feddit.org

5 points

24 days ago

You are a treasure for the Fediverse to have. You allowed yourself to get triggered later on, but this comment right here is pure gold! 🪙

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Lvxferre@mander.xyz

5 points

22 days ago

Thank you!

Although, to be frank, I wasn’t triggered. Sure, I got mildly annoyed at two users, one for behaving like a dumb fuck and another for adding zero to the discussion; but the main reason why I was ruder with the HB users is that they don’t understand things unless you speak their language - it’s how they typically speak with each other anyway, I knew that it wouldn’t offend them.

(The first one is likely still pretending that this comic represents sexual abuse, that “gullibleness” isn’t a valid word, and that I was using my typically convoluted vocabulary to “sound smart”.)

Addressing the other comment, about HB [de]federation:

I don’t know what the admins there want, but it’s somewhat clear that a lot of the userbase wants to eat the cake and have it too: they want access to the content offered by other instances, but still behave like they were in HB.

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3 points

22 days ago

If you poke around inside HB, you will see them having these same conversations - I recall one, found by searching the keyword “(de)federation” where their admin was begging and pleading for them to behave. I might have restricted the search to whatever their announcement community is called, which I can usually find by sorting the local communities list by oldest. Anyway, their userbase obviously doesn’t care.

This points to why normalization of toxicity is so incredibly dangerous: by not stopping it inside their own instance, they train people that that kind of behavior is okay. Now, of course the users are going to act the same way outside of it!?!?!? You cannot extract blood from a stone, you cannot expect a leopard to change its spots, you cannot (necessarily) expect civility from someone trained on 4chan, and by federating with them and providing zero means to block them, that isn’t half as much their fault as ours. The likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Steve Huffman are all going to do their thang, but it’s our choice to use the platforms that they provide.

Lemmy’s 0.19.3 was supposed to allow user-blocking - older posts calling for user-level defederation were always told “just wait, it’s coming”. However, what little protection it did offer has since degraded further - the only thing is does is block communities for someone, not the toxic-AF userbase, and while it used to also block notifications from them, as of 0.19.5 the latter protection is already gone. At this point I expect it will never happen. Bc if it did, people would block Lemmy.ml too, and they can’t have that.

Only the authority admins can choose to defederate from hexbear.net and lemmygrad.ml, and lemmy.ml too except who are we kidding that’s not happening. Some instances have at least blocked certain communities such as ChapoTrapHouse, but obviously meander.xyz has not (https://mander.xyz /c/chapotraphouse@hexbear.net), seeming to prefer to leave it up to each individual user to decide which users, communities, and instances to block - except again, you cannot block the latter, not without some kind of bot or doing the work manually for each individual user and community, plus any new ones that may be created in the future. And despite all the posts that seem to indicate otherwise, quite often we are prevented from even discussing the matter. In the 10 months since I made this account, I have only had 3 posts removed - all 3 for criticizing the admin practices on Lemmy.ml. What is allowed to be said is only the tip of the iceberg.

Watching Innuendo Studios’ The Alt Right Playbook changed my thinking forever, helping solidify my thinking that while you can lead a horse to water, you cannot make it drink. I am not criticizing what you did here bc you weren’t speaking for the sake of changing the actual HB’s mind, but to breathe the light of knowledge into the dark corners of the situation, mainly for the sake of the rest of us who know nothing about that game and perhaps are too busy or otherwise not inclined to look up such details. FANTASTIC! But anyway, I now know that people who troll are not worth talking to.

So I’ll probably move away from Lemmy, either to PieFed or Tesseract on dubvee.org or both, or lemmy.cafe seems quite welcoming and is the only fully Lemmy instance I’ve ever heard of that has defederated from all of the big 3 - and notably virtually nothing else (except threads.net), so it’s like lemm.ee but without that source of toxicity. It also is running 0.19.6-beta.9, and has fantastic welcome messages on the home page - most instances refuse to update your sidebar content to help guide new users, inclined highly ironically lemmy.ml itself that just has a link titled “What is Lemmy.ml” that points to a post that has since been removed:-D. Both dubvee.org and lemmy.cafe are only run by a single admin though iirc, so seem less stable for the future.

