Rewrite: September 2024
Welcome one and all to BestOfLemmy! The goal of this community is “manual curation”. Please post good (or best!!) posts you find around Lemmy, highlighting the discussions, communities, and people that make up the Lemmyverse.
There are two rules: Manual Curation and beginner-to-lemmy focus. Please share content on Lemmy that helps introduce Lemmy to newbies!
Don’t make automatic bots or algorithms make your pick here. Although its fair game to use bots / algorithms / search engines to look for content, the ultimate decision to post must be made by you. Aside from that, have fun!
EDIT: Discussion in this Welcome Thread is extremely loose. Its important for any community to have a place for freeform discussion, including meta-criticism and wandering off topic, so that individuals are free to express yourself. I won’t be moderating this topic as much as other posts however. Still feel free to report posts that cross the line, but comments here specifically are intended to be more freeform.
I don’t feel it’s my place to push back on the matter of the locking of the specific post - as we covered, it’s your vision that you need to implement.
But since you seem interested in the wider topic in general, I will say that warning people about the variety of ah… “behaviors” that one is likely to encounter across the Fediverse is precisely what I think is most lacking from most instances (at least those that haven’t defederated from the most extremist ones, which e.g. my first instance Kbin had, but it is defunct now and anyway it was definitely in the minority there - e.g. across the entire Fediverse the only instance that I’ve ever seen that has defederated Lemmy.ml is Lemmy.cafe, which I only found about about today:-).
Every single person that I’ve told about Lemmy irl has come back in the next conversation to say “do you realize the extremist content (advocating for violent overthrow of the government) that is on there?” The thing is, having blocked it myself, I do tend to forget… for me Lemmy is about interesting conversations, fun memes, e.g. about computer coding, etc. But advocation for violence is not something so easily pushed aside, by someone new who doesn’t know how to block yet (and what even would they block - a community? a user? an entire instance? being new, they simply do not understand yet what is likely to work, and what each decision entails. what they want to block is “disturbing content”, but there is no checkbox for that, and seeing how untruthful so many people are, likely to never be one)
Communities like Chapotraphouse or The Donald or even so many posts in [email protected], which depict e.g. actual decapitation of landlords, is not something that “normal”, “mainstream” people in the Western world are wanting to see. e.g. people leaving Twitter/X bc Musk is too extreme and Mastodon too problematic, only to find that generally speaking, Lemmy contains even more extremist content, though on what is claimed to be the leftist side.
So kudos for wanting to carve out an island of sanity. It remains to be seen how people, especially new ones, will find it, amidst all the noise, but still it’s a laudable goal. And then I still don’t get why new people wouldn’t be interested in individual instances - I would be - but that’s your business.:-P
I do think it would help to clarify the description of the community though, to make the aims more clear as the Fediverse grows, rather than you having to explain yourself to each poster, after-the-fact. Anyway I wanted to offer that thought - thanks for listening:-).
You should probably create a post on [email protected] so that we can redirect to new joiners to it
Okay, done - but probably needs substantial re-wording, for cleanliness, to use less offensive wording (although people will take offense at being labeled “extremist” regardless so I did not do too much in that regard), to hierarchically present less information at first and then more as it goes deeper, etc. It is, however, a start.
Ideally I would like for such places as ChapoTrapHouse to put a label onto their own communities - they are aware of how they are, and they like it, and many people across the Fediverse also enjoy it, so it is not that it is “bad” or “wrong”, but rather like NSFW content it is “shocking” to stumble upon it unawares.
Though if they refuse to, then yeah, I’ll take the hit and do the labelling for them, for the sake of the sanity of those who don’t know how to stick up for themselves in the Fediverse.
I can change the wording of my original post if need be if it’s going to be used as an education tool… As long as I get concensus to do so
I doubt it would help much - then they would just claim that you edited your words and therefore caved under pressure. Which they will do all the time, but heaven forbid that you even contemplate similarly, even for the most considerate reasons, and even with a full accounting for each action, the date and time it was taken, and your reasoning explained, etc.
