I was wondering how the pre-reddit lemmy members feel about the influx of ex-reddit. Have things got worst or better? Is there any lemmy etiquette that we are missing?
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I’ve been here since the beginning of 2020, a few weeks ago I was regretting that this project wasn’t very popular so now I’m delighted to see this craze for Lemmy/Kbin and federated tools in general. I hope it will continue, welcome to all _/ Power to the people.
Its crazy seeing how much engagement there is on posts, I really like lemmy, even before the reddit influx, so far so good.
Generally positive, with caveats. Lemmy’s early adopters were driven by an understanding that Reddit was not a viable platform for self organization, free discussion and association. We knew this day would eventually come.
The current wave of bans and hostile takeovers occurring on Reddit is nothing new for the radicals. We watched them suppress the Blue Leaks, we watched them shut down r/CTH in the middle of the George Floyd uprising, we watched them coup r/PresidentialRaceMemes, we watched them purge r/GenZhou, a community focused specifically on revolutionary theory.
Reddit has demonstrated time and time again that it is happy to serve as an instrument of counterinsurgency. This comes as no surprise, with an Atlantic Council alum heading their content moderation policy.
As one of the most astroturfed social media platforms on the Internet, Redditors bring a lot of those problems here. They tend to behave like they are the smartest people in the room, just because there are a lot of them. They like calling other websites echo chambers, when they hail from the biggest echo chamber on the English speaking net. The conspiracies I’ve seen them spread about the Lemmy devs and contributors have been absolutely wild.
I think time will heal most of them.
Conspiracy? One of the devs has a website where he literally openly denies the Uyghur genocide, Tiananmen square massacre, “Mao did nothing wrong”, “Ukrainians are Nazis”, denies every single critique of USSR and China, and a whole lot of other vile shit. Read for yourself: https://github.com/dessalines/essays/blob/master/socialism_faq.md#did-mao-kill-millions-of-people
This is the real test of the fediverse. Can software written by a piece of shit like that exist without being influenced by their garbage political views?
I think it’s possible and I like Lemmy to thrive but it’s important to keep an eye out for tankies and to not close your eyes to the reality of who started this.
Can software written by a piece of shit like that
someone isn’t a piece of shit because they hold different opinions than your own. it’s OK to post articles even if you don’t believe everything in them. I glanced through one of the articles about the death tolls under Mao - https://mronline.org/2006/09/21/did-mao-really-kill-millions-in-the-great-leap-forward/
The guy goes through analysis, cites sources, and makes an argument that the death toll is inflated due to Western propaganda.
Is that really such a piece of shit opinion? Wrong or right, I don’t think the author did anything wrong nor the dev by putting it in some sort of compilation. People are allowed to disagree on controversial topics.
Remember Noam Chomsky? He got so much hate back in the day when he defended someone’s right to be a holocaust denier. It’s as if you are not allowed to critically think about certain topics.
For example the Ukraine nazis thing. Ukrainians are not Nazis - but the Ukrainian military did official incorporate a neo-nazi paramilitary group. Just saying that is grounds for someone to claim you’re a Russian shill. I really wish people were more open minded and rational in discussion.
If you believe someone is wrong, explain why you think so instead of just attacking them like you are doing here.
Edit: Sorry, I have even more thoughts…
Remember Noam Chomsky? He got so much hate back in the day when he defended someone’s right to be a holocaust denier. It’s as if you are not allowed to critically think about certain topics.
Noam Chomsky is generally pretty smart, but he has some blinders. I am actually shocked to hear he would entertain this, as a Jew who was in his teenage years during the Holocaust. Was he doing the bone-headed ACLU “Even Nazis deserve the right to free speech” thing? If this is his position, I actually disagree with him.