Btw whether you are interested in joining PieFed or not yourself, I highly recommend reading this: https://join.piefed.social/2024/06/22/piefed-features-for-growing-healthy-communities/ - many of those thoughts that you and I discussed over a year ago about voting patterns, with trust based on reputation scores and sorting based on someone’s pattern of behaviors, as we do irl, are fleshed out there. They might be great solutions to the problems, or they might be horrible ones, but either way it’s an interesting read, and a step forward to making something actually happen!

We cannot control others, only ourselves. New, mainstream people are far less likely to join Lemmy due to all the extremism and toxicity that we allow here, the (mostly false) mantra “you can just block it tho” aside, not everyone wants to treat their social media like they are installing Arch Linux btw.

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Lvxferre@mander.xyz

3 points

22 days ago

So, I’ve hit !announcements@hexbear.net, and found the admin asking people to behave:

1. When in a federated instance, their rules (and their code of conduct) apply. […] 3. Conduct that is deemed untenably toxic to the Fediverse and Hexbear’s standing within it (by discretion of Hexbear moderation) may be subject to reprisal, regardless of whether it is explicitly outlined.

Alongside this thread where they discuss federation or not, asking posters if HB should federate, and how. Voting results were mostly pro-federation through an allow list, but what’s interesting is the content of the comments - or, rather, what is missing:

pro-federation users were like “weee! WE GO OUTSIDE AND WE OWN LIBS!”
anti-federation users were like “no, they’re going to ruin Hexbear!”. (This comment in another thread is a bit more explicit on this.)

But in no moment they showed concerns towards the other side, like “no, our funposting would be misunderstood and create issues out there” or “those kids won’t behave”. As a group it was only looking at its own belly button. And it was always focusing on political views, never on behaviour.

(Owning libs would be fine and dandy if they didn’t bloody assumed that everyone and their dog is one.)

I also found a few extra shitty things, like:

Defed note on Blahaj. Blahaj saying “it’s fine”, and HB basically “NO! I know better LGBTQ+ issues than an instance created for LGBTQ+ people! Listen to ME! ME! ME!”. It sounds a lot like the situation in this thread - sub LGBTQ+ with “woman” (the author of the comic) instead.
Critical support to Russia. What the admin says is sensible and reasonable… or it would be if the very userbase didn’t print the admins’ words and used it in the PPB pigsty. If you criticise the Russian government you will be assumed to be a NATO shill, throwing all “but critical support!” thing out of the window.

user-blocking

Yeah, user-blocking doesn’t really work for this. It’s a great way to remove random annoyances, but not a whole userbase that thinks that slacktivism and ignoring “the other side” is OK.

Watching Innuendo Studios’ The Alt Right Playbook changed my thinking forever

Dunno if this was a rec, but I’m watching it now. It’s good stuff - first video and they were already spot on.

I’ll probably stay in mander.xyz, but I’ve been watching PieFed from afar for a long time. I really like some features that Rimu is implementing.

~~[In case some HB user, full of gullibleness, is reading this: think on the purpose of this utterance. Spoilers: context.]~~

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4 points

22 days ago

Yeah it is all so extremely obvious:

Assume good faith in even the most obvious of questions, except in cases where a user is explicitly acting in a combative or unreasonable manner.

Do not directly link to comments or posts of other federated instances on public posts with intent to goad or mock.

When in a federated instance, their rules (and their code of conduct) apply.

Allow instances their own space for discussion, if requested implicitly or explicitly.

etc., though none of that is ever actually enforced, making it a list of “suggestions puh-lease”, rather than “rules”.

Speaking of voting, as a mathematician you will appreciate this one most of all: https://hexbear.net/post/1712067. Quick summary: they took a vote, then discarded the vote entirely. One of the results was 41 for remaining federated with lemm.ee vs. only 4 for defederation - that is 91% for, vs. only 9% against. And then programming.dev wasn’t quite as close but it was still freaking hugely biased towards one side: 27 (58.7%) for remain federated with them vs. 19 (41.3%) to defederation. The difference between them being 8 votes out of 46 = 17.4% - which is nowhere close to a tie. Unless you are an HB admin I suppose and then:

The end vote for programming.dev and aussie.zone was a tie, so we decided to break the tie in favor of defederation.

