Ironically they would have been happier if they had remained ignorant of such matters…

I hope OP is okay…

Yup, I just had a discussion with someone I considered rational and got all of those answers thrown at me: “you said X and since sometimes X leads to Y and then sometimes those Ys lead to Z I am going to confidently assume that you said that you support Z even though you explicitly said that this was not the case, and now I won’t even consider the possibility that you merely meant that you support X but not Z”. I did not desire to leave Reddit only to find Reddit 2.0 here, now twice as authoritarian yet somehow also twice as illegal and piratey, but somehow both at the same time?!

There truly is a middle ground… most of the time, but it takes blocking every single one of the largest and most active communities on Lemmy. (Which iirc was true of Reddit as well?:-P) People are still people, so like true snowflakes do exist I guess, who somehow are the ones most active in arguing against everyone who does not share fully 100% of their beliefs, even if they share 90% of them. And I can only imagine what you as an instance admin have been exposed to.

Separately, I think it is a good idea for any instance admin operating inside the USA to shut down. Waves hands, you know what I mean - truth sometimes takes a back seat to expediency and optics, so if Lemmy is where “leftists” congregate (and remember that “leftists” means like “pedos” and “luigi proponents” and the like, or at least someone could try to claim that) then… we should not exist, some may say (and you as the admin carted off without even so much as a warrant needed). So we who know, we who get it, we support you remaining safe.

Btw the user labels I mentioned are just one way to automate it, but the same identical backend calculations supporting that can also be applied at a moderator level to e.g. automatically block such a reply from such an account to a community that has stricter rules for “nice behavior” than the common meme comms. Lemmy did away with karma, but PieFed did not - so if people want the karma-less 4chan experience, they can have it… but not here, where the mods (or instance admins) have decided that minimum standards must be met in order to participate.

And yes I mentioned also to TPM that I have started calling those who use the same tactics as the Alt-Right, but ostensibly to apply to the left, as the Alt-Left. They exist in their alternative facts echo chambers, and then sadly come out of those emboldened thinking that they have every right to exist in the real world espousing those beliefs - even when they get kicked out of those spaces (as e.g. Chapotraphouse) and yet still somehow demand that the less extremist places bend to their wills? However, this is just human nature - specifically it is childlike behavior, where unless someone is willing to stop them, they will continue. After all, it works for “insert politicians name here”, so why not for them as well? The world as we knew it is gone - we are now “old”, and those standards of decency have died, it would seem.

Hexbear - and lemmygrad.ml, and some users on Lemmy.ml - use the identical tactics of the Alt-Right, even while claiming to be leftists, so I have started calling them the Alt-Left. As in there are true leftist ideals (dbzero, slrpnk, etc.), and then there are those “alternative” leftist spaces that use alternative facts and forms of argumentation.

Your attitude is very much appreciated! Sadly, people’s ideas as to what constitutes “fun” are always going to differ - lefties making fun of righties, and vice versa, or centrists making fun of extremists, or vice versa, straight people making fun of LGBTQIA+, and again vice versa, religious people making fun of atheists and still yet again vice versa - it takes an enormous amount of effort and care and consideration to limit ourselves to only common ground and be decent to everyone, and as normal human beings we sometimes miss the mark. Especially when going through a hard time irl so perhaps on our best days but what about on our worst, or average, or below average ones?

Perhaps it is even impossible for people with different viewpoints of the world to coexist - not people with differing ideas I mean but differing perspectives on how okay it is specifically to make fun of others. The 4chan approach will only ever devolve as time passes until it finally breaks apart - e.g. lemm.ee - and perhaps there is little hope for the Beehaw-like approach as well as it seems to take too hard a toll on the humans having to put in the effort to implement it, I guess we’ll find out. Man I wish there was some kind of middle ground there! Maybe we’ll find that instead? 😼

In short, the fediverse needs normies

I am sorry but this will never happen. Normies use Windows, are Christian, from the USA, and mostly centrist. Or perhaps use Mac, are Muslim, from the UK, and were formerly right-leaning. Or even if they think they are leftist, they will learn here just how wrong they were, as in finally being exposed to how deep that rabbit hole goes. The wider Threadiverse can be quite punishing to anyone who does not share hard enough the groupthink mindset. Especially if they accidentally respond to a post, shared in All, from Chapotraphouse (which Lemm.ee famously did not defederate from, nor does dbzero, nor lemmy.zip, etc.). Or make an offhand comment in most lemmy.ml communities?

r/Redditalternatives is full of people who were looking to leave Reddit, actually decided to take people’s advice to come here, but could not stand us (we are a Nazi bar, showcasing tankie philosophy and various other purity tests as you noted) and so gave up and returned to Reddit. They felt the opposite of being welcomed here.

