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.
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.
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