I use it as my daily driver most of the time - it’s fantastic! There are some features that are annoying, so like Lemmy it’s still in development, but overall it’s much better for most things IMHO. Its search function (like Reddit’s) is crap, while Lemmy’s is amazing, but the whole overall flow with Topics and now Feeds really helps. e.g. if you wanted less political material, then you could just not subscribe at all to those communities (or avoid the largest, most contentious ones), but still access it via the Topic description up above anytime you wanted - basically allowing you to have your cake (no politics appearing in your Subscribed feed) and eat it too (yes politics, via another route).:-)

I mean… that’s how they make their money, so… yeah?:-)

By having an external source of truth to compare against. In this case you could spin up your own instance, and as a mod you could see where all the votes were coming from, so you could simulate having the same set of defederations as some other instance. Anything that does not match up then warrants further examination.

People did something similar and found that lemmy.ml was modifying its internal database logs - though it was claimed that it was merely due to the newest software release that it alone was running at the time, before it got rolled out to become public. I never followed through on that further.

That’s all somewhat expensive to do, but basically if you run your own instance then you have total control. (Even then, you won’t know what’s going on inside of the OTHER instances that you do not control!).

Oh I just meant that you might be surprised by being banned yourself - being there now, even if they have not come for you yet, doesn’t mean that they won’t in the future. Sorry, I suppose the eating leopards was misleading bc it could be interpreted so as to imply that you wanted some of those aspects, but I did not mean to imply that you did.

An example story of someone being banned there who found that fact surprising - in this case they were even told to kill themselves by a lemmy.ml mod, who said that he wanted to shoot the OP, but it was OP’s comments that were removed, not the mod who advocated for violence against him.

Just the fear of that alone was enough to cause dmv.social to shut down, back during the waves of CSAM attacks, before the automated software was implemented to filter it out.

The word you are looking for there is “instance”, like for you lemm.ee is your instance.

And if you scroll to the bottom of any page, you can see the instances list of all the other ones that are connected or disconnected (the latter called more often “defederated”) from yours. lemm.ee is connected to https://lemmynsfw.com/, although it looks like something is wrong with the connection between it and feddit.org (e.g. it’s not reporting even the Lemmy software version for it, plus the encoding for the name looks different than on Lemm.ee - someone may have typed it in wrong?), so @affenlehrer@feddit.org you’ll have to contact your instance admins to tell them about that.

Even then, to connect to the communities for the first time is quite a process: you can figure out what the URL is going to be, then try to go there, then request to join, then wait maybe a day and the content should show up (but only new content form then onwards, while old stuff is a lost cause at that point). Most of the time someone else (with more experience) has already done this for you, but if they have not…

Btw PieFed solves all of these issues (except it might not allow porn? I’m not sure but I don’t see it anywhere there), whereas Lemmy is quite a bit behind in its software experience that it offers. The entire Fediverse though is more for the '“early adopter” mindset than like Reddit, where everything “just works” (so long as what you want is in alignment with increasing their profits). Using Lemmy is a LOT like using Linux - except here there’s basically no documentation that someone is pointed to, you kinda just have to ask or read and find stuff out as you go.

Lemmy.ml is not defederated from Lemmy.world, so new users will see everything by default.

Also, “instance blocking” would be better named as "community muting’, bc it leaves users from those instances free to vote and reply to your content, trigger notifications, and you’ll still see it in other communities.

To truly block it, someone has to first even know about it, and then the only real options are all rather extreme - move to an instance that has defederated from them all (Lemmy.ml in particular is extremely rarely defederated from), switch to using PieFed, a Lemmy alternative written in Python rather than Rust, or the Lemmy apps Sync or Connect. Or implement a filter like with Ublock Origin or some such. None of these are trivial, and again, none are available to new users to even be told are possible, or helpful to be done.

Yes, all of the Threadiverse (the forum based subset of the Fediverse) has only ~55k monthly active users. So if a significant fraction of a million people were to join, it would put significant strain on things - the hardware (especially network connections) alone would become swamped, and especially the moderation workload would skyrocket.

Check out PieFed btw - its advancements to enable democratization of moderation are fascinating! As just one example, during the signup wizard where someone says what interests they have and get subscribed to communities based on their answers (another feature Lemmy lacks), it asks people how much word filtering they would like to see about “Trump” and “Musk” - a lot, a little, or none (no filtering). Thus, users can define their own expectations as to the experience they want to see, rather than have that dictated to them by a mod.

