I came here around the time the rif app shut down, and the general vibe I get from this place is much more negative than when I joined. Is Lemmy growing more toxic or is it just my imagination?
While Lemmy might be getting a larger variety of personalities, some of them being jerks, I still find it a far more pleasant place to be than reddit.
Check your communities, and what instances they’re on. Not all are created equal. lemmy.ml tends to be pretty wacko unless you’re of their particular ideological alignment, lemmy.world is very very large and thus has a very very large number of obnoxious shitheads compared to other instances. On the other hand, beehaw.org is intentionally and pathologically positive. I also find lemmy.ca quite friendly, though I might be biased.
Rent free
You weren’t tagged and still showed up to prove OPs point. It’s not rent free when they’re being stalked by a fucking weirdo basement dweller.
I’m browsing all and you guys are telling your daily ghost stories. I have blocked all of the meme communities where you repost stuff from reddit, so most of what comes up is this or world news, and I don’t need to explain its political bent. You have to realize this comes off as very forced and melodramatic to people on some level. Your being completely unable to take a joke is just icing on the cake.
Daily ghost stories? Me posting memes from reddit? You told a joke? The fuck are you on about, lol?
If you’re suggesting that by saying “rent free” in response to someone outing you for stalking them is a joke, then we have very different definitions of what a joke is. It’s akin to a Republican making a dumbass comment and when confronted responding with, “it’s just a joke”.
Also, did you seriously not understand that “you” can be plural and nobody thinks you are posting every single meme on multiple different websites? Can you see straight right now?
You do not have a very strong case for stalking (who, the site itself?) by talking about something you federated with in a public forum. Remember, this is a website the owners willingly hooked up to another. This is like loudly complaining about a business while standing in front of it and acting like one of the customers is stalking you when they say something. It’s hard to believe you would say that sincerely. It’s more like an un-self-aware attempt at manipulation from a child. The internet moderation-attuned desperation to control conversations is palpable. I pity any coworkers you dare to express yourself to.
Do you have any other ways that you would like to describe my saying the words “rent free” as an unforgivable provocation? Let’s see what you come up with this time.
You’re deranged, man. Also wouldn’t he be the one living rent free in your head if you feel the need to check his comments daily? Get a hobby or something.
This is completely delusional. Again, I got here from the All feed. I clicked on this because I was curious what people were framing as “hostility” - clearly you don’t think you are being paranoid and hostile rn, which is extremely funny. You guys failed basic reading comprehension and totally freaked out.
If you’re following them around, that’s not living rent free in someone’s head, that’s just being weird.
The whole idea of the phrase is the one living rent free is just enjoying their life while the OTHER person obsesses about them.
If you’re the one doing the stalking, it’s the stalkee that’s living rent free in your head.
I wouldn’t call beehaw pathologically positive. They just seem to bee some very nice people that caught to create a community of nice people. It’s not a pathology, it’s a common understanding.
Check your communities, and what instances they’re on. Not all are created equal. lemmy.ml tends to be pretty wacko
“Hey y’all, anyone feeling hostility on Lemmy”
“Yeah, let me tell you what, fuck those fuckers over there. They fucking suck and I hope they rot.”
Like, how do you not immediately block everyone on lemmy.ca after reading this hate?
I also find lemmy.ca quite friendly,
Sure, if you ignore the assholes who pop into other communities to take a colossal shit on them.
Bro they just said “tends to be pretty wacko”
That’s like, really mild. You might need to get some thicker skin.
I’m sorry if my post offended you.
Is that what you think happened here?
The irony of your stupidity and judgement in that post is hilarious.
Is lemmy.ml is the second largest instance? Or at least rapidly growing? That would explain why it feels this way.
.ml stands for Marxist\Lenin afaik. And the mods\admins take it very seriously.
I see a lot more assholes from .world and .shtjstwrks
.ML peeps are either chill or really cringe depending on how militant they are.
The majority of shit stains I see are from .ml while .world is a close second.
It’s just .works, really.
Hi 👋
.ml is the instance run by the developers of the Lemmy fediiverse software, and they themselves are tankies. Do with that information what you will.
Do with that information what you will
Hey, some of us made our accounts when this was the Lemmy instance.
o7
Some of us joined much later when the apicalypse happened.
Huh, TIL.
