So, you’re a debate bro who argues Syrian refugees increase crime and terrorism, trans women in sports and children accessing trans healthcare are legitimate issues, and support Israel and claim there isn’t a genocide.

You say shit like “So many hypersensitive thin-skinned vacuum-cleaner owners! Perhaps they’re projecting their insecurities because deep down they know I’m right.” and argue intolerance that people don’t support your terrible viewpoints?

You’re peak fucking reddit mate.

To me the good of the Fediverse is that it highlights dishonest people like yourself.

The first - and definitely worst - experience I’ve had was 2 years ago when I got banned from !europe@feddit.org for “racism and gaslighting” on the basis of, well, pretty much nothing except the moderator’s paranoia.

It wasn’t me, but looking at your moderation log and the messages in question, I would have called it “islamophobia and downplaying neo-nazi crimes” and banned you just the same. Others are welcome to have a look at those messages and judge for themselves 🤷

A feature I like about Lemmy is that the mod-log is public and that you can go from comments in the mod-log directly to the related discussions.

People should really check out OP’s mod-log and make up their own minds.
Especially about the things he wrote about in his “Lowlights” section.

So a good time apart from the usual cestpools of life: political and news communities.

I was curious about the posts mentioned so I took a look at your history and can kinda see why. The Linux one didn’t make too much sense to me but people were generally nice to you, although understandable skeptical since you’re talking about hardware not working. Honestly you had a bit of a meltdown in that thread, which I think contributed more to the down votes than the initial opinion (like you said, text brings out a worse version of yourself).

The political ones, I mostly pieced together genecide denial (?) which has generally been very unpopular here. To be fair, that was more than a year ago, although what was unpopular then has aged even worse, what with people in Europe getting arrested for pro-Palastinian views and such.

I’m not saying the behavior of mods and such were justified, of course, just… y’know, two sides of the story. You’re in the right to express your views and seek discussion, but others have an equal right to call you out on it-- especially if you get defensive and rude over polite, reasonable responses.

But that’s just my two cents. I only ever comment, and I’ve had moments with people being rude or misunderstanding my intent. It happens, as social media is just that way.

tried !europe@lemmy.dbzer0.com and in short order had a similar experience.

looks in the mod log

reason: blatantly denying genocide

Yep i guess i can skip this section of the post

Great post. I’m frequently reminded that 40k people is so much more than it seems as I consistently encounter users who have been here and quite active for 3 years and yet I don’t recognize them.

That ban from c/Europe is a badge of honor in my book. One of the nice things about the modlog is that anyone can quickly verify whether bans or comment removals are justified according to their own perspective. It shouldn’t always be as necessary as it currently is, but with people on Lemmy constantly throwing around accusations of bigotry, nazism, genocide denial, etc, its quite useful to be able to quickly view a user’s moderation history. Honestly that might be the most useful feature that Lemmy has, aside from the ability to federate.

However, I do have one minor quibble with your post.

for me this was quite a shocking confirmation of the intolerance of a certain section of the (mainly US) left.

To ascribe your banning from a European community on a European server because of an opinion on a European situation to the US left is quite unreasonable. Also, the mod who banned you appears to be German. This is one of my pet peeves about Lemmy, that Americans always seem to take collateral damage in the most random threads lol. The Lemmy user base is significantly more international than the reddit user base in my experience, and thus the anti-American attitudes that seem quite common outside of the US are frequently exhibited here.

I don’t know that there’s anything that can be done about it, but I do know that it’s unproductive to blame Americans from the outside looking in. I mean it’s unproductive to blame average people for the actions of their government anyway, but it’s especially annoying coming from people who don’t even live here and often lack a lot of context and empathy with their angry rants. None of this applies to you personally btw, but I’m just saying it for the record.

I’m eagerly looking forward to more silly, niche communities. Communities like /c/pigeon@mander.xyz & /c/stick@sh.itjust.works are wonderful examples of people providing genuinely human and silly fun content. It shows there’s an actual community, not just nerds advocating for Linux.

I do find a few things annoying about the federation system, like opening links directly to lemmy.world on my desktop an having to surgically recreate the link on my instance if I want to interact with it at all. I figure it’s part of the growing pains and we will find interesting ways to solve it.

Still, I feel so much better using this platform. I feel like contributing isn’t just padding the Reddit admin’s pockets and being used to fuel AI models. Y’all are a much more chill group anyway. I’ll keep posting my food here.

And then there’s the echo-chamber problem. It turns out that when people have an option to avoid dealing with ideas they disagree with (even slightly), very many of them choose that option. IMO this is a major (perhaps fatal) problem with social media. The fediverse is not magically immune from it.

Yeah. Federated social media is even more prone to this effect than centralized. This is the single reason why I believe Lemmy can’t possibly become anything meaningful on a global scale. It is a purgatory built in the image of long dead websites where we all wait for the rotting corpses of old media to wither away.

I’m mostly here to argue about politics with people who aren’t conservatives or libertarians - just like you, I think engaging with different opinions is healthy, and I’ve had a hard time finding leftists to argue with elsewhere.

I think the tribalism, purity testing, and mod power tripping is far worse here than reddit. I was banned from memes.ml two days ago for pointing out it’s in bad taste to celebrate the deaths of American soliders, and I totally don’t support at all what Americans are doing in Iran or Palestine. After a couple back and forths I was banned for spam. I was responding to comments, explaining my position, not spamming. Then to top it off, I was banned from privacy.ml yesterday. I saw a user I was arguing with the previous day using an argument I taught them. I literally explained something to them in a DM, and they were using it correctly against someone else, and I was again banned for “spam.” A single silly “I’m proud of you” comment. Granted it was obvious that they clearly didn’t like me but still, you can’t get caught doing that and not expect me to say something. Very immature.

What I find funny about it all is they’re banning someone who’s on their team. I’m on board with most of the stereotypical .ml ideology (I don’t think we’d get along OP), but some users, and especially those with power, have no tolerance for any dissent. I don’t even think I was dissenting, just saying the evil facist bootlicking troops probably aren’t as evil as they want them to be, so don’t cheer when they die. Is that really too much for some people?

Thank you for contributing and for this introspective analysis, but thank you most of all for writing it yourself and not using a random word generator to do it for you. It’s a rare treat to read human prose these days.

Just so yall know who some of you are agreeing with, this person managed to get permanently booted off the !france@jlai.lu community which is very VERY tolerant of differing opinions compared to the average fediverse community. I remember them, they kept defending racist news outlets for no good reason and using far right talking points and dogwhistles (while claiming to be a leftist), until the mods got tired of their constant denial.

Modlog (and this post’s comment section) shows some genocide denial too, no shit they don’t feel welcome in some communities…

One of the points of moving to Lemmy, for me at least, was to get away from people like them.

We here all want the Threadiverse to succeed. That doesn’t mean that it is going to though - it turns out that it takes a helluva lot of effort, which few to none are willing to put forth (all the way up and down the scale from contributing actual code, funding, moderation efforts, posting more content especially OC, or even just reigning in our most toxic impulses as we reply to one another in comments, smashing a downvote or failing to upvote).

I do think that eventually, as the technology itself gets better, the Fediverse is the only thing likely to be able to hold the tide against the onslaught of for-profit enshittificated alternatives. Even though we make our own kinds of Algorithms here that allow what can be said or done in the various spaces, almost none of which are properly labeled as such, leaving people to always guess incorrectly and then have to find out the hard way what are the unwritten rules.

this was well written and a good description. I’ve seen a lot of the same. thank you for putting your thoughts out here :)