The thing about the Holocaust is that there is a rigorous consensus that it took place, and that it was the worst atrocity in modern history. This is supported by anthropological evidence (the physical sites and artifacts where the exterminations took place), meticulous records recorded both by the perpetrators and the victims, the oral history of its survivors and their offspring. There are many well known people alive today who can name relatives who perished in the Shoah (Bernie Sanders and Norman Finkelstein, off the top of my head). My father met Eli Wiesel personally when he was in the hospital receiving medical treatment.
This is a very different case from the kind of academically discredited lies we see originating from the “Black Book of Communism,” which starts out by counting all the Axis KIA as victims of Communist brutality, and which ignores the now-available information revealed by the opening of the Soviet archives 30 years ago. If you apply the logic these people use for the Chinese Revolution to the US Civil War, you would come away with the conclusion that Abraham Lincoln murdered one million Americans and that the abolition of slavery was one of the greatest mistakes in history.
Marxism is supposed to be the eminent critique of all which exists, but the typical dork from Reddit who knows nothing at all about Chinese history except for Tank Man and thinks 1.4 billion people are just brainwashed subservient lemmings who need a white savior to come fix their country isn’t the person I care to talk to about it.
For example the Ukraine nazis thing. Ukrainians are not Nazis - but the Ukrainian military did official incorporate a neo-nazi paramilitary group. Just saying that is grounds for someone to claim you’re a Russian shill. I really wish people were more open minded and rational in discussion.
At the outset of the war, Reddit got really fucking weird. Obviously the invasion was a horrific crime, and you are reasonably justified in arguing that all events resulting from it are fruit of that poisoned tree. But the approach Reddit took was absurd. The entire place became Ukrainian nationalists overnight. Reddit became a self-appointed arm of Ukraine’s propaganda war, and the “bravest and boldest” among them even went to became volunteers for the Reddit legion. It reached such a level of derangement that these people genuinely believed morale on the front lines depended on what a bunch of American suburbanites were posting about the country, where bad news would be stifled, and the most credulous tales of heroism were spread without question. A bunch of dipshits sitting in their livingrooms on the opposite side of the globe spent over a year calling each other defeatists for posting any news or analysis which didn’t bode well for the war effort. They genuinely think they are in the trenches, exchanging mortars in the posting wars.
I see similar trends on the Russian side of the war, but on the English-speaking part of the Internet, this is an infinitesimal minority.
The whole situation has demonstrated what a poor state the anti-war left is in. Where the anti-imperialist left is outnumbered by fucking paleoconservatives and right-deviationist “MAGA Communists” and “Patriotic Socialists.” This isn’t just a Reddit problem either. On the Fediverse, organizations like CODEPINK have been banned and labeled as “Tankies” for advocating for an end to the war. On Twitter, organizations like DIEM25 have received a similar treatment. The general attitude is that we should support David in a war of attrition against Goliath, without question. A lot of poor bastards are getting fucking killed over a power struggle between the world’s capitalist elite.
“Even Nazis deserve the right to free speech” thing
I’m sure he would say this. But in this specific case it’s more of a question of not having any topic be off limits. I know there’s a lot of emotions towards the holocaust and anyone who questions it is immediately labeled some sort of neo-nazi (and 90% of the time, that’s what they are). Chomsky firmly believes in the Holocaust, because like you said, he experienced it. He’s a Jew in his 90s.
But consider a world where you canno make an academic or scientific inquiry into a topic because “the issue has been resolved”. What kind of world is that? He was defending a researcher who did an analysis into the Holocaust and came up with significantly different figures. Basically claiming the death toll was inflated. Which is, to the best of the research I’ve read, entirely incorrect. Something like 6 million people died in the Holocaust and there is plenty of evidence to show that.
But again, the point isn’t whether the researcher was wrong or right. It’s just that we can’t set the precedent that certain topics are “finished” and can’t be modified anymore. Because at that point we’re not doing science or research - we’re falling victim to ideology. Keep in mind the guy he was defending was getting charged with a crime since this was Europe and they have certain laws about Holocaust denial.
