmy and the Threadiverse existed before the Reddit API exodus, it really took off around then with dedicated, passionate people working together to build something new, something better. I was one of them and was in real-time communication with admins of many of the popular instances today. There was passion, drive, and determination to make something great. And for a while, we did.

Somewhere along the line, though, the old toxicity started creeping back in, it was left largely unaddressed, and eventually metastasizing to where we are today.

So while there can be debate as to whether that means Lemmy ultimately succeeded or failed, in my view, still holding on to the original desire to make something better than what we crawled out of, I see it as a failure.

That community now has one less moderate centrist.

I know where you’re coming from, but I cringe when I hear that term because of the straw man arguments that get thrown around here.

Like, if I were to post a spreadsheet here with all of my views laid out in detail, 99.9% of people, regardless of their local Overton window, would be like “Yep, he’s a lefty.”

But because of the purity testing / extreme positions around here that I do not agree with (mostly related to violence, revolution, and “burn it all down at all costs”), I’ve been called a Nazi, a sympathizer, a fascist, a bootlicker, an “enlightened centrist who only wants to do a little genocide”, and worse.

Nuance here is dead. Godwin’s law is dead. Most of the top-level comments for posts related to current events go straight to some Nazi reference, and where do you even go from there if you want to have any kind of discussion? Conversations are derailed before they even have a chance to get started.

Fair enough; ‘extreme’ is as relative a term as “hot” or “cold” is.

I guess I’m just using “would the average person say this in polite conversation?” as my reference point.

Lemmy, from my observation has more of a reputation to outsiders as being a lefty-safe-space

Truth be told, I don’t want this place, or the Threadiverse, to be considered a lefty safe-space any more than I’d want it to be considered a right wing safe-space. Honestly, I just wish people would leave their political ideology at the door and just interact as people.

Though I’m not naive enough to think that will ever happen on any platform - it’s just a wish lol

But the problem with any ideological safe space is the extremes. That’s what I feel is not being addressed.

I know it was buried in one of the longer comments I linked, but one point I made was this:

Take some of this rhetoric from Lemmy, replace the proper nouns, and it’s indistinguishable from what you’d read on an extreme right-wing board.

That’s just not the kind of atmosphere/environment I want to be associated with.

Heh, thanks. It’s proven difficult to condense a little over two years worth of behavioral observation into succinct comments, so I’ve tried to just build on what others have pointed out with my own experience.

From my perspective, the best way to deal with toxicity (whatever that might be for a given individual) is to have multiple accounts and to have regular “time out” periods where you only use the non-politics accounts. This is of course not viable if you are a single admin.

From a user’s perspective, yep, that can and does typically work.

I’m looking at things from a higher vantage point, though: The health, safety, and reputation of Lemmy and the Threadiverse as a whole.

As it stands, I’m embarrassed to tell people what I do in my spare time (run an instance and interact on Lemmy). You get a “normie” coming in off the streets, and what are they going to think jumping into this place? Are they going to want to stick around? I genuinely feel this place is on track to becoming the next 4chan, and that’s with me being largely (though not entirely) desensitized to much of this stuff. I can’t imagine how fresh eyes would interpret the atmosphere here.

And like one of the linked comment threads mentioned: We need the normies. If we want this place to succeed, we need them. Otherwise, it’s going to continue distilling down to the most extreme views as more and more of the rational people call it quits. And I just can’t see normies wanting to come here and stick around the way things are. Not without a LOT of work curating things, but I can’t see them wanting to do that either.

On the other hand American social media is an intellectual, moral and even economic (I am actually serious about this) dead end.

Agreed.

That’s why I use use the Threadiverse, although I am trying to slowly move off Lemmy to Piefed for obvious reasons.

Having tired to have rational discourse here about anything related to the outside world (without things immediately devolving to extremes), combined with the demographic overlap between Piefed and Lemmy, I strongly disagree lol

Just sharing some thoughts in context of your very justified comments on the Threadiverse. I am not necessarily trying to change your mind or prove anything. :)

Same.

I’ve outlined it in other threads, so I’ll just link to a few of them instead of repeating myself.

1. https://dubvee.org/comment/4486545 (Mostly the 3rd section in that comment)
2. https://lemmy.world/comment/18189873 (ThePicardManeuver’s comment and replies)
3. https://dubvee.org/comment/4492868
4. https://dubvee.org/post/3788765 (Really, the whole post covers things, and most of the comments are insightful).
5. https://dubvee.org/post/1516426 (A post I made almost a year ago to the day when I first noticed extremism becoming prevalent here).

You’re not wrong (though I got rid of other social media and thus have little to compare against).

But regardless of what’s happening on other platforms, we do not have to allow or platform that here. We can be better We should want to be better.

We can show people the door who are taking things too far, making death threats, promoting violence, and/or otherwise stirring the pot - force them back to the fringe instances and away from polite/civilized society.

