So hopefully Lemmy doesn’t catch on so will that those folks come here in force, too. For now at least, it’s much better.

At the very least, I suspect Lemmy, as a federated network, has more power to filter them. We saw years ago what happened when the Wolfballs bigots tried to join, they were eventually isolated by most other instances who continued to run without them. So as long as we can retain a situation where the largest instances actually take a solid stance against assholes and trolls and bigots, then it becomes much easier to make them all optional, shunned to register on the more liberalist permissive instances.

Seems like the average user on here is smart enough not to get caught up in that bullshit thankfully.

I wonder if it’s still early enough to give people taps on the shoulder - “don’t feed the trolls, friend”.

I’ve never understood the mindset that this social site is made up of a different mix of personalities than any other. It’s not.

On the other hand, this is often the case in small communities. Most Lemmy instances are general-purpose or large enough to have a typical mix, but I have been to a few sites which will moderate away any hostility whatsoever, and that does make the site unusable for some personalities. These kind of sites have rules like “No politics. No insults. No drama.” Toxicity isn’t inevitable, there’s nothing forcing community staff to tolerate mean people or mean outbursts, but it does take a mixture of design decisions and careful micromanagement which most communities, and especially most large sites, don’t bother with.

edit: and on the flipside, there are also communities where toxicity is expected and it’s amazing to see someone acting nice there, it might even be done as a trolling method.

But I will say that I’ve basically stopped checking my notifications because all of a sudden it seems like almost every time I go in there, I’ve got at least one insufferable, hostile, negative, etc response or message in there. It didn’t used to be that way.

I still check mine, but occasionally I’ll know I’ve said something that will have a hostile reply. Usually when I’ve asked someone to stop being hostile and inflammatory :)))

That’s one of the benefits of having a forum small enough to have a community. Troublemakers stick out like a sore thumb.

It’s not only about many people here being technical, of course you’re right that it plays a big part, and it’s also that the Fediverse is a rejection of for-profit, closed social media, so there’s a HUGE crossover between its users and the FOSS community (including Linux users) who really take strong issue to many things about Windows (and Mac) that Windows users consider to be normal. And with Lemmy especially, the initial userbase was largely anti-capitalists, since Reddit was banning many of their subreddits and was exploiting their users for profit with ads, blocking third-party apps, and bending to the demands of media companies and their owners. So plenty of people here are political about software.

Enough folks drank the coolaid,

You say that like the UK all sat down in a room and most of the country said “please censor me”.

with the only way to fully dismantle them would be to shutoff all access to the Internet

I don’t think this is true. It’s a bit complicated because there are ways to obfuscate the traffic, but generally speaking, I’d assume governments could track and block nodes just as easily as you can find them.

Tor is slow

It might trip you up for real-time things like gaming and you might take a while to download HUGE files, but it’s much faster than its historical reputation

and has a reputation of being used by pedophiles and drug traffickers

This is true for any privacy software. Encrypted chats, cryptographic currency, darknets. Even the internet itself has that reputation. Anyone trying to hide what they’re doing is likely to seek privacy tools. Reputation means nothing.

The write-up they link is also insightful. Notably, they “explicitly reject these accusations” of being Zionists and insist it’s a legal precaution required by their countries.

I’ve bought servers for hosting some small communities and I sometimes thought maybe I was paranoid for retaining anonymity and carefully picking the country and company to allow muh freedoms as far as speech goes, but it’s interesting seeing .world and feddit pull out the “just following legislation” card (which is understandable, given that staff imprisonment is obviously bad for their community, but also irresponsible and complicit to simply accept the situation instead of resolving it, and because this is an internet community there are safe ways to resolve it).

Assuming you’re using the default Lemmy UI, there’s a block settings menu in your account settings page. It’s worth exploring, there’s some good options to play around with.

Did it show you a specific error/ban message?

Anonymity relies on other people using the same name. Otherwise you’ve just got pseudonymity, like me right now.

You can get the same end result with throwaways, but it’s a bit more time-taking on most instances since spammers have abused most of the instances without a signup manual approval.

I don’t see how that’s relevant.

Not that user: My biggest problem with Debian was that packages were often so out of date (even sid). This was a big issue for the kinds of software I wanted to run, and also generally denied me useful newer features in most programs. Security and stability weren’t that device’s most important values.

I like high quality communities, which cannot maintain quality without staff, and which would probably struggle to maintain any funding.

One example of a community I became a moderator for often had trolls occasionally show up and post obviously malicious content, and commercial ad spam. Due to timezone differences, these often took hours to be deleted by existing staff.

So it wasn’t about morality, righteousness, money or power. It was about me wanting to develop a community I cared about.

Edit: in a comment chain, you mentioned people who clearly moderate for other motives. They exist, I’ve seen them and helped get some removed in one particular community. Like you said, there are other motivators. Sometimes a community is so desperate for volunteers that they keep junk ones on-board, sometimes the admin personally likes them and enables their abuse, or sometimes the admin is too absent and no-one can kick the abusive staff out. And worse, if a staff team is toxic, it’s harder to bring good volunteers in.

It depends on the community. Larger general purpose communities tend towards that, the people who acknowledge you are typically people disputing a ban or who took it personally. On the other hand, for a Lemmy example, look at the admin Ada (and similar examples) who have reasons to regularly communicate their decisions and achievements and are clearly in line with their general community’s values – their community won’t have as many people crying about censorship because the community doesn’t pretend that they will tolerate bigotry.

Mods who just delete garbage posts (sometimes called “janitors” on other platforms) are typically faceless thankless volunteers, or abusive personalities powertripping. It’s a tough job, and someone has to put their hand up for it.

Yeah I realized my reply was a bit silly so I retracted it, I’m guessing I was a bit late and you’d already replied.

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Honestly, I’ve never had this problem. Two GPUs, two clicks in the gui driver manager.

It looks like lemmy.ml didn’t remove it, but their staff are certainly anti-ICE, plenty of posts there for weeks full of outcry.