Lemmy users are much more entrenched ideologically than an average layman. We all have strong opinions and it can get pretty heated. I avoid posting inflammatory posturing if I’m self aware enough. But I’m just as human and fallible as the rest.
Someone more self aware than me!? How dare you! /s
And they think the real world is reflective of what we talk about here. It’s truly bizarre. I’m terminally online, unemployed ATM, but I still get there’s an outside world.
Take all the Trump voter hate for example. Do they not truly understand how under and misinformed most American’s are? Watch Mamdami interview Trump voters in NYC. Not ONE was what we picture as MAGA.
Also, since Trump 1.0, people refuse to talk politics. We’re at a party last month and talking about my new, weird, .22 rifle. I started to bring up a thing in the Big Beautiful Bill that was on-topic and the only thing I find decent in it. “NO. We’re not talking politics.” “I’m NOT. I’m talking about one thing I think is cool and will help gun owners.” Jesus. Now we gotta dance on eggshells.
Yeah, the total destruction of community and third-places is I think the #1 cause of the division of political discourse, but second is that people refuse to engage with other human beings on the topic. They watch TV or browse online, and they get one extremely biased view of the world. They don’t share it with other people where they could get other points of view.
It used to be people would get the paper and talk about it with each other, but that’s taboo now. You take it to an online community who all agree with you. There’s a reason why the infamous Thanksgiving family gathering caused strife. It’s because people were actually having discussions and disagreements. Disagreement is healthy, but people seem allergic to it now.
Disagreement is only healthy if both people are approaching it with the desire to further their understanding
Honestly, I disagree still. That’s the ideal, but even just seeing that there are other opinions held by people you care about is good. If you live in an echo chamber where everyone agrees with you then you think you must be right on everything.
Disagreement with unreasonable people does not change your opinions, it hardens them in the worst way. Also I don’t care about the people making unreasonabke arguments
I think it depends on the situation. I’m not saying to spend time arguing with them. I’m just saying showing them there’s another position that reasonable people they know hold is good. Most people are told the only people who hold a different position than them are crazy people.
I do care about these people, because they vote.
under and misinformed most Americans are
Which is weird, because we are all here. It’s almost like it’s not that hard to find the truth, you just have to be actually invested in finding out what the truth is.
Is malicious ignorance malicious?
Do they not truly understand how under and misinformed most Americans are?
Um, that’s exactly why we are pissed off at them. It’s easier than ever to be informed yet people act like it’s harder, somehow. Pretty fucking enraging.
In my experience, no one but trumpers refuse to talk politics. And it’s because they want to remain actively ignorant. Can’t have anyone revealing the giant holes in their fucked worldview. You might turn them trans, after all.
i’m on the spectrum and can’t handle political conversations if the other person is being confrontational. this doesn’t/shouldn’t make me a right winger, but would make you assume as much about me.
I was talking about in real life, and with people I know well enough to talk about anything remotely deep. Further, I didn’t say I would be confrontational in all cases.
Well, many of us are on the spectrum whether that be ADD, ADHD, Asperger’s, or some other form of autism. Helps us to be highly technical and computer savvy, doesn’t help so much with attempting to reframe “right and wrong,” for most of us.
Unfortunately the very entrenchment, ideologically speaking, that these particular “character traits” cause most of us to have, are being celebrated as “immunity to propaganda” in the media. The reality is that we have an innate sense of right and wrong, and that shit can get skewed all over the place in your formative years. The only remedy I have seen for this is the person intentionally exposing themselves to other cultures.
ADD, ADHD, Asperger’s, or some other form of autism
Wouldn’t the latter fixate more on logic & more likely oppose neurotypical nonsense like biases & overdramatic outrage?
This comment seems like an overly simplistic view
I see an attempt to attribute problematic conduct to conditions at least as likely to resist it & don’t necessarily promote it.
I’m not sure how much “bias” or “overdramatic outrage” are exclusive to NT people
No one wrote exclusive. I know autists & aspies find precautions around irrational neurotypical tendencies incredibly annoying like walking on eggshells.
lemmy.world is very very large and thus has a very very large number of obnoxious shitheads
Yeah? Yeah, you think so? Obnoxious? Yeah? You sayin’ there’s obnoxious shitheads round these parts? That what you’re sayin’? Just wanna be clear! Well you’re wrong! Lemmy.World isn’t large at all. The whole fediverse combined isn’t very large! Not like my penis! Can’t believe you said Lemmy.World is full of obnoxious shitheads! Why would you think that? Can I have $20? Your mom gave me $20! Heyyyoooo!!!
