PS: The discussion on this post turned mainly into a (one-sided) debate about whether the content of my contributions passes the Lemmy ideological purity test. So dull, yet so predictable. To be clear: I stand by everything I’ve written on Lemmy. Efforts at shaming will fall flat, as will pompous denunciations and attempts at dunking based on virtual sleuthing. I’m far too secure in my convictions to be bothered by a brigade of insufferably self-righteous progressives trying to one-up each other in their efforts to root out dissidence. To the (quite numerous) others who offered interesting feedback and kind words, thanks.
Here are some reflections on my personal experience of federated social media.
A bit of background. In the 90-9-1 trichotomy, I am one of the 9%: an occasional active participant. As of 3 years ago I had been dabbling in social media since I was a teenager in the 90s, but never very deeply. Newsgroups and IRC; a bit of invisible blogging; various techie web forums; Twitter from 2008 (hardly any tweets); Facebook in the early 2010s (a post or two per week at the peak); then Reddit. As of 2023 I had been “on” Reddit for nearly a decade and not even written 100 comments. Then I decided on a whim to join Lemmy.
The good
Three years later I have written nearly 100 original posts and over 3000 comments! This is an order of magnitude more than I used social media in the previous 25 years. How to explain it?
A bunch of things. I liked the UX instantly, it’s much better than Reddit. No ads, so no nagging feeling that you’re bankrolling a corporation. A (slightly) higher level of conversation quality than Reddit.
Probably the single biggest explanation is just that it’s quieter. On Reddit I always arrived too late to the party. It’s hard to find the motivation to say something when a thread already has 800 comments. On Lemmy, I’d arrive 12 hours after the post and there were only 6 comments. If I take the time to compose my thoughts, somebody might actually see it! I get the paradox here (there are tons more eyes passively looking at Reddit), but the “quiet room” effect is real.
Highlights
Hands down the best community I’ve found here is (no surprise) a specialized one: !birding@lemmy.world. Lots of original content and genuine expertise, zero vitriol or toxicity. Perfect. In a similar vein, !pigeon@mander.xyz, where you can literally post pics of pigeons to an adoring audience.
I’ve also got some value out of !linux@lemmy.world and !privacy@programming.dev for one of those reasons: the ambient expertise. It’s not really breaking news: Linux and FOSS and privacy are really the only subjects where the fediverse can go toe-to-toe with the corporates in terms of expertise. IMO that’s already an achievement that should not be squandered!
Quite a few of my 96 posts are original content (“OG”, ugh). A whole bunch are photos from my bike-touring escapades, which I posted somewhat arbitrarily to !bicycle_touring@lemmy.world , !bicycling@lemmy.world, and !solarpunktravel@slrpnk.net. I rationalize this as an alternative to blogging: instead of hosting your own invisible vanity website, you can write what you have to say in a place where you have less control but where people may actually read it. It’s the logic of social media, basically, but minus the ads and opaque algos and shareholders. As expected, my holiday photos were not viral sensations, but they did attract some love and a few nice comments. Success!
The less good
My experience on Lemmy has taught me something that I knew in theory but (somehow) not quite in practice: Socializing via text on a screen is quite hard to pull off successfully. The lack of physical accountability, the inherent difficulty of text communication (avoiding ambiguity without the help of a face or body language), all this tends to make people into worse versions of themselves. Me included to some extent, I’m sure.
And then there’s the echo-chamber problem. It turns out that when people have an option to avoid dealing with ideas they disagree with (even slightly), very many of them choose that option. IMO this is a major (perhaps fatal) problem with social media. The fediverse is not magically immune from it.
Lowlights
The first - and definitely worst - experience I’ve had was 2 years ago when I got banned from !europe@feddit.org for “racism and gaslighting” on the basis of, well, pretty much nothing except the moderator’s paranoia. Shut out of the single community that had most drawn me to Lemmy, I tried !europe@lemmy.dbzer0.com and in short order had a similar experience. I am a European liberal who votes green, and a moderate on social questions, although admittedly I do enjoy debate. To be shut down so brutally for daring to question progressive doxas in the politest terms - for me this was quite a shocking confirmation of the intolerance of a certain section of the (mainly US) left.
On !degrowth@slrpnk.net I got a virtual slap on the wrist for posting an article offering constructive criticism of degrowth. I’m basically a degrowther myself but I believe it’s important to stress-test one’s ideas (cf. J S Mill). The moderators politely disagreed. Fair enough. I deleted my post and unsubscribed.
