A lot less annoying then endlessly filtering content by community and user
It is the opposite. People join an instance which does not agree with their point of view. They get banned. They move to a different instance.
Echo chamber galore.
On the other hand, learning to deal with people you dislike is a useful skill. If everyone segregates themselves into opposing factions there will never be any progress.
Of course, I’ve personally blocked about 600 people…
I have enough people I dislike and disagree with IRL, I will have all my opinions confirmed when I’m browsing online, thankyouverymuch. /s
My reply test to see if you blocked me
You are not blocked, because you are beneath contempt.
[jk]
o7 to the brave admins of Hexbear, Lemmy’s tankie quarantine instance.
I just sort of picked a server at random when I singed up. Turned out to be a cool place, but I am sure that is true for most instances.
I kinda did the same. Except I went for .ml and folks would call me a tankie for no other reason. Got kinda boring so I switched to another.
Personally I kind of don’t want everybody to be like-minded, because that becomes an echo chamber. What I’m after on Lemmy is people willing to explore subjects objectively, without beating the bushes for enemies or competing for upvotes.
Meanwhile I’m on a Dutch instance and look at all the bs…
You dumb dumb Dutchland isn’t part of the Netherlands continent
You are the one with BS not me
Other than the one we are all thinking of here, I can’t say I really agree.
cough lemmy.ml cough cough hexbear cough
2, hexbear and lemmygrad.
I don’t mind hexbear
I used to, but they either got blocked or defeded,. either way my experience got WAY better.
Help a noob out - it’s reddit, right?
Doesn’t this lead to potential echo chambers though. If I go and block all content I don’t like, how can I have ideas that challenge my beliefs?
Who cares? It’s social media, I come here for entertainment. Don’t let it form your opinions and believes. Read credible newspapers and journals from across the spectrum and go touch grass and have a civil conversation with a stranger if you want to hear ideas that challenge your beliefs.
People are downvoting you not because you are wrong, but because it really hurts when you call people out with this kind of precision. It should be common sense that the message boards full of randos shouldn’t be the foundation of one’s political worldview, but it’s also really easy to make message boards full of randos an integral part of one’s social life.
Getting your news from credible, non-social sources, is important. Being able to read an article and move on without heading to the comments is important. Having conversations with real people offline is important. But those things don’t offer the same steady drip of dopamine that social media provides.
A lot of people here are excessively online, and in desperate need of grass touching, and they don’t want to be told that directly, but they do also need to hear it.
Not everything has to have an opposing perspective, where’s the opposing community for knitting? Tearing?
c/tearrorists
Rip and tear, until it is done. And you can start knitting again.
I wouldn’t pull that thread if I were you.
Probably purling.
Some people don’t come to social media to have their beliefs challenged and that’s okay.
Underrated benefit of Lemmy is that it isn’t infested with bots the way its larger counterpart is. Reddit has really turned to garbage.
Lower quantity of content here, but more authentic
There are some instances that lean in specific directions, but there are also several that are kind of just melting pots. For the most part I don’t need to use blocks too frequently, but there are definitely some spaces/users that I find are too hostile that it gets in the way of their intended messaging. But then, that line is going to be different for everybody.
Almost everyone is on Lemmy.world, so… I don’t know. Don’t think they made a choice. People who are not on Lemmy.world made a choice at least.
Should I be concerned about being on lemm.ee?
Not sure if a third is everyone
People talk about filter bubbles, but there’s a nuance here: on Lemmy, you’re not being served up whatever the platform owners think you should see from an opaque algorithm. You’re going to, by default, see cesspool content. You have to choose to block it.
I was happy today when I made a post on an obscure community and some guy just passing by on the “new” feed left a comment.
Very true, count dongulus.
Unfortunately, the owners of your instance can also choose to block something for you.
Hah, the world admins are desperately trying to keep the instance running, blocking shit isn’t even close to their radar.
Wait, is some content blocked on some instances and available on others? If that’s true then I still don’t understand lemmy - I thought the content was everywhere.
Some instances choose to “defederate” other instances, which means that users from one won’t be able to see or intract with content from the other. This is primarily meant to combat instances that create spam or host illegal content, but many instances use it for political purposes.
And without that capability, every instance would be a cesspool of Nazi and pedo content flooding in from the Fediverse’s dark side.
The instance I’m on doesn’t seem to block any other instances and I’m not seeing any Nazi or pedo content.
hello fellow sdf’er :) I specifically chose SDF so I could choose what to block myself, and so far I have just blocked a lot of anime. Anything political I see is leftist.
But that gets back to something similar to OP’s statement. As in, you can spin up your own instance (though a not entirely trivial process), or you have the freedom to choose an instance that matches your style [edit: and people tend to gravitate towards an instance admin policy that matches their preferences].
Some people want some content blocked - e.g. NSFW, or even NSFL. Or even better, slap a label on each content item, which rather than have to choose between the binary options of forcibly remove or allow fully, offers each person their own choice to view or not. PieFed even has a NSFL/gore/gross tag that you can set, though only for posts ATM not comments.
