I've seen around 3 occasions of that this week, altho I have never seen anything like it before.
if I remember correctly they were:
smack talking a mod (FlyingSquid) for saying not to report the same comment twice, when they were different comments, and the report was spam
someone comparing .world with .ml in politics (as in there was a comment saying "this post will be overrun with .ml people, and then a comment going "but you are from .world") (Maybe Im part of the problem? I have been called out for being a fascist because I questioned the "puching nazis" theme)
one more which I can't remember.
Anyways, what is all that about? Are people really starting to hate on 50% of the lemmy population because of their instance?
Thanks for asking this btw. Just found it with a quick search wondering the same thing after reading yet another comment section (this one about Trump, Musk and JD Vance) that turned into 50% whinging about .world mods/admin and horrible reddit users turning their lemmy into a shithole. The answers you got here were really helpful for me to understand a bit more about the context/history of these spaces.
.world is the biggest instance and therefore a prime choice for trolls to create accounts. Most of the trash posts I’ve seen lately are from brand new users on lemmy.world
I am equally suspicious of brand new lemmy.world users as I am of veterans of lemmy.ml. Older accounts on .world are usually pretty normal.
Its an incredibly pro US biased instance despite not being hosted in the US and having a .world domain.
Greatest hits are [email protected] forbidding non-US topics and of course [email protected] and its bias check bot according to which every non US media is left wing biased.
The bot itself is only mildly offensive, but the fieflord bot-love is just repugnant.
About a month ago news did a "feedback about the bot" thing, in which they declared undying love for the bot above all things and declared any input other than breathless support for the bot to be vote manipulated misinformation.
There were about 3 mods involved, all contradicting each other, and themselves, very condescending, and very sooky and sulky. "One of the mods almost resigned over this!" kind of stuff.
You had to start every comment with "look I know you guys are doing your best and investing all your free time as volunteers but..."
ml is administered by the creators of Lemmy, they are openly socialist/communist/tankie depending on your own ideology, ml was chosen to represent Marxism-Leninism, and so the people it attracted are generally also adhering to this kind of ideologies.
.world was created for Redditors exile, as such, it is mostly center-left to social democrat.
Political extremists tend to extremise everything, typically a tankie will call you a Nazi/fascist if you disagree with them. That's one of your answer.
Secondly, some ml people are frustrated that Lemmy is not their own little thing anymore for them and their friends, as world is the biggest instance now by far. So they show some kind of instance-xenophobia, not much different from the Great Replacement theory: "we are being culturally replaced through mass migration".
Not all .ml people are like that of course. In my experience, it is enough to block a few tankies to get back to civilized discussions.
I made the mistake of being an anarchist on ml and hexbear.
Waay, waaaaaay too many tankies getting insanely pissed off and swarm when you criticize (point out obvious facts, really) any non US/Western countries or allies along anarchist lines.
It rapidly devolves into idpol, rants and tirades that are barely related to the topic or comment, Fox News style 'I'm just asking questions in good faith' which are obviously not in good faith if you're older than maybe 10.
I dare someone to go ml or grad or hex and attempt to have a serious and thorough conversation about the Sino-Vietnamese war. Or Uighurs. Or the Holodomor. Or whether the concept of self-determination applies to Ukraine, Taiwan, and Palestine at the same time.
I remember at one point explaining a meme that popped up on some China's social media site that boiled down to 'Deng Xiaoping's reforms have led to Chinese women craving giant Black cocks', and all of them being just fine with incels and racism when its not Westerners doing it.
Craziest part is when they horseshoe so hard that you have 'communists' arguing that LGBTQ are degenerate vermin. Although that is more rare, it does happen.
EDIT: Its somewhat sad, as it is great fun when everyone is dogpiling on some new latest insane western neocolonialism or corporate incompetence/hellscape type stuff, but I treat those places like Ravenholm:
Or whether the concept of self-determination applies to Ukraine, Taiwan, and Palestine at the same time.
That's the hypocrisy that pisses me off the most. I don't know how someone can support resistance by any means for Palestinians but seriously suggest Ukrainians are nazis for resisting an imperialist invasion.
PS: there's at least 2 anarchist instances on Lemmy 😉
Craziest part is when they horseshoe so hard that you have ‘communists’ arguing that LGBTQ are degenerate vermin. Although that is more rare, it does happen.
If someone claims something happened on the fediverse without providing a link, they’re lying.
The culture where these sorts of blatant lies are accepted without question is my biggest problem with .world. You can have whatever actual beliefs you want, but lying like this is really despicable.
