Documentation of Lemmy.ml's Extremism [Megathread]

LemmySlopSkimmer [none/use name]@hexbear.net · 9 days ago

Documentation of Lemmy.ml's Extremism [Megathread]

Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net · 9 days ago

Server owners using lemmy as a platform need to realise that this shit is self-harm and they should work towards eliminating it in the culture of their communities. Attacks on the developers of Lemmy are ultimately harmful to the growth of your own server if you use Lemmy as a platform, they have the added danger of potential to completely demoralise the devs into giving up, which would completely end your platform entirely because this project is never going to be picked up and continued by liberals or conservatives as it is ideologically at odds with them.

If you want a decentralised reddit platform you need to deal with the fact it’s communists developing it and get over it. Communists are the only people that would develop it this way. If you want liberal or conservative platform design, that exists, it’s called Reddit.

Server owners should be playing down or eliminating this behaviour in their communities if they want to see the platform (and by extension their own community) succeed.

DaMummy [none/use name]@hexbear.net · 8 days ago

I think that’s the whole point. Basic divide and conquer strategy. The world has seen what genocide looks like. When I first joined lemmy, I noticed the fracturing of it plain as day. While I can’t say that I ever considered myself a “tankie”, I see the appeal, and it’s pretty much the exact opposite of what I’ve been told it was.

Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net · 8 days ago

Yeah exactly why server owners should push back against this. They’re only harming themselves by allowing it to be constantly pushed by groups on the platform. The groups doing this are doing so specifically to harm the platform and by extension to harm the very communities that they constantly push this shit on. They are not good faith actors. They’re wreckers and they’re actively bringing as much harm to the liberal communities as they are to the socialist ones.

DaMummy [none/use name]@hexbear.net · 8 days ago

I realize that I’m in the minority here, that’s my main gripe with “tankies” so far. It’s a very wall’d off group. I know it may not even be possible, but I do think it’s a pigsty that has be dove head into first. I realize it’s highly likely they’re not even good faith actors. And just seeing some of the characters in my little instance, I imagine it’s full of thick-skinned motherfuckers, at least they better be if they made it this far with the hand they’re dealt. I get what you mean though, to an untrained eye, it does seem very fractured, and lemmy.world puts themselves on a pedestal. I went there first by default, just as a reddit alternative, and the barrage of “everyone else is the problem” is heavy.

purpleworm [none/use name]@hexbear.net · 8 days ago

What would you suggest for making it less walled off? Even if you don’t have suggestions, could you explain more about the problem itself so that others can consider solutions?

DaMummy [none/use name]@hexbear.net · 8 days ago

Just isn’t federated with many communities. Unless I have weird settings. I even see posts from certain communities, just not comments. Again, not a fault of hexbear, I’m the issue here. As much as I sometimes hate it, I thrive off toxicity. I’m still finding my home on lemmy. Someone in this post said, that people adjust their personality based on whatever gets most upvotes in each reddit community. And it’s hard to find the right one here. Hexbear is a community, and unless you find a home in any of the sticky posts, you’re outta luck. Those get 100s of comments, other posts are lucky to get 5.

purpleworm [none/use name]@hexbear.net · 8 days ago

You’re right that HB isn’t widely federated, but that’s mostly not HB’s choice. There are a handful of instances that HB defedded from because inter-instance conflict got really bad, but for the most part it’s actually that they blocked us, sometimes pre-emptively, and now HB is on most of the blocklists that get passed around as a recommendation for new instances.

Granted, there are several instances that we definitely would have blocked eventually had they not blocked us immediately, but I don’t think that’s true of the vast majority of instances.

I don’t look at the megas almost ever, for what it’s worth. I just look at the front page, where tbf I think the norm is more like 10 - 20 comments usually.

DaMummy [none/use name]@hexbear.net · 8 days ago

Yeah, I keep hearing that there was some conflict struggle session. I do think people here have a good corner of the internet for themselves, I just require disagreement I guess.

purpleworm [none/use name]@hexbear.net · 8 days ago

Most of the “struggle session” stuff refers to intra-instance fighting rather than inter-instance fighting, though there were a couple (especially with the nominally leftist trans-positive spaces) where it became mainly an internal issue because some of our userbase had a lot of affection for the instance and even the admins but others absolutely hated them (with the attitude that they were doing a disservice to their communities).

I just require disagreement I guess.

Why? I’m not asking because there is no good answer, but because I think the answer one gives is important for figuring out what to do about it. It’s also worth considering if you feel like discussions on science are too restrictive if the views of flat earthers or young Earth creationists don’t have much representation. What does that mean for the initial question?

Besides the standard HB line that we do, in fact, have a lot of disagreement (e.g. I view China and Vietnam as revisionist and the DPRK as not-even-revisionist and I am fine expressing these views), I’ve been thinking a lot about the general premise of sentiments that are similar to this. Let me be clear that I’m not assigning the sentiment to you, but I view it as adjacent and therefore worth mentioning.