So we bring it back to the Lemmy devs. The article I read (I didn’t read them all) was an analysis of the death toll of the Mao period and claims the figures were inflated. Does someone posting a link to this or otherwise sharing it make them a “genocide denier” and a “CCP tankie”?
This immediate lashing out when experiencing “wrongthink” is something I think is so toxic and dangerous to having serious discussions about sensitive topics. The more you study these things, the more you realize things are never black and white. There aren’t good guys and there aren’t bad guys. Or rather, maybe everyone’s a bad guy. But I think you get my point.
Regardless, I appreciate your comment.
I’ll start off by saying, I am going to quote-reply a bunch of things from your comment. Don’t take it like I’m trying to be a debate bro and own you online. I actually think your comment is quite constructive.
Something like 6 million people died in the Holocaust and there is plenty of evidence to show that.
Six million Jews. This figure excludes the Roma, LGBT, Neurodivergant, Communists, Anarchists, partisans, and prisoners of war. The total figure lands somewhere around 10-11 million, at least according to the US Holocaust Museum.
But consider a world where you canno make an academic or scientific inquiry into a topic because “the issue has been resolved”. What kind of world is that? He was defending a researcher who did an analysis into the Holocaust and came up with significantly different figures.
In abstract, I completely agree with this, but we live in a world where the reactionaries have more money than God to churn out this sort of self-serving analysis, and debate subjects which ought to be settled. We live in a world where government and think tank employees get paid to spend eight hours a day revising history on Wikipedia while volunteers and academics have to worry about keeping a roof over their heads. We live in a world where we’re still debating the right to abortion in the year 2023.
As such, I am much more interested learning the lessons of the triumphs and shortcomings of the masses of people who fought against this evil than I am about debating whether it was really even evil to begin with.
To repeat myself, I have never heard about this take from Chomsky, and I’d be interested to learn about it in detail. I assume it is actually benign because there are a significant amount of people who criticize Chomsky from the left and I have never heard them mention this.
So we bring it back to the Lemmy devs. The article I read (I didn’t read them all) was an analysis of the death toll of the Mao period and claims the figures were inflated. Does someone posting a link to this or otherwise sharing it make them a “genocide denier” and a “CCP tankie”?
In general, I think the Western audience knows absolutely nothing about this history. This is not limited to the layman Redditor, but large swaths of academia and the fourth estate as well. It would be fascinating to see what answers you’d get if you asked a random Washington Post or Wall Street Journal reporter to explain what happened in the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution with no notes. This is the standard I choose to hold the developers against. I am pretty sure Dessalines has the history pinned down much more accurately than the average American propagandist. He has clearly at least done a lot more research.
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In general, I agree. The parameters of discussion on the big social networks are very heavily controlled. The largest communities on Reddit, like r/Politics, r/WorldNews etc. are extremely single-minded. Some places like r/AskHistorians tend to be a bit better.
debate bro and own you online
don’t worry this is the type of stuff i go on reddit for I’m glad there are people willing to go into long form discussion here
so ultimately I think we have to agree to disagree a bit here although I respect your opinion. You’re absolutely right that there are organizations out there, both governmental and billionaire funded, that astroturf the shit out of the internet ( and you didn’t mention AI like chatgpt, which will make this problem exponentially worse since it will become increasingly cheaper to astroturf).
I agree that I’m not personally going to debate a holocaust denier - they can more or less get fucked. I just don’t think they should be sent to jail or otherwise censored. And this more or less lines up with Chomsky’s beliefs. I’m a huge fan of him and I am 100% behind his free speech absolutism.
