Comment on Do you refrain from participating to a community if it's hosted on Lemmy.ml ?
ALoafOfBread@lemmy.ml 1 day agoAs someone on .ml I really don’t think it’s that bad. Definitely left, and generally pro-China, but not too extreme imo. Hexbear is pretty bad. I’m a socialist and I disagree with a lot of the stuff there. But .ml is very much not a true “tankie” instance, in my opinion.
OpenStars@discuss.online 22 hours ago
A lot of the issues people have with .ml are the practices of the admins.
Though also when hexbear.net was defederated from so many instances, a lot of those users switched to using their Lemmy.ml alts - many are quite open about this fact - and just continued posting as they had done previously, despite that style being the very reason why hexbear.net had been defederated from.
And when more instances - like lemmy.cafe - start defederating from Lemmy.ml, then those users will surely switch to alts on something like lemmy.world or Lemm.ee that are generally considered too large to be defederated from.
A lot of innocent users get caught up in the cross hairs of this fight between tankies vs. anti-tankies. People using your instance as a platform to attack (e.g. brigade and otherwise spew forth toxicity) other instances, yet possibly behaving normally else wise inside the instance itself.
Also, whether something is “extreme” or not depends on someone’s background context, and I would definitely say that the content on lemmy.ml is considered somewhat extreme for someone on America. Even/especially those who even consider themselves as “liberal”, not realizing yet what little that means on the international stage. The content is nowhere close to being as extreme as that from lemmygrad.ml or hexbear.net, but far more so than e.g. Reddit or Mastodon.
So I hope I have adequately conveyed that it’s not your fault in any way, you also expanding to mean all the other innocent users on lemmy.ml, but I wanted to convey that yes, I would defederate myself from your instance in a heartbeat if given half the chance. Possibly you won’t even mind:-), but you seemed interested, so I hope I helped by writing all this out.
ZDL@ttrpg.network 11 hours ago
Weirdly, I find a lot of the content on America-centric sources (not just in Lemmy) to be pretty damned extreme myself. Like the casual assumption that guns are the right way to deal with all problems. (Slightly exaggerated, yes, but sadly only slightly.)
OpenStars@discuss.online 4 hours ago
Sigh… yup. Much of that has been traced back and shown to not have originated from inside the USA, but it does not matter how it started bc it’s endemic now. And regardless of the rhetoric the news itself is pretty violent, with all the reporting of mass shootings - you know, bc they actually happened, except most of the time the for-profit news media doesn’t bother anymore, and instead prefers to sell something sexier than all the needless deaths of children.
But you can’t wake someone up if they refuse to come into the door in the first place - that is what I meant about labeling content to make it more acceptable to a mainstream audience, so as to boost subscriber counts and thereby increase the overall health of the Fediverse. Being okay with stagnation seems unwise to me, bc it predicates a fall.
ALoafOfBread@lemmy.ml 15 hours ago
Oh yeah, and it makes total sense. The brigading, insofar as it happens, really shouldn’t. But also, as someone who espouses left wing views, I always want to give critical support to left spaces - even if they’re imperfect. And .ml and even hexbear have a lot of valuable discourse - I comment on hexbear threads regularly with less radical points of view than their users often have, and I get good responses and engagement usually because I’m good faith.
OpenStars@discuss.online 14 hours ago
I thought I was left-wing myself, then realized that I may as well be a right-wing nut compared to global standards!:-D
But it takes time for people to learn and change. Mainstream people in the USA may still have valuable contributions to make here, like funny cartoons for us all to laugh at, and thus I decry how they are pushed away due to the extremist content on the Fediverse.
After watching Innuendo Studios’ The Alt Right Playbook, I just cannot listen to hexbears anymore. Those attempts to bully people in just about every conversation with “tactics” other than relying on the logical truths of the issues themselves just really turns me away.
Be careful - your circumstances surely differ from mine, with like your family and job and such - but I note that they are far more likely to change you than the reverse. It’s just how that works.