I was recently talking to some friends about Lemmy and the whole Fediverse idea, as it seemed like a really cool part of the Internet. As I was talking about it, though, I realized how unusually friendly this whole place is, and I joked that I “surprisingly haven’t found any bigotry.”
I’m wondering if anyone has come across that, by any chance. If it’s rare, my guess is that even though it’s decentralized, each instance has a set of rules and values that are shared throughout the Fediverse, and I’m guessing it’s easy to defederate with any seedy communities haha.
Bigotry? Not yet. Toxicity? Quite a bit.
The first big example was the reaction of quite a few people when beehaw defederated shitjustworks and lemmy.world, people called beehaw users and their admins all kind of names, sometimes even in communities and by users who were not on either instance.
Then Threads. There are a lot of users who think people who don’t agree with everyone defederating Threads before they even support federation are barely even human, and anyone who questions it, will be called all kinds of names. Just pointing that out gets you downvoted.
Then there are the usual people who can’t handle other people having different opinions/experiences, I recently had to defend that my Reddit experience (when I use it which is very rare now) is barely different from before, and no, it did not turn to shit and no, it’s not full of bots, and no, the quality of discussion is still high because I curated my subs.
On Reddit, I would unsub from communities behaving like that (e.g. I decided to leave /r/Fantasy when I realized that not hating Rings of Power or the WoT show is not behaviour the sub deems acceptable), on Lemmy, communities don’t have enough of an identity for that yet, so for now I just block some users.
I wonder how your experience differs from mine, being on an instance with no downvotes.
Not hugely, I think. A lot of it was actual comments.
But seeing as I’m on my own single-user instance, I might disable them at some point just to see ;)
Gotcha. I haven’t been in the loop with beehaw and shitjustworks and everything like that, but I could picture that kind of drama happening.
The Threads stuff is also hella wack, people seem to have a ton of heavy opinions about it.
I do think the ability to filter different communities and stuff out is really valuable. I’ve had a few friends who (understandably) had pretty negative opinions on Reddit long before the API stuff, but I think a big part that they missed is how easily you could curate your Reddit feed, which made my experience much better. I did delete my Reddit account, but I wouldn’t find it unreasonable to believe that Reddit’s fairly the same way it was before the protest since lots of people still stick around and are just casual users who don’t care too much (and I don’t really blame them haha).