And people seem to actively like it this way? We have echo chambers for a reason… and it is far easier to simply continue them than to put in the enormous and continual efforts required to do otherwise.

Btw, brace yourself: people are talking there that there will very likely be another Rexodus in the next few weeks as Reddit is about to once again screw the pooch and break everything by doing away with modmail and replacing it with… get this… their chat bots. Oh boy, I do not envy mods of most communities on Lemmy right now…

If we wanted normies to feel welcomed here, it would need to start with us actually wanting them to feel welcomed here, collectively rather than individually, imho.

Edit: I find the upvote/downvote ratio on this comment hilarious 😂. When I say that people do not feel welcomed here, somehow the response by some people is to specifically NOT leave a comment either welcoming me or at bare minimum politely expressing disagreement and perhaps even make an attempt to edumacashiate me in the intrinsic errors of my philosophy, but instead to smash the drive-by downvote button and move on. I can only imagine the thinking process behind that: “THAT’LL show them!”… and obviously I am j/k there, as there is no thinking process behind that, I would strongly wager, which has been my own point this whole time. 🤔😂 By all means, rather than attempt to be different, let’s instead aim to be exactly like Reddit, just shifted further left.

The strategy of “hiding” - especially in plain sight - is a good trick, e.g. look how well it has been working recently here in the USA. Fox News is allowed say whatever it wants, and others what they want, and now the two sides cannot agree on the most simple and basic of facts, much less interpretations of them.

This means, sigh, that I think your strategy of trying to stay on top of it manually might have always been doomed to fail? Automated tools may be the only way. Even if they were less than ideal. Like if a tool could implement the same way that we normal people interact: “okay fine I will listen to you b/c I KNOW you and I have ENJOYED listening to you in the past, so now I will listen to you still yet more”, like an escalating amount of privilege based on “reputation”. The trolls are always the first to cry out against this, so perhaps this thought is correct or at least along the right track? :-P

And this is why PieFed gives me hope: it is no longer so reliant upon the manual efforts of a moderator to curate my experience for me, now I can engage with the tools to curate it for me however I want, and then change them (retroactively applied even!) further. Here is a recent example: on your recent post https://dubvee.org/post/3789665, [email protected] has been trolling people sharing their fairly negative opinion. This is a 2-year-old account that somehow I have never run across before iirc, but from the looks of things they are more than merely having a bad day, they are pulling out all the stops “I am such a nice guy, you should feel privileged to have me here”, all of it, basically just outright begging & pleading to be noticed and moderated, since I guess negative attention is still attention, right? Well on PieFed.social, their account name has not one but TWO danger / warning signs placed next to it, which if I mouse over one it says “Very low reputation. Beware.” This user is not “banned”, nor “moderated”, so they don’t try to leave and make a new skin to hide behind, they are instead simply “labelled”, so that I as an end-user can decide what action I would like to take. And personally I would like to read their content… and then keep scrolling. At one point I thought about responding, but seeing these icons, decided against it. They only have 8 posts and 80 comments total, but a LARGE number of those are zero or even negative (and sometimes by a LARGE negative, like not just -1 but <-10), so the software does the work for me of notifying me that any reply that I may choose to make is likely to end in me not enjoying my experience. So I let them be and moved on happily with my life. Their reputation preceeded them - just as my own does irl, just as yours and mine do inside the Threadiverse here, just as Nature and The Universe intends. Or for brand-new accounts there is a different icon alerting me to the fact that they are so “new”. This label took no manual effort to make - either by me, a mod, the one it is attached to, an instance admin, nobody, just code.

And it makes sense, right? Someone who receives 10x more negative feedback than positive feedback is kinda ASKING FOR IT, r-r-right?! Not based on the instance that they choose to make their home, but on their own actions and consequences from those. Someone who wants their content actually read by nice people needs to BE NICER, someone who wants to be treated seriously among serious people needs to BE MORE SERIOUS, and so on - otherwise e.g. upvotes in a meme community are not appropriate to be considered as sufficient “reputation/karma” among, e.g., a scientific community in mander.xyz, or a reporting one, or what about LGBTQIA+ that has its own internal criteria? Appropriate (-ly) matching karma is hepful, while mismatching karma is the opposite, and yes I say this even when it works “against” me, like if I shitpost inside of a scientific community and get downvoted, then… I deserve it!?:-P (no really, truly I do in that case; and in fact in such a case it would even have been helpful to have labelled me as an “untrusted” source, to avoid misleading people, who might otherwise see my large shitposting-derived karma and possibly think otherwise?)