This is… just… wow. >91% wanted to remain federated with lemm.ee, and 59% to remain federated with programming.dev, but screw the users - what do you think this is, a vote? Oh wait… :-(

And once again the comments in that post tell the REAL story. e.g. this one https://hexbear.net/post/1712067/4540345:

Multiple users legit left this site for months at a time multiple times due to those dumb struggle sessions. Hexbear even lost devs over some of them

devs!!! They are turning away their own programmers who provide the site that they all use to shit onto each one with!?!?! And given how Hexbear predates Lemmy, I think they actually meant “dev”, rather than “admin” - i.e. someone who did the work of modifying the code, which is all the more relevant given how it is in Rust, which is not an easy language to learn, even for someone starting off with extensive knowledge of C++.

But speaking of admins, the admins themselves say things like:

however we consider providing a safer browsing experience for marginalized users more important than the opportunity to dunk.

THE OPPORTUNITY TO DUNK - not the opportunity to converse civilly will, not the opportunity to learn, to listen, to discourse, but TO DUNK.

And ofc the admins are not the only ones speaking thus - “Compromising the ability to spread leftist ideas to others in order to…”, “They’re reading what we’re saying and the message is still getting spread. Our ideals are spread through interacting with people…”, “you can’t stop some users from seeing the ridiculous fascist takes”, “Where do they think new users come from? They don’t spontaneously appear from thin air they appear because other people are exposed to them in other spaces.” - and here’s one that literally uses the actual word “disrupt”: “With Lemmy, it was about building something that was going to eventually create its own theatre-of-operations that disrupted existing ones, and hexbear was going to be connected to that so I could always justify it.”

The only reason that Hexbear exists and is federated with any other instances at all, from the mouths of the very self-same admins that run it, is… again… “THE OPPORTUNITY TO DUNK”.

So when e.g. Cowbee comes in, ignores 95% of what I say and hyper-focuses on one tiny little aspect, demanding that I show proof of all of my work, while not offering any for their own points and instead just saying “just trust me bro, and hit up my DMs where we can talk more” (but then forgetting I suppose that they said that, or presuming that I could not read it in the very self-same post, or more likely presuming that others would not take the time to do so, and then they claimed that they had never done such a thing at all, hrm…).

The Innuendo Studios series is absolutely one of the best series on YouTube that I have ever seen! I just presumed that you already knew of it, but yes if you haven’t taken time to watch throuhg all of them, you absolutely would probably enjoy it! Everything he’s done is amazing too, like the agency of protagony. Also the gamer-gate one, titled something like why is jack so angry, b/c it shows the historical development of those trends - but that was just a precursor to the ultimate one: The Alt-Right Playbook.

I see these same tactics played out over and over and over and over and over and over and over again by people like Cowbee, and it is just exhausting. I LOVED your take-down here, but that simply cannot keep up with the absolute TSUNAMI of bullshit that “they” are able to spew. It takes them two seconds to say something and move on, so even if it takes you only two minutes to reply, let alone two hours, then they “win”. And either way they declare that they do so. As Trump is pretty much guaranteed to do so, if he does not outright win himself, in about one month from now.

So that’s the thing: anybody can go in and read these comments, from the HB’s very own mouths. The highly ironic thing is that they actually ARE behaving themselves quite well when they are out here!!! Compared to what they do inside there, that is. (have you seen the pig-poop link yet? ewww…) But who is going to spend that kind of time?! And yet, their messages are chosen to be spread all across the entire Fediverse, unless the instance takes the requisite steps to specifically defederate from them. Like a CSAM attack, this is a wave of hostility and more importantly childishness that festers inside their borders, but also explodes outwards to affect us all. Unless we go somewhere that has enacted defenses to keep it out.

At which point it becomes relevant that especially when they noticed that they were getting defederated from most of the major instances, and their admins chose to defederate even more other instances, many HB users fled to their alts, e.g. on Lemmy.ml. Even if those alts had existed prior to that, still, they became the new vehicle through which the HBs chose to spread their messages.

No wonder 100% of the people that I have told about Lemmy irl looks at me so oddly - one glance at the all feed, at the types of things coming out from like memes@lemmy.ml, and all the toxicity spewed from HBs and HBs under the guise of other alts, or others who were never on HB but act the same, is always enough to turn my irl friends away from Lemmy. And has finally done the same to me, now that places such as PieFed and Tesseract are available (but possibly would have been enough regardless).

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Lvxferre@mander.xyz

3 points

21 days ago

To be fair, the voting there is just to probe the waters, the admins still want to take the final decision.

