2d ago

It might be too late for the Threadiverse...

It was a rather sombering thread, that echoed quite a bit of what I've been saying about .ml, the Triad, general toxicity of their Tankie "ideology" for months now.

I know @ptz@dubvee.org was speaking of general toxicity, but the Triad is a huge chunk of it, the culture they create...festers it. They comprise the bulk of the hostility, I've personally seen it over and over and over again. All the "Just go back to Reddit" or "just another lib Redditor refugee" comments for someone that dared to have nuance.

Hell, I saw hex users fucking cheering .ee's shutdown because it was some sort of psyop/CIA/fed/lib/"They didn't perfectly agree with me" instance. They call feddit.org a "Nazi Zionist" instance for the crime....of not wanting to be arrested and complying with German law...

I haven't looked to see if they've started any "celebratory" posts about Dubvee yet and I also don't really want to, if they're there, I already know what they're going to say in it -_-

Unfortunately, I fear the problem was far worse than I thought.

Ptz speculated that the toxicity has "metastasized". And you know what? He might be right, it seemed to be a lot better off 2 years ago, now....now I feel we might be losing the battle against the toxicity and I don't think PieFed will be enough. Complacency has set in

My hope was that with enough instances defederating from .ml and the rest of the Triad, it would be a tad easier to take down toxic Tankies, trolls and their alts. But, few wanted to burn the bridge with the toxic main devs' instance and now it might be too late. (Cheers to @Illecors@lemmy.cafe and the lemmy.cafe instance, one of the few of note to actually defederate from the entire triad!)

Like ptz said and I fully agree with, this place started with promise 2 years ago, but it appears to be ultimately morphing into 4chan (or like I've been saying, Voat 2.0) after all

Oh well, I've got some thick ass skin so I'll probably be here till the end, till the last sane instance shuts down.

I'll see you there @dessalines@lemmy.ml

/Sadmemerant

Heck, maybe I'll do a hail Mary and start an instance on a custom fork of lemmy with "normie proof" onboarding while dumping a few hundred in ADs (Maybe even on Reddit itself, HA!). I'll flood this place with "normies" LMAO

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I'll repeat a few things I've been saying about this. To keep it ~~short:~~ less verbose:
What people call "toxicity" online relies heavily on irrationality, from the aggressor and/or the target. And politics raises the stakes of everything, so irrationality + political engagement is specially prone to generate catty behaviour, name calling, uncalled combativeness, and all that crap.
Now look at social media. You'll see irrationals infesting every platform. Reddit in special encourages it, and most lemmings are from Reddit.
Why this matters: because I believe people here are focusing too much on .ml and Hexbear, without noticing the problem would still persist without them.
- Now look at social media. You'll see irrationals infesting every platform. Reddit in special encourages it, and most lemmings are from Reddit.
  True, but on other social media, there's millions of users and it's a LOT easier to dilute the toxicity when a SMs D/MAU is being measured in the millions
  Why this matters: because I believe people here are focusing too much on .ml and Hexbear, without noticing the problem would still persist without them.
  Yea, but I really think .ml not being defederated from is causing a bit of a feedback loop encouraging similar toxic behavior in other users for their own, even non-Tankie, reasons
  
  Yea, but I really think .ml not being defederated from is causing a bit of a feedback loop encouraging similar toxic behavior in other users for their own, even non-Tankie, reasons
  Can I just say that if instances start flipping from being lemmy instances to piefed instances, as is slowly happening, then lemmy.ml will potentially find itself more marginalised and the questions of defederation will happen. As it stands now, lemmy.ml is the foundational instance for the lemmy software and that is likely the primary reason why many instances won't pull the plug.
  
  Generally, when you read a comment that makes you wonder just how dumb the person who wrote it is, it comes from one of those two places. At least they're consistent?
- Indeed, without ml hexbear and grad those irrationals would spread without reason to other instances, turning everything into a cesspool. And luckily we have the tools to not engage with them, block them or outright defed from their host.
- Yeah, while people can have their valid criticisms of the culture of various instances, we need to be extremely wary of the idea that the problem will be solved if we just isolate outselves from the folks we sit furthest from on the political spectrum. I've seen toxicity from folks on all sorts of instances, even if some have more (though I've honestly seen more from certain instances other than the triad)
  Literally every platform has toxicity, regardless of its political makeup. If we want to improve the culture of this space we can't just scapegoat a couple instances (that to be fair, do seem to have big issues from what I've seen from other folks, though my interactions have been mostly cordial)
  And leftist spaces seem to chronically struggle a lot with in-group fighting and toxicity because we're all driven by our care for issues of moral importance- which often lets us justify being shitty to one another if we can frame someone as the villain in the story of an issue we care about.
  I think creating a culture that is unwelcoming of anti-social, bad faith behaviour regardless of whether we agree with the stance or not would help massively. But that is a difficult thing to create structure around doing.
- From the day those protests started Lemmy was far far worse than Reddit for anyone but further left progressives. I have fat more often been called a Nazi here for like warm takes. It's a spectrum and Lemmy is definitely a far more toxic place then reddit is if you don't agree.
  
  yep yep! ive been called a nazi because I psoted about the Green Party lol
  
  I know exactly nothing about the green party but like Jesus fuck you'd think leftists would have learned that's an important word to stop diluting given many of us are living under a system slipping into actual full blown fascism and it's an increasingly big problem globally
  Its so painfully harmful to leftist causes to go around accusing your fellow leftists of being a nazi for not being your exact flavor of left. We all need to cut that shit out and grow some emotional and interpersonal maturity.
  
  Thats because in generaly the "leftists" that occupy spaces like ml arent really leftists at all, they are anti-western idologues. You will very rarely see them posting about things left wing people tend to care about like workers rights, cost of living, housing or things like that. They are far more interested in geopolitics, especially on issues where they can make "west bad" posts.
  
  While I understand your argument that their ideology is defined in large parts by other factors than political alignment, I do see them talk about those kinds of things, specially through the lens of demanding communism as a resolution to those problems, or calling for the abolishment of the class that facilitates those problems 😅
  
  I saw some research about this recently let me see if I can find it, it was based on reddit communities but I think it applies to lemmy as much if not more.
  ah here it is
  ABSTRACT
  Social media’s role in the spread and evolution of extremism is a focus of intense study. Online extremists have been involved in the spread of online hate, mis- and disinformation, and real-world violence. However, most existing work has focuses on right-wing extremism. In this paper, we perform a first of its kind large-scale measurement study exploring left-wing extremism. We focus on “tankies,” a left-wing community that first arose in the 1950s in support of hardline actions of the USSR and has evolved to support what they call “Actually Existing Socialist” countries, e.g., CCP-run China, the USSR, and North Korea. We collect and analyze 1.3M posts from 53K authors from tankie subreddits, and explore the position of tankies within the broader far-left community on Reddit. Among other things, we find that tankies are clearly on the periphery of the larger far-left community. When examining the contents of posts, we find misalignments and conceptual homomorphisms that confirm the description of tankies in the theoretical work. We also discover that tankies focus more on state-level political events rather than social issues. Our findings provide empirical evidence of the distinct positioning and discourse of left-wing extremist groups on social media.
  
  can u break down what thats saying?
  
  The Green Party is farther left than the Democrats. But people throw around nazi and fascist as some sort of insult, not even knowing the meaning of those words.

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