this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2025
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Fedigrow
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To discuss how to grow and manage communities / magazines on Lemmy, Mbin, Piefed and Sublinks
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I am not attached to Lemmy, I joined because from my perspective commercial American social media is not viable for me, it's equivalent to supporting/enabling those who wish you harm.
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: