End of the road. Wish I could say it’s been a fun trip, but that would be a lie. Running this instance started out as a fun project, but it has been nothing but a nightmare for a long, long time. I’m looking forward to the freedom I will have after being shackled to this mess for the last two years.
This instance is shutting down for good on 7/31/2025.
If you want exports of anything, let me know. After that, I’m pulling the SSDs and going full Office Space on them.
Edit 07/12/25: Thank you all for the kind words, understanding, and appreciation. While I have been consumed by the negativity here, I never forgot about the positives. Unfortunately, the negatives can and do become overwhelming.
If you appreciate what I’ve been trying to do, then please do not let the efforts die with my departure. The toxicity I’ve described cannot be solved by any individual alone and requires a group effort.
- Don’t engage with those acting in bad faith or just trying to get a rise out of people. This is basically “don’t feed the trolls” but sometimes the trolls are subtle.
- Don’t let emotion cloud your logic and try to remain rational. Always try to see the bigger picture and keep that in focus. Context matters. Ramifications of actions matter.
- When you see people calling for violence, ask yourself “And then what happens?” Because it’s most definitely not going to be “we all join hands in a circle, a rainbow appears overhead, and the world is saved”.
- On the same note, a large percentage of those calling for violence don’t even live here. They’re just trying to rile people up or spread chaos by feeding on our pent-up anger.
- There are very few absolutes in this world, but people around here love to speak in them. If someone only speaks in absolutes, then they’re missing most of the picture which is in the middle. Beware of those people.
- If you see someone twisting what other people are saying just so they can attack them, please report them. This is a common form of trolling/harassment which is often difficult for mods to detect without personally investing themselves in every conversation thread. This often manifests as “Oh, so you think X, so you must think Y” where Y = an absolutely insane jump in logic. Then they attack the person as if they had said Y with other people dog-piling on afterward.
- Admins: Please, please start clamping down on extremism and general toxicity. No psychopath, racist, etc has ever come back from a temp ban a better person. Force these unhinged people back to the fringe instances and defederate from those.
- Most importantly: be good to one another. At the end of the day, we all have more in common than we differ.
Original plea below, though it’s superseded by the above.
I’m gonna get right to the point: I’m burnt out, I kind of hate this place, and I really don’t want to be here anymore.
I started it not because I kept getting banned from elsewhere but because I wanted to do and be part of something better. Well, two years in, and I cannot say this place is any better, just differently bad if not worse. Too many people here seem to think that because it’s not “corpo social media” that anything goes, and boy do some people really run with that.
The average Lemming has the nuance of a wrecking ball and the maturity of a junior high edge lord, and trying to keep the peace here has become more than what I want to deal with. The worst part is that they’re so caught up in their own self-righteousness that they can’t see they’re just as bad or worse than what they’re spewing violent rhetoric at; trying to talk sense into anyone or de-escalate things is immediately met with “bootlicker”, wild accusations, and/or worse.
I need help. Well, really, Lemmy needs help, professional help, but barring that, then I need some more referees to keep this place under control.
This instance has a mission, and I am no longer able to deal with the volume of toxic shitheads who do nothing but call for violence, take people out of context and jump to insane conclusions, and just act like petulant fucking children. Seriously, the demographic here is disgusting and needs to grow the hell up.
So this is it: Either some people step up and help to keep this place sane, or I’m shutting it down. Clock is ticking
Sorry to hear this.
You’ve always been helpful to me, in any of our interactions, and I’ve always thought that the Tesseract project was one of the better looking and better functioning frontends. I appreciate everything you’ve done here, and hope you’re able to find some peace. Whatever decision you make, you have our support.
Thank you for everything. You have been a positive force here. Is there a chance you will release the amazing UI work you have done for those of us that are still holding on?
Thanks. You, too, are one of the positive constants around here. Wish I could just hand-pick all the good people and restart my instance, lol, but that ship has sailed.
The repo is archived now, but I merged in and released the work-in-progress branch that had a few bugfixes . It’s fully open source so anyone who feels like it can still fork it and pick up where I left off. http://github.com/asimons04/Tesseract/
Thank you ptz for putting in the effort to make this place much more enjoyable, for running a great instance and building a very advanced frontend 🫡
I’m very dishearten to see you go 🥺 but you must put yourself first.
