I posted this yesterday:
And apparently this warrants a instant permaban.
They don't even tell you what rule it breaks. Which one do you think it might break?
In any case, every time I visit Reddit and look at my local subs (Montréal, Québec or Canada) I look at the comments and they're absolutely vile. The community has become so fucking toxic it's unbearable. And I also realized how my mental health actually improved since I left that community.
They can keep the permaban. I don't give a shit anymore. I'm so over that god forsaken place.
Peace out.
Quick update:
I contancted the mods and apparently I was permabanned for spamming and they immediately muted me so I wouldn't be able to message the mods any further. I can understand that it can be considered spamming, but I feel they're being extremely harsh over this. They really have no chill.
Lemmy feels like the internet used to. Not about ads and algorithms, but just people interested in things asking questions and engaging naturally.
I'll be happy to be proven wrong, but I don't think Lemmy has any hope of survival as a truly global platform.
I've been through this a few times: Usenet, Digg, Reddit. They started off small and stayed mostly civil even though there is a wide range of opinion. Then they start growing rapidly and people see an opportunity to "get their message out", whether that's spam, personal aggrandizement, a political message, or whatever: exploitation vs participation. After a while it becomes just too much for some people, so they find somewhere else to congregate.
As they leave, that platform becomes ever more useless, leading to more migration. The platform eventually becomes useless even to the exploiters, so they figure out where everyone went and follow them.
And the cycle continues. I think that the cycle can only accelerate as "exploiters" become more proactive in following "participants" to new homes. That implies an eventual breakdown of the whole concept of global discussion communities. Are we seeing that already on Lemmy? I don't know, but I'm registered on 4 different instances, each with their own primary focus, and there has already been a bit of federation/defederation drama on every one them.
I think the only way to break the cycle is to figure out a way to eliminate exploitation. That may well be impossible, at least on any platform that has global reach, centralized or not. As far as I can tell, those who would exploit a system have always found ways to do so.
Yeah, I totally get that. I think that there is this insatiable desire for the upstart site to topple the previous site. On Digg we made fun of Usenet and Fark, on Reddit we made fun of Digg, on Lemmy people are always saying “fuck Spez”.
I think that people are worried that if Lemmy doesn’t keep growing (at Reddit’s expense), then it will collapse under its own weight. I hope the federated model works out. I could easily host a Lemmy or KBin instance on my homelab.
But yeah, the depressing truth is that as soon as someone invents a profit motive, it’s only a matter of time before it’s ruined.
And it doesn't even have to be the people running the platform or instances having a profit motive. Usenet, for example, started falling apart long before anyone tried to monetize actual hosting. Spammers alone were enough to destroy it.
Anytime you create easy enough access to a large enough group, people will try to exploit that access for their own gain. Obviously, platform and instance operators are best positioned to do so, but exploitive account holders can do plenty of damage on their own.