Anyway, my point here was perhaps to give you some sliver of hope that things can be improved - it will take effort, and that effort is already happening! You don’t need to worry about the details right now, I just wanted to offer that sliver of hope that if you came back then it might be better:-). I do not blame you in the slightest for leaving though - as you mentioned, you warned people a year ago, I remember that you truly did! (Here btw is a link to it: https://dubvee.org/post/1516426 in case you need to send it to anyone:-D) Please rest and heal? :-D

Edit: and btw I did end up finding an old archived copy of dmv.social’s last message - ironically on Beehaw, which I guess b/c of the software differences, did not end up deleting it? It basically points to the CSAM attacks, which had just become solved even at that time (dbzero’s comment points to it) but the admin was simply so over and done with all that shit that they just wanted out by then, it looks like. Which I understand:-).

I have been fairly open - though not quite outspoken - in voicing my concerns that I do not think that the Threadiverse will succeed. Though the extent that there is even the tiniest glimmer of hope, it lies with PieFed (or Sublinks etc.), rather than Lemmy.

When I petittion to get Hexbear.net defederated from Discuss.Online, thereby opening up a generic instance that would be open to all incoming people fleeing from Reddit from Huffman’s shittiness, I started to have a brief hope. It did not last long, b/c the USA elections happened, and more importantly the trolls seemed to switch their strategy, no longer remaining constrained on the Triad servers and instead appearing everywhere, by which I mean Lemmy.World, lemm.ee, sh.itjust.works, etc. - though importantly not truly and literally “everywhere” e.g. dubvee.org, beehaw.org, and the like. Anyway, before that I would see ~90% of the most batshit insane comments coming from hexbear.net, and then after their removal still ~90% of the most insane ones leftover coming from lemmy.ml, i.e. defederating (even if only by personal blocking since the Lemmy version of an “instance block” is laughably ineffective) really did have a chance of cleaning up >99% of the Threadiverse. But then after the elections they started coming from more normal instances, and I gave up that hope that the tide could ever be turned.

And now I have little hope that the Threadiverse will ever grow - obviously it will “survive”, but like as a Linux forum where people circle-jerk about Arch Linux (I love Linux too but… dayum, can’t we talk about something else as well as that?) and leftist politics, but nothing else that is worth talking about.

I have even had to resort to going back to Reddit - damnit the events happening in the world are IMPORTANT, and so when I’ve blocked most of the toxic communities on Lemmy, or even when I don’t block anything at all, that NEWS often simply is not here to be found and read, much less discussed! :-(

The Threadiverse is simply in the process of becoming the next 4chan - we had hope that it would be the next Reddit, and unfortunately that too is becoming the case, but on a speed-run to its current state, it would seem, with both AI scraping every instance and power-hungry moderators and instance admins (especially Lemmy.ml), and also somehow even more authoritarian control such as lack of modmail or even notification that an action has been taken against someone (except on Lemmy.World where they seem to have modified the code to send such a notification - yet Lemmy.ml refuses to do similarly across all of Lemmy, either because they are too overwhelmed with other priorities or more likely they simply do not care: Lemmy.ml works as intended, the rest is everyone else just piggy-backing off of their efforts made for themselves for their prioritizations, while if we want better then we have to go and build it for ourselves - which is fantastic to see that YOU have done just that!:-).

That said, I still do have some hope for PieFed. Its focus on “trusted instances” can help provide a separation from those that are merely “present but not trusted”, providing the ability for votes from e.g. Beehaw to count more (exclusively if the moderator asks for that feature?) than votes from e.g. Lemmy.ml, assuming that the latter has not already been defederated from.

Like an immune system, I believe that we are under attack - it is both a signal that we are doing something of importance here, and also an enormous burden for those who have to fight on the front lines, as you have been doing. I can well understand your desire to sit back and rest for a good bit, before (if ever) returning even fractionally to that fray.

But even then, the Threadiverse might not succeed. Or if it does, it may have to be without such people as you (or I), who would rather have nothing than have to wade through fecal matter in order to find a glimmer of a tiny nugget of something worthwhile. There are libraries, there are books to read, there are TV shows to watch - we don’t need to read crap shoved into our faces virtually all of the time, on that point I am with you. Afaik, this may be how actual adults behave? (though especially after seeing the results of virtually any USA election, I have to add the caveat: regardless of physical age!:-P)

Go rest my friend, I hope to see you again, perhaps, one day when you’ve healed a bit. :-)

WHAT?!?!

I have wanted to quit Lemmy / the Threadiverse too, several times, but meeting people like you (and there are damn too few of such!) have restored my faith and allowed me to stay.