Thanks. It’s been a ride, for sure, but I’m ready to get off.
Well this sucks, but I understand and share your frustrations. You’re one of the names I’m always happy to run into around lemmy (and of course in TenForward). I hope stepping away takes a source of stress out of your life.
I’ve never tried to run an instance, but I’ve been fielding reports as a mod in a few communities and have seen a lot of the behavior that you’re talking about - that awful combination of viciousness and righteousness. I’ve had to remove hit-lists, calls for somebody to murder politicians, cops, or advocating violence against various people perceived to have failed someone’s “purity test”, and much more. And I only help mod in a handful of meme communities, not anything serious. I can’t imagine how much work must go into managing anything remotely political.
My worry is that this is happening everywhere on social media, and that we’re just on one of many platforms grappling with it. If you want my theory, stuff like this is downstream of social media being personalized and curated by opinion, either by algorithms (like TikTok, Twitter/X, etc.) or manually by moderators (like here or reddit). When you get too many people agreeing with each other, it creates an echo-chamber that amplifies the most extreme takes about everything and views differing opinions - or even tempering voices - as “trolls”, “bootlickers” (as you mentioned), or worse. The news has been full of people radicalized from various bubbles on the internet until they act in ways they might not have if exposed to more diversity of thought. It begins with people hyping each other up with extreme language that lacks nuance, maturity, or reason, and then ends with a small % of impressionable people storming the capitol, firebombing Teslas, or maybe becoming that one anti-natalist murderer that got Lemmy a mention in the news recently. It’s absolutely unhinged behavior, and I think these are all symptoms of the same thing.
In short, the fediverse needs normies. We need diversity of thought and opinion, or else more reasonable people are going to burn out or feel pushed out by all the noise and toxicity.
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.
Or even if they think they are leftist, they will learn here just how wrong they were
I remember being so confused when I first joined, because I saw the hexbear communities constantly posting insane stuff like hoping Biden would die, or using “lib” as an insult, and I assumed they were a conservative instance.
I worry that you’re right about it being too big of an ask to hope everyone becomes more welcoming and open-minded, but I’m still personally going to try to be a tempering voice on here. Part of the reason I post memes and stay out of political stuff 99% of the time is because I want there to be more content that’s just here for people wanting to have fun.
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? 😼
I’ve had to remove [list of awful stuff] or advocating violence against various people perceived to have failed someone’s “purity test”, and much more
Yep, to all of that. In spades. From one to another, I do appreciate the work you do both modding and contributing to communities.
It’s easy to become not quite numb but…acclimated(?) to that as just “words on a page” and swipe it away with the mod button, but when you step back, two things stand out to me:
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A person said those things. A person typed those out and thought to themselves “This is a perfectly acceptable thing to say.” That’s scary.
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The massive number of upvotes those attract and the score representing the number of people who saw that violent rhetoric and thought “yes, I like this. I agree with this”. That’s downiright terrifying.
If you want my theory, stuff like this…the fediverse needs normies … or else more reasonable people are going to burn out or feel pushed out by all the noise and toxicity
(Not cherry picking those points specifically, just shortening for brevity.)
Couldn’t agree more. I’ve tried to provide a “normie-friendly” space with my instance (based on my own experience here as well as feedback from some former Reddit colleages who briefly tried Lemmy and nope’d right out). But things have become so extreme here that I honesty don’t think any normie in their right mind would want to stick around and dilute the unhinged behavior. i.e. The toxicity has metastasized, and I don’t think there’s any going back.
I hope I’m wrong. I really do. Despite the animosity I have toward what this place has become, I still want the idea/concept of the Fediverse to succeed. But until admins, far and wide, start taking this extremism and toxicity seriously, start de-escalating this stuff from the top down, and forcing these unhinged people back to the fringe instances (which can be de-federated from), I just don’t see how this place is going to become anything but the next 4chan. Again, I genuinely hope I’m wrong.
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I’ll miss dubvee, to be sure. Mostly I’ll miss you PTZ. You have been a voice of reason and sanity in this crazy federated space. It’s special when you can find someone who is reasonable, capable, level headed, and passionate - it’s rare. I really do appreciate the amazing work you have done for your communities, and the platform - perhaps the appreciation was too silent. I’ve admired the way you ran dubvee, the automod efforts, it was really nice to see such positive efforts and attitude.