I find the Fediverse really friendly in regards to NSFW/NSFL content, in that it is both here but virtually never unlabeled (ONCE in the last year iirc there was a particular spam account that got through…). Politicial or extremist content not so much unfortunately, so we’re back to blocking or defederating, for those for whom consent of the reader of their messages means little to nothing.
To me Lemmy.world is just a place to login, I forget how I even got here. But I really don’t think of it as one instance vs others or care how it compares with others. The content is what matters, and if I finally understand it correctly the content is everywhere.
Mostly that’s true but not entirely. The common analogy is that the Fediverse is a bunch of pirate or free trading ships passing in the night, each passing messages from one to another until they all have all of the messages - “federation”. However, some captains have some bad blood between them and other captains and refuse to pass messages from them along - “defederation”. And for good reason I need to add, bc if outright illegal material were to make its way onto your “ship”/computer then you could be in big trouble, like literally with the FBI or other equivalent governmental agency in other countries. Or imagine that some captain decides to send out a virus - not all of these captains are apparently ethical!
In practice, any captain of a ship can decide which messages they want to pass along to share with others vs. keep private solely for themselves (their own internal set of users). And likewise they get to decide which messages to receive too - like none from a particular source, or maybe only some if they are structured a certain way. And then on top of all of that, Lemmy.World in particular has decided to edit certain messages to filter out banned keywords that they deem offensive to their users.
So like an irl example is that a few years ago a bunch of people/captains decided to create Alt-Right instances, and these spewed forth violent rhetoric and pedophilic content throughout the Fediverse - which in addition to being not nice was highly illegal. So rather than allow that to get us all in trouble with the FBI, in response all the other captains/instances decided to block/defederate from them. In theory I suppose you could spin up your own instance - becoming captain of your own ship - and you could choose to receive to those messages (but again, be careful about content that is literally illegal!). Although actually I think those instances may have shut down in the meantime, deciding to switch to the likes of Truth Social, so they probably are not around anymore to be federated with even if someone wanted to. Still, to be on the safe side, every instance I’ve ever seen has defederated from them, I guess in case they ever decide to come back.
So one practical way that this affects you personally is that Lemmy.world has decided to defederate from hexbear.net, a known nest of trolls (they enjoy a highly contentious argumentation style, but they don’t stop that even outside of their communities where it is consensual, and it is this refusal to consider consent of people outside of their echo chambers that makes them trolls). So no, this content in particular is not “everywhere” - it is blocked quite often from many/most instances.
If you truly wanted to experience the Fediverse with as few filtering of messages as possible (although remember that not all of it is offered in good faith), then you may want to make an account on lemm.ee rather than lemmy.world. But otherwise lemmy.world is a great instance - it is where ~80% of all the people on Lemmy are located.
Fantastic explanation, thanks for taking the time to post that! I’m fine with not having to sift through a lot of troll content and angry argument from people who just want an argument. There’s still a fair amount of “So WhAt YoU’rE SaYiNg Is [something I was not saying]” but I guess that’s inevitable. I think Lemmy.world is great.
Good choice of instance :-)
Any system model that eventually encourages echo chamberism should not be in use, even if the intent is to change the system before echo chambers occur, by then it will be too entrenched to just change
I don’t think giving users the freedom to choose what they want or don’t want to see encourages anything. Some of us are here for the memes or literally anything other than politics. Everytime a debate about defederating comes up, that fact is the first thing everyone forgets about
> sees people exercising their freedom of association
> “yeah this thing sucks btw”
Have to counterbalance dog piling when your ban hammer can’t target a whole nest
But those echo chambers are a normal result of human interaction, from the friends you choose, to the events and bars/clubs you frequent, to the magazines and papers/websites you read.
Echo chambers will naturally occur as long as people can choose who to follow or read or otherwise consume or connect with.
The only system to prevent this would be to always force every flavor of everything to anybody, removing every way to filter or freedom to choose who to follow and what to hear/consume. And that sounds very dystopian and fascist to my ears.
Fascist? Are you fucking kidding me? You’re literally just describing newspapers, broadcast news, town criers, and literally all life pre-internet.
Filter bubbles occur because we have the ability to selectively choose to only hear news we like which is a new phenomena that is a result of the internet, because it is fundamentally a messaging system, not a broadcast system like virtually every news system throughout history.
You are just falling into the American trap that personal freedom is the ultimate good and should trump everything else, even if the systemic effects of it are bad.
I fear you misunderstood me. Fascist would be if choice would be forbidden, when everyone would have to always hear every side of every topic.
Even with newspapers and the like are filter bubbles possible. I am free to buy only the newspaper who writes the stories in the way I want to read them. There are left wing newspapers and right wing newspapers and stuff in between. And even with newspapers and broadcasts you are still free to only consume what you want to consume and block, by not buying or active ignoring, what you not want to see or hear. Things like cracker-barrel philosophy or Stammtischparolen where a thing long before the Internet.