The problem on !china@sopuli.xyz, meanwhile was (is) slightly different. It’s that the community is swamped by a single hyperactive member who posts relentlessly on exactly the same themes with the same POV, and - the echo chamber, again - responds badly to any pushback. I contacted the moderator in private and received a virtual shrug.
So I decided to ditch all politics and stick to photos and niche subjects. But even here it has not been plain sailing. A (slightly whiny) post I wrote a few months ago about the difficulty of installing Linux on cheap hardware (a pretty niche subject!) received an avalanche of mockery and insults that really took me aback. And then I really stirred up a hornets’ nest quite recently in this very community when I proposed a feature which would hugely improve my experience of Lemmy without affecting anyone else. Can’t link to that because it got (very belatedly) deleted, ostensibly because offtopic but in reality because the proposal was unpopular. In fact this was my last post on Lemmy to date. Probably not a coincidence.
Conclusions
For me personally, the jury’s still out. I’m pretty ambivalent about social media in general. Since The Atlantic introduced a discussion space a few months ago, I admit that I’ve transferred some of my energy there. And yes, it’s been a better experience. But the reason is no indictment of Lemmy: It’s that The Atlantic has a paywall, which essentially means I’m talking only to privileged people like myself there. I enjoy Hacker News even more, but that’s because it’s super specialized (politics is mostly banned), and professionally moderated, and also (attention: wild POV!) because it’s full of engineers and other spectrumy types who take a Spock-like approach to communication. The problems I’ve had on Lemmy are problems of all generalist social media, not specifically of the fediverse.
In my case what remains are the figures. Despite everything, I have contributed more, and more personally, on Lemmy than I ever did on the R-site or anywhere else. That has to count for something. Corporate social media is a manipulative money-driven spyware-fueled nightmare. The federated decentralized type is obviously, plainly, better. That’s why it has to succeed.
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So, you’re a debate bro who argues Syrian refugees increase crime and terrorism, trans women in sports and children accessing trans healthcare are legitimate issues, and support Israel and claim there isn’t a genocide.
You say shit like “So many hypersensitive thin-skinned vacuum-cleaner owners! Perhaps they’re projecting their insecurities because deep down they know I’m right.” and argue intolerance that people don’t support your terrible viewpoints?
You’re peak fucking reddit mate.
To me the good of the Fediverse is that it highlights dishonest people like yourself.
hahaha oh boy
…The fediverse is not magically immune from it… …ditch all politics…
the magical free-speech experiment launched by idealistic commies of course collapsed in an authoritarian heap almost immediately
the commies just wanted a place to dictate where they couldn’t get banned
but everyone still says “look reddit bad”
I couldn’t figure out why they aren’t on Reddit… It is such a safe place for them… Why are they all here… I think you’re exactly right
On the contrary, I think the impulse to check a user’s post history and judge them is a bad habit on Lemmy.
Take me. Scroll through my history, and you’ll probably peg me as a AI Tech Bro and a… closet neolib, maybe? I dunno. But if it’s along those lines, you could not be more wrong, on either count.
With the exception of extreme trolls (or moderators doing their thing), I think Lemmy’s culture of “purity checks” is poison to the platform. It turns communities insular, toxic, and angry like it does on Reddit, governed by takes that have nothing to do with the particular thread. It kills the focus of communities. It rewards conformance.
And this thread is a good example. I thought OP was raising some good general points, but digging previous comments up threw all that out the window. I’ve seen this happen in other threads, where a technical or fandom discussion devolves into unrelated, raging arguments on something I did not come there to read.
If you don’t want to be judged by extremely toxic takes, don’t post them.
That is the same as saying “no disrespect” then immediately saying some extremely disrespectful shit . Sorry you deservedly lost all credibility in my opinion.
I don’t know if the original poster posted those takes, but if they did they deserved all the blame. I mean there are literally thousands of hours of unedited video shopping the genocide. To even try to say it didn’t happen means you’re a troll a shit box.
Thank you for expressing perfectly the points I didn’t have the energy to make myself. It’s a comfort to know that there are other people here who still believe in free expression and enjoy hearing opinions they don’t necessarily share.
PS: But judging by the upvote tallies, we’re outnumbered about 3 or 4 to one. I have no idea how democracy will continue to exist if this is representative of the offline world.