About users (incl. devs) leaving, it’s worse in the context:

Yeah, pre-federation Hexbear was noticeably worse compared to now. I really don’t understand what people see in pre-federation Hexbear. I guess it was less openly bigoted, but seeing all those bullshit struggle sessions and people who you regard as your acquaintances arguing over the stupidest shit isn’t exactly great for your mental health either. [emphasis mine]

Multiple users legit left this site for months at a time multiple times due to those dumb struggle sessions. Hexbear even lost devs over some of them

When r/CTH was banned from Reddit, I thought that it wasn’t to blame - it’s just that the Reddit admins wanted to throw a bone to the fascists, as CTH was in the same banwave as frensworld and clownworld. I mean, it’s spez/kn0thing, we know that “umm, ackshyually, we don’t hate you fascists. See? We’re also banning some left-wingers! Please stay in Reddit, our dear fascist userbase”.

However, if I’m reading those two comments right, that is clearly false. CTH → Hexbear was already tailored to cause trouble to other communities back in Reddit; this tendency only continued in the Fediverse.

And unless it has a target, its users will fight each other, even if they’re all leftists and consider each other leftist, so they can’t even pretend that they’re just dunking libs.

[from the other comment]

One of the tricks that HBs - and also Magats - use is to say something, knowing full well that it is not true, but relying on the fact that others will simply go along with it.

The alt-right playbook that you linked mentions it, under “changing the goalposts”.

[And before some casual reader tries to distort this into the horseshoe “theory”: nope. I’m talking here about rhetoric tactics that you see regardless of political views. It’s just that the alt right loves it, and HB happens to love it too.]

And lemmy.ml is arguably all the worse for being more tolerable therefore more insidious to have to parse.

It’s kind of funny how it remembers me Marx’s The 18th Brumaire - specially the first two paragraphs. As if the .ml admin team (and Lemmy devs) were mimicking what Reddit did as trying to create something new, but being bound by the already existing circumstances so they’re forced to replicate how the Reddit admin handles users:

trying to handle clearly incompatible groups, and failing at it;
hidden rules (in Reddit it was “profitability”, here it’s the admins’ views), opaquely enforced through the listed rules
admin team can’t be arsed to verify if users actually violated a rule (explicit or hidden) - if it looks like a violation, assume that it is, and then refuse to go back on the decision
muppets assume that the user is by default bad, unless there’s obvious evidence contrariwise (sometimes not even)

…and as a result .ml ends as the farce for Reddit’s tragedy.

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4 points

21 days ago

That kind of voting “strategy” might best be described by the keyword “gamble”, as in it could pay off or… it could backfire. This was public. We all saw what they did. They dangled the whittle “vote” in front of their users, then they snatched it away. That’s a “power move”, as in someone flaunting their dick size just to show off - worse, a tiny one, while daring someone to talk back. The emperor has no clothes, etc. THAT level of insensitivity is on full display.

The enemy of my enemy is not always my friend. Two lefts do not make a right. 1+1 != 1.9, nor 2.1, but precisely 2, the former two answers revealing how it is possible for both to be incorrect even if in opposite ways - and then other answers such as 2i, e, -100000, and “your mother” are examples of still more ways to be wrong, although oddly enough “two” could be correct, depending on whether the rules are flexible enough to recognize such.

Flipping to lemmy.ml, I have enormous respect for those code developers having offered their skills to release that for the entire world to use. Kudos. But running an instance is a different skillset - and yet, back when other instances were not yet a thing, they offered that too, to help lemmy get off the ground. Kudos again. Though power corrupts, and over time… Anyway, just b/c something started off one way does not mean that it must continue forward indefinitely - the word for that might be “stagnation”, or even “inflexibility” to adapt to changing circumstances.

I agree with all of what you said, except how things appear twice. I think rather than people refuse to learn from history, and therefore mandate that it be repeated, far more often than twice. e.g. Rome fell, now USA is the new Rome, and it will fall too, whereforth who will step up to the plate next? (after a few hundred to a thousand years time ofc, to allow time to forget) Humans are so incredibly stoopid - or at least I know that *I* am - and we love to fall in love with ourselves and our latest bright shiny idea, as if it had never been tried before.

