I’m done, I’ve been banned for expressing a different opinion (without insulting or personally attacking anyone), I’ve been accused of evading a ban with multiple accounts (this is my only account I’ve ever had on any lemmy instance), I’ve had people selectively ignore my comments and accuse me of things which I never said, and I’ve had people ignore valid criticisms and keep attacking me.
Reddit has many issues with trolls, one-sided discussion, and just general bullshit, but many Lemmy instances are way worse. The newfound freedom of Lemmy has attracted many extremists, from both sides, and many of them are moderators, who are more than happy to remove any contrarian opinions. This results in discussions being echo chambers
Because the community on Lemmy is so much smaller it’s a lot easier for small groups of dedicated posters to dominate discussions on certain topics.
I’ve noticed a lot of the same behaviour as you have on certain topics. Unfortunately it’s difficult because like you say engaging on those topics is frustrating because the people with an agenda have more time and energy than you to dedicate to pushing their narrative, and aren’t open to more nuanced discussion.
There’s an interesting blog I think about regularly about online communities that I think you might find interesting: https://eev.ee/blog/2016/07/22/on-a-technicality/
Now that article calls for banning of assholes. I don’t think that’ll work on lemmy, so instead I propose this: If you just accept that those people are going to continue to do their thing and instead engage in the more positive parts of Lemmy then overall we might be able to build a bigger community of people who add positively to Lemmy. If you or others who are being pushed away leave then the asshole : positive people ratio will only get worse.
Such a call to action only works if the people in question have some sort of a fixed interest specifically in the Lemmy community. Those on the fence about leaving (myself included, not that it matters) have no such interest.
I’m considering leaving because the community sucks. Why would I stick around based on the threat that if I go it might get worse?
That’s like a manager telling an employee at a shitty job that they shouldn’t quit because then the place will be short staffed.
I get what you’re saying but I don’t think the “manager telling someone not to quit” is correct as an analogy. We’re all here because we wanted to be a part of a different community than reddit. That to me is the fixed interest. We want to build an online space that we all enjoy being part of.
To build that space us early adopters who have an interest in seeing it succeed unfortunately need to bear the brunt of the painful startup process. Any small online community formed by people leaving a previous space (that doesn’t have central control) will initially have a large number of assholes. The amount of “I’ve been banned from reddit X times” comments is way too high. Those people will eventually be drowned out by a larger population of nice people if the nice people stick around. Only by trying to build the space we want to see will it get built.
It’s either that or we all ditch federated spaces and go back to reddit. Leaving the tankies and other toxic people to Lemmy.
False.
We’re here because we wanted to be part of Reddit, but for one reason or another found it not feasible.
For my part (and I’m guessing many others, given the surge of new accounts around the same time) I had no desire to leave Reddit, until the API nonsense. So I was looking for something similar to or better than Reddit.
Not different. In fact specifically not different in most ways.
Certainly not “worse than”.
That’s not a fixed interest. There’s nothing keeping most users here beyond a lack of options. I’m not interested in “building a space”. The space is here it’s just filled with recycled content from Reddit, narrow minded political extremism, and even worse of a hive mind than Reddit.
Your optimistic pep talk is all well and good but it’s also somewhat naive and unlikely as well. You’re asking a lot from people to show up to a shitty situation and just deal with it until hopefully, maybe, possibly at some future time it’ll get better…and after being here many months, I’ve seen no change for the better and in fact I think it’s gotten worse.
Sounds good to me.
I’m pretty much there already, which is pretty sad considering I came here fully intending on Lemmy replacing Reddit for me completely, only to find next to zero content I’m interested in, no or dead communities for my interests, and awful comments when, out of other options, I turned to simply browsing defaults to at least read something.
I’m not fully there yet, but I’m about 90% of the way to accepting that Lemmy is a failed experiment, undone at least in part by the shitty community. To doing exactly what you suggest and leaving this place to the tankies and other toxic people…and of course the fatally optimistic folks desperately insisting it’ll be great…someday.