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.
Regarding the recent locked post: as the creator it is indeed your vision that you need to maintain. I do hope that you will consider editing the description of this community to clarify such for people in the future:
Otherwise it made sense that it would fit? Perhaps... "please, no drama" or some such? Well, it's a thought:-).
Second:
But if actual posts are not desired, only comments underneath those, that would help to clarify as well. Otherwise "discussion" can be ambiguous.
I hope this meta-discussion itself is of interest:-).
Perhaps the rule is that I'd like this place to be a good "Frontpage" for Lemmy posts. A "Beginner-to-Lemmy" kind of curation / discussion hub. By the time we're on community-on-community or server-vs-server discussion, we've left the realm of beginner topics / introduction to Lemmy kind of things.
Its not the "drama" I'm necessarily against. Its more like, "my vision for this community means that discussions about the peculiars of servers or community comments is unhelpful here".
I recognize the need to discuss different servers and communities. But "BestOfLemmy" should be beginner-to-lemmy focused. I don't think new posters would necessarily have much benefit from that kind of comment.
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 memes@lemmy.ml, 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 !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca 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.
I first thought that if they helped fund Lemmy, then I'd rather not be here much longer to support their accomplishment, but also I own a Volkswagon so it'd be very hypocritical of me to do that. I agree that we just work on making Lemmy better and they lose power of their own chaos
I almost left the Fediverse myself after stumbling across them - talking with such people is not what I wanted to spend my time and attention on. Fortunately Kbin.social that I had been on prior to it going defunct and my switching to Lemmy did not promote their posts so heavily (it had, and its fork Mbin still has, its own internal voting system, so its sorting algorithms ignore "upvotes" from the Fediverse and pays attention instead to "favorites" from only other Mbin/Kbin instances, probably for precisely this reason). So I knew that the Fediverse could be better.
The problem is: nobody that I recommend it to irl realizes that - they see the variety of posts from e.g. !memes@lemmy.ml, and think "this is what Lemmy is", and they drop it never to return. And how can I argue otherwise? I myself would rather leave it entirely than put up with constantly having posts promoted everywhere you look from the likes of Donald Trump, Elon Musk, or the same style from hexbear even if they call it "leftist". This, along with the lack of technical development (compared to e.g. Reddit), are the chief impediments to growth that I can see.
But things are steadily improving - e.g. we can do instance blocks now, and e.g. PieFed and Sublinks are coming to join with Mbin and Tesseract to offer alternative codebases to just Lemmy on the Fediverse, which like Kbin's alternative voting scheme may offer solutions to some of the current issues. Therefore as long as I can enjoy sane conversations, e.g. this one with you:-), I will stick with the Fediverse, as it evolves moving forward.
I feel bad about instance blocking though. Like I did it with HB and pre-emptively grad, but it just feels like I'm cutting a whole people off because a minority group pissed me off. I'll probably give it a week or so and unblock the instances because there's absolutely no way that everyone sucks there
First, do whatever you want - I am not here to tell you what to do:-). That is indeed a highly personal decision, and I for one will not begrudge you to pick either option that you feel will work best for you.
Second, I used to think similarly. I'm telling you, those Innuendo Studios videos will change everything about how you think in these terms. e.g. you simply cannot talk with Trump supporters, or hexbear members - they don't even "use logic", as a normal person would. Though they do use it like a 5-year-old toddler would: as a weapon, if they think they can gain advantage by making mouth-noises that attempt to sound somewhat vaguely like it. It's fucking exhausting to constantly analyze, decide, and attempt to respond (or not) to such - especially when their favorite trick is to "control the conversation", by ignoring whatever you actually said and instead pivot it over to some other matter entirely (but only until they sense that they can't win that way, and then they'll switch strategies entirely on-the-fly) - and quite frankly ain't nobody got time for dat nonsense, imho. But again, ofc you should free to do whatever you want...