Yeah, well, maybe if I felt like I wasn’t the only one around here taking a stand against extremism, violent rhetoric, and toxic behavior, things could have played out differently and I could have pushed on. You can’t place the blame on just having a single admin - that may be one factor, but becoming completely demoralized from the lack of support from most other admins/instances was the real cause. This is a wide-ranging problem, and a single small instance (let alone a single admin) cannot solve it alone.

Sorry not sorry - For the next 2 weeks I’m in “captain going down with his ship” mode and I’m not holding back on what I think about this place, what it’s become, and where it’s heading. Two years ago, we had the tools, motive, and opportunity to make something truly better here, and we failed.

Thanks. It makes my heart happy knowing that I’m not the only one seeing Lemmy for what it’s become.

There are still some good people it seems, but I feel like there is a large (but diminishing) silent majority of people who, like me, don’t want to bother engaging because of the people who are too extreme. If you (or anyone else) is aware of some community that is a bit better in this respect, I’d be very interested in joining. (Mostly to lurk and read comments, but perhaps to participate when I have something to add).

That was the whole premise of DubVee (my instance). We’ve got a fairly strict set of policies covering extremism and toxic behavior because, from the start, we wanted to be better than where we came from (Reddit). We’re highly curated/heavily moderated, and our content policies apply to local and federated users equally (enforced with liberal use of perma bans and defederation from extreme/fringe instances).

That was going very well for quite some time, but with the recent turbulence in the Fediverse (lemm.ee shutting down and big Lemmy instances spinning up parallel Piefed instances in the same month), most of that curation came undone - probably 80-90% of the accounts that had been identified and banned over the last two years were all back with new alts.

That’s basically when I decided to throw in the towel; I’ve been doing this alone, and I just don’t have it in me to go through it again. When DubVee launched, I had a second admin who helped out, but they lost interest a little under a year in, so it’s been a solo-operation since.

While I’ve had offers from some amazing people to help lighten the admin burden, they were from admins who also had their own instances to worry about. I truly appreciated the offers, but I just didn’t feel it was going to be enough to keep this place going without being committed full time to the mission/vision here.

As far as I know, Beehaw would be the next best thing (they were basically my spirit guide when I set this place up). I’m not sure they moderate federated content like I did, but the local environment there is very welcoming - only limitation is they don’t federate with .world or sh.itjust.works. Similarly, if you’re a Trekkie, startrek.website is also well moderated (though, again, not sure if they moderate federated content).

I’ll add that on Lemmy I am sometimes afraid of even downvoting … and I figure some instance admins could be irrational and doxx me or something

Votes were never fully public, just restricted to admins and eventually community mods. I never worried too much about that since if I was afraid of a psychotic admin, I’d probably defederate their instance.

What’s worse, though, is some rogue admin from the gregtech instance decided to make a web tool that lets anyone look up anyone else’s votes. I feel like that’s too much power for the wrong hands to have access to and disagree with their stance that “since anyone can spin up an instance and see votes, why not make this tool available to everyone”.

When I was modding a couple of larger communities that often attracted some pretty psychotic people (news, unpopular opinion), I did very much live in fear that some psychos were going to doxx me for shits and giggles. That’s not an irrational fear. I’ve directly seen them calling for Jordan Lund (LW mod for politics, news, and a couple other communities) to be doxxed and had to mod those comments (which I absolutely felt put a target on my back).

deleted by creator

Appreciate it, and glad I’m not alone in noticing this.

I try to remain tactful, but it’s often difficult when I have so much pent-up animosity toward all of the users, mods, and admins around here who have allowed this place to devolve into what it is now. We had all the tools and opportunity to truly make something better here. For a while it seemed like we were on track to achieve that, but things started going south and now I’m afraid it’s too late to do anything about it.

FWIW, other than the trolls who camped there (which you dispatched quickly and with gusto), I never had any issues from your end. I think my main gripe is with the larger instances allowing all this toxic behavior to fester. Can’t just defed .world, for example, unless I want to be Beehaw (well, i do want to be Beehaw as that’s always been my instance’s spiritual guide, but I recognized that blocking .world and SJW wasn’t feasible for me).

Anyway, I’ve rambled long enough. Sounds like you know quite well where I’m coming from, so please take care of yourself and your own mental health. (I feel like the ghost of Jacob Marley rattling my chains as I say this 😆)

[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, including Tesseract.]

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 (LW) / administratively removed (local instance) YPTB 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 even more of the rational people burning out and bailing, then that community needs reined the fuck in to only verifiable information. Some of those rational people also may be developers who contribute to the platform, BTW.

Shut down any posts/comments that cherry-pick interactions, spin narratives about the mods or the perceived rationale for the actions taken, present things out of context, and/or submissions that 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 or are just trolls stirring up shit to post there.

Allowing a place to harass mods (I know jordan lund gets a regularly scheduled 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, on topic, 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 account / 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 ‘[Blank] and their family should be lined up and shot’’ 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.

Edit: Broke this up into sections.

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/