The last few posts made here, they’ve shown up, made the most inane, idiotic, and pointless comments, upvoted each other in a frenzy of circle jerking, and generally made a pest of themselves.
They’re a nuisance, and add nothing of value to the Lemmy experience.
Personally I would much prefer the smaller, tight knit group of NZ and NZ-adjacent posters over a swarm of non-NZ users that are posting here because they can’t see the vast majority of posts on lemmy (out of the top 8 servers, there are about 36,000 monthly active users. Of those, about 2/3rds of those users are on servers that have defederated with hexbear.)
My 150 word article would have led to more… discussion - and I just didn’t have it in me to start a conversation like that where there were already aggressive and flippant comments.
While I do enjoy the smaller community of the NZ instance currently, if it ever grows larger I think you’ll be facing similar challenges with users as can be seen with the NZ subreddit on reddit. Such is the nature of social media. So it’s worth thinking about how to manage it in the future is what I’m saying, I guess.
Lemmy 100% needs better mod tools. And user tools for that matter. Users being unable to block an instance is a pretty big hole.
Some lemmy instances are trying to foster a friendly community, and really the only tool we have for this so far is to defederate until tools improve.
I agree - imo a smaller but friendlier group who are here in good faith is preferable.
That happened to me too. I came in yesterday with something to say, and when I saw that some of the first people in there were making overly simplistic statements using (problematically class-based) American insults with hexbear-specific spelling, I just didn’t want to post in there.
They have a full on culture of dogpiling/bullying using in-group memes and it gets overwhelming.
I say this as someone who a) likes the name Papakangahorohoro and b) thinks the locals should thank their lucky stars that it’s not named after a local councillor’s friend’s uncle like so many new development streets are.
Oh boy, I hate reading history and learning about how many towns used to be called something else, but some government promised a person if they did a thing they could have a town named after them.
Te Wera a Waitohi aka Waitohi aka Picton is a crazy one. The NZ Company cycled through naming it Horne Bay, Newton Bay, Cromwell, Beaconfield then finally settled on Picton after a guy who was into slave trading. Facepalm.