Not that I am blaming the founding fathers of the USA - far from it, b/c (1) it was an experiment, and (2) it actually did work out well all across the wide world. However, it was a piss-poor implementation, which if it was to have been considered as worthwhile then steps should therefore have been taken to have made it more robust. But fast-forward to nowadays, facing up against things that it has never really had to contend with before - chief among them a level of foreign aggression that costs the actors so little, yet yields such enormous dividends; but not far behind is the incredible stupidity that already lies within and is totally separate from that, especially seeing as how it predated it by hundreds of years - and I honestly fear that it cannot stand against such an onslaught (especially this 2-pronged assault) for too much longer.

So in my view what we need to do is WAKE UP. A fire is in the building and we should do things about that. Secure our valuables (e.g. children), identify an exit (if there is one), and the like. But then in the face of all of that, to listen to the likes of HBs… wow, just wow, uh… no. I would leave social media altogether rather than put up with the likes of that. Except when I made my account I did not know. And also it took me months to figure out the extent of the problem, e.g. that it includes lemmy.ml too. And also I did not want to simply leave, without telling others first of my findings. And also Kbin had fallen, long may Mbin yet live, but others were rising up to take its place - and while Sublinks seems perpetually not yet ready, PieFed is looking mighty fine these days. I can be free, not just keeping lemmy.ml at arm’s length, but fully and entirely free, from all that bullcrap. Though I am certain that it will not be perfect either - it lacks a lot of the polish that Lemmy has for instance, and yet even there it has things that Lemmy does not, e.g. I’ve asked questions and seen changes made in (not even tens of) mere minutes! Which itself could lead someone to ask… why wasn’t it made already?:-P But anyway that’s a far cry from begging to be able to defederate from the toxic userbase on lemmy.ml, and a year later we seem further from that goal than ever before - almost as if there is resistance to providing such a feature…

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4 points

22 days ago

Oh, I missed a trick so here’s another separate reply - I hope it is more informative and therefore interesting than annoying to do it this way, split up (but you may have already started reading and responding the other so… you might not read this otherwise).

One of the tricks that HBs - and also Magats - use is to say something, knowing full well that it is not true, but relying on the fact that others will simply go along with it. The lazy bc they won’t bother to fact-check, and the authoritarians bc they don’t want to cause controversy by arguing against their leaders. It’s actually a useful tactic, I have to say, separately from how I may feel about it being attempted to be used against myself.

So I noticed how one of the posts that you linked - https://hexbear.net/post/280770 - did that (hehe, well actually all of them did, repeatedly, but I wanted to call up one item in particular; also they presented it in the largest font size possible, BUT I WON’T YELL IT AT YOU HERE! … ah, anymore than that much:-):

Lemmy.world has slandered Hexbear.net’s name by accusing us of being a brigading troll instance, after days of requesting evidence they have provided none.

So by again sorting the Communities list by Old, and this time it wasn’t the oldest but still it was close to it, I found Lemmy.world’s announcement community, and thereby this post: https://lemmy.world/post/2498330. It lists 8 links - 4 comments made by HBs on Lemmy.world and 4 posts made on HB itself. And then for good measure 4 more links to Lemmygrad.ml that Lemmy.world also decided to defederate with at around the same time period.

Now, I bet you can anticipate what those linked comments said, can’t you? Here’s one for clarity:

deleted by creator

Yeah, well, anyway, at the time, Lemmy.world did provide the receipts requested, whereas HB demanded proof, then ignored said proof, then demanded more proof - and you can see where this is going. Despite how someone tried to deliberately cover up their own involvement - though importantly, only after they got called out for it by the entire Lemmy.world admin team.

My point is that I have never once seen someone from HB use a good-faith argument (or if I have, it has been so long that I cannot recall it). 100% of what I see from them is either the most inane BS, or at best neutral. I would most definitely go to the trouble of learning how to write a bot or Firefox add-in or filter rule or something in order to block such content, but that would only selfishly help myself. Unfortunately, every new person who joins Lemmy must discover this all over again on their own - it is not printed in the sidebar “hey, just so you know, HB spews BS”.

And lemmy.ml is arguably all the worse for being more tolerable therefore more insidious to have to parse.

Anyway, I hope this was interesting. Sometimes, people on the internet lie - and the worst kind are those that tell you the truth, after having lied to themselves (i.e. can no longer distinguish between truth vs. fiction).

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