this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2025
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Fedigrow
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I've outlined it in other threads, so I'll just link to a few of them instead of repeating myself.
Some very perceptive observations in those comments. To others - click thru and have a read! This is clearly a mod of unusually high quality, if they're really bowing out then we really owe it to them (and ourselves) to understand why.
Heh, thanks. It's proven difficult to condense a little over two years worth of behavioral observation into succinct comments, so I've tried to just build on what others have pointed out with my own experience.
I really empathize with your take BTW. Over the last year I have been unsubscribing from mainstream communities one by one for pretty much the exact reasons you cite: acute groupthink, dogpiling, purity testing, incitement, celebration of violence (the Luigi Mangioni cult was why I unsubscribed from "Uplifting News", for example), vulgarity, basically all the things you find in a school playground.
So I get you totally. And yet the "ban 'em high" zero-tolerance strategy only goes so far. I was myself banned for the cardinal sin of racism after making a subtle (but entirely innocuous) point which happened to challenge the prevailing groupthink in an otherwise pretty decent community. That community now has one less moderate centrist.
The best possible solution is surely hands-on moderation in line with what happens at Hacker News (where the quality of discourse is incredibly high despite, as I understand it, very infrequent recourse to bans). But that community is full of literal-minded geeks and has a full-time paid moderator, yes.
I know where you're coming from, but I cringe when I hear that term because of the straw man arguments that get thrown around here.
Like, if I were to post a spreadsheet here with all of my views laid out in detail, 99.9% of people, regardless of their local Overton window, would be like "Yep, he's a lefty."
But because of the purity testing / extreme positions around here that I do not agree with (mostly related to violence, revolution, and "burn it all down at all costs"), I've been called a Nazi, a sympathizer, a fascist, a bootlicker, an "enlightened centrist who only wants to do a little genocide", and worse.
Nuance here is dead. Godwin's law is dead. Most of the top-level comments for posts related to current events go straight to some Nazi reference, and where do you even go from there if you want to have any kind of discussion? Conversations are derailed before they even have a chance to get started.
Could have written almost all of that myself, to the letter. Yep, now I remember your amusing description of the "responsible centrist" or whatever's the term of mockery. Personally I am that odd type (possibly not so rare these days) who finds the left extremely annoying while never voting for anything else.
I was also banned from another community BTW (relax, there are only 2!) for objecting to the egregious community rule "No Zionism", which IMO was very close to literal racism given that none of the other rules concerned specific countries or nations. The mods there would do well to read this piece just out today, by an Israeli pacifist, and consider again the value of open debate and speech, not to mention empathy (something they are always so keen to ask of others). Absolutely heart-rending.
PS: I'll add a quote from the cited article because it's so uncannily relevant to this whole thread:
Thanks for sharing!
From my perspective, the best way to deal with toxicity (whatever that might be for a given individual) is to have multiple accounts and to have regular "time out" periods where you only use the non-politics accounts. This is of course not viable if you are a single admin.
Then there is the issue of making the most of a bad situation. Even though for me tankies are mortal enemies (including the Lemmy Devs), I see usage of Lemmy (well the Threadiverse) being a less worse choice than using American commercial social media.
With the Threadiverse, there is a weak light at the end of the tunnel. We may never get there, but it's there. On the other hand American social media is an intellectual, moral and even economic (I am actually serious about this) dead end. That's why I use the Threadiverse, although I am trying to slowly move off Lemmy to Piefed for obvious reasons.
Just sharing some thoughts in context of your very justified comments on the Threadiverse. I am not necessarily trying to change your mind or prove anything. :)
In terms of Lemmy Dev admins being the mortal enemies, piefed is up and kicking (I'm sure you know this)
EDIT: I see you do based on another reply by you.
From a user's perspective, yep, that can and does typically work.
I'm looking at things from a higher vantage point, though: The health, safety, and reputation of Lemmy and the Threadiverse as a whole.
