this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2024
302 points (92.7% liked)
Showerthoughts
29692 readers
1487 users here now
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. A showerthought should offer a unique perspective on an ordinary part of life.
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- Avoid politics
- NEW RULE as of 5 Nov 2024, trying it out
- Political posts often end up being circle jerks (not offering unique perspective) or enflaming (too much work for mods).
- Try c/politicaldiscussion, volunteer as a mod here, or start your own community.
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct-----
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The downside of that is the filter bubble or echo chamber effect. Question is whether Lemmy should be a fun experience for you or something to broaden your horizons a little
You can listen to people try to convince you that Russia's war is justified and that Tienamen Square never happened for a while if you want, then make up your mind and block them later ;-).
It was super fun to be gaslit by people while I was actually living in Taiwan but yeah, gets old after a while.
I mean, personally I am not here to discuss politics or get the news. I'm here for memes and nerding out. All that real-world shit doesn't vibe. I wanna laugh.
Exactly. I want to be able to mention the fashion lizard, the bisexual twink doctor, and his husband the suffering Irishman... And for people to understand who I'm talking about.
I agree, the filters here are great. I don't mind the real world stuff but I filter your instance because I don't want to see furry porn.
(Not trying to be snarky, your kinks are not any of my business, hence the filter. My comment is meant to be genuine.)
Bruh. It's not an echo chamber to filter out literal Nazis and other stuff. Ain't nobody changing their mind from "spirited" internet debate and I don't need their garbage in my day.
If you really mean "literal Nazis", that tends to support the hypothesis that you're not being exposed to much that contradicts your worldview.
Tell me more about how you must listen to literal Nazis on a daily basis to contradict your worldview.
And if you don't think Lemmy has or has had to deal with literal Nazis:
Lol
What instance is "literal Nazis"?
There are many that were defederated many months ago that aren't even the common ones discussed. I forget some of their names but you can review the defed lists. They are beyond the pale, open open racism, calls for open violence, CP, etc. I'm not talking about some double speak, bad policy maga stuff, I'm talking about cartoons showing minorities as animals, cartoons of lynchings, etc.
The fediverse is a big place.
Edit who the fuck downvotes this
I was speaking to the general practice of filtering in response to the echo chamber generalization, not the original post calling out instances. Personally I filter out porn instances because that's not what I'm here for. The nice thing about the app I use is that I don't see any posts from those instances but I can choose to see comments because people interacting on the posts I see are generally there for random reasons and are reacting instead of posting their whatever.
I feel like the term echo chamber gets thrown around a lot. Imo an echo chamber has to be highly specific. I wouldn't classify every monolingual person as trapped in an echo chamber for example. I would also argue against to idea of having to be weary of creating your own echo chamber online. Use social media how you like, the solution to echo chambers is going outside and touching grass not forcing yourself to interact with every community on the internet.
It's an echo chamber whether you think that's a bad thing or not, only being exposed to one type of view point is what an echo chamber is. And people probably should be exposed to opinions they disagree with, but it doesn't have to be constantly, and it doesn't have to be when they're already stressed or tired, for the sake of their mental health.
Very well put!:-)
Simply being something isn't an echo chamber, you have to have a thought or opinion being shared by the group. If every person you interact with only speaks one language, and they all share that one language is the best method of communication, that's an echo chamber.
I agree. Although it is useful to be aware of your own biases.
Assuming you don't mean literally "touch grass", the solution is seeking out opinions/thoughts outside of your echo chamber. That doesn't necessarily mean forcing yourself to interact with terrible communities, but being aware and understanding (but not agreeing with) them.
Although I again refer to using social media how you like is fine. No one needs to be exposed to certain communities. It's not wrong or lazy or bad to ignore certain communities or viewpoints, especially toxic ones. However you should be aware that they exist and it can be helpful, if you choose, to understand where they come from.
As a harmless example, if you don't like brussel sprouts and none of your friends like brussel sprouts, it may benefit you to try brussel sprouts or to seek out and talk to or read about people who like brussel sprouts. You can still at the end of the day dislike brussel sprouts. You don't have to change your opinion. But now your opinion is more well rounded.
wary=cautious
weary=tired
It's a good comment just trying to help.
Ha, I was tempted to make basically the same comment. I'm super weary of people mixing the two up!
Like most things, there's a sliding scale. I block two instances (in my client) because of the high noise-to-signal ratio, and a few individuals who I find particularly obnoxious. I've never blocked anyone who I thought was trying to have a good-faith argument with me, regardless of their position. But I also don't feel obligated to stand and listen to the MAGA dipshit shouting obscenities at minorities, either. Is it an echo chamber? No more than me not watching Fox "News".
