this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023
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While I had this issue a whole year ago, it's intensified a lot these last weeks: People just don't want to lurk and understand the place. I see people calling communities "subreddits", not reading the rules or basic purpose of the site before signing up and posting and complaining when they get banned, someone asking completely off-topic things in /c/linux, people reacting to titles and not reading the post, people commenting without reading other comments. Especially people coming from popular subreddits and streams where being perfectly redundant is acceptable. If you agree with something and have nothing valuable to add, use the voting instead of burying it! That, and the extra aggression we've seen, especially with people getting culture shock from the politics but just in general.
It's a general attitude of arrogance or uncurious ignorance and it's hard not to be offended, especially when some of us came here, in part, to get away from that culture.
Also, the normalization of pro-capitalist attitudes is a huge bummer. A non-trivial chunk of people trying to rationalize Reddit's actions as 'just a bad CEO' is unfortunate to see, that narrow-sighted denial of systematic factors and of what makes this ecosystem act differently, it's unfortunate especially on lemmy.ml which until recently was explicitly anticapitalist.
Again, this isn't completely new, but it's suddenly become a huge issue which may no longer be manageable without either mass action calling out inconsiderate attitudes, or harsh moderation.
This!
Just kidding. If it's any consolation, some people from reddit, like myself, are still trying to learn Fediverse and Lemmy practices but also hated the meme-speak culture of most reddit and the Right-wing politics. I particularly came to Lemmy because it looked like a privacy-friendly place run by and with Leftists that had actual conversations and I'm really happy I could find something like that, instead of the opposite or nothing! So, thank you and everyone else that's cultivated this place into what it is today! I'm looking forward to a place with real discussion and with people with politics close enough to my own, I also hope it doesn't get overrun with reddit's worst qualities.
Hah, not sure if you already saw my comment in the thread where someone complained about thisposting and got this'd, but it always struck me as weird that it caught on in the reddit crowd. It came from places where voting doesn't even exist and you have to make a reply to show agreement.
The "pro-capitalist" thing isn't bad IMHO
With Reddit users moving to Lemmy, attitudes on Lemmy become closer to reddit mean: Leaning mid-left due to the majority of users being young western people with many IT workers among them
I remember from the time when Mastodon was very young that many Mastodon instances were explitly far-left,anti-capitalist, queer, or all of this. This caused most other instances to be full.of users who don't want that so even apolitical instances turned into far-right asshole circlejerks
Then both sides started to federate only among each other
Its not like Trumpists,Incelas and such are the majority. I'd rather deal with some shitty communities on a large instance rather than have to think about who to federate with again with half the instances blacklisted. Its not like we can prevent them from using Lemmy anyway. At least some of them might be positively influenced by exposure to other viewpoints
I've covered some of the points about anti-capitalism in the reply I just wrote for a similar post, so I'll link there to avoid redundancy.
I don't really understand the intended message with the Mastodon example. "Free speech" platforms are almost always swamped with neo-nazis, literal pedophiles and other super controversial people searching for sites to host their garbage whenever they get kicked from other places, and revolt most other people who would consider using the platform. This has nothing to do with the anti-capitalist and queer-only instances not wanting to host them, it would have happened even if those instances never existed. You might as well blame Beehaw for blocking the Trump fanatics and neo-Nazis who ended up populating Wolfballs. It doesn't make sense, they're not to blame. Almost any site bans those users, not just far-left, or even left, sites. Most centrists and almost any site with advertisers don't want to share space with Gab users screeching out edgy slurs and spam either. It's a basic expectation of being able to hold a productive conversation. Any community should be allowed to kick out anti-social invaders.
No, instances with basic standards kicking our hateful users isn't to blame for why general instances host them. It's the general instances that accepted them and didn't also say no. Those general instances were allowed to kick them out too, they chose not to. Most Lemmy instances historically have kicked them, even those run by liberal capitalists.
And if they allow they platform to be turned into a Nazi pub, they're certainly not being apolitical. Abstaining is a political decision. Trolley problem 101.
I'm fine with people not wanting to connect with instances filled with people who obsess about wanting to kill them. I don't see the issue here.
I do understand the value of exposing people to different to viewpoints, and the dangers of echo chambers, but there is a lot of space in-between complete isolation and letting everyone into everywhere. And I actually enjoy using separate communities for each. I was one of the few users who used the former Go Talk It Out (gtio.io) Lemmy instance, where any conversation was allowed provided it was good-faith and civil. There are some conversations where I do want a range of political opinions or where political opinions don't even matter, and others where I want to discuss a theoretical idea without unproductive spam from people who see a word and whine or troll. So I would rather see that system of federation, where instances specialise and choose who they link to appropriately.