You might have seen a few weeks ago there was a heavily-populated post about a lib anarchist decrying class analysis before concluding their screed with a statement along the lines of: “Also, many, many anarchists disagree with me and that’s a wonderful thing about anarchism.” For the sake of saving me a little bit of writing, here was my response to that part of their statement:

I love this lib line that disagreement is a virtue, because it shows their position is nonsensical and nihilistic. Freedom to disagree is a virtue, and it’s a primary virtue of science to be able to challenge things constantly, but science has rigor that allows for a consensus to be reached via that process of challenging. Merely sitting around in a state of everyone contradicting each other shows that there’s a serious problem preventing any sort of actual resolution being reached, which is detrimental to any sort of successful organizing by definition.

Again, you definitely didn’t say what they did, it’s just my most convenient frame of reference for this genre of issue.

Perhaps my view is distorted because a space where I strongly agree with nearly all of what people say simply doesn’t exist to my knowledge, and I don’t view myself as having an island to stand on to be out of the sea of liberalism and reaction that I constantly encounter in my daily life. Hexbear is more like a sand bar to me, where I’m still stuck in the water but at least I can stand. I could never blame someone for disliking it (I frequently dislike it myself), but I do have an interest in understanding how things could be better from your perspective.

ZWQbpkzl [none/use name]@hexbear.net · 8 days ago

The only ones who still give a shit about this and haven’t migrated to piefed yet is shit.just.works and goat is 100% that troll. Hence it being posted there and not Lemmy.world. Even the anticommunist brigade learned that .world mods were a lost cause.

Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net · 8 days ago

piefed

I must have missed this. Python? Sounds like a bad idea. It’s been a while since I was in the SEO game but Python sites underperformed in google serps because performance underperforms compared to sites in other languages. Performance is a key metric google likes, you have to be an absolute giant of a company to get away with poor performance and still get search results outside of niche search phrases

chgxvjh [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net · 7 days ago

Reddit is implemented in Python too. It’s fine.

mathemachristian [he/him]@hexbear.net · 8 days ago

Yeah and in their rush to roll out new features to outcompete lemmy they’re accruing a lot of technical debt. I didn’t look into it too much but apparently they’re messing with activitypub in a way that makes most of their features only work on other piefed servers or forces devs of other platforms to implement them themselves, when supposedly there is a better way

Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net · 8 days ago

Features won’t “outcompete” lemmy.

For server owners: Nobody is joining lemmy to create a new lemmy server based on feature completeness, they’re choosing based on ease of use and setup. The easier and more brainless the setup can be made, the more likely new servers will be created.

For content consumers: They’re choosing based on what content exists or because propaganda said x is better because reasons and they believed it. Sometimes that’s ideological, sometimes that’s preference for a specific UI, often it’s just emotion and vibes.

Lemmy dev focused on growing server owners should focus on making the setup as painless as possible, and making the backend as easy to use and customisable as possible. Lemmy dev focused on content consumers should focus on content first, then achieving good vibes, then ideology. Arguably the latter 2 of these Lemmy has been fairly poor at achieving, which is where alternatives found success filling.

ZWQbpkzl [none/use name]@hexbear.net · edit-2 8 days ago

I would say Python can be a better choice just because you can get more contributors than Rust and develop faster, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. What’s going on is Lemmy has some very strict design patterns and somehow manages to use 10x more resources than PieFed.

Maybe Lemmy more capable of handling larger server loads than Piefed but idles really heavy like a java server would. But to a self-hosted fediverse server, the low idle seems ideal.

Tatar_Nobility@lemmy.ml · 8 days ago

This is why there has been a shift to other federated platforms like Piefed and Kbin.

Alaskaball [comrade/them, any]@hexbear.net · 8 days ago

Reddit2 and reddit3

SpookyBogMonster@lemmy.ml · 8 days ago

MoreTankieReddit

Wait…

hellinkilla [they/them, they/them]@hexbear.net · 8 days ago

Hasn’t kbin been dead for like 2 years?

SevenSkalls [he/him]@hexbear.net · 8 days ago

Mbin is still a thing though, at least last I checked (which has been awhile).

chgxvjh [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net · 8 days ago

I see this a lot of FOSS user communities. There often is the idea that they are doing the developers a service by using their software rather than the other way around. Bullying open source developers is pretty common, especially volunteer open source developers.

There is the idea that someone else will just pick up the project when you push the current devs out.

Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net · 8 days ago

There is the idea that someone else will just pick up the project when you push the current devs out.

They’ve been trained to believe supply will appear to meet demand because of capitalism but fail to see that the incentive structure in FOSS is different and many devs are doing it because they want to, not because there’s anything to gain from it.

Push the people out who want to do it and you’ll have nobody that wants to do it.

boboblaw [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net · 8 days ago

There is the idea that someone else will just pick up the project when you push the current devs out.

lol, lmao.

The difference between a FOSS “fan” and a FOSS contributor.

Documentation of Lemmy.ml's Extremism [Megathread]

Documentation of Lemmy.ml's Extremism [Megathread]

Noteworthy Selection

Full collection list at the end

Dessalines - Head .ml admin - Head Lemmy Dev

Davel - .ml admin

Nutomic - 2nd in command Lemmy Dev

General Tankie user behaviour

Full Collection