Anyhow, if you want more detail about the whole thing with Chomsky… there’s a page on Wikipedia that goes over it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faurisson_affair
Here’s what he had to say to critics of his decision to support the holocaust denier
Let me add a final remark about Faurisson’s alleged “anti-Semitism.” Note first that even if Faurisson were to be a rabid anti-Semite and fanatic pro-Nazi – such charges have been presented to me in private correspondence that it would be improper to cite in detail here – this would have no bearing whatsoever on the legitimacy of the defense of his civil rights. On the contrary, it would make it all the more imperative to defend them since, once again, it has been a truism for years, indeed centuries, that it is precisely in the case of horrendous ideas that the right of free expression must be most vigorously defended; it is easy enough to defend free expression for those who require no such defense. Putting this central issue aside, is it true that Faurisson is an anti-Semite or a neo-Nazi? As noted earlier, I do not know his work very well. But from what I have read – largely as a result of the nature of the attacks on him – I find no evidence to support either conclusion. Nor do I find credible evidence in the material that I have read concerning him, either in the public record or in private correspondence. As far as I can determine, he is a relatively apolitical liberal of some sort
I think the line that sticks out to me the most is- that it is precisely in the case of horrendous ideas that the right of free expression must be most vigorously defended
If we give up the principle, we lose everything.
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No Lemmy ettique missing as there wasn’t enough of a community to form anything. I had no issue with the smaller size and all the usual posters I’d see and chat with have dispersed with the larger array of content.
But now you don’t get people signing up, talking about the lack of content and disappearing. Or servers set up in hope and shut down - eope.xyz caw.ai Jeremmy.ml or ones that ragequit fapsi.be. And of course wolfballs.
Even if most go back to reddit it will still be an improved space with the servers and communities that remain I think.
The lack of “Lemmy etiquette” is basically the whole point of the project. There is no general rule. There are places for shitposting, there are places for serious discussion. The civility fetishists get their corner, the people who enjoy replying to bigots with pigpoopballs.jpg get their corner. There is a niche for everybody - and if there isn’t - you can start one without being completely isolated from the rest of the network (at least, initially).
The situation on Reddit was absurd. The “Reddiquette” rules were generally okay, but very open to subjective enforcement. I spent many years on Reddit. I browsed a lot of different communities on there. But if one person on a community I browse makes a post saying “look what this asshole is saying” on another community I browse, and I go there an make an insightful comment, I am now “brigading.” If somebody wants to politely debate whether trans people have a right to exist, or whether or not we should send the homeless to concentration camps, and I tell them to fuck themselves, I am being “uncivil.”
Communities need mods and admins who have their back, not mods who become cops for the admins who become cops for the board of directors who only care about increasing KPIs and profit. The coolest thing that can happen on the Fediverse is landing in a place where the admins will eat a block or two to defend the integrity of their communities. This is something which is simply impossible on Reddit.
Please please tell me where I can find shitposting communities. Looking for some fun that isn’t mean or terrible to others.
I think [email protected] sounds like what you’re looking for?
I should’ve known it was the beginning of the end of my time on reddit when I commented “well if people are gonna start flying Russian flags on their trucks here in the USA I’ll be keeping a baseball bat in the trunk of my car” shortly after the invasion of Ukraine began - specifically non-violent, and if they’d have been able to read my mind, the intent was so I could smash the windows out of their truck not actually beat the shit out of them, and I received a 3-day ban from the whole site for “advocating violence” or whatever the fuck it was called. I took a looooong break from reddit after that as I was honestly pretty disgusted an admin essentially supported Russia by banning me for my benign comment, but found myself there again.
Without RIF I’m definitely never going back.
Double Edit: removed my previous edit as it was based on reddit tendencies I need to get over haha
Gonna say that comment sounds very nationalistic and xenophobic to me. Would I ban you for it? No. But you’d definitely get a warning if I was the mod.
Unless you’re doing the same thing for anyone flying the US flag, that’s just standard hypocrisy.
I don’t think Lemmy supports Russia. It’s very anti-imperialism in general, which is a good thing! But, Americans advocating for violence exclusively against other imperialist symbols just smacks of double standards, ya know?
