For context: I was a much more ignorant person back in 2014 than I am today. My views then do not reflect my views now (tw: Fatphobia, Sexism, Sinophobia, transphobia, Z-propaganda)
This isn’t my first rodeo dealing with a reddit migration. My first attempt to leave the site happened back in 2014 when several subs got banned, including several shaming subs when Ellen Pao was CEO of reddit.
Back then, there were a lot of unfounded rumors of the site being taken over by the Chinese government (cause Ellen was Chinese American), and being an ignorant person, I fell for it hook line and sinker.
So around that time, a few reddit alternatives started getting passed around, including a site called Voat. It was basically just like reddit, but the bandwidth and UI wasn’t nearly as sophisticated as reddits, thus the site constantly crashed. I spent a bit of time on there before heading back to reddit and never looking back. And the main reason I left was because the overall culture there was mean spirited, unhinged, and basically a reactionary version of reddit (which looking back makes sense considering this reddit migration was basically a reaction from trying to protect people)
Fast forward to now, and I’m starting to get de ja vu from the fediverse. At first I was on kbin, which seemed promising at first until I noticed that any article involving trans issues had a slew of transphobic comments that had a lot of traction. Realizing there was very little moderation being done there, I gave lemmyworld a try, but same issue, plus it seemed any article having to do with Ukraine had a lot of pro-Russian posts. And whenever I bring up this fact, I get a lot of pushback from users and mods. Part of the reason I ended up here is because one user told me “If you need a safe space, you should go over to beehaw with all the other snowflakes.”
At this point, I already have a fairly negative view of the fediverse. I hate what is happening to reddit right now, and yet it feels like the alternatives aren’t much better in providing a safe environment for its users.
Maybe my problem is with redditors, but at the very least reddit was equipped to keep the dumbest of dumbasses out of visibility. Here, even in supposedly more open minded communities and instances, such dumbassery has just as much weight as thoughtful, upvoted posts.
I don’t know. I can’t see myself staying involved with this project for long, if it’s just going to remain as unpleasant as it is now.
Also, sorry if this isn’t the right community to be posting this in. I’ll gladly move this where this needs to go if its the case.
Edit: riveting discussion example: @Cat_of_the_Round fuck philosophy. unless you reeeeelly care that much. your behind a kb for christ sake. Oh no. Someone had an opinion. I’m assuming you can in the very least ignore them. Othewise who the fuck cares?
yeah, I think I’m done here.
fediverse is dealing with a large influx of users thats way bigger than anything theyve had to deal with so far
this coupled with the fact that you can join in on from any of the sites if you are banned from a specific instance means moderation has not been able to keep up
the devs of the various sites are working in improving their teams and tools to better deal with the moderation required, its likely a temporary issue
for now make as much use of the block button as possible, both for specific people and whole communities that seem to exist solely to be assholes
on top of that, beehaw has recently defederated with two of the biggest instances, lemmy.world and shitjustworks, meaning that moderation will probably be able to keep up more again
Personally I think it is a couple of things. My experience while being on the net for 35 years or so is that moderation on one hand and on the other hand a bit of a thick skin and a “Do Not Feed the Trolls” attitude is required. I have encountered trolls on Reddit and on Usenet which was way before Reddit. Yes I was on Voat awhile with you too… so I know what you mean.
Why? One it is a number of things. Good communication only happens when both parties are trying. So bad communication is more probable then good out of the gate. Plus the numbers game again. One troll can ruin the day of 100 other people. There always seem to some people that actually enjoy the trolling thing. Plus most of us are better at talking then listening. The internet is mostly a safe space for talking. Not so much always for listening.
Finally with all of its issues places like Reddit and other moderated forums are pretty effective. The people that do not like them are the Trolls. They will tend to leave and go to the free speech places which means those places have a much high density these days.
I also wonder if this has something to do with the breath of society and ways of being. There has always been part of society with this rough and tumble male culture where might makes right. Maybe it is some of that and how that part of society struggles with modern sensibilities.
Anyway my theory.
I was on voat since when it was called Whoaverse. It had so much potential, but then all the nazis showed up and ruined it. Here’s hoping that does’nt happen here.
Why did beehaw defederate from these two instances in particular?
They claimed it was volume of posts and the free registration. It costs nothing to make a new account on shitjustworks and completely flood a beehaw post full of just plain mean comments. Beehaw wants some ability to decide who posts. For their own site you have to submit a tiny application, but they would prefer that problematic instances be limited in only posting. They don’t mind sharing posts, but federation is explicitly two way. Until moderation tools fill the gap they are doing it in defense.
That makes sense, but why isn’t kbin defederated then? I didn’t need to do anything other than supply an email when signing up for kbin.
Because they haven’t had issues moderating kbin users. The big issue is they felt that the amount of time they way too much spent modding those two instances
Because those two instances are pulling in huge traffic now and unlike beehaw you don’t need to be approved to sign in. So their influx of new users are making it very hard for beehaw team to moderate (not that I am supporting their decision but I understand the reasons behind it.)
Hate to be that guy, but general reminder that Lemmy and Kbin are not the whole of the fediverse. This is definitely the most growth that either Lemmy or Kbin have seen, though.
my saying fediverse instead of specifying lemmy and kbin wasnt to imply that those are all of the fediverse, i did so because federation tends to mean that an influx of users to any of the federated sites means an influx of users to nearly the whole network
That’s true, though the ratio is relatively weak. The microblogging services in the fediverse have seen much larger influxes than what Kbin and Lemmy are going through, and while I’m sure both Kbin and Lemmy saw some growth from those influxes, it was probably pretty minimal. I have seen some new users on Mastodon as a result of the Reddit issues, but obviously it’s just been a fraction of the new users on these platforms.
So the statement “fediverse is dealing with a large influx of users that’s way bigger than anything they’ve had to deal with so far” is either inaccurate in the definition of the fediverse, or inaccurate in the relative size of this influx.
thats fair