Free expression does not mean no push back. You shouldn’t complain about someone calling you out because they don’t agree.
However, I don’t like it when people get banned from communities for disagreement. Unless you spam, or do not engage in a good faith argument (both of which are noise, not signal) you should be allowed to post.
I have literally never complained when someone disagreed with me politely. I love debate. I don’t like rudeness, insults, mockery, brigading, and all the rest of the litany of social-media toxicity.
Agreed on brigading, with a caveat.
Sometimes what feels like brigading is just a lot of people being genuinely pissed off at you enough to stop lurking. I have experienced this myself, from saying something dumb, or being confidently ignorant, etc, and thereby attracting the anger of the mob.
Usually there’s someone in there willing to correct me, so I learn something from the experience. Which I would never have done if I just got annoyed at the pile of hostility and assumed I was right.
Another problem is that rudeness and insults and mockery are not objective. There is no set definition.
For some people, it’s rude to say a trans man is a man, because the idea seems unscientific, or against their religion, or just unfamiliar and therefore possibly dangerous. They have a visceral reaction of disgust or fear, or uncertainty, or all three, because they don’t know what this means for the world.
For the majority of people, it’s either fine to say, or not important. Someone wants to be a guy, what do I care? There are real problems to worry about.
But for a trans man, if someone says that trans men aren’t real men, it’s not just rude, it feels like a kick in the balls. For them, the stakes are very high.
The person saying it might feel like they’re taking crazy pills when they get such a strong pushback, because to them, it’s simple. Dick = boy, pussy = girl. They learned it before they could remember learning anything, and never even dreamed it could be more complicated than that.
So they genuinely aren’t being intentionally rude, but the other person feels very insulted. See? It’s like when I used to be an obnoxious atheist, and mocked the idea of religious belief because it just seemed so pointless and silly to pretend there’s a big old man in the sky who made everything.
Before I knew it was more complicated. I did not consider that a) You cannot actually disprove God, so arguing about it is very silly indeed, and b) if someone builds their psyche around an idea, one that holds great meaning to them, and helps them see meaning in this life, and gives them joy… Why would I fight that?
(As long as they aren’t being control freaks and trying to impose their own beliefs on other people, of course.)
Anyway, the point there is that young me would not think he was insulting someone’s entire pysche by mocking the idea of God, but he was. And therefore, the people I may have come to terms with back then, and learned from, dismissed me as an atheist, and I dismissed them as too stupid to see the obvious.
So it’s not as simple as “Everyone just stop being rude! Jeez! Stop calling me a genocide denier!” and expecting a pleasant, unthreatening debate.
Sometimes the truth can feel like a threat because of how wrong you are.
This whole argument (neatly summarized in the final line) is based on the premise that whenever someone gets pushback it’s because they’re wrong. I beg to differ. Anyway: sterile debate, I hear your points. Let’s call this a day.
Charlie Kirk got exactly what he deserved.
Luigi was a hero.
PS: But judging by the upvote tallies, we’re outnumbered about 3 or 4 to one. I have no idea how democracy will continue to exist if this is representative of the offline world.
You’re judging the resilience of democracy based on upvotes and downvotes?
I was waiting for this comment. Since others won’t bother checking, here’s the fact-check.
who argues Syrian refugees increase crime and terrorism
Incorrect.
trans women in sports and children accessing trans healthcare are legitimate issues,
Correct.
and support Israel
Correct. I support every sovereign country’s right to exist.
and claim there isn’t a genocide.
Incorrect. Literally no opinion because it’s unfalsifiable.
On the vacuum cleaner, I was totally right and stand by my based take.
Also, to add:
Information hygiene here is bad.
Every day, nearly every time I scroll the feed, some spicy headline goes past. When I go to look it up, it’s often completely made-up misinformation, or a warped ragebait headline, or a literally bot-written Tweet, yet it’s voted right to the front page.
…I thought Reddit refugees would be sick of this, and more careful/skeptical, but apparently not. I’ve even talked to some users who don’t understand the distinction between opinion columns and news.
And I had an argument with a mod, who had no problem with an LLM engagement farm Tweet as long as its “the right message.”
…I thought Reddit refugees would be sick of this, and more careful/skeptical, but apparently not.