Although, Lemmy leans strongly left, and the instances are tankie ones; there isn't a lot of right-leaning posting IME. I think this is a particularly difficult time for reasonable conservatives because of how their party has been co-opted by fascists. The instances I'm on doesn't do a lot of defederating, but I know just by virtue of being on Lemmy, I'm getting a left bias.
Yeah I'm not sure that there are any real conservatives left. Like I would have thought that Liz Cheyney was one, but look what happened to her, despite how high-profile she was.
George W. Bush was even a progressive, funding schools and feeding homeless people etc. But then the Tea Party - Ted Cruz, Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, etc. - started taking over control from that old guard of actual conservatives, both fiscal and cultural (wouldn't Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham qualify here as good examples?). However, before that process could finish, the Alt Right started up, with even moar-er(-est) "alternative facts" and literally neonazi propaganda, leaning heavily on the blatant racism components (rather than hiding behind "wish we could help but the budget you know..."). And now I'm not sure if what is here is even still the Alt Right or something else altogether.
I think if Ron Desantis had won the nomination things would be different, but as it is the entirety of the Republican party bows now solely to Trump, making it more about loyalty to him than about any particular policies anymore. i.e. should we say that the Alt-Right is dead, killed ironically for not being extreme enough for some of its most outspoken members, and now Republican party = Trump? JD Vance certainly is showing how that works, having once decried Trump but that was then and this is now. Speaking of, JD Vance seems to want us to call the current movement the New Right, which if they win, basically means (as best as I can tell) that Trump will not be a President but made into an actual monarch.
Completely agree, except that I'd amend that no real conservative politicians exist. I think there are a lot of real conservatives - you named several - but that simply can't get elected with our current election mechanisms. Primaries need to be eliminated. Progress like adoption of RCV needs to expand. The electoral college needs to be eliminated. If we can make progress in these areas, it'll let moderate conservatives to regain control of their party. And it'd let people stop arguing and being frustrated with having to vote for the lesser of two evils.
Oh yeah sorry, I took that as a given. Liberals != Democrats, especially on matters such as gun control where even conservatives (~90% of Americans want some, limited forms of gun control), and conservatives != Republicans. Ahem, sometimes politicians LIE to get elected!?!?!! (How you can tell: their mouths move 👄:-) So yes you are absolutely correct, I meant the particular brand of lie that is attempted to be sold to their constituents.
And some (politicians) I assume may even be real believers, but not the ones who end up making it into the halls of power. Hence while I agree with all that you said, I don't think that it will ever happen. RCV would allow someone other than those who are willing to literally kill to get in power win, hence it won't be allowed to happen. I mean, it already has started happening, but it won't be allowed to get as far as being able to sway the election overall. Wow how I wish I was wrong!
Historically, no nation has ever survived having devolved into a 2-party system afaik, so I don't hold out much hope for a long-term future. Especially since governments themselves are starting to take a back seat to multinational corporations that have more money, power, and ability to control things than the countries are allowed to retain. The EU is able to resist this, the USA refuses to for the most part but it can in a pinch if it wants, but who else could hope to?
After all, the wealthy control the very sources of news that we all consume, and if we don't even know what's going on, how can we make decisions - like what would they be based upon? Which ironically is why the open-source Fediverse made so many of us excited, to think about breaking free from underneath the control of the Almighty Algorithm. But then we accidentally walk into a community in lemmygrad.ml, hexbear.net, or some lemmy.ml posts and we begin to see the downsides to that - as this OP discussion is attempting to illuminate. Reddit at least allowed blocking of trolls, whereas if we want that here, we will need to expend the effort to make that happen.
Nicely put!
I don't so much mind this, at least. It's just curation, and I'd far rather have it in our hands than the hands of moderators or platform owners. Not that moderation isn't useful, and hosting admins can still defederate - but giving users the ability to manage their own block lists, at the user, group, and instance levels, makes it less critical to have moderation, and makes moderation a little less prone to abuse.
Right! Except regardless of your wishes, "they" don't seem to want for us to have that ability to block "them". For a LONG time Lemmings begged, pleaded, and cajoled for the ability to make blocklists. The answer, as I see in the historical archives (hehe just older posts I mean:-), was always "just wait - we'll implement this in 0.19". Fast-forward to when that happened: it barely does anything at all.
A block of a "user"/account is iirc as full as it gets - I am not even certain that they can downvote you after that. A block of a "community" is likewise solid - those posts will not only not show up in your Subscribed feed, but even from your All one. However, a block of an "instance" merely blocks the communities from that instance, but the users themselves are still free to troll in other communities, free to reply to and ping you thus generating notifications, free to downvote you, and otherwise carry on almost as if you had done nothing at all wrt that particular instance. It is extremely weak.
Also I'm skipping over the details here but what little it used to do is steadily being rolled back so that it is even less effective than it was before (irt the generation of notifications). And since the developers of the Lemmy sourcecode are also the admins of Lemmy.ml, despite all the pitiable outcry from the users affected - there was one here just this week where an admin literally told someone to kill themselves, over a silly misunderstanding of something that happened inside of a video game - absolutely none of the largest instances will condone defederation from lemmy.ml.
And I get it: we are running their software. Abuse or no, we are the guests, and they are the masters of this Lemmy project. Yes it may be open-source, but if we want their future code releases, the boat cannot be rocked too awfully hard.
So, you can either block every user from that instance that you ever see, one by one, or... suck it up and take what "they" offer to you. Or find another solution.
But notably, I don't want to just block users b/c of the moderation practices of the admins - it's the users themselves that, trained within that echo chamber as to what they can get away with, troll people all across the entire Fediverse (unless they specifically defederate from that instance). From another comment I made elsewhere:
As if the default Lemmy experience isn't a massive filter bubble in itself. I doubt hardly anyone here would want to federate with Twitter and Truth Social even though that would make your feed, in fact, less of an echo chamber. Hell, a huge number of inctances don't even federate with Hexbear, Lemmygrad or Threads.
I think it's pretty much impossible to fully get out of filter bubbles, but the only way to really get every view on everything is to be part of everything mainstream AND everything more underground. Personally, I don't feel the need to associate with any other social media. I think toxicity differs from being exposed to a different point of view.
Reddit has had the problem for years that if you tried to make a point that slightly differed from the hive mind's opinion, however eloquently you would put it, everyone would just pile on with their 'akshually' mentality and not even be open to any other viewpoint than their own.
And that's toxicity without even mentioning folks that would just say 'no' followed by hateful language.
I feel Lemmy is a far kinder, more balanced community where you can have a polite discussion about stuff. And OP is right, if a certain instance shows its users can't behave or have such different views than your own, you can just make them go away and enjoy the rest of Lemmy.
I just hope those users don't defederate from the rest of us so at some point they will have a more nuanced view of things.
My experience has been much closer to what you described reddit to be. Lemmy is extremely unwelcoming of differing opinions.
Disagreeing with your perspective is easy because it’s utterly misguided. Lemmy is a paragon of inclusivity, welcoming all opinions as long as they adhere to basic decency. The platform thrives on a diverse range of ideologies, from anti-capitalist to anarchist, fostering a rich tapestry of debate and discussion. If you find it unwelcoming, maybe it’s because you can't handle being called out for having incorrect views. ^(/s)
Counterpoint: filtering out the furry communities by blocking a single instance
Honestly if the furies want to have there own space that's fine. Just don't invade the rest of Lemmy. Same goes for hexbear and whatever else.
Absolutely. I don’t have any hate for them it’s just not my thing and it’s a bit unpleasant when I see it. It’s a great feature for the fediverse that we can filter and let others enjoy their thing in peace.
Eating poisoned shit isn't broadening your horizons.
That's my philosophy too. I like browsing all so I heavily filter with keywords and blocking. My community block list is approaching 600
I'm reminded of a quote that goes something like this:
The beauty of a self-curated experience is that you're free to engage with the things that you want and can ignore the things that you don't want to deal with. The risk of people isolating themselves is simply a part of having the freedom to choose your own experiences, the same as the real world.
Personally, one of the reasons that I'm here is because I have no choice but to deal with right-wing extremism in my daily life, and I don't want to deal with it online as well. Reading news articles? That's fine, but I don't want to see chuds screaming about DEI or woke or whatever in the comments.
This reminds me of Innuendo Studios' latest offering (yes Ian Danskin is sharing some videos again!) Why Don't You Respond To Criticism?.
Yep. See also: sea-lioning, the gish gallop, and a myriad of other tactics used by the far-right.
Also, another of my favorite quotes:
Self-curating my social media experience is self-care.
Hahaha absolutely yes! That series is hands-down my absolute favorite of all of YouTube, which is really saying something next to the likes of Kurzgesagt and Crash Course series. Also Ian Danskin's other videos like the agency / protagony one - chef's kiss! 😘
It doesnt necessarily mean that importent things won't be covered. I just don't need fox news opinion about it.
The existence of "echo chambers" is debated by scientists. It really doesn't matter who you hang around with, you're going to disagree with people.
The echo chamber is overstated: the moderating effect of political interest and diverse media.
Tweeting from left to right: Is online political communication more than an echo chamber?
Echo chamber? What echo chamber? Reviewing the evidence
Maybe the solution is to either not restrict yourself to one platform or to be aware of the bubble.