A lot of this boils down to consequences of lemmy.world being the largest instance: typical Reddit users beeline for it, trolls go there, larger comms so more frequent issues with moderation, people who fail to distinguish between "we shouldn't concentrate our activity into the largest instance" and "largest instance bad! EDIT WOW THANKS FOR LE GOLD TO LE KNEE KIND STRANGER!", so goes on.
Back when reddit* was just starting to fall to shit, I had already been dipping my toes in the mastodon water, and while I really liked the instance I was on it did not have enough people on it to properly surface good collections of off node traffic.
Knowing that Mastodon had the problem, I didn't dick around with smaller nodes. To be honest it's still a fight if you're on a node with only a handful of people, you have to do something to mitigate the lack of community traffic in the face of lacking discoverability.
People are doing that here though - e.g. the user Blaze made accounts on basically every instance, and subscribed to every community. This gets around the limitation where at least one user of an instance must subscribe to a community before it will even so much as show up for others to also subscribe. Really the developers should have made better automation so that this was not necessary, but... anyway it works, for now:-).
lemmyworld in many ways is still just reddit. don't get me wrong, I've talked to plenty of cool people on there before. but it is the biggest instance that ballooned after the API controversy and a lot of them seem to have just brought Reddit to the fediverse with them. I have no issues with any mods there, I've not really seen them at all. they did defed a community from my instance though so that's pretty lame of them.
I beg to differ: even Reddit these days is little like Reddit, as it was just prior to the protests. Reddit f-ing died, and Lemmy.World is nothing like that shithole, especially what's left nowadays with bots copying bots speaking to bots, allowing humans to simply scroll forever.
To any extent that it is like the Reddit of old though, yeah it's just bc it's so big. It was guaranteed that some instance would become that, bc people are people - at least here, not like AI-Reddit. 🤡
Like in the grand scheme of the fediverse we're all tiny. But of the "reddit clone" instances it might be bigger than everyone else put together even.
I went over to your instance and checked, and yeah, it's a reddit clone interface too
The structure makes all of us "like reddit" because reddit has always had a shit ton of different small subs with vastly different vibes. A decade ago there was some sub on Reddit that had the exact same vibe your instance has today. That's just how big reddit was.
Federation just means no one group of admins can seize control, even if World went to shit tomorrow, everyone would just bounce. I have zero "loyalty" to my instance, if it starts to suck I'm out.
I don't hate LW, I even regularly post to a few LW communities. The sysadmins do a good job. There are a few debatable moderation decisions, but those are usually documented on [email protected]
The main issues I have with it is
centralization of communities coupled with the current federation implementation creating 7-days delay for instance like aussie.zone (see [email protected] for a meme and discussion on that topic)
their communities being the default means they can take controversial decisions and impact a topic for everyone until an alternative community emerges. See all the debates with the Media Bias Fact Checker bot, which in the end got removed from [email protected] ([email protected] for an alternative) but apparently it still on [email protected]
another consequence of centralization is impact of their being unavailable. People here might remember August 2023 when LW was under consistent DDoS attack, it was barely usable. This prevented a third of Lemmy total users to use Lemmy. Should they face a similar issue in the future, most of the Lemmy communities would be unusable.
Because the pedantic shit that the socialist get away with in .ml, Hexbear, and Lemmygrad doesn’t fly here. And because of this, they accuse .World of bias while completely ignoring the fact that their own instances ban people for simply being “liberal.”
I got into an argument with some hexbear users on their instance. Curiously despite all my comments going against the hexbear consensus the only ones that got deleted were the ones that called out another user for using a pay to see documentary. I ironically said something along the lines of "nothing says socialism like paying for propaganda" and then had that comment quickly deleted. My crackpot unproven theory is that the moderators of that instance are deliberately trying to sell information (propaganda) to impressionable leftists to make a quick buck.
I have nothing against the wolders but the admins of that instance raise more than a few eyebrows. Particularly when they rolled back specific anti hate speech policies in favor of vague common sense ones to stay ahead of the anti-woke crowd.
Kind of feels like they have been trying to take over Lemmy. Which... Could be a lot worse but still rubs me the wrong way.
Some of the dumbest and most aggressive comments I've seen on Lemmy came from lemmy.world. Most comments on it seem OK, but it does have a reddit-like flavour with a good number of unpleasant users.
I am really somewhat surprised to hear that honestly. After Lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net, the worst extremes I see by far come from lemmy.ml. Sort of a "when I see trolling this bad, then >90% of the time it is lemmy.ml".
