OpenStars

Nah - back then, that was a problem for tomorrow's (now today's) politicians to have to solve. So long as it worked to put Trump in power, and attempt to remain there, everything was going to be A-okay. And that's my problem with that kind of thinking: it works, but it's always only ever short-term for some reason.

Oh no, if only this entirely predictable outcome could have somehow been... predicted?

I guess we didn't threaten enough doctors and nurses lives and families /s.

But the (clickbait) title got people to (click) talk about it so... it accomplished its publishers' goal, nonetheless.

Yeah, there’s math for it

And next to zero chance that these ~~drink~~ edit: drunk numbsculls would have worked it out before their stunt with one another:-).

Consent makes all the difference... but yeah bullets do tend to travel.

But unlike Reddit, the communities here change very frequently - new ones spring up all the time, and old ones receive fewer content delivery, or sometimes new ones spring up out of an old one.

Though if communities could be trusted to label themselves with category labels, that would allow them to dynamically update, moment to moment as someone was in the mood to e.g. take a break from politics after reading that for an hour, and now wanting to relax with e.g. non-political memes.

It would get complicated to label them, e.g. [email protected] is anything but non-political, and despite the leftist stance of midwest.social, the community [email protected] is mostly devoid of politics. So like... are such labels up to whatever the user wants, or whatever the community mod does, or an instance admin...? It would depend on the implementation I suppose.

As it is now, smaller communities tend to get lost even in the Subscribed feed - e.g. the largest poetry community is [email protected] with "only" 1k subscribers - so having multiple feed categories to switch among may allow less-populated communities to flourish more readily.:-)

Fwiw, I moved to Kbin.social more than a year ago at the time of the Rexodus, then bounced around multiple Lemmy instances, and this is the first that I have heard of that community iirc. And similarly I had never heard of this [email protected] either until you told me about it yesterday:-). The former is listed on the Lemmy.ml main communities page, but it is #43 (by the default sorting method - it looks like Users/Month?) so quite buried (and likewise this community doesn't even make the first page, even locally for the lemmy.ca instance it is on).

Anyway, it's a really good point that if this were to be taken forward, it should be noted that Lemmy.ml is one of the oldest instances, and that the admins/maintainers are the Lemmy developers, so anyone involved in advancing the Fediverse forward, or perhaps keeping abreast of the updates for the Lemmy code, may want to not block it. i.e. it is good to list both the costs & benefits of doing or not doing that.

That said, (a) I don't think those are scenarios for the mainstream public - e.g. people fleeing X b/c it is becoming too politically extreme (how ironic then that we are even more so, not so much in an average sense but in a maximum one, though just calling it by a different name:-P) - and (b) anyway it would be good to have such things be opt-in, rather than have to opt-out of them by default. So yeah, somehow finding a way to explain the situation clearly and cleanly, and without so many words as I have used here. Plus, how would people even find this information? e.g. going to https://lemmy.world/, you see e.g. a "getting started guide", but there are already so many comments on it that the auto-scroll takes many times to populate them - and using the web UI at least, we can't really search through comments, until they are all loaded.

So maybe something could be done on the Lemmy Explorer? There is already an option to "include suspicious", maybe something similar could be done to "include politically extremist"? Although I suspect in that case it would end up going back to being opt-out again