I just assume that the far-right nutjobs are a small minority and as long as this is true, I prefer them getting drowned in one huge community over many small walled communities which only federate with a small group of similar-minded instances. Thats all. Basically the same as we had on Reddit with one large community but many different /r/ Its totally fine if you have another preference
When Mastodon was tiny but already stuck in the left-right battle, it was just a bit extreme imho. Some Mastodons allowed everyone in, some hat a banlist of far-right instances, some only federated with explicitly pro-LGBTQ instances (but always incompletely, since the community is always rapidly changing). This makes it difficult for new users to choose the right server. If Lemmy/Mastodon/whatever has 100 mil users or more these things stop to matter, of course. But before I would rather have one large platform growing
GTIO is an interesting concept, though, and solves the problems I assume maybe. Thanks for the link, I didn't know about it, will check it out
I am a reddit migrant, but I've been lurking off and on for a year or so. Honestly it has a feel like it could be like reddit was a long time ago, smaller communities, more engagement with people that really care about the community, and communities that really feel niche. One of the things that's sucked to watch on Reddit is the amount of random communities I run into on all that aren't gaming or another animes soft core hentai subreddits has decreased significantly. So it feels like there are 10 meme subreddits that all post the same picture, 5 politics subreddits that all post the same stories and memes, and then various popular subreddits that just aren't something I'm into like formula1. I miss finding new interests on all, for example it got me into fountain pens. Or at the very last allowing non-drawn nsfw content on all kept me scrolling long enough to find it lmao.
Absolutely, discovering something new has always been a great part of all sites where users create their own communities. One I know even had a feature where each week they randomly (in a fun game) selected a nominated community to advertise sitewide. I've almost completely avoided large communities for the past... eight years, give or take. The fun was always on the fringe, nowhere near as much low-quality attention seeking or dumbing down to twitter screencap reposts there.
Just go with the harsh moderation.
Well that requires either becoming staff or persuading existing staff, and I just ain't got time for being mod, and the devs (idk about other staff) certainly don't have the time to weild some iron fist, even if they were so inclined.
I guess the irony is then, Reddit is going to experience this exact problem as mods have fewer tools at their disposal.
Do you think open source and free information for all mindsets can't also believe in capitalism? If lemmy.ml was explicitly anticapitalist but they lost their identity due to the flood of new users like me then that's regretable, but I wonder if you just don't want capitalists on decentralized services or not.
I think they were lamenting the fact that people don't seem to recognize why capitalism's inherent forces tend to cause enshittification of services. That it's not just a bad CEO that causes this but the inevitable squeeze that will happens where user good-will is exchanged for money. This is why hopping from privately owned central service to another will not solve that problem.. but decentralized services that are not owned by any single agent (and therefore can't be bought, can't be turned into value for investors) can resist it.
It's good to see people here, good to see people protesting and taking control. So, I welcome you (if that amounts to anything :D) However, I wish people also take stock and ponder why social media service after another turns into crap.. :)
A pro-capitalist can absolutely value OS and freedom of information! But there is inherent tension. For one part, private property is a fundamental cornerstone of capitalism, which (I assert necessarily) led to the invention of intellectual property, a direct inhibition to freedom of information. FoI is not within the best interests of any leading business under capitalism, they have an active interest in maintaining market dominance, and the most power to make that happen through harassment or legislation. So, as a result, we get laws like copyright and major government agencies enforcing it even for things like films and medicine. Piracy like LibGen happen in spite of the worldwide attempts of publishers to destroy it.
Wolfballs admin was an example of a pro-FOSS (Lemmy-contributer!) capitalist who was able to provide benefit to with the project because they shared pro-FoI values. I'm not saying pro-capitalists can't have a place here, or can't add value, but a huge influx and culture shock is the quickest way for Lemmy sites to forget or misdiagnose the causes of reddit's failure and the strengths of Lemmy, and try to turn it into an ad-infested crypto-integrated hellscape or otherwise put profit above users. Even basic things like using an advertising income model creates censorship (Manufacturing Consent has a good section explaining this in detail).
Anti-capitalism is deeply rooted in lemmy.ml, and Lemmy, it's even brought up in the software documentation. It's not incidental or trivial, it is the cause for many effects. It's a big part of why we didn't do what other reddit alternatives did, and avoided their pitfalls. I don't want to be a product here. So yes, it is sad to see that shift into conflict with the software and community's founding values, and it's not just because of some team sports, it's because profit-seeking is what killed reddit and I don't want it to kill us.
Thank you for your detailed answer. That makes sense. I also don't like when things are commercialized and would rather have something like lemmy instances be either a co-op or funded by donations.
I think most hackers, at least in the past, were anarcho-capitalists or crypto-anarchists.
I'd say most hackers were anarchic full-stop. Most probably without any analysis of economic systems, merely a distaste for rules or authority. It's intrinsic in the act of hacking.
There is certainly a huge influence from (socialist) anarchists, such as zine culture and other punk influence, and rejection of intellectual property (e.g. piracy). "Anarcho-capitalism", as far as I can interpret, is founded on a respect for property and non-aggression. Hacking is possibly the opposite.
Cyberpunk culture, especially historically but even today despite recuperation, is a direct critique of capitalism-without-government, or where the corporate has become the government, depicting it as a dystopia.