Let’s flip the argument around. Lets say i wrote:
‘if people started flying rainbow flags on their cars in my country , I’ll keep a baseball bat in my car’
Do you think i deserve to be perma banned for ‘advocating violence’?
Yeah I gotta say personally both sentences sound violent to me. They can absolutely be understood in both a violent and a window-smashing way, but the wording is so on the line that I too wouldn’t want to see it in a community.
The meaning of what we say or write is not purely what is meant by the speaker/writer but also in large part what the audience or the person we speak to hears and understands. As the person saying something, we always have to be aware of how it may be understood or misunderstood. We all have different contexts, experiences and ways of communicating. All we can do is be as specific as possible to remove any uncertainty. Vague wording is how dog-whistling operates.
Maybe a better way of wording it would have been:
“if people start flying (…) flags on their cars in my country, they better watch out for their windows 'cause I’ll be keeping a baseball bat in my car”
Please tell me the legend of wolfballs
Wolfballs was what could be called a free speech instance run by Master of Balls… There was friction, but personally I liked that the was a variety of instances if not the content.
Exploding-heads run by Kapow is the closest in vibe and a spot where some jumped to.
Master of balls left an exit note here which pretty much sums up the vibe, stored on the fedirama community https://lemmy.ca/post/390398
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Definitely better. I tried getting into Lemmy about a year ago and it was kind of a miserable place. Most communities were abandoned and the website was less usable than now, the only active group were tankies (specifically CCP lovers). There just wasn’t any demand for a Reddit alternative. I abandoned Lemmy and went back to Reddit not long after.
Now the website feels sooooo much livelier and is a much nicer place. The community isn’t huge but it feels like the content I need to find is here, and as people settle in specific communities activity is going up! Once Lemmy fixes their bugs and Kbin fixes their federation I’m confident I won’t want to go back to other websites.
That is promising , I was hoping we are not polluting the pool , so to speak
If anything, we’re cleaning the pool
Imagine moving to a place that’s home to a lot of people you don’t like, and calling them dirty.
You mean, imagine all of human history since the earliest hominid first stood upright and saw another group across the savanna?
I, personally, would prefer slower linear and more organic growth. I want people to be here because the want to come, not because they want to run away from somewhere else.
But I do acknowledge that there was not much discussion going on and was not enough content for my procrastinating habits, nor I could keep myself informed in current events.
Thou I have had lemmy.ml account for three years now I never heard of beehaw before this reddit wave started, so that might be on me.
While I am positive overall, I do not like that some bad habits from reddit are resurfacing here, mostly not being able to have different opinion without someone insulting you.
I hope there will be enough instances where discussion and difference in opinion will be nurtured and welcome.
I have a pet peeve around people saying “this.” When they agree with someone. Idk why… I was hoping I wouldn’t see that here but unfortunately it’s cropping up.
My concern is that and a bunch of other reddit-isms flood the site. I don’t mind redditors coming here but I hope the site can still have its own identity.
There are a few others:
- “at least the <inanimate object> is ok” on videos where someone gets hurt
- “no shoes therefore dead”
- “some ninja is cutting onions”
- “sir this is a Wendy’s”
- Etc.
I mean this reddit post complaining about annoying phrases came out 9 years ago. 9 YEARS. And since then I continue to see so many of those and others.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1i5cd2/_/
I don’t want to gatekeep either. But certain phrases repeated over and over is just so irritating.
This.
can’t really be worse than before given that there was barely content being posted to begin with. have been pleasantly surprised to see very little “le narwhal bacons when?” shit so far, but that’s me being a grouch and doesn’t really constitute etiquette
have been pleasantly surprised to see very little “le narwhal bacons when?” shit so far
You’ve been away from there for a while huh? That’s ancient Reddit stuff at this point.
le narwhal bacons when
lol i don’t think i’ve seen this since like 2011
clearly hexachrome has been hiding out in a little used corner of the internet and isn’t caught up with current memes. (I think i’m jealous of them)
