In the past week and a half, I've noticed Reddit behaviors starting to try and poison all of the places that people are taking refuge in to get away from the toxicity, myself included. They've started to DDoS Lemmy for a while, which is a Reddit thing to do and what they're notorious of doing whenever they feel they don't like something.
And now they've been trickling in numbers, these incredibly toxic users that behave as they would on Reddit. The reckless shitposting, derailing open civil discussions with unfunny and irrelevant jokes. The downvote brigading and banding together to get you banned. This exact thing has happened to me on Lemmy, that I had to leave because the toxicity was gradually building.
We should reject Reddit toxicity in general, tell them they don't have a place here or anywhere. They know where they can dump their shit in, but they feel that because they've made mountains of it, that they've got to come over to other places and do it all over again.
I left Reddit because the toxicity levels have gotten unbearable. I really am yearning for a place where I can talk in and not be antagonized. I'm sure others are too.
Kbin and Lemmy are better built than Reddit in several ways to handle those behaviours to a certain point:
Karma: it's hidden on Kbin, and I can't find it on Lemmy. So, there is no pressure to post or comment something. Do you know that feeling on Reddit when you have 500 karma, you write a comment, and later you have 480 karma? That's what I'm talking about.
Instances with their own rules: every instance has its own administrator(s), and they can set different rules for them and apply them. Some are more tolerant than others, so in the end,your experience depends on what instance your account is. Besides, some instances don't have downvotes, so that's a big plus too.
People: we all, or the most of us, know how situation was on Reddit, how we struggled to make our experience be positive, with no success. Because we know that, we don't want that situation to replicate on these places. It's difficult sometimes, but we do what we can.
Defederation: as someone said here, if situation inside an instance is too hard to tackle, to the point that those bad entities harass users on other instances, then defederation is key, until the situation comes back to normal.
And there are other things, like algorithm (or lack of), code open sourced to fork if you wish, etc.
Eh?
You have 3140 karma ("reputation"). It's not hidden.
I cannot see it unless I go to my profile page, so it's hidden to me. It's not like on Reddit, where you could see it at the upper right corner, no matter the Reddit page you where on.
I really don't see the purpose of karma and why places like Lemmy and Kbin feel that they have to implement. Karma isn't my concern, it has only been my concern when it comes to Reddit because they tie karma directly to your account to where it affects how much you post and where. If that doesn't happen at all in either Lemmy or Kbin - why have it at all?
Quite frankly, karma systems across all walks of all social media platforms is it's own disease. Even if it serves no purpose, it has a hold on many people to think and act in reflection to how much karma they've accumulated. I've noticed the more karma someone has, the more narcissistic they become, the more that they feel they've above someone and feeling untouchable. Why, because their count outnumbers yours. People with low karma count don't really care, because unless you're on Reddit, no affects. However that routes back to my earlier point.
I can talk about a similar (karma-like) system on another site. It was a wiki-style site popular from 2006-2010.
Their original system counted a user's creations and edits. There was the expected amount of drama around who had more creations vs edits. Creators tended to add a lot of high volume but low effort crap. Editors would get a lot of grief over 'stealing' entries because the idiots who created the site put the username of the last editor at the bottom of the entry.
It got worse.
Around 2008 the idiots reimagined the site and expanded the scope. They kept the shitty idea of keeping the last editor's username, but they added a points system tied to how many new features were added. For example: if you added a town you were awarded 1 point, but if you added a street or river you were awarded 1 point for each kilometer of road or river. Shit got real weird.
It was a race towards crap. AngrySteve59 was no longer at the top of the list. He was replaced by GamerJoe84 who had racked up shit points using the new system.
Points just seem to make people crazy. "Rate me! Evaluate my work" - Lisa Simpson
Most of these are very good things except the downvotes thing. Or at least if I understand correctly, it could be the same as with tutorials after youtube removed dislikes.
You can block users, communities and even complete instances on kbin.
Blocking entire instances still seems to be bugged, in my experience. I've blocked a handful of German-language instances because I speak 0 German, but still see posts from those instances every now and then.
(Tagging @Maestro for visibility)
That's because we don't have Instance blocking on kbin. We have domain blocking, which is not the same thing nor does it provide the same function.
Instance blocking is supposed to be coming soon however according to comments on codebase (no idea on an ETA).
What's the difference? If I block a domain, none of the communities or posts from the instance hosted on that domain show up, right?
No. That's what the instance block will do when we get it. Right now with the domain block, the point of it is for example, say you hate imgur.com. Why? Doesn't matter, you just do. You can block the imgur domain so nothing from imgur, regardless of where it's posted, will appear in your feed on kbin. If I post a picture linked from imgur on m/gaming, you won't see it when you browse that magazine.
If you try to block an instance with that same method, posts and comments still come through fine. I've blocked a bunch of European instances due to language issues but the posts still sometimes comes through regardless (and many other people have commented saying the same over the last month, hence why we'll be getting a proper instance block soonish).
Thank you
This was very helpful to know, thank you!
When I posted a few weeks back about doing the same, someone pointed out that feddit.de (the biggest German instance) also hosts quite a few English language communities. So, I just blocked the few big German communities that kept popping up in my feed instead. Maybe consider doing the same?
Vielen gruss aus Deutschland! Wilkommen und herzliche Wiedervereinigung mit uns. Wir sprechen gern Computor mit ihr!!
(Sorry to all involved about that thing that just happened there. I'm actually enjoying the German instances that I can understand about 35-65% of. IEL)
Can do right now on Kbin, FYI.
You can block users. I use the Memmy mobile app and just click on the user name and then the three dot menu on the upper right.
Maybe switch to the normal lemmy.world interface when you want to block someone. It's right there.