Comment on The Wikipedia page for the fediverse describes a den of iniquity
OpenStars@piefed.social 1 day agoThis deal with Charlie Kirk has people on edge, although so too did Luigi, and the Presidential election, and so on.
Yes here’s an example from today - I just sorted News posts by active and scrolled down to find a post with >100 comments on it:
6 hours ago one person said (referring to USA Vice President JD Vance, the subject of the OP)
Didn’t this guy get shot in the throat? Awful talkative.
And someone replied:
Not yet, unfortunately.
Neither received any downvotes, and the latter reply received more upvotes than the one I quoted above it. Am I wrong to interpret that the reply is suggesting that it is unfortunate that the guy has not yet been shot in the throat? Involuntarily in case I need to add that, i.e. not euthanasia but non-consensual killing aka what most centrists would call “murder” (although I am not wanting to debate whether other definitions such as “justice” might also or even rather apply).
Of course it could be a “joke”, though isn’t the recipient just as much the party who determines what a message means as the sender? If it is a “joke” (possibly as in “haha jk except not really"), then there are an enormous number of such, and have been for quite awhile now - especially “joking” about how Luigi needs to save people, joking about the fact that a second amendment exists in the USA, joking about how people can conveniently die in non-murderous ways e.g. their liver goes out (see the posts about the recent Steve Bannon announcement), and just overall about how death is a good thing so long as it happens to “them”, the “other side” (again, I’m not wanting to get into whether it’s deserved, just stating here that such is being discussed, since these topics relate to how centrists from Reddit would view the Lemmy platform).
These kinds of things are likely to get Lemmy banned from the USA as the authoritarian program proceeds forward, but that is a separate issue from centrists (including those who think of themselves as leftists, not realizing what that means when recalibrated on a more global scale) and most especially conservatives (e.g. in the USA, that are currently using Reddit) feeling welcomed here.
So anyway that was the first such post that I examined. The next post has even more egregious and obvious comments, such as this one, from a whole week ago so at this point seems extremely unlikely to be removed by a mod and even if it were, it has already long served its purpose:
As always these pussies will have a big whinge then back down.
Please just make it legal to kill Nazis again, I’d do it for pay if we could claim a bounty on the hides.
(And then s whole discussion ensues about just how okay it is to kill people. Other more… “circumspect” comments to that same OP include such things as “The 2nd amendment works for all sides.”
So far this is 100% of the first 2 posts I have examined, so let’s move on to #3. Yup, I immediately spot this really cute picture of a cat depicting someone being beheaded, in response to the statement “the aristocrats!”, itself in response to something deleted by a Moderator. So this makes 3 of 3 posts, still a perfect 100%. And I did not have to reference anything from any tankie instances (where the frequency is surely much higher), or anything removed or likely at this time to ever be removed by a moderator, one even having been from a week ago. Seriously, calling for shooting/beheading/otherwise killing “the enemy” are extremely common here. You have undergone extreme efforts to avoid seeing it, I understand, but it does exist, and new people visiting here can notice it, not knowing to expect this level of vitriol. Tbf even Reddit these days is exploding with calls to Luigi people, they just work much harder to repress it - which I am not saying is a good outcome, my only interest here lies in explaining what *is*, not what *should be*.
Blaze@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
Filtered by Top Day on slrpnk
OpenStars@piefed.social 1 day ago
All of those posts are mere hours old, and shown from an instance that has defederated from Hexbear and Lemmygrad. And even there, I definitely see calls for outright murder, such as this one, although here it was fortunately caught and removed by a mod:
That post was of very limited / niche interest though, with only 17 comments total. If you want to disprove my wording that “all” posts have such calls, you can easily find several posts with 0 comments, which obviously disproves my wording choice:-). And likewise those with 1-20 comments - among a community that often has hundreds (e.g. this post from just 10 days ago has >1500) - is low-interest.
Blaze@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
First of all, sorry I thought you wanted to use slrpnk as the first link you posted was from there, I forgot that slrpnk doesn’t federate hb and grad
But actually, thinking about it now, does it really matter? LW defederates both, so there would be no way for a hexbear comment to make it to that community? hexbear.net/c/news@lemmy.world
Anyway, it doesn’t really matter, it’s still not 100%
I don’t have time for a comparison, but doesn’t Reddit has a similar amount of call to violence today? Intuitively, one would think that if people are okay with reading those on Reddit, they would be okay with those on here too
OpenStars@piefed.social 1 day ago
Correct.
Hrm… you know what, maybe? I mean my first answer is most definitely no, bc Reddit fights hard to censor it, but beyond that, people find ways to convey the same meaning, so there is a certain sense to which your statement could be true? Perhaps I am thinking back to my / our experiences on Reddit from two years ago without updating it in my head to reflect modern times.
But then at that point I want to say no again, for several reasons. One, I do have to read some subs on Reddit bc the content is simply not here - and you go to where that is, and that concept will never change no matter how popular the Threadiverse gets - and I don’t see anything close to the levels that we see here. Then again, it might exist there, just not where I am looking?
However, two, people in r/Redditalternatives say that we are too toxic - which we are - and that as bad as things are over there, we are worse from what they see, and we also have less content. The only thing we have less of here that they like is fewer bots - although tbf we have those here as well, despite how most of us have blocked them and they tend to be properly labeled here (which I would argue makes 100% the difference - one that you know is a bot is not a problem, as it is not pretending to be a human).
All of this is far more complicated than I am able to say cleanly and succinctly - e.g. we do have a higher maximum here of extremists, and also it seems to me a much higher baseline level of it as well, but we also have kindness here, whereas there it seems mostly absent, and we have more intellectual discussions here whereas there the baseline level expectation seems to be either teenagers or right-wing trolls that everyone just seems to give up on keeping our and just accepts the fact that they are everywhere, in every sub, in most posts even though they get ignored.
And yeah, calls for murder appear there - but they tend to be removed. And yeah, some of that content gets removed here as well, but as I showed links to, not all of it, nor even perhaps the majority of it, though depending on which community, on which instance, and which subject matter and in particular which mod (team) is looking at it.
We are definitely a den of iniquity. Perhaps Reddit is too. X/Twitter even more so. Bluesky seems far less so though, so maybe that was the source of that comparative thought process - some journalist who is editing Wikipedia in their spare time, so applying their personal bias to it, which is true but mainly in a highly narrow sense?
Perhaps the focus should not be on whether calls for murder exist - I’ve shown you, they DO, but that overall the Threadiverse provides tools to engage with content in enjoyable ways. Obviously engaging with controversial topics is going to bring up controversial wording, but someone can - as you do - block it easily. Reddit is too restrictive, and 4chan too open, but the Threadiverse provides a nice middle ground. It does require a helluva lotta work though, to understand how to make proper use of those tools. Or rather, Lemmy does, whereas PieFed makes it downright trivially easy with Topic Feeds and keyword filters and such (e.g. “guillotine” and “2A” and perhaps things like “, deserve it” and whatnot). Here at least you can make something work, whereas on Reddit you just can’t.