I do want to warn you though that it is a fundamental principle of the world/universe that people automatically start to become more like those that you surround yourself with - e.g. even if you wanted to stop drinking alcohol, if you surround yourself with friends whose major activity is to talk at a bar, then it would become difficult to hold that line... (note I myself drink alcohol all the time, and just a few weeks ago visited a friend, ofc our first instincts were to meet at a happy hour, it just makes financial sense and is fun!... - so anyway I'm not trying to offer any judgement there, just illustrate the principle that if someone were to decide against it, that would be difficult to maintain in the face of others who continually make the exact opposite decision).
And I did not like what Reddit was doing to me. I was being more snarky, more contentious, more pedantic, less kind, less considerate of others' opinions, etc. I started to worry that it would affect my relationships at my new job. Reddit has a... "culture" that is quite well-known for being that way. And we may think that it won't affect us - but it will. Maybe if I had already had established relationships with these new people, but I did not, and these "new" ones, the first after I found and joined Reddit, seemed vulnerable to my having had to interact with so many Reddi-trolls (as a mod of a couple small gaming subs over there).
Third, I never said that "everyone sucks there" - for any of those instances. Though like Reddit, there are... known patterns of behaviors, that most of them display. Once or twice is indeed an outlier - and given enough time we will see people from every instance do something to piss us off (unless the instance is extremely tiny; also maybe someone is just having a bad day, so their behavior not only does not reflect their entire instance but even themselves, usually?) but when you see something like >50-90% of the people from an instance doing the precise same thing, it most definitely becomes a "pattern".
You asked a question, and got >800 responses, most saying that you were not imagining things: there really is a very noticeable "pattern" of behavior that people have come to expect from them. If you want to ignore those responses and... "enjoy" your time with them, then go ahead. I tried the same, with users of lemmy.ml. But if it helps to hear my story, eventually I got over it, just blocked them all, and I have not regretted that once since. Yes I do miss out on some posts from those communities - but I still see posts from people from those instances on other communities that I am subscribed to, and also likewise comment replies to me, so note that a user-block is really a pathetically un-powerful, soft thing, unlike full, hard, strict defederation.
For an example, you need look no further than the other reply to my previous message, where they said:
I can still see it, I just don't get a "notification" for it, each time they ignore my consent and decide to (attempt to) push their thoughts at me regardless. Btw, if it helps YOU, I will explain what they are attempting to do here: first, they try to pin the blame on me as if I am the one being unreasonable (the very first word starts with YOU, as an attempt to speak in a confident tone of voice, as is proper for such an accusation), also they ignore how (as I said many, MANY times) people would continually respond to me, days and days and days and days and days and WEEKS later (i.e., my response is one thing, but who was it that first started the whole having a hard time "letting something go"?:-P). Ignoring my consent is considered "abusive" behavior, in most parts of the world. Also, I totally forgot about the incident that they are referring to, but this person, in their reply, conveniently entirely ignores that other events than that have occurred. e.g. I mentioned an incident saying something about Biden v. gas prices, whereas this incident says nothing about Biden, nothing about gas prices, nothing about inflation, therefore this must be the only incident that has ever happened, and MUST be what I was talking about... right? 🤪 I like to think that even as a 5-year-old toddler, I would not fall into such an extremely obvious logical fallacy as this, to presume that I know everything, when in fact it is painfully obvious that this person is talking out of their ass. So should I respond to them - and to everyone else that wants to take a go at me as well, for daring to say that e.g. Biden lowered gas prices? Or am I simply not allowed to speak of Biden, or perhaps it's rather the topic of gas prices, or inflation, that is forbidden to ever speak of - unless ofc I happen to agree with their POV? And is that like... ever, or only on their own instance, or perhaps wherever their instance name gets brought up - what are the rules here? Moreover, why are they the ones making those rules, and constantly shifting them whenever it suits them? And why is Russia=good, America=bad, rather than oh say genocide (whoever does it)=bad, and capitalism=bad too, but what other options do we even have (derp... Russia is capitalistic too...).