After that, yeah, lemmy.world has the largest absolute number of trolls on the Fediverse - you kinda expect some from any large instance, and they are definitely the largest by a wide margin! According to https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list, they have >5-fold active users than anyone else. I presume that's monthly. The next largest instance, is lemmynsfw.com, followed by Lemm.ee, sh.itjust.works, lemmy.ml, etc. but each of those with 2-3k users compared to lemmy.world's 17.2k. So the latter is bigger than many others (if not quite all of them) combined.
Trolls from lemmy.world I block individually, but lemmy.ml got so frustrating for me that I blocked the entire instance. I do not regret that in the slightest. It was that or quit Lemmy altogether. Lemmy.world though seems... "manageable", i.e. not every person from it is worthwhile to talk to, but enough are that it's worth blocking only the trolls while keeping the rest, imho.
Was expecting this comment, I used to be a pacifist, after asking why people would* punch nazis in asklemmy, I read a few books they reccomended and I changed my mind.
I'd say the biggest criticism is that it's the largest instance, and is also a "general purpose" instance, which sort of takes away from the main goal of the fediverse. When 90% of content comes from one instance, it opposes the goal of decentralization.
I chose lemdro.id because it's nice and fast, the admins are very good, and its main topic is around technology/software which I like
I don't think the existence of large instances is in itself strictly antithetical to decentralization. The network effect makes them inevitable.
The power in the fediverse is everyone has a standard toolset to interact with the entire fediverse. Most people won't, and that's okay. The important thing is that, should larger communities become too oppresive as they gentrify, replacing them is a cheap decision, as you and everyone like-minded with you can squad up and leave at any time and lose nothing as the standard tooling of the platform facilitates that migration. You have mobility in the fediverse, and that permits choice to those who seek it.
This will stop being true once the larger instances start augmenting their experiences with proprietary nonsense. Features that only work there, that you can invest into and become dependant on, that you'd have to give up if you leave.
The day that happens will be the day that chunk of the Fediverse dies. Or, well, it won't die, it will probably flourish and do very well. But it won't be the Fediverse anymore. It will just be another knee-high-fence-gated community, that happens to run on Fediverse tech.
.world runs into issues because it's overwhelmingly liberal and the mods are anti-Marxist on a platform built by Communists and dominated by leftists in general. They also defederated from the major Marxist instances. Lemmy.world is largely a replication of Reddit as well, so people leaving Reddit also don't necessarily want that either.
It's also by far the largest instance, not necessarily in a good way. It tends to dominate the fediverse and thus their mods and admins have an outsized voice, even if federation helps combat that issue.
Plenty of people like Lemmy.world, you'll get different answers if you asked on another community like Lemmy.ml's AskLemmy.
Communists? Really? There is quite a gap between being leftist (which in itself is a term that generalizes multiple ideological position and political views. Look to my home country Denmark and see how many left leaning parties exists. None of them are Communists btw). Sorry if this comes off as arrogant, but are you from the US? I ask because I often see US citizen use this overgeneralization and seem lack knowledge on the difference between e.g. socialism and communism.
I'm a Marxist-Leninist, I've read over 2 dozen books on Marxism, you can check my comment history if you want. The lead developers of Lemmy are Communists.
Also, the Nordics are Social Democracies, not Socialist.
Look to my home country Denmark and see how many left leaning parties exists. None of them are Communists btw
Western bloc countries purged their governments of explicitly communist parties back in the 50s and 60s, during the hottest years of the Cold War. The parties that formed in their wake had many of the same ideological inclinations operating under different monikers. So you've got Red–Green Alliance and more left-leaning voices in the Social Democrats talking about public housing and land reform and a worker-lead democracy, just like explicit Communists in Cuba and Vietnam and South Africa and Korea and India were seventy years ago.
Similarly, "conservative" parties organized under UKIP, National Front, FDL, or the AfD espousing all the same racist, ultra-nationalist, imperial expansionist views common to 1930s European fascists. None of this shit is new in the material sense. It's just fresh paint on the old frame.
It's one of the easiest instances to join, thanks in no small part to the focus on growth over doctrinaire censorship. Consequently, a lot of people who don't like .world end up joining it just to get access to the other more tightly administered communities.
They also defederated from the major Marxist instances.
From what I recall the issue was that users from those instances acted like weapons grade cunts and it was just easier to defederate from them rather than the admins and mods have to deal with all the issues that came with them. They didn't block them simply because they're Marxist instances.
