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by bloqs 502 days ago
I had to get rid of lemmy. I know some instances are better than others, but the volume of unstable, immature zoomers (particularly the US variety) pushing openly communist rhetoric (and brigading and just abusing anything that doesnt conform to that) made it completely unusable. I really gave it several tries as well as I liked the tech. It was useless for discussing anything unless you aligned immediately with the mob. Yes, I blocked some instances, but the app delivery means the culture bleeds between them. It felt like worse twitter.
3 comments

I mostly agree with you (I'm staying on Lemmy despite the average user, not because of them), but this is not really relevant to the point here.

My point is that it would be really nice to have a gamedev instance that is able (but not required) to federate. Instead of creating yet-another discussion forum that is completely isolated from the wider network, they could simply set up a Lemmy server with federation disabled.

After the community is somewhat established, they could then start whitelist federation. Perhaps, they could open only with programming.dev. Then they could perhaps open federation to the Mastodon instances that are focused on indie developers/gamers.

The only way to get rid of this (current) scenario where Lemmy is only for frustrated tweenagers and keyboard warriors is by cultivating the alternatives in the Fediverse.

I feel like it's not just instances, but also the groups. I've carefully selected a bunch of well-moderated groups that bring me content I care about, and I interact regularly.

But I know what you're talking about, because every time I go there, I'm logged out and I have to see the front page. If I make the mistake of reading it, I'm horrified every time.

Then, I refresh the page and I'm logged in, and it's basically just a well-tended forum again.

Also, yes, there's a bug that shows me as logged out, but if I ctrl-shift-R, it refreshes with me logged in again. A regular refresh doesn't do it. I cannot imagine what that bug is, and nothing I've done has cleared this in my Firefox. So weird.

Yeah, the default view is absolute horrendous (to me) after I got a couple of customers who seem to love 196 stuff.

There has been some discussion to allow admins to make a selection of communities that should be visible/hidden for non-logged users, let's hope this lands soon.

Regarding the login bug: what version of Lemmy is your instance on? After I upgraded my instance to 0.19.8 this issue has mostly gone away.

At the bottom it says: UI: 0.19.3 BE: 0.19.3-7-g527ab90b7

So I guess I just have to wait for them to update. Thanks for that!

Feel free to remove my comment if it's not allowed.

I am _very_ disappointed with Lemmy. The community is full of echo chambers, and that's already bad.

But what broke the camel's back for me is the fact that one of the Lemmy creators one day literally posted what I will describe as a propaganda website. I had to double check, but nope, it definitely is a propaganda website. The fact that you made a software just to spread your dangerous ideology is _so_ disgusting. Malicious.

I used less and less Lemmy since then.

This also prompted me to contribute to PieFed[1], but at this point Fediverse for me does not feel the same anymore. That event left a bad taste in my mouth.

I also have had bad experience with Mastodon, but this reply is already long.

The word Fediverse has "diverse" in it, yet it feels like anything but diverse. It's full of people with same beliefs screaming the same argument every day. It's full of that open source purists forcing you to change to Linux or something like that[2][3].

[1]: https://join.piefed.social

[2]: https://mas.to/@TechConnectify/112995177480955078

[3]: https://kevquirk.com/blog/linux-elitism-again

>This also prompted me to contribute to PieFed[1], but at this point Fediverse for me does not feel the same anymore. That event left a bad taste in my mouth.

Email is federated and can be used to spread knowledge and subterfuge alike. That's the cost of freedom.

Like any other community, you need to find what you fit with and stick with that.We can't hope to grow if we quick every last alternative over solvable problems. Every centralized website had solveable problems too at one point.

>The word Fediverse has "diverse" in it, yet it feels like anything but diverse. It's full of people with same beliefs screaming the same argument every day. It's full of that open source purists forcing you to change to Linux or something like that[2][3].

if we're being frank: this is an issue we will always deal with as people on the fringes. Quote I take to heart:

>The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong

All the normal people will stick to Tiktok/Instagram/Facebook/Reddit/etc. no matter what. When you hear all this bad press they are not the ones will who use their energy to move to an alternative. So by that definition, we are already "radicals" for moving off. So yes, we will get a lot of "wtiches" on the way and it's up to our judgement to find the "civil libertarians" to form community with. It's simply inevitable and friction we need to overcome if we don't simply want to give up to the centralized sites.

> The fact that you made a software just to spread your dangerous ideology is _so_ disgusting.

Why do we keep making this mistake of looking at the character of a person to judge the merit of the creations?

Sure every creation is a form of self-expression, software is not an exception. However, it doesn't mean that using the software makes you aligned in every way with the expressed views.

Yes, the Lemmy devs are morons who still defend the most abhorrent regimes. Gargron (the Mastodon dev) is a self-righteous prick who thinks he can control civil discourse by putting up barriers that can be easily overcome by any malicious actor. The Pleroma devs are sociopaths who can't even stand each other. The developer from PixelFed has the attention span of a toddler on a sugar high, keeps talking about "the power of community" but then goes on tirades against anyone that attempts to build upon any of his projects.

But at the of the day, absolutely none of this matters to the users. The software is free. The power is given to the user, not the developer. No one is asked to use the software only in a certain way, or to subscribe to any ideology before getting access to the source code.