Can confirm some asshole on .ml is chasing around my comments wasting both our time, isn’t that right mistermodal, you incel loser.
The world is increasingly hostile, but let me still seems more humane than any other social media.
Go fuck yourself!
You kiss ya mother wit that mouf!?
I kiss yours
I put on my robe and wizard hat!
no I kiss yours.
I don’t think so, it’s just a dynamic that any platform (including Reddit) has, and like always, it depends on what community you join and what instances your account is federated with.
Things are quite politically tense right now, and it doesn’t help that there are also a lot of issues outside of that sphere (enshittification, Windows 10 EOL, etc…) that could make people angry as well, and have heated debates.
Also, with any influx of people, there may be tensions as the userbase has more voices from different viewpoints, and some may escalate while others won’t. You do have the ability to pick and choose who your admin is (instance), where you want to post, and where you’d like to visit, and you can make your own community without restrictions, so if one method of moderation in a community seems out of your preference, feel free to explore an alternative.
No, but I do actively block any community designed to rage bait like news, politics, and faith
This is the key. You are not required to engage with the rage. Block people, block communities, block instances! Curate your mood and don’t give space in it to things that will poison it.
I haven’t noticed it lately, but I’ve experienced what you’re talking about. As far as I can tell, it ebbs and flows.
There are trolls. Not as many as other places, but we have them.
Once we isolate key people, we look for people we know are in their upstream – people that they read posts from, but who themselves are less influential. (This uses the same social media graph built before.) We then either start flame wars with bots to derail the conversations that are influencing influential people (think nonsense reddit posts about conspiracies that sound like Markov chains of nonsense other people have said), or else send off specific tasks for sockpuppets (changing this wording of an idea here; cause an ideological split there; etc).
The goal is to keep opinions we don’t want fragmented and from coalescing in to a single voice for long enough that the memes we do want can, at which points they’ve gotten a head start on going viral and tend to capture a larger-than-otherwise share of media attention.
(All of the stuff above is basically the “standard” for online PR (usually farmed out to an LLC with a generic name working for the marketing firm contracted by the big firm; deniability is a word frequently said), once you’re above a certain size.)
from Bannon:
“The opposition party is the media,” Steve Bannon, who helped run Trump’s 2016 campaign, told PBS Frontline five years ago. “And the media can only — because they’re dumb and they’re lazy — they can only focus on one thing at a time.”
So the solution, per Bannon? Overwhelm them.
“All we have to do is flood the zone,” he said. “Every day we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done, bang, bang, bang. These guys will never — will never be able to recover. But we’ve got to start with muzzle velocity.”
https://www.npr.org/2025/02/07/nx-s1-5289315/trump-week-in-review
The best defense is to call them out on it and then walk away. They’ll downvote the shit out of you, but who tf cares about upvotes and downvotes. If someone is getting downvoted heavily, read what they said carefully before piling on.
I seriously doubt lemmy is under that sort of concerted, planned attack. There are only so many bot handlers and the like and they aren’t wasting time here.
Lol, I want to live in your world.
You honestly think the fascists and oligarchs are aiming for lemmy? We’re not a blip, not even a sparrow, on the social media radar.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_platforms_with_at_least_100_million_active_users
Say I’m paying you to go out there and influence people. I’d fire you if you came back and said you hit lemmy with your time and my money.
How many people do you know IRL that have even heard of lemmy?!
Sometimes it’s not just the numbers but who those numbers are. Depending on what you’re trying to achieve, influencing all the techy Linux nerds that seem to make up Lemmy might be more helpful than just blowing into the wind for as many as possible on Twitter or whatever.
I’ve got no data either way on this, just some basic social engineering training for work.
Can’t see anyone bothering with lemmy’s pathetic user count, not for a few years at least. Like I said, were I paying you for social engineering, I’d be more than disappointed if you went after us.
Maybe your training taught you something I don’t know? If you’re talking about social engineering in the context of IT, I get that bit, taught classes on it myself.
It’s not always about the user count though. It’s about your end goals. There’s two types of social engineering. Mass and targeted. You’re focusing on the mass social engineering.