They defederated from Hexbear "as a last resort-" before ever federating with Hexbear.
In the Lemmygrad defederation thread, there's unsupported claims of hate speech and calls to violence, which we have to fill in the blanks - the mods are anti-Marxist and anti-revolution, so any Marxist instance is going to fail that test.
The Hexbear defederation thread is somehow worse when they list why instead of leaving it to the imagination. Read some of the top comments, it's clear that it was anti-Socialist in motive. Real spooky scary zingers listed as evidence in the post like “The West’s role in the world, through organizations such as NATO, the IMF, and the World Bank - among many others - are deeply harmful to the billions of people living both inside and outside of their imperial core.” This statement is 100% obvious to anyone not stanning the US Empire.
Another example listed is “These organizations constitute the modern imperial order, with the United States at its heart - we are not fooled by the term “rules-based international order.” It is in the Left’s interest for these organizations to be demolished. When and how this will occur, and what precisely comes after, is the cause of great debate and discussion on this site, but it is necessary for a better world.” Yet again, they are defederated for being Marxists, and therefore being revolutionary. This is just because they are authentically Marxist, not because posters were mean.
The mods of Lemmy.world are Liberals. Not just any liberals, but "true believers." Marxism is dangerous to them and so they shut it out, they spelled it out plainly.
Also, just thinking about it, but OP, you are posting this on a LW community, while people really disliking LW probably blocked the instance. You could maybe crosspost to [email protected] to get additional answers
I usually beef with sh.it.just.works users because by far I've met the most wrong takes there, especially in WPT, and it's quite funny considering the instance name conveys a sort of desperation in not being able to get Lemmy to work, which just makes it seem like it's an instance for the less intellectualy gifted of us, but it's all in good fun really. Some communities there are also quite nice.
I'm pretty aligned with hexbears/MLs but their Russia simping is too much, whether it's critical support or trying to get a reaction out of folks to post the pig it just feels like a nazi bar type situation.
Ironically db0 and slrpnk feel far more legit to me as an anarchist though neither are explicitly anarchist or based around being leftist in any other way.
Blahaj.zone banned me for transphobia on my first post I think. Or one of the communities did. No idea what I said there but I totally get them not messing around with bans.
World is just the largest instance, so naturally has the most trolls, spam, dodgy mods with weird rules and so on and so forth.
That's the beauty of the fediverse though, if they ever became a real problem for me I'd just block em all. I kind of love this instance culture. Makes the place feel more human than the cold masto bullshit.
My wrong take of sh.it.just.works’s name is that it’s for people who neither care nor know how the fediverse works or what it even is - people who just want to consume and occasionally randomly interact.
Justworks has some dedicated anti-leftism communities. Essentially folks dedicated to having a problem with Lemmy existing as long as it is made and maintained by communists.
Are people really starting to hate on 50% of the lemmy population because of their instance?
You betcha buddy. Joking. For myself, at least.
Idk what's going on with Flying Squid, but a lot of the trolls accounts I see are from .world so people are probably starting to associate that instance with those kinds of people.
I don't think FlyingSquid is a troll; I just think they tend to be argumentative and opinionated (I can be those things as well, so I'm not really judging when I say so).
He is also very heavy handed. The entire admin team is (not necessarily a bad thing). I was banned from a community for reporting a comment that insulted me directly because they didn't like a joke I made. The joke was a harmless word pun, the comment I reported called me an idiot. But I was the one banned. Resource? None, calling the mod chat to argue a community ban is discouraged and also an offense. My account could be banned just for pointing it out in this comment. But that's just the way things are here. I had to block FS because he tended to argue in bad faith with me whenever I happened to comment in the same post as him.
The Troll thing I mentioned was more regarding the hate for .world accounts. I'm a little skeptical of some, especially the newer ones.
I've seen some of Flying Squids' comments, but its not like I've been following them closely. I don't think they're saying anything wrong, based on what I've seen. I wouldn't begrudge someone for being passionate. That just shows me they care.
I want you all to know that I'm happy you're here, cis het white male frat boy from old wealth with an ivy league education or a neorospicy gay trans Jewish anarcho-communist and everything else out there.
While I won't judge you on your instance, I will judge you on your ability to be a good neighbor. I'm always glad to see humility, kindness, empathy, comradery, etc. on display.
I don’t find any issues on .world. Yeah some people say dumb stuff, but that’s just the world isn’t it? I am sure there are others who think the same of me. It’s whatever, some people getting mad at .world are just mad they’re not in an echo chamber.