Also, if I were to respond, what manner of nonsensical "logic"(al fallacies) would I subsequently be presented with, in their next reply? I came to the Fediverse to enjoy reasoned discourse... but in the above paragraph, notice how argumentative I became? Less kind, less considerate, more argumentative, more pedantic... see the pattern? I will spell it out just to make it crystal clear: it is Reddit all over again, which I tried to leave behind, but on Lemmy.ml and far more the other two Big Three instances, I continually find that it is here on the Fediverse as well - though not equally distributed. I tend to not have such a form of... shall we call them "low-effort" exchanges with someone from most other instances, e.g. lemm.ee or sh.itjust.works, and if the opportunity does ever present itself, it is trivially easy enough to block just one person and move on with my life. But it is fucking exhausting to try to keep up with the constant barrage of such, so when I start noticing these extremely obvious patterns like 98-99% observations of trolling behavior coming from accounts located on one of the Big Three instances, yeah the opportunity to stop virtually all of it with a handful of keystrokes and clicks was too tempting to pass up. And you've seen it yourself, but anyway, choose to not block them if you want, though I made my choice to do so. It is good to have choices to pick from:-).
What are your goals, that you hope to accomplish by being here on the Fediverse? It is something to ponder anyway, and when you are able to answer that, then you should find your answer much more readily, as to whether not blocking those instances will help you attain your goals.
My goal is to have a chuckle or general discussion despite what side people are on. I believe light teasing of the other side (and even your own side) opens serious dialog because you are acknowledging your side is imperfect, just like the other side. If you tease the other side and take yourself too serious, then that's bullying.
Second, and with all due respect, everything you say can be easily summarized. And please don't misunderstand, I believe you're absolutely right in everything you have said, and I appreciate your detail to make sure you're not misunderstood. However, every comment has been an essay. That takes so much mental energy for you. I can respect the effort you put into your comments because, godamn, it takes a lot with how much work you put into them, truly kudos.
However, I see it as building a front page for a resume. If you put too much meat onto the plate, then they're never going to eat the potatoes. You want a filet mignon with a baked potato. I absolutely mean no offense. Just wanted to say that you could say the same thing with less words
It sounds like you would enjoy good-faith discussions with reasonable people, regardless of - or even especially if their "side" differs from yours. But, and here I want to make a huge distinction b/t "teasing" vs. this, how do you feel about e.g. brigading/trolling/abusive behavior, when it is done by people on your same "side", against those dirty, stinky, rotten people on that "other side"? I have never once seen an example of a good-natured discussion on hexbear.net, though I imagine that it surely exists from what people say, yet buried underneath an entire mountain of the "other stuff" that I would not enjoy wading through, looking for the good stuff.
Ironically, that is exactly what I went to Reddit for. And I saw it, in the historical sense, even participated in it here & there infrequently. Though every month that passed I saw it less & less often, as more & more people clamped down on their opinions, b/c of not wanting to have to deal with the push-back from teenagers wanting to use Reddit more as "social media" (where you are allowed, nay encouraged to vomit up your feewings, rather than e.g. search for a logical exposition that already exists and thereby learn by reading rather than opening your mouth to speak). It got to where you couldn't block enough of them, when they outnumber you and more & more continue to add themselves, each one refusing to learn, each one clamoring to speak (there's a selection bias here I know, among those that do - but anyway there sure are a lot of them). e.g., 3 posts back-to-back in r/Android like "which phone do I purchase", "which phone do I buy", "which Android phone should I get" - all posted within mere hours of one another, none desiring to realize that the question has already been asked, that there is a megathread designated for such, that people might need some additional detail in order to answer it, and that by constantly clamoring like that, they were driving away the very people that have the most knowledge to have been able to answer them, plus taking away the latter's ability to have conversations about matters of actual substance. So more & more it got to where the blind were leading the blind, b/c the people willing to actually answer thus were not the same as those who wrote long, drawn-out essays full of actual facts, e.g. results of actual tests performed by them or someone they trust, and the latter not without good reason.