I know you will continue to do good things, and I hope you find satisfaction and joy in them. I’m happier knowing your in the world.
Thanks. And same to a fellow “sane voice in an ocean of madness”. I think my instance was getting hugged to death last night, so things got slow and I just stopped responding until this morning.
I thought I could just defed and mass ban my way to a
non-toxiclow-toxicity instance, but between the.eeshutdown/exodus and other instances spinning up parallel Piefed instances around the same time, so many of the banned accounts came back with brand new alts.Imagine spending 2 years tediously cleaning up a field of broken glass, finally thinking you’ve gotten the worst of it, and then someone comes along and kicks the trash cans over and you have to start all over again.
Yeah, i really feel that (the first few days of my community migration i was posting frequently to get people to out themselves, so I could get the community back to its non-dramatic normal). People problems require people solutions, which is always a huge time sink
Lemmy, or whatever will replace lemmy, needs a more thought-out reputation and identity system. Perhaps something along the lines of new accounts with no posting or history are not really considered real yet, they have to prove themselves in a pseudo conversational web of trust before they are considered anything more then a anonymous stranger.
Lemmy, or whatever will replace lemmy, needs a more thought-out reputation and identity system
Agreed, but from my understanding, the lack of reputation system in Lemmy is deliberate. Which makes sense because it was conceived because the devs weren’t exactly popular on Reddit (or so the story goes as I understand it).
I may dive back in with Piefed at some point in the far future, but right now, and considering the demographic overlap, it’s not something I even want to think about.
And apologies for still shutting down despite the offer of admin assistance. After I thought about it, I just need someone who’s committed to the mission here rather than just helping to bail out a sinking ship (forgive the analogy lol).
If you need any DB exports, let me know.
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:
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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?!).
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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.
- 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?
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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.
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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…
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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
strangerfriend.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.
Thanks. At this time, I have no plans to return in any capacity (though if I do, it might be on my spiritual guide instance Beehaw).
The only problem with Piefed is…it’s the same demographic as Lemmy and thus is going to have the same toxicity problems. It may make it easier to sweep it under the rug but it doesn’t address it at the source.
My honest, no-longer-gives-a-fuck-what-people-think, opinion is that instance admins across the board need to take a much, MUCH harder stance against toxic behavior if the Fediverse is to succeed and not collapse into a cesspit singularity. No more slaps on the wrists, temp bans, etc. I’m (all too) aware there’s a revolving door of shitheads, but the behavior remains the same and they often get to fly under the radar after putting on a fake mustache and hat and coming back in.
I’m as upset as anyone about the state of the world, but I’m a functional adult capable of expressing myself without every second comment being “guillotines, Luigi, violence, violence , revolution!”. I’m on the spectrum, though classified as “high functioning” but I learned a long time ago that neurodivergency is not an excuse for toxic behavior. I mention that only because it’s a common excuse that gets thrown around, and i don’t buy it for one second.
You and many other good people, yeah, I’m gonna miss. I’m also gonna miss TenForward terribly; it’s one of the very few communities that actually feels like a community. But, unfortunately, I gotta do what’s best for me and that’s get the hell away from this place.
I’m terribly sad to see you go. You’ve been one of my favorite people on Lemmy. I’m glad I could help in a small part on tenforward. I totally understand your reasoning and support your decision. Feel free to reach out any time.
Thanks. That means a lot and back at you and the rest of the regulars at 10F.
TenForward is probably what kept me here as long as I have. It’s like a shining example of what this place could be, so props to you, @[email protected] , TPM, Stamets, Squid, OpenStars, and everyone who helps (or formerly helped) make that what it is. Everyone there is so supportive. They build each other up / build on each other rather than tear each other down. I meant what I said: It’s the only community I deal with that actually feels like a community. I truly will miss it and all of you chill Trekkies.
That said, I do still have my
.worldaccount, and I’m not quite sure what to do with it. I’ve stepped down as mod from all the communities that aren’t just me, but until I figure out what to do with those, I haven’t deleted that account. Maybe I’ll mothball it and pop in and say hi once in a while.
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. :-)
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.
