I for one have stopped posting any content to lemmy.ml communities.
your “boycott” was already happening naturally because (ayk) lemmy.ml’s mods are insufferable
We need to call on more servers to defederate with lemmy.ml if we want more people to join the platform, I dont want my friends’ first experience of the platform to be a tankie post.
100% of the people that I’ve recommended Lemmy to have admonished me for even so much as having mentioned it, citing the extremist rhetoric that calls for violent upheaval of all capitalist systems in the Western world.
If I do a Google search (yuck I know), Lemmy.ml is the 4th hit, and the top hit for an actual instance. On it, the default view shows only Local posts so… yup, that’s what a day-1 noob would see, is that instance making fun of capitalism especially the USA.
From the actual top instance, Lemmy.World, those posts make up a significantly smaller percentage of the feed, but how would people know that? And they aren’t nothing either.
Also, blocking an instance from Lemmy does very little to curb the onslaught of toxicity from it: that merely mutes the communities hosted there, whereas the users are still free to harass you, triggering notifications, vote to influence the visibility of your content, etc. I was browsing All and made the mistake of replying to a comment in ChapoTrapHouse@hexbear.net one day, and then did that again in lemmygrad.ml, and each time received replies for WEEKS and WEEKS afterwards. I almost quit the fediverse entirely:-(. Browsing from All, how was I supposed to know what those communities, or instances, were all about - was that truly “my” fault for being ignorant? Either way, I almost left, so I understand why none of the irl people I mention Lemmy to will stay either.
The people arguing against defederation are ignoring how users can be harassed here against their consent, and since no other alternatives are being made available on Lemmy to deal with the situation, defederation remains as the only option left.
(Side-note: PieFed does offer several intriguing alternatives, including showing the sidebar text below every post so that someone knows what the community standards are, even arriving at the post from All rather than going through the community page first, and labelling certain instances with special text, e.g. for Beehaw it says:
This post is hosted on beehaw.org which has higher standards of behaviour than most places. Be nice.
with that link to the exact text offered by the instance admins describing their alternative and unusual moderation practices in their own words; and another is in labelling users to allow democratization of moderation rather than a binary remove/retain decision - although while all of these experimental features are awesome, PieFed’s UI is quite a bit behind Lemmy’s so not quite ready for the masses.)
A hexbear user “called me out” in chapotraphouse for “transphobia” for a comment I made pointing out how insane it is that the hexbear team was calling the admin/mods of blahaj.zone “transphobic” – the admin and most of the mod team are actual trans people.
So I replied to the callout by saying I’m a landlord (I’m not) and asking how much I should charge for rent as a “card carrying leftist.” Replied to a few responses about how I’m a one of the good landlords and providing an essential service at a reasonable price.
My idea was to bait the worst offenders, and it worked. I waited for the replies to roll in, then blocked every single user that commented on that post. Anyone that DMed me about it got blocked too. A couple weeks later I blocked the hexbear and lemmygrad instances in my user settings.
It worked great and I haven’t had many issues since.
I’d rather have .ml scaring shitlibs away while they stay on block, best of both worlds.