“I thought the behavior that they engaged in on the other site wouldn’t happen here on the new site!”
shocked pikachu face
The people who left reddit to join Lemmy aren’t representative of the average reddit user. They consisted of a fraction of a percent of the userbase and generally were the type to be calling out bad information hygiene. It might surprise you, but everyone who ever used reddit doesn’t behave in the exact same way or value the same exact things. Tbh, I think the information hygiene was much better here shortly after the API exodus, and it has slowly degraded again over the past few years.
Btw I never heard information hygiene before but I’m going to keep using that, it’s a great term.
It’s definitely been a term for some time. I don’t know who invented it, but I heard it elsewhere.
I love it too.
Yeah while Lemmy has been great for refugees from reddit. Lemmy’s decentralized approach makes it very difficult to deal with bad faith actors.
More than a few extremely bad trolls/people that were banned from Reddit for very good reasons have infected Lemmy over the past few years.
I remember when I first got here, there’s ALWAYS the innitial shock of “what IS this place???”
Once I figured out what this place was, I asked what I thought was an obvious queation.
“If people can interact with the same communities from different instances, wouldn’t it be easy to just make a new account on a new instance? The name might be the same, but the instance is different, so it’s a different account. And since anyone can host an instance, what’s not to prevent someone from hosting hundreds or thousands of instances with the explicit intent on being malicious?”
When I asked that two years ago, I was told by several members that would never be an issue, since instance owners can defederate with instances.
Which I don’t think solves the problem. It seems to me in a cat and mouse game here it’s not the admins who hold the advantage. Seems like the troublemakers hold the advantage.
Because everything the admins have is reactionary. They can only ban after the troublemakers cause trouble. But then they’re back in 10 seconds.
The admins aren’t paid. The mods aren’t paid. It seems to me if troublemakers wanted to shut everything down they would do it with a coordinated attack. Having thoussnds if not millions of bots all at once overrun the human mods.
Eventually the mods and admins would have no choice but to shut down. Too little resources to keep up with the work of running a popular instance.
And thats kind of what happened with lemm.ee. Not trolls per se, but a lack of resources. They ran out of money and resources to host an instance, and that’s without the traffic of overwhelming trolls.
Yet when I said this, I was told I was wrong. Yet here we are. Now you have 1 troll who manually makes account and is banned. Makes account, gets banned. Makes account, banned again.
Thats ONE troll, who honestly seems like he’s doing it for his own amusement rather than malicious intent.
What happens when there’s a much larger concentrated troll attack?
The only way I can think of to actually solve that problem is a whitelist, and that’s a thousand times more work for unpaid moderators and will produce the echoiest of chambers
people don’t think.
they react.
So a good time apart from the usual cestpools of life: political and news communities.
I was curious about the posts mentioned so I took a look at your history and can kinda see why. The Linux one didn’t make too much sense to me but people were generally nice to you, although understandable skeptical since you’re talking about hardware not working. Honestly you had a bit of a meltdown in that thread, which I think contributed more to the down votes than the initial opinion (like you said, text brings out a worse version of yourself).
The political ones, I mostly pieced together genecide denial (?) which has generally been very unpopular here. To be fair, that was more than a year ago, although what was unpopular then has aged even worse, what with people in Europe getting arrested for pro-Palastinian views and such.
I’m not saying the behavior of mods and such were justified, of course, just… y’know, two sides of the story. You’re in the right to express your views and seek discussion, but others have an equal right to call you out on it-- especially if you get defensive and rude over polite, reasonable responses.
But that’s just my two cents. I only ever comment, and I’ve had moments with people being rude or misunderstanding my intent. It happens, as social media is just that way.
Yeah the dude is trying to point it a “their problem”, while he is trying to excuse a genocide. I don’t know about the ban, but it’s funny that these kinds of people always think they are somehow victims.
Sure, that sounds mostly fair to me. Except on the silly genocide point, which is maybe revealing of something. Again, I do not have a personal opinion on it and never expressed one beyond refusing to endorse the progressive party line, which seems to have taken on the quality of a religious purity test.
especially if you get defensive and rude over polite, reasonable responses
Defensive, sure. But almost never rude. I’ve made a massive effort to avoid insults and mockery because I understand it’s counterproductive. That is unlike very many of the people who I’ve had the temerity to contradict or disagree with on this platform. It sometimes feels like others often don’t made that distinction (between testiness and outright insult), and take any contradiction of viewpoint as a licence to get personal. You seem to be fair-minded: If you looked more closely, I think you might see what I mean.