Yeah, they sure have. I had a handle on it for a good while, but when lemm.ee shut down, most of my bans were basically undone as those spawned anew elsewhere (.ee accounts made up a large portion of my issued bans). I found I just didn’t have it in me to go through that again; it took months to identify and ban the trolls, toxics, and extremists the first time.
And if that weren’t bad enough, other instances started spinning up parallel Piefed instances, so many of the banned accounts came back with Piefed alts. Combined with the
.eeshutdown happening at the same time, it was just too much whack-a-mole.Imagine spending 2 years tediously cleaning up a field of broken glass, finally thinking you’ve gotten the worst of it, and then someone comes along and dumps the trash can over and you have to start all over again.
The Threadiverse is simply in the process of becoming the next 4chan
I called that close to a year ago when I got the first whiff of the toxic atmosphere that was brewing. Can’t find (or rather don’t feel like finding) the post I made, but I said almost exactly what you said. I also said that if this place started to stink like 4chan, I’d pull the plug. And so I am.
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 http://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: http://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:-).
This is a 2-year-old account that somehow I have never run across before … has not one but TWO danger / warning signs placed next to it
Yeah, user tagging was always a feature I had planned to add to Tesseract but never got around to. They wouldn’t have been crowd-sourced or otherwise shared, but it would at least let you flag users to keep an eye on and eventually block or report.
The problem with that, from an instance admin perspective, is that even though they’re flagged with a big “Warning: Highly Radioactive” sign , I’m still platforming them; the toxic waste is still on-site and out in the open. Everything they say and troll is still showing up under a domain registered to me, hosted by hardware, bandwidth, and electricity I pay for and visible to local users. That’s neither the look nor environment I want here.
I’m not saying I have to agree with everything that shows up on DubVee via federation (lord knows I don’t), but there are people and rhetoric that I definitely don’t platformed here because it runs counter to the mission I’m trying to achieve and/or is flat out illegal and could have black vans show up at my house.
And that account (I saw it in the replies and immediately banned them) is tame and just obnoxious compared to the extremism that’s become commonplace here and has pushed me over the edge and out the door.
And it makes sense, right? Someone who receives 10x more negative feedback than positive feedback is kinda ASKING FOR IT, r-r-right?!
Yes and no. Lemmy used to have scores/karma in the API, but the devs yanked that out in 0.19.0. Considering some of the disgusting things that get a lot of upvotes and how anyone who tries to de-escalate or talk sense gets downvoted to hell and called a bootlicker, it’s not necessarily a good indicator. Which, to be fair, the Lemmy devs kind-of mentioned when they removed scores from the API, so they were right (though for the wrong reasons).
I’m not saying the Fediverse is a lost cause (and if I am, then I hope I’m wrong), and I applaud the efforts Rimu and Piefed are doing to improve things. But the whole “censorship resistance” aspect of it is certainly working against it by way of making it effectively impossible to truly ban anyone. Like it or not, there’s a reason Reddit (and probably other platforms) does things like fingerprinting browsers/devices to enforce ban evasion. Here, you can troll all you want, call for violence, stir the pot, and then just hop to another instance and start again. This is a a feature, not a bug. 😡
I genuinely feel that instances were so preoccupied with seeing their own or Lemmy’s overall MAU counts go up that they didn’t stop to look at who they were platforming. Then there’s instances that flat out endorse violence so long as the admins agree with the target (cough midwest.social cough).
I used to post/comment in politics communities, but I’ve never been here with a political agenda and tend to block or ban those who are; I just want to stay informed with the facts. There’s just too many users, mods, and admins here who give extremism and shitty behavior a pass so long as the behavior is in line with whatever flavor of “leftie” the instance subscribes to.
And therein lies the problem (described better in another comment by ThePicardManeuver). People see this as a “leftie” platform and viciously enforce an echo chamber. Those who don’t pass the, quite often insane, purity tests get harassed:
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“Oh, you think X, so you must think Y” (where X = anything not 100% in line with an extreme, absolutist staement and Y = an absoltely insane leap in logic). And then proceeds to attack the user based on the faulty assumption that they said Y when they said X. Then other people pile onto that and futher attack as if the original person had said Y.