Being written in Python rather than Rust, PieFed’s own scalability is definitely worthy to be called into question, but on the other hand it is already testing out so many features that people have been begging for on Lemmy for many years without seeing any hints that those features will ever come, while PieFed already has them. Things like categories of communities, just recently made user customizable and also shareable, so they act like multi-Reddits.

If I may say, with all due respect (truly), Reddit highly encouraged “engagement” for the sake of those stats being sold to advertisers hence increasing their profits.

But here we are free from such. Breathe a sigh of relief at that… and note how we can choose to do things differently here.

Yes, I am saying this bc you are new, in hopes that it will help bring you up to speed and explain why people are downvoting you (I didn’t myself btw). I hope you don’t feel I’m picking on you. Okay, I’ll shut up now and leave you alone!:-)

Did you do so in a community located on lemmy.ml? Try it, it should be fairly quick, and you’ll be banned from communities that you’ve never even heard of, for violating a rule that is written down nowhere that I can find.

Or maybe after the election seasons, they might not be as quick these days? It might have accomplished its purpose already.

True, but those users on the Big Three are fairly reputable for being contentious. So much so that merely blocking Hexbear alone will improve someone’s experience on the Fediverse by ~90%, and then if you are able to block Lemmy.ml (most people using Lemmy cannot, not truly) then that improves it by a still further 90%.

Put another way, yes it blocks too much - that much is sadly true - however when the vast majority of the most batshit insane comments that one sees across the entire Fediverse comes from a user on one of the Big Three instances, then rather than leave the Fediverse entirely to get away from such, it makes a helluva lot of sense to just block users from those instances (which again, most people on Lemmy really can’t do, without going to extreme measures).

It’s like email spam: what legitimate content are you willing to give up in order to block the vast majority of incoming stuff that you don’t want to see? There’s enough leftover after blocking it out, at least for me and many others say the same. It does kinda suck for users on those instances, but like… at this point it’s very well known, and they’ve made their choice, so now all that remains is for me to make mine, and my preferences - to avoid nonconsensual insanity thrown at me relentlessly from an instance that not only fails to discourage such but sometimes actively encourages it - should be able to matter too!

I’m seeing a lot of people call Hexbear a tankie instance lately - they aren’t really though, they are an instance full of trolls who are militant against any belief system at all (most especially their own?), or as near to that as makes no difference. They constantly lie - most especially to one another, and have even been caught lying to other instance admins.

I would lump Hexbear in under a name like The Big Three (to block), but I just thought I’d point out that many people are going to argue at its being called specifically a “tankie” one. And ofc it’s more than just these three - e.g. Midwest.social has been caught in numerous scandals as well, though unlike the Big Three, the actual users there are perfectly fine, so I don’t advocate for blocking it, just avoiding the communities there.

Speaking of, the Lemmy “instance blocking” would have been much better named as a “community mute”, since it allows you to see the users from that instance, and they can vote on and reply to your content, triggering notifications, etc. The only real way to do an actual instance block is to move to an instance that has defederated from it (requires admin rights), or use PieFed that can implement a true user block from any instance you ask for (no admin approval necessary), or the Lemmy apps Sync and Connect can likewise do that.

You are not the first person I’ve heard this from. Ironically the people who avoid anything even resembling a political topic can have quite the calm experience there, in the other communities.

However, it’s still supporting that behavior, and there’s also the “first they came for” mantra, which suggests that even though they haven’t banned you from the entire instance yet, it may still lead to a shocking surprise when they eat your face off later rather than sooner.

But yes there are many other instances to choose from:-). Like feddit.org for a location-based instance for someone in Europe, or Discuss.Online for someone based in the USA, or themed instances such as programming.dev or literature.cafe, etc.

On r/RedditAlternatives people say e.g.:

1. it’s software made and run by tankies
2. it’s way more difficult to figure out how to use, than e.g. Reddit, much like Bluesky is easier than Mastodon
3. it looks so much more empty, especially for topics not about using Linux or generic memes - where content at?
4. they don’t need apps and will continue so long as Reddit hasn’t killed off old-Reddit yet
5. they don’t want to bother with change, and their niche sub is where their current community is located, with very few others willing to move, hence they do not either (crabs in a bucket)

Obviously all of these have at least a germ of truth, as well as being mixed in with laziness and believing falsehoods, like that Reddit isn’t already changing underneath them, so that even using old-Reddit as they have for years, it’s not the same anymore as it was.