The general tone of your comments, i.e. generous but a bit mystified, suggests to me that you just happen to share the prevailing values and assumptions and opinions here. That will go a long way to getting you a good experience.
Great post. I’m frequently reminded that 40k people is so much more than it seems as I consistently encounter users who have been here and quite active for 3 years and yet I don’t recognize them.
That ban from c/Europe is a badge of honor in my book. One of the nice things about the modlog is that anyone can quickly verify whether bans or comment removals are justified according to their own perspective. It shouldn’t always be as necessary as it currently is, but with people on Lemmy constantly throwing around accusations of bigotry, nazism, genocide denial, etc, its quite useful to be able to quickly view a user’s moderation history. Honestly that might be the most useful feature that Lemmy has, aside from the ability to federate.
However, I do have one minor quibble with your post.
for me this was quite a shocking confirmation of the intolerance of a certain section of the (mainly US) left.
To ascribe your banning from a European community on a European server because of an opinion on a European situation to the US left is quite unreasonable. Also, the mod who banned you appears to be German. This is one of my pet peeves about Lemmy, that Americans always seem to take collateral damage in the most random threads lol. The Lemmy user base is significantly more international than the reddit user base in my experience, and thus the anti-American attitudes that seem quite common outside of the US are frequently exhibited here.
I don’t know that there’s anything that can be done about it, but I do know that it’s unproductive to blame Americans from the outside looking in. I mean it’s unproductive to blame average people for the actions of their government anyway, but it’s especially annoying coming from people who don’t even live here and often lack a lot of context and empathy with their angry rants. None of this applies to you personally btw, but I’m just saying it for the record.
One of the nice things about the modlog is that anyone can quickly verify whether bans or comment removals are justified according to their own perspective.
Not really. Most of the time it’s like "So-n-so got banned Reason: "
So you click the context to see whats happened, and the thread is deleted. So you can’t even see what was said. You only see the topic title.
Or if the whole thread isn’t deleted, you just see “Comment deleted by mod”.
But if the comment was removed, it usually has the transcribed comment directly above the ban reason in the modlog.
However, you are right that the modlog is still very limited and could be much more functional. There are ways to remove posts and comments without them appearing in the modlog, usually by banning the account entirely with the content removal box checked. Then it will show the ban, but all of the removed content is simply gone. It’s a thorny problem to solve to be fair, because people have also used the modlog in an abusive manner, so it’s kinda important to have the ability to actually nuke really bad stuff without it reappearing in the modlog.
Also if you try simply scrolling through the modlog it’s obvious that a bunch of stuff is randomly omitted and completely unclear why. It’s only really useful to check the histories of specific users or mods, because you can sort that way and everything for that particular user seems to come up properly.
Pushback accepted. You’re absolutely right, in the main case I mentioned the community was (technically) German and the mod was German.
Alas, there were a bunch of other incidents on other communities that left a really bad taste in my mouth and in the end convinced me to avoid literally anything even slightly politics-adjacent on Lemmy. To be clear: I have totally mainstream political views, I don’t regret anything I wrote anywhere (I would have deleted it otherwise). Anyone is free to look it up and argue back if they (or I) can be bothered, but we all know that this is unlikely to be productive (to put it politely). The de-facto impossibility of genuine debate on anything even slightly controversial does feel like a serious failing of social media. Discovering all this up close has unfortunately been a part of my experience here.
Yes, and it’s not like the US far left isn’t extremely intolerant, that’s absolutely a true statement. But I feel similarly in terms of how I try to use Lemmy. It’s hard to gauge how much of the toxicity around political topics is exclusive to the Lemmy userbase, and how much is just an unavoidable failure of social media in general. Our specific flavor of extreme left wing toxicity is pretty shocking when you first encounter it, but it’s really no different than the more mainstream types of political toxicity you would encounter on reddit. Instead of worshiping Trump they worship Xi and Putin, but the unwarranted aggressiveness and complete detachment from reality is similar.
I agree 100% with everything you’re saying. Expectation of conformity and zero-tolerance of nonconformity form a sort of tyranny that always makes any discussion of locally accepted gospel impossible. Many social media communities seem founded on absolutist beliefs that just aren’t up for discussion at all. Sometimes even asking informational questions out of genuine curiosity is treated as shilling or trolling - I suppose in those communities asking questions about doctrine any right-thinker should already know and accept is automatically suspect.