Echo chambers are a normal part of being human, it exists in small (only between friends),huge (tribes/nations/cults/religions) and anything in between more or less as long as humans are able to communicate.
Even with newspapers and the like are filter bubbles possible. I am free to buy only the newspaper who writes the stories in the way I want to read them. There are left wing newspapers and right wing newspapers and stuff in between. And even with newspapers and broadcasts you are still free to only consume what you want to consume and block, by not buying or active ignoring, what you not want to see or hear. Things like cracker-barrel philosophy or Stammtischparolen where a thing long before the Internet.
Are you arguing that the filter bubble effect is the same for a newspaper and for a social media site?
Yes, the filter bubble effect is still possible to some extent with a traditional chronological news feed, but it’s quite frankly absurd on it’s face to claim that that is the same severity of filter bubble, when a site like Reddit / Lemmy operates by taking those chronological news feeds and filtering them further.
The Guardian might be a relatively true neutral newspaper (meaning it appears to lean left by mainstream standards), and yet articles it publishes that back up any remotely right wing / economically conservative points do not get posted here.
Echo chambers naturally arose in the past because information could not travel freely, that does not mean they are a good thing or something that we should be recreating and reinforcing on the internet now that it can.
I never said that they are a good thing, I say they are a natural occurrence, something that only can prevented by a very dystopian system.
Because people will always filter what they want to hear and consume, and with that create filter bubbles. If you went to church (regardless of the specific religion) you enter a filter bubble. If you talk with people on a rave you are in a completely different filter bubbles then in a country music bar. Filter bubbles are all around us and yes the Internet is, by its nature, a magnifying glass for this effect. But it inherent to the human nature not inherent to the Internet. So to prevent filter bubbles you would have to radically change the human nature.
We’re not talking about every possible aspect of life. We’re talking about the choice we make in how we consume news. One way leads to more of a filter bubble, one way leads to less of one. Everything else you’re saying is just besides the point justification for why you wanna choose the one that leads to more of a filter bubble.
And I use my filter bubble power just now and here I think. Have a nice rest of your life
Idk about fascist but it certainly makes vulnerable groups open to harassment.
That too, yes!
I agree wholeheartedly
And what we’ve learned about trump cultists is that echo chambers are fabulous.
How do you filter out an entire instance as a single user? I was just trying to figure that out the other day, but it didn’t appear possible.
Account Settings - Blocks - Instances
Ah, thanks. I had to scroll down a ways because my individual community block list was large enough to push that one out the bottom of the page I guess.
Note that that approach doesn’t actually block the users from that instance, only the communities.
To block user content leaking through that block, there’s apps like Connect or Sync, or the Lemmy alternatives PieFed and Mbin, which additionally offer a number of advanced features that Lemmy does not have such as Categories of Communities (but you’d have to switch instances to access those).
Apparently I earned a site wide ban from lemmy.ml, but their posts keep showing up here. Annoyingly, apparently when you get banned the “block community” button is hidden, so you have to add each community you want to block individually. So just blocking the entire instance solves my problem.
Lemmy.ml is such a weird situation. Personally, I worry about the future of Lemmy when I consider who runs the circus.
It started off as the first and only Lemmy instance run by the maintainers. It was classified as general purpose, but leaned hard to the left. The maintainers are mostly Tankies, but the users are not, and Lemmygrad is created for the purpose of being focused on far-left politics. Lemmy.ml was my first instance, and I was an early user. Early on it was nice there.
As Lemmy grows, new instances appear, and eventually ML is not the largest, just the oldest. As that happens, the original intent of the ML TLD choice starts to become visible, as the instance shifts from general purpose to an instance for “Marxist Leninists” just like Lemmygrad. Early users have now mostly migrated elsewhere because it is no longer the “flagship” instance.
Now we’re in a position where the majority of Lemmy users exist on non-ML instances, and think that the ML instances are run by morons, yet those morons maintain the codebase that runs every Lemmy instance.
It’s a ticking timebomb. I expect we’ll all be on Kbin by 2030 after something boils over and the Lemmy maintainers start fucking around with the code to get their way.
You were not the first that this happened to - they’ve even kicked out mods without any warning (and literally told people to kill themselves), nor will you be the last. At this point it seems to be a right of passage that people must go through, bc it is administered by the Lemmy sourcecode developers so very few instances seem to want to risk pissing them off.
Blocking especially Hexbear alone solved 90% of my issues with toxicity on the Fediverse, and blocking Lemmy.ml brings that up to like 99.9% - there are trolls elsewhere ofc, just like there are some people who might have been worth talking to on Lemmy.ml, but overall it acts like a spam filter that much improves my happiness here.:-)
Not sure how to on desktop but I use Connect and it’s in the menu options of posts. Super easy to block individuals, communities, and instances.