This and other tactical considerations examined in great but entertaining (to me) detail in Innuendo Studios’ The Alt Right Playbook series. TLDR: people who use that argumentation style are not overly concerned with being “correct” so much as merely “winning”, by any means necessary. Which is why you have little hope of reaching someone who uses that with your logical expositions, though in return they can and will wear you down just with the force of it continuing relentlessly - exactly how a 5-year-old wins their arguments btw.
The same with the conservatives, they have chosen their echo chamber, aka drawn a line in the sand so to speak. All that remains is for us to choose what, if anything, we (all) are going to do about it. Eventually the Fediverse will fragment into “sides” - you simply cannot tolerate the intolerant and preserve your own integrity i.e. be untainted by it, no matter how much you want to, you simply cannot. Like Ukraine v. Russia, Palestinians in Gaza occupying that sweet prime real estate that wealthy Israelis have been eyeing, Taiwan next to China that will end up being the same (unless outside intervention prevents that one?), we have little hope of changing their behaviors, we can only adjust our own in response.
And you were wanting to raise awareness, kudos, even if it got mixed in with you blowing off steam. Next time maybe wait a day or week to post, but it all worked out - and frankly maybe letting people see the authenticity and rawness of your anger due to the situation may have helped more than toning the message down to be more acceptable to people who seem to barely care anyway.:-) So it all worked out well. i.e. you worry about how the wording of your message will be received bc you have a conscience, while on the other side those who no longer have one (at least, trained to societal norms) will not worry about such in the slightest, only how they can exploit yours in whatever fashion, e.g. to silence you.
Edit: a nice tangential message: https://lemmy.world/post/19605993.
I’ll just leave it be. Honestly the whole situation took on a life of it’s own. I expected like 1 or 2 people having the same experience. Not a 880 comment megathread lol
It has become a rite of passage: people go down into the den of iniquity, and most emerge on the other side, having learned from the experience?
What’s weird is how if you go into ChapoTrapHouse and read the depictions of such events from “the other side”, almost universally what I see is that they blame the victim - as in, ‘they wandered into our space and dared to speak about what they only thought they knew’. Setting aside how someone is supposed to know something that they thought they already did, it is simply not logical to look down on someone for ignorance - willful ignorance yes, b/c that’s just another phrase for obstinacy, but every single one of us is ignorant all the time, right up until the very moment in time that we no longer are? So anyway, it seems to me to be a labelling issue - they are proud of acting like jerks, and it would help if every new member of the Fediverse did not have to discover this the hard way, as you (& I) did.
Seriously those, those Innuendo Studios videos - they are quite “extra”, in the most delicious of ways. I hope you enjoy them:-) - they were fully game-changing for me in terms of how I thought of such people, who only play at logical argumentation without really knowing what it is. Once you know that, everything becomes seen in a different light.
They also apparently shared my post on The Dunk Tank and they doing about the same. They can dish it out, but not take it
It would be hilarious if it weren’t so tragic. This is the mindset that elected Trump, and may yet do so again. i.e. what you say is not half as relevant as who is saying it - e.g. genocide done by Russia or China is perfectly fine - and they cannot begin to see the flaws in that line of reasoning.
But… historically they helped fund the creation of Lemmy, so… I guess genocide done by Russia or China is perfectly fine after all, at least fine for them to say, and for their posts to show up in everyone’s feed by default. Or if they are somehow “not fine”, then I see no functional difference between how those two extremes are treated.
Tbf, people are trying to improve things, slowly, over time - e.g. the instance admin of sh.itjust.works said that they would automatically user block hexbear.net for all newly created accounts, then send them a PM explaining the process to unblock them. I don’t know if that’s implemented yet, but that’s awesome! Really it harms nobody’s ability to read whatever they want, but makes going to such places as Chapotraphouse be opt-in rather than out, which seems to match the preferences of most users of the Fediverse - though as you discovered, not all.
I suspect that when they notice that a substantial proportion of their moderator actions must be taken against people who choose to remove that block… perhaps they may reconsider their position on the level of the entire instance (for the same reason that US anti-terrorist agencies are far more worried about domestic than foreign actions for the last several years - bc if “winning” is literally the only thing that matters to someone…). But that’s their business, and anyway the user block solves a great deal of the problem in the short term, so I for one was ecstatic to read that. But, that’s just one instance, and there are hundreds if not thousands more.