I want to say some stuff, if it is okay:

1. you are not alone. See above. Beyond that… we see it too. This place is so much worse than irl, it is “the internet” (a place not just for sharing pics of cats, but somehow also for those who thought 4chan was too lame… and now demand to share the same place as those wanting to share pics of cats?!).

2. this was inevitable: I read somewhere, when I accepted my second mod position on Reddit, that all the good mods leave their communities after ~1-2 years. Dealing with the cesspool of humanity is draining. Trying to clean up an entire instance - whew, this speaks to your success that you made it this far, rather than a failure that you could not go further. Do you want to know the definitive proof, in my mind, that confirms this for me? It is the fact that you haven’t shut it down already, but gave a deadline and are willing to stick it out to the end of the month. This is the end result of a CONSIDERED and THOUGHT-OUT deliberative process, not an emotional breakdown. Yes you feel emotions about it, obviously, but your decision is also supported by logic.

3. please take a break (I mean after you shut down the instance, not in lieu of it). You deserve it! No really: you truly do! (though I cannot promise to be here myself when you return - this soul-sucking void has a way of burning us all out) After that… selfishly: I really, strongly hope to see you here as a regular user. But if your mental health would benefit from the opposite, then I would rather see you not - wait, does that make any sense?

4. PieFed has a number of features that sound like ideas that I’ve heard you say that you implement manually, although it offers ways to do them automatically, e.g. auto-collapsing, auto-hiding, even auto-removing content by people with extraordinarily low reputation scores, and with the option to measure reputation within the specific community in question - e.g. someone cannot run up a high karma on hexbear and then come here and use that to troll piefed users. The really cool thing is that while setting up those “rules” takes effort, their implementation then scale up to however many / all users you want. Caveat: I have never tried modding a PieFed community so I do not know how much of that remains theoretical vs. is available right now. Anyway that’s a thought for the future - I mean as a mod, on some existing PieFed server, not necessarily spinning up your own although that’s obviously an option as well, but I figure not a likely one given your burnt-out status. Yes, trolls will complain that you have blocked them from participating in it but… this was inevitable. It is your house: you have the right to run it however you please.

5. whatever you do, do it because of who you are, not for others. I… well this is easy to say, so very much harder (impossible?) to implement, though I need to keep trying! Oh wait, but we were talking about you here, yeah, totally, “you”… yeah…

6. at the end of the day, the Fediverse still has merit, imho, simply b/c it is out from under the heel of the oppressors. Yes it attracts children here, but also those of us yearning to be free. This takes EFFORT - as you more than most of us know - but it has its advantages as well. Case in point: Reddit simply is not worth my time to comment in, these days, I find. I read - b/c some things can only be found there - but do not engage, b/c it is not welcoming. (Sadly, most of Lemmy is not very welcoming either… - and yes, I have ABSOLUTELY tried to be the change that I wanted to see, to promote “engagement” everywhere, as compared to people posting but then nobody wanting to comment, so I try to help even if I am literally the only one who does so)

With lemm.ee shutting down, and hexbear losing its license (yes it got it back but it really and truly did LOSE it before that!), now more than ever it is quite obvious that the Threadiverse is struggling under the weight of the toxicity burden. Though I do have great hopes now that PieFed is replacing Lemmy. Take your break, rest, heal, and I hope that you will return stronger than ever before! (as a regular user, possibly a mod) You deserve it, internet stranger friend.

Edit: omg the people downvoting this post… how is dubvee.org shutting down “not relevant” to a community literally called Dubvee Meta [email protected] ? The obliviousness is astonishing to me… and only serves to reinforce OP’s point about ignorant behaviors poisoning the well here on the Threadiverse.

Babe I love you but… not that much!?!?!? 😛

Omg Lemmy still auto plays videos WITH SOUND :-(, I miss my PieFed account so much right now (Cloudflare issue - it happens sometimes).

Counterpoint: number must go up! 💲💰💸🤑

Actually the OG is ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆ ([email protected]), although we can see the cross-posting chain as well as the true OC attribution in the lower right corner so perhaps no real need to provide such a mention at all?

Answer ready: it is 42. Now, would you like to know the question?

So should I like… downvote this one then? 🤪

Depending on where you are, maybe just “cd”.

Except the OP image says .exe so that’s not all that came in the package…

And it’s not even one creature or even type of creature. Look up rhizobium.

Tbf, as we learn more about our gut microbiomes, it turns out that humans are that way as well. Maybe that’s why we have the thoughts in our heads vs. the feelings in our guts… (no that’s actually not it at all, except… isn’t it though?).

So it’s a B.A.T. signal detector? 🤪🦇