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“Patrick modded me because I was advocating violence, and I was, but it was against someone I think is a Nazi. So Patrick must be a Nazi and is over here creating a safe space for other Nazis”
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“I got banned for saying ‘Death to [blank]’ but I think [blank] is complicit in genociding, so the mods clearly support genocide.”
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“That’s such an enlightened centrist thing to say” and trying to discredit anyone who disagrees with their extreme take. e.g. If someone says “I agree with you in principle, but maybe take it down a notch” to which they reply “Oh, did I hurt the enlightened centrist’s feelings?” For those unfamiliar, the ‘enlightened centrist’ straw man argument is a false equivalence that posits that if the Right wants X and the Left opposes X, then the enlightened centrist would propose a compromise of ‘let’s just do a little X’. It is used to discredit anyone who is not fully in line with the person’s typically extreme take by falsely suggesting they support the thing.
And so on and so on. Even if Piefed had bright, flashing warning labels on all those accounts, not everyone would see them due to people interacting from different platforms, different apps/UIs, etc.
And Lemmy loves to dog-pile, so all those accounts have to do is plant the seed and then sit back and let the average Lemming’s overly-inflated sense of self-righteousness take over and amplify the harassment.
Why this kind of behavior gets a pass around here, I do not understand. But it’s common, it’s toxic, and needs to be addressed. It’s only gotten worse because it’s been allowed to fester and desensitize and futher radicalize people. (Again, see TPM’s comment in this thread for a clearer version of what I’m saying).
Take some of this rhetoric from Lemmy, remove the nouns, and it reads exactly like what you’d see on right-wing boards.
So yeah, I again applaud the efforts of Rimu and Piefed, but this is a people problem (the people doing it as well as the admins/mods who turn a blind eye, etc). Better tools can help, I agree, but they’re not going to fix the underlying problem without the people running instances saying “this kind of toxicity and extremism are unacceptable”.
Here btw is a link to it (http://dubvee.org/post/1516426): in case you need to send it to anyone:-D) Please rest and heal? :-D
Ah, thanks. That was almost exactly a year ago to the day. I remember writing that now, and can safely say in the last year, things have gotten worse. Much worse.
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.
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I’m sorry to hear about this and wish you the best in your next endeavours.
I’m curious, will this be the end of Tesseract too?
Well, shit
[This wasn’t the final straw, but it was one of a few factors that caused me to finally commit to the decision to shut down and leave this place and everything associated with it.]
While I understand the raison d’etre for YPTB, in practice, it’s largely a place for shitheads to spin narratives, throw out wild accusations/jump to conclusions, and harass mods.
I blocked / administratively removed it long before I started showing up there and only happened on a couple of posts recently because some shitheads decided to @ me to try to goad me (mentions from blocked communities still come through in notifications). That’s to say it’s not because I’m being thin-skinned here.
Word of advice: There are bad mods, sure, but most aren’t. If you don’t want more of the rational people burning out and bailing, then that community needs reined the fuck in to only verifiable information. Shut down any posts/comments that cherry-pick interactions, spin narratives about the mods or their rationale, present things out of context, and/or are “gotchas” where the OP goaded the mod into something (and often comes in presenting it out of context). And if people are frequent flyers to that community, maybe they’re the problem.
Allowing a place to harass mods (I know jordan lund gets a regular 15-minutes of hate) should be censure-worthy. You know damn well we’re all volunteers here, with lives, and are just doing our best to try to keep our spaces in order, welcoming, and fair to as many people as possible.
Thanks, appreciate it.
I’m curious, will this be the end of Tesseract too?
Yes, unless someone wants to fork it and maintain it. I’m done with Lemmy and everything associated with it. http://dubvee.org/post/3790890
Really sucks to hear, though I understand you gotta do what’s best for you. Tesseract has been a massive improvement over the Lemmy UI, it will be missed
🫡.
Thank you for everything you’ve done for the lemmyverse.
Sure, I’ll help out.
@[email protected] I’ll keep tesseract open when I’m at my desk to respond to reports.
Thanks. Promoted
Lemmy is worse than Reddit. Just without Adds.
There is no discussion with most users, just a series of people whith opinions and soapboxes.