Say you want specific information on how Crowdstrike works. You could launch a massive social engineering campaign on Twitter but if you don’t catch any of the engineers who work at Crowdstrike then what’s the point? You just spent all that money for nothing. It would be better to find where those engineers socialize online and try to inject yourself there, doesn’t matter the size of that community and it could very well be on Lemmy in one of the programmer communities.
Now if you want to convince the entire world of something then yeah, focus on the big user counts, don’t worry about the small fry communities. It’s all about your end goal.
I love the civility of this exchange. It’s why I left reddit. Thanks!
Agreed on influencing say influencers (e.g. decision makers in corporate IT for example who presumably would be somewhere on here)
No way. It’s definitely impossible for us to ever be deceived. Get a hold of yourself
I used to think like that until on the e-mail address I had for my lemmy.world account (an account which I left following that) I started getting e-mails in my native language from an organisation based in Tel-Aviv inviting me to attent a “learn about Israel” online course.
This was when I was already very vocal about the actions of Israel in Gaza.
That e-mail wasn’t public and as far as I know only server Admins have access to that stuff.
When the largest Lemmy instance is infiltrated at the Admin level by state actors (and that’s also very clearly the case for Moderation in the main forums there, as reflected by their moderation actions with even one Moderator of the news forum being very openly Zionist in his posts elsewhere), the idea that there are bots and sockpuppets around in Lemmy trying to shift opinions for the benefit of nations and even large political forces, isn’t exactly outrageous.
I mean, if I remember it correctly the budget of Israel’s Hasbara ops is somewhere around $1 billion a year, so plenty of money to have a few people at least part time trying to influence a place with maybe a few hundred thousand people, like Lemmy.
There is a phenomenon going on right now where tiny sites are getting knocked offline due to sudden traffic, basically DDOSing them. It has been found that the automation of these bot farms sends out scrapers to find new places where you can post on the site. Like anything, anything hat allows you to post anything on the site. So it will find some tiny store’s webfront, see it has a place for customer reviews, and then tell the bot farm it has found new land. The place then gets swarmed with bot traffic.
So literally everywhere you can post anything is getting bot traffic right now.
From personal experience, this is definitely untrue.
What the fuck did you just fucking say about me, you little bitch? I’ll have you know I graduated top of my class in the Navy Seals, and I’ve been involved in numerous secret raids on Al-Quaeda, and I have over 300 confirmed kills. I am trained in gorilla warfare and I’m the top sniper in the entire US armed forces. You are nothing to me but just another target. I will wipe you the fuck out with precision the likes of which has never been seen before on this Earth, mark my fucking words. You think you can get away with saying that shit to me over the Internet? Think again, fucker. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of spies across the USA and your IP is being traced right now so you better prepare for the storm, maggot. The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your life. You’re fucking dead, kid. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can kill you in over seven hundred ways, and that’s just with my bare hands. Not only am I extensively trained in unarmed combat, but I have access to the entire arsenal of the United States Marine Corps and I will use it to its full extent to wipe your miserable ass off the face of the continent, you little shit. If only you could have known what unholy retribution your little “clever” comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your fucking tongue. But you couldn’t, you didn’t, and now you’re paying the price, you goddamn idiot. I will shit fury all over you and you will drown in it. You’re fucking dead, kiddo.
Haha baby killer
Are you aware that there are people in this world that have a severe medical condition which causes them to be that way? My mother for instance is one of those people. She is a truck driver that has bad knees and a bad back from driving the truck but you probably do not care about that case either. Oh well I am not one of those people I am 6’4" 245lbs and I exercise every day. I would love to see you say something like to my mother in front of me. Probably never happen though you are probably just an internet tough guy. I doubt very seriously you would say that to someones face. Just my thought.What do you think. Oh I am sorry you probably do not have a brain. I on the other hand will be happy to buy you a plane ticket to come here and see if you have the nerve to say that to someone I know.