As a Hacker News-type person I never thought of my communication as Spock-like, but that’s a great term!
It’s comments like these that stop me from leaving. Thanks.
You’re welcome! [also notice we both got douchevoted lol]
I’ll swap my “Spock-like communication” for your “douchevoting” any day.
Tldr OP is a racist Zionist European and therefore has to stick to birding
And this is based on… What exactly? Asking because you’re not the first person on Lemmy to draw such an extreme conclusion based on reading a single phrase you disagree with.
Conclusions like yours are the reason people Fight so much on social media. Granted, I’m not immune to this, I got to do better, i urge you to do the same.
Patience, reason ate virtues
Scroll down a bit in the thread if you need more examples
Probably the OPs comment history is my guess.
Not who you’re commenting to, but for me it’s based on wasting/spending the time to read not only OP’s analysis about the Fediverse, but then looking into their comment history and public modlogs for their ‘perfectly polite’ takes that got them banned.
Which is far more than basing a conclusion on a single phrase.
People wearing the skin of decency usually gives reason for people to fight on social media. And sometimes people do the research so others don’t have to.
And then there’s the echo-chamber problem. It turns out that when people have an option to avoid dealing with ideas they disagree with (even slightly), very many of them choose that option. IMO this is a major (perhaps fatal) problem with social media. The fediverse is not magically immune from it.
Yeah. Federated social media is even more prone to this effect than centralized. This is the single reason why I believe Lemmy can’t possibly become anything meaningful on a global scale. It is a purgatory built in the image of long dead websites where we all wait for the rotting corpses of old media to wither away.
Unfortunately there’s loads of reddit style interactions on here. But at a structural level, it’s successfully set up differently from Reddit.
Will be good to see it flesh out more, and I hope it keeps growing.
As it grows I think it will be much easier to justify a new person or instance in cutting off entire toxic areas and that will only cause it to grow faster.
Right now we all have to weigh the balance between activity and toxicity but eventually we shouldn’t need to make that calculation, we can have “high moderation” and “low moderation” versions of every topic.
Right now we all have to weigh the balance between activity and toxicity but eventually we shouldn’t need to make that calculation, we can have “high moderation” and “low moderation” versions of every topic.
Including when you secretly mass moderate people, Patrick.
Oh no, the bigoted sack of shite is upset!
Write another book about it if you want, but no, you can’t play with the leftists. Also getting banned from feddit for being too liberal is HILARIOUS.
Banned for a day. Next time is a perma.
Get ratioed AND go fuck yourself.
Socializing via text on a screen is quite hard to pull off successfully.
People for millennia have been socializing via text on paper and found it extremely easy. Text on a screen is hardly that much different. I think the modern problems society has communicating via text has more to do with the wetware than the software. I imagine a moral panic also exploded 5000 years ago when writing letters became a thing.
This reflects my experience, approximately.
Yeah… Lemmy/Piefed is a mixed experience for niche interests. I fear a set of “insulated hyper-political echo chambers,” to put it somewhat crudely, is not going to attract the masses from corporate social media.
It’s kinda my fault, though. I’m not putting enough effort in seeking out those niches, much less posting in them; it’s too easy to doomscroll.
I keep telling myself to dedicate more attention to “specialized” forums like HN or SpaceBattles or DPReview, but alas, my brain keeps failing me there too.
Whenever I see the leftist/liberal infighting and purity tests, like the ones in your comments, im always reminded of a quote from the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley:
“The revolution turns against itself, because its the only thing its strong enough to beat. You can’t get any group of more than four people without at least one fucking idiot.”
Thanks for your contributions to an open internet. Birding is one of the better communities on lemmy (im a fan of the_pack myself, because I ride a motorcycle and im uncultured i guess :) )
It look at lot of community blocking and leftist super-user blocking to make Lemmy palatable. And even then, you still end up with like the “football” community and all the top posts are about Palestine, Israel, Donald Trump, America bad, like jeez people can you turn it off for five seconds and talk about soccer. Its a bit like the Fox News comment section where you’ll have some innocuous article and half the comments are about Crooked Hillary. But there’s some good stuff on Lemmy you just have to work for it.
!birding@lemmy.world mention! Easily my favorite community here too.
My experience is much the same as yours. The Linux community is usually a bit agressive everywhere. I have been banned for questioning things as well. Still, I’d never go back to mainstream social media platforms.