Also, Lemmy isn’t doing well in terms of adding new features to capitalize on attaining more users - e.g. in many ways the software here is even more authoritian than there, since while there is a modlog there is no modmail, no notification upon removal or locking of your content (notice the similarity here to being shadow-banned?), and the modlog simply says “mod”, so there is zero recourse to understand or appeal a mod decision. Plus lemmy.ml routinely instance-bans people from communities that they’ve never even heard of, for a single criticism of something going on in Russia, China, or North Korea (which ofc would be perfectly understandable for a rule violation, except that’s never stated anywhere in any rule set!?!?!? how are people supposed to follow the “rules” when nowhere are they ever written down!?).

And don’t even get me started on the TROLLS here!!! That is the express purpose (this one even written down, tbf!:-) of Hexbear, to have the opportunity to “dunk” on liberals - which itself is totally fine, so long as both parties give consent to it, but the trouble comes when it spills out from those communities, or when someone stumbles into them by replying to a post seen in the All feed, without the ability to read the side-bar text first explaining what it is all about.

Lemmy requires ENORMOUS efforts to curate someone’s feed, by blocking users, communities, and even whole entire instances (speaking of, the Lemmy feature that “does that” actually does not do that - it would have been better named as a community mute, since it still allows users from the instance to appear in communities not located specifically on that instance), and in the meantime people get bullied and name-called for their beliefs. Surprise: most normies do not enjoy that happening to them, hence just walk away rather than put up with all the gaslighting and other crap coming at them from Lemmy users. We aren’t terribly welcoming here, in many ways.:-(

Here is an example of an instance admin abusing the privilege of being able to see who voted for what content. OTOH, this incident was noted, and people started abandoning whole entire communities there and moving them elsewhere.

THIS is the freedom that the Fediverse offers: not that you can do whatever you want, but that you don’t have to remain beholden to anyone else (like spez), and instead can move elsewhere at any time, while still accessing the entirety of the Fediverse (unlike Reddit which gates it behind their API limiters, for the sake of profit).

shouldn’t follow you

Do you mean… across communities? PieFed has a community-specific metric iirc, or else it was coming soon, but Lemmy has nothing even close to this.

PieFed also has anonymous voting, but I am personally against that, as it seems too easy to abuse. I’d rather go the other way and make everything fully public. If you want to offer someone a criticism, then why not attach your username to that message being sent? Doing that would make for a much more civil environment IMHO.

Absolutely: the voting systems were out there for a reason:-).

Is it really the fault of the system then, if it was set up with one intention but then was abused?

Btw, reddthat.com has downvotes disabled, so if you made an account there you would never see them again. The downvotes would still affect the sorting of the comments on other instances though, and thereby the frequency of replies.

I for one want downvotes, if I say something incorrect then I deserve it, but I don’t want downvotes from people who are just trolling - nor upvotes from them, nor replies either - bc then it takes some of my time and attention to try to guess what is going on, and sort true facts from their fictional views of the world.

So for me, it’s not “voting” that I would like to see addressed and fixed, but rather the presence of trolls. Which PieFed (and the Lemmy apps Sync and Connect) provide many tools to help with, e.g. it can block all users from an instance, unlike the Lemmy feature of the same name that merely acts as a community muting but does not actually block the users themselves in any way.

I love how PieFed is heavily pushing towards the democratization of moderation, but that’s another subject altogether I suppose:-).

But then they would be easier to spoof and thereby enact vote manipulation.

PieFed was doing some experiments along those lines. Personally I don’t like the idea of fully anonymous voting and would rather go the other way and make them fully public - that would give people pause before doing things like downvoting every single reply to a post or every post in a community, or following people around and downvoting everything that they do.

Voting ideally would be a 2-way proposition where someone can offer their opinion, and the recipient should have the ability to choose whether to receive it or not - i.e. be able to block someone who is abusive, or whole entire instances where that is exceedingly common (cough Hexbear cough, and their very common alts on Lemmy.ml).