I have enjoyed interacting with you, and I’m tempted to say that I will help out, but I know that I won’t be able to keep up the effort long term due to health issues. I don’t want to see you close up shop, but I thoroughly understand why you would want to.
I’m commenting because I just want to express solidarity with you. I have started to not like Lemmy all that much over the last several months. The average temperature of the comment sections on most of the communities has reached a boiling point. Even when I’m having benign conversations with people, someone else comes and shows their ass. Everyone has their own purity tests, which nobody can seem to pass. There is FAR too much USA politics on Lemmy (and I’m speaking as an American citizen).
A couple of years ago when Reddit shut down their free API, I really enjoyed interacting with folks here because most of the people who were here first were pretty cool, and then those who migrated because they objected to Reddit changing their API policy were also pretty cool. In more recent months though, it seems like we’re getting a much higher percentage of people who can’t stay unbanned from Reddit and continue their bad behavior on Lemmy. It’s exhausting.
I hang out on other forums too, and it seems like the same basic issues are happening there as well. Mods are starting to complain that they’re losing patience with people and threatening that they’re just going to start banning instead of issuing multiple warnings.
It’s gotten to the point where I don’t even want to interact with people online.
So anyway, you do whatever you need to do in order to maintain your sanity. You owe us nothing. I hope you get some assistance - seems like you have gotten a bit just since this post - but I will get it if you still decide you’ve hit your limit in the future.
You’ve described my experience here exactly. The fist 6-12 months here, during the API exodus, were amazing. The people who were here were here because they wanted to be here.
After that, it’s like it just filled up with all of the people too toxic to be platformed everywhere else, and the good/nice people got chased off or completely drowned out. I was determined not to let them win, but I feel like I’m swimming in what used to be a clean lake but is now a toxic cesspool. I’m all for fighting the good fight, but I also know when a retreat is warranted.
Thank you for being one of the dwindling voices of sanity around here.
I’ve got one person added to the team now, and I’ll see how that goes, but I am not optimistic that is going to be enough.
The fist 6-12 months here, during the API exodus, were amazing.
It was a strangely unique time where people were collectively building something instead of identifying parts to tear down.
So true. Love that analogy.
It’s good to hear others express this perspective; I wasn’t sure if it was just my faulty memory. I was also initially impressed with Lemmy’s community around the time of the API exodus. I took a long break around some instance drama noise, just joined back up a month ago, and I’m already considering bailing again. Maybe social media is doomed by its nature, I dunno. I wish you all the best.
Thanks. I just wish some more instance admins would express this perspective and maybe we could address the problem. Sadly, I think it’s been allowed to metastasize to the point of no return. I could be wrong - I hope I"m wrong. I still want this concept to succeed, but I just cannot see that happening in its current state.
Until then, I’ve done all I can do on my own.
I’m not going to claim that I haven’t had my own bad moments, but those didn’t really start until the toxicity crept in. I normally feel bad about it when my composure slips, and I wind up beating myself up over it. I have tried to step back and reassess what I want out of Lemmy, and frankly I’ve settled on mostly lurking. I hate that, and I’d hate it even more to see this instance close up (again though, totally get it).
I really enjoyed what beehaw was doing, but since I’m pretty much an app-only user, it got to be impossible to keep participating there when they weren’t keeping up with upgrades which broke compatibility with Voyager. I appreciate your aim with this instance given the beehaw influence.
I’ve actually been contemplating moving my account, and if you get the help you need, I’ll probably move here because of your goals with the instance.
I’m not going to claim that I haven’t had my own bad moments, but those didn’t really start until the toxicity crept in. I normally feel bad about it when my composure slips, and I wind up beating myself up over i
Same.
Thanks. Yeah, we’ve been “Beehaw-lite” since inception. I wanted to be general purpose with a good mix of content but also have a mission and guiding principles, so I looked at what BH was doing and modeled off of that.
FWIW, Beehaw recently updated to 0.19.11 or 12, so all the apps should work now. For a long time, they were stuck on 0.18.4 because they were planning to move to a different platform, but I guess that’s a ways off (or plans changed) so they updated to the latest Lemmy.
I’ve actually been contemplating moving my account, and if you get the help you need, I’ll probably move here because of your goals with the instance.
If we’re still here in a month, you’re totally welcome to! lol
Welcome, @[email protected] to the admin team!