What the fuck did you just say about the God Emperor of Mankind, you little heretic? I´ll have you know I graduated top of my class in the Space Marines, and I´ve been involved in numerous secret raids on Chaos, and I have over 300 confirmed kills. I am trained in Plasma Warfare and I´m the top Inquistor in the entire Imperium. You are nothing to me, but just another Xeno scum. I will wipe you the fuck out with precision the likes of wich has never been seen before on Terra, mark my fucking words. You think you can get away with saying that heretic rambling to me? Think again, fucker. As we speak,I am contacting my secret network of Vindicare Assasins across the Emperium, and your IP is being traced right now so you better prepare for the storm, maggot. The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your life. You´re fucking dead, kid. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can kill you in over seven hundred ways, and that´s just with my bare hands. Not only am I extensively trained in CQC, but I have access to the entire arsenal of the Imperium of Man, and I will use it to it´s full extent to wipe your miserable ass of the face of the continent, you little shit. If only you could have know what unholy retribuition you little ‘‘clever’’ heresy was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your fucking tongue. But you couldn ´t, you didn´t, and now you´re paying the price, you goddamn idiot. I will shit fury all over you, and you will drown in it. You´re fucking dead, heretic. Extermanatus upon your hive world.
I noticed it a few months ago. It feels like a sudden, inorganic shift. Either all the good people have trickled off to a better basin, or someone or something has influenced Lemmy users
Everyone should keep in mind: Besides the darkened tone of the world seeping into nearly everything, this place is probably crawling with shit-stirrers of a slightly subtler flavor than your typical obnoxious troll.
This effect might be from lemmy users in general hating everything about the world right now, or it might be the work of bots and/or illicitly paid humans fronting as the “general left.” The type that reflects your viewpoints pretty well but injects their comments with a little something extra, inflaming you or depressing more than what seems reasonable, maybe pushing you a little closer to the edge, whatever that edge may be.
We (or at least I) have no idea how much astroturfing is happening in the comments. It’s probably best to take anything that seems peculiarly provocative with a grain of salad.
Grain of salad?
I don’t think this place is big enough yet for my conspiracy theory to make any sense, but if I was the CEO of a company like Reddit and I wanted to prevent users moving to Lemmy I would make a bunch of accounts on here and spark as much drama and infighting as possible. And there’s been so much of it lately, whether it be callout posts on different instances or people concern trolling under posts, that it does feel so inorganic. When you come on here hoping for a better place and you see users writing mini manifestos calling out another user’s character flaws, it is extremely offputting.
Pretty sure Lemmy got on the influence bot radar some few months ago. Comments are now deeply negative and constantly drumming the 2FA and guillotine remedies to every complaint. Interactions outside of this kind of content I still find Lemmy users to be magnitudes higher quality than Reddit.
Bots warning us about using better account security sounds pretty wholesome actually
No, it’s not just your imagination. It has become distinctly more hostile in all communities.
Yeah. I was going to say I feel like people have a lot of “legitimate” reasons to be negative right now, at least in America. Our mental health has been tried.
at least in America
Oh boy. Try to imagine how people living in nations the USA and Canada exploit part of the world may be feeling right now.
There has got to be some satisfaction watching the US crumble
Taking pleasure while watching millions of innocent people suffer ranks up there with sociopathic tendencies.
That’s not what I’m referencing at all. can you possibly try to imagine their living conditions? For centuries?
It really hasn’t
Yes it has
No it hasn’t
It definitely has
Definitely has not
Everyone knows that it HAS though
Dave doesn’t. In fact, he agrees it hasn’t
mid 2023 felt honeymoony, but i knew would eventually wear off
Yes.
I change accounts far more often now.
To avoid all the blocks you are getting?
Stalkers.
Reading the comments here brings up a question I’ve had. Does it really make any difference what instance I’m on? I thought the whole benefit of federation was that it does not matter where I’m coming from.
Somewhere on your instance page, usually at the bottom, you can click “instances” and see which are federated and not.
It 100% does. I’m on 3 to get different flavors of Lemmy. I was on 4, but left an instance because of tone.
Yeah it kinda does, WHEN YOUR INSTANCE IS ALWAYS DOWN AAAARGH
It does kinda matter.
If the instance you are on defederates from another instance, you wont see the defederated instance’s content.
IIRC, the only thing you would really miss on Lemmy.World would be Hexbear. Maybe Exploding Heads? I don’t recall the entire list. But they’re all dipshit trolls, so nothing of value is actually being lost.
I’ve seen a lot of hard exclusionary leftists making noise outside of the triad.
exclusionary leftists
Redundant.
Yeah, we tend to look down on things like people claiming 17 year olds are adults dtf
I’d position myself further left than “progressive”, closer to “leftist”, but not of that brand that thinks that anyone who isn’t doing exactly what I want is the enemy.
