I'm shutting down my instance (dubvee.org) and leaving the platform. Just wanted to pop in one last time and bid farewall to you amazing people. Ten Forward has been the one consistent bright spot in my time here, and I will never forget you all.
If you feel you need to know why, my post/comment history sums it up (or see this post ). I don't like goodbyes or getting all mushy, so in lieu of those, and if you must, I'd prefer shitposts lol.
And since I don't like goodbyes...
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.
That community now has one less moderate centrist.
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.
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.
Lemmy, from my observation has more of a reputation to outsiders as being a lefty-safe-space
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:
Take some of this rhetoric from Lemmy, replace the proper nouns, and it's indistinguishable from what you'd read on an extreme right-wing board.
That's just not the kind of atmosphere/environment I want to be associated with.
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.
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.
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.
On the other hand American social media is an intellectual, moral and even economic (I am actually serious about this) dead end.
Agreed.
That's why I use use the Threadiverse, although I am trying to slowly move off Lemmy to Piefed for obvious reasons.
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
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. :)
Same.
I've outlined it in other threads, so I'll just link to a few of them instead of repeating myself.
You're not wrong (though I got rid of other social media and thus have little to compare against).
But regardless of what's happening on other platforms, we do not have to allow or platform that here. We can be better We should want to be better.
We can show people the door who are taking things too far, making death threats, promoting violence, and/or otherwise stirring the pot - force them back to the fringe instances and away from polite/civilized society.
Yeah, well, maybe if I felt like I wasn't the only one around here taking a stand against extremism, violent rhetoric, and toxic behavior, things could have played out differently and I could have pushed on. You can't place the blame on just having a single admin - that may be one factor, but becoming completely demoralized from the lack of support from most other admins/instances was the real cause. This is a wide-ranging problem, and a single small instance (let alone a single admin) cannot solve it alone.
Sorry not sorry - For the next 2 weeks I'm in "captain going down with his ship" mode and I'm not holding back on what I think about this place, what it's become, and where it's heading. Two years ago, we had the tools, motive, and opportunity to make something truly better here, and we failed.
Hey, I may be ugly and hate-filled, but...what was that third thing?
S7E01: Descent Part II + Family Guy: Blue Harvest
TNG 6x24: Second Chances
Ok, she said "Night Bird" but same energy.
It also helps to imagine that scene, but with this voice:
I could have done the meme in one frame, but I wanted Quark to do a Jim stare.
Yep, yep, and yep to all of that, and some of it I've said for over a year and was dismissed with "just give it time".
I've always referred to that as the "elephant in the ~~room~~ fediverse". But yeah, I fully agree that's definitely a major contributing factor to the current environment. I even made a joke post about it the other day: https://dubvee.org/post/3789665
Here's the gist of the post to save you a click
Title: "We are not the same"Like I said in my shutdown/meta post, I want the concept of the fediverse to succeed. I really do. But exactly as you just said (and others have said and I have said), the more well-adjusted people need to arrive in a critical mass, and I don't feel there's an environment here to welcome them let alone attract them or entice them to stick around. Maybe that will change. I hope it does, but I'm not optimistic enough to stick around and find out.
I do feel we started out on the right foot back in mid 2023, but as we've grown, we've just turned into a refuge for people who have proven too toxic to remain anywhere else.
At the end of the day, aside from the people like you, ValueSubtracted, and other friendly ~~faces~~ names I've come to enjoy seeing around these last couple years, I'm going to miss the idea of this place far more than the place itself.