As it stands, I'm embarrassed to tell people what I do in my spare time (run an instance and interact on Lemmy). You get a "normie" coming in off the streets, and what are they going to think jumping into this place? Are they going to want to stick around? I genuinely feel this place is on track to becoming the next 4chan, and that's with me being largely (though not entirely) desensitized to much of this stuff. I can't imagine how fresh eyes would interpret the atmosphere here.
And like one of the linked comment threads mentioned: We need the normies. If we want this place to succeed, we need them. Otherwise, it's going to continue distilling down to the most extreme views as more and more of the rational people call it quits. And I just can't see normies wanting to come here and stick around the way things are. Not without a LOT of work curating things, but I can't see them wanting to do that either.
Agreed.
Having tired to have rational discourse here about anything related to the outside world (without things immediately devolving to extremes), combined with the demographic overlap between Piefed and Lemmy, I strongly disagree lol
Same.
Oh man i feel that, i was telling and recommending people IRL about lemmy in summer 23. Not doing that anymore 😅
I don't think telling anyone you moderate a community on Lemmy and interact on Lemmy is somehow more embarassing than telling them you moderate a community on Reddit (for comparisons sake). People who would mock you in some way for that would do so whether or not its Reddit or Lemmy, and likely would just view all of it as inherently nerdy anyway.
Lemmy, from my observation has more of a reputation to outsiders as being a lefty-safe-space (closer to Bluesky) than anything else. It's really not that close to 4chan at all given the sheer gore and overt racism and hatred on there. I know what you're getting at here, but the dredges of 4chan and Twitter have outright open nazi apologetics in front of everyone. Also, given how unpleasant Reddit can get at times (at least just as bad as here) - I don't think the type of conduct you're referring to is inherently a problem for budding social media sites. Not excusing it, but just that it doesn't seem to be an existential factor.
What "normies" want, if anything, would be non-political communities taking more of a focus. Which I am certainly trying to do.
Truth be told, I don't want this place, or the Threadiverse, to be considered a lefty safe-space any more than I'd want it to be considered a right wing safe-space. Honestly, I just wish people would leave their political ideology at the door and just interact as people.
Though I'm not naive enough to think that will ever happen on any platform - it's just a wish lol
But the problem with any ideological safe space is the extremes. That's what I feel is not being addressed.
I know it was buried in one of the longer comments I linked, but one point I made was this:
That's just not the kind of atmosphere/environment I want to be associated with.
Sure, I'm just noting its wider reputation.
It's not considered extreme really (*excluding some instances). I know you're referring to calls for violence to certain political figures but it's as nothing as to what you'll see on Twitter or 4chan.
Fair enough; 'extreme' is as relative a term as "hot" or "cold" is.
I guess I'm just using "would the average person say this in polite conversation?" as my reference point.
Well I don't know of any social media platform that's somehow free of that.
Right, but we had the opportunity to be better here.
While Lemmy and the Threadiverse existed before the Reddit API exodus, it really took off around then with dedicated, passionate people working together to build something new, something better. I was one of them and was in real-time communication with admins of many of the popular instances today. There was passion, drive, and determination to make something great. And for a while, we did.
Somewhere along the line, though, the old toxicity started creeping back in, it was left largely unaddressed, and eventually metastasizing to where we are today.
So while there can be debate as to whether that means Lemmy ultimately succeeded or failed, in my view, still holding on to the original desire to make something better than what we crawled out of, I see it as a failure.
The Threadiverse is definitely not ready for "normies". Even if we ignore the extremism, the on-boarding, UX, service provision stability, topical coverage is not at the point where normies can join.
I've told people about the Fediverse as a concept, but I haven't suggested anyone try it, as I don't think it's ready.
I will note that I personally think the federated model isn't inherently too complex, it just needs better UI/UX and the network needs to be larger (e.g. 1 M MAU, 50 K DAU with coverage of at least 5 major langauges).
I am not really sure there is any magical solution to dealing with extremism. Better mod tools, a development focus on automated admin work will help, but I don't think it will solve the root cause. IMO it's not technical problem, it's a social issue that's also present in mainstream corporate network (albeit it can be more subtle there).