But other people complaining about trolls are right, there’s just no place for that. Report, block and move on. It’s not your job to educate anyone.
Meow meow meow meow meow meow <----- That's the kittens meowing, because they're having a such a good time, but it's still kind of scary! But it's October season! It's spooky scary time!!!
That's not true! There are also useful idiots as well as actors (only the latter of which realize that a game is even being played). So the number of "people" is lower than apparent, yet nonzero.
Easy, because it's often home to some extreme and often bizarre opinions. It often makes Reddit seem civil and intellectual.
In the last month alone, I've seen:
Downvotes for suggesting that if you were to ask Big Tech to split, they'll probably just split in a way that keeps them aligned, while cutting unprofitable chunks out.
Downvotes for suggesting that TikTok shouldn't be banned for being "stupid", given that most social media is stupid, and people often said that about the shit that many of us grew up with.
Just endless nonsense about how you cannot print with Windows, like at all, while Linux (never stating a distro) "just works". It's clear that so many people in the tech community on lemmy.world haven't used Windows for years.
Crap about LLM's and how providers like OpenAI are "dumb", despite the fact that many use grounding and expert systems to guide towards correctness (literally what I work on in my job).
Being so US-centric AND contrarian that you regularly see posts around how "Europe is so much better for this", when Europe is a fucking continent with separate countries and their own laws/customs.
Posts about how we can get "normies" to use Lemmy
None of the above would happen on Reddit. They're all signs of communities that are detached from reality, so much so that on Mastodon there are several posts from people that have called Lemmy (basically meaning the "main" instance) out as being toxic and unfriendly compared to other fediverse offerings.
I used Reddit for around 15 years, and had never seen the above. Sure, it was toxic in other ways, but Lemmy in 2024 is basically 2004 Slashdot - just replace Bush with Trump, and it's basically the same shit about how Microsoft is evil, anyone that doesn't use Linux is a moron, and arguing about Star Trek.
My biggest problem with .world is that people will just make up whatever they want about the out-group and everyone just believes it without question and with no interest in examining the evidence. It's a toxic element of the site's culture that encourages circle-jerking and the automatic dismissal of opposing viewpoints while making intelligent and informed discussion impossible.
The moderation is also pretty heavy-handed with censorship and things get removed for "misinformation" pretty frequently just because the mods disagree with it. You don't have to go very far back in the modlog right now to find removed posts from Cowbee and Alcoholicorn, despite both backing up their arguments with published books from respectable authors. It's best to avoid engaging with the mods at all, I got banned from World News because a mod couldn't defend their position so they just banned me. There's a pretty clear bias towards NATO and the US.
But like I said my main issue is the first point, and I'll stop judging .worlders when I start to see people actually ask for evidence when someone says, "I saw a bunch of tankies eating kittens" instead of just blindly accepting it as fact because it's about an out-group.
Can it be an out-group and also have totalitarian control of the platform structure?
These people made Lemmy. Sorry if their numbers are lower than average. I guess next time around they can make a no libruls allowid sign or something so the other 98% of humans know not to ruin their great fun.
Lmao y'all are wild. Why are you on a platform where people you don't like have, "totalitarian control" over the structure? Is it, perhaps, because they used this "totalitarian control" to create a structure that was decentralized and allowed communities to form that operated on different rules and different views? Doesn't sound very totalitarian if you ask me.
You literally just made up a strawman argument, which you then immediately cited as "evidence"?
Mods are busy. If this is what you tend to do, I don't blame them one bit for not wanting to volunteer their unpaid time to deal with it - for the same reason I now understand better why some women would prefer the bear.
Now, please downvote me, you know you want to... just this once, I want you to know what it's like to do something with the recipient's consent.
World is the biggest instance. I think this is just a case of people seeing problems there more often. I'm not convinced it's inherently worse than other places.
It’s the most toxic instance I’ve ventured into (and admittedly have this account on). People spread lies and vitriol here about as much as Twitter and Reddit.
Lemmy.world users generally hold ridiculous, unrealistic leftist positions and do not have any concept of people who might have any other more moderate left positions
Here's a clue : try posting something in support of Jews or Israel on either .ml or .world, and you'll see the two user bases are exactly the same type of antisemitic tankie trash, no discernible difference whatever
By supporting Israel, you are not supporting Jews. Israel, being a settler colonial ethnostate whose national project requires the conquest and ethnic cleansing of territory, cannot be a safe place for Jewish people.
Associating Jewish people with the genocidal actions of Israel is antisemitic as fuck.