As I just started to do with you, with my essays. Sorry - it's a defensive mechanism, when people (such as done in that other reply) start to challenge me, and I very much want to respond with FACTS... for all the good it will do, to some. While for reasonable people, as you said, the deluge isn't even needed at all. e.g., all those details about the "event" the other commenter mentioned - Biden, gas prices, inflation - these types of "facts" only matter to people engaging in good faith. Those facts may influence your decision about something-or-other... but not theirs. And if it were me, I would want the facts, so I offer them:-). But there is a time & a place, you are right. I just wanted to point out that the longest paragraphs were those where I even mentioned that I was slipping back into my old habits, developed on Reddit, when having to deal with people that blithely ignore the facts - at which point I should remember more readily that yet more facts, unlike if our roles had been reversed, aren't going to be convincing.
Though you are a different person than me. Perhaps you can turn off certain portions of your brain that I cannot, and are okay to delve deep into the dark realms, to find something there of substance. I would argue that you don't even need an account for that - simply reading what is already there should be sufficient, but if you want to ask them questions... no, no, no, that still seems very inefficient, for the very simple fact that: you cannot extract blood from a stone. i.e., you can't get something from someone when they don't have it to begin with, so if what you seek is "wisdom" or "understanding", even of "their side", then notably I see no evidence that these people even know what their own "side" is espousing, much less have the ability to convey it clearly in words that will be meaningful to you. What *I* see is that they enjoy "dunking on" people, but the "facts" that they choose to use to do that with... are noticeably lacking in substance (which isn't to say that everything that they claim is incorrect - even a stopped watch is correct twice a day - just that they won't likely be able to back up their beliefs with more than merely links to articles that themselves are full of logical errors, inconsistencies with actual reality, and "theory" that ignores practical existence). Overall you can learn something yes... but e.g. if you want to know something about monkeys, it is significantly faster to ask an anthropologist than to ask the monkey. But perhaps I am conveying this all wrong: if you watch Innuendo Studios then I am positive that Ian Danskin can explain it much better than I:-). Something along the lines of... they want to live in a magical reality that is (somehow) "correct", but they are willing to take very many unsubstantiated shortcuts to get there, except most of them (it seems the ones who are most likely to speak outside of their echo chambers) don't even know what those fundamentals are, and instead just enjoy "dunking on" others who do not know them, i.e. the in-words for the in-crowd act as magical passwords, while the out-group can go fuck itself. To be fair, I see this irl too, and a lot of it (Musk-worship, Bezos-...tolerance, etc.) is a LOT more damaging than whatever is going on over on hexbear, though that does not mean that I enjoy it whenever/wherever I do see it.
No brigading, or trolling to make someone angry. Trying to bully people into submission isn't ok. A light poking is ok as long as it'sin good faith, but really just talk to people like you're face-to-face.
I've been taking to the other guy like we're face to face, that's just how I talk to people who talk shit they can't back up.
How is it ignoring your consent if I have no way of telling if you've blocked my instance or not?
Maybe you should write a few more rambling paragraphs complaining, you bring up the tactic of diversions, but it's really just projection as you're a flagrant user of it yourself (writing lengthy paragraphs that never address the issue is one example). You never responded to my main point here
You made a huge wall of text with some claims not borne out by your links, did you even fully read what you were citing or did you skim looking for things to confirm your argument?
From you:
From the hexbear discussion:
Again quoting you:
The hexbear thread expressed the same rationale to block “shits fulla chuds” the fact that you characterize them as reasonable-minded people speaks volumes about you personally.
Just checking in with how someone from a marginalized community felt about this situation: https://hexbear.net/post/497935
I was ready to take you seriously but if you’re misrepresenting your very first points that’s a lot harder. You’ve been doing more than that, you’ve been inverting the actual history and in the process ommitted the actual options of marginalized people to suit your narrative.
quoting you again:
Hexbear is majority non-cis, and its weekly trans megatheads are extremely active. I already looked into this, they have done several polls, and have chatted with a number of them since I started moderating /c/transgender
Are you trying to imply that they’re bigots now? On what basis? If anything you’ve said enough to make me suspect you more than anyone else.
You got made fun of once and can't seem to let it go, from reading the mod log they seemed confused by what you were even trying to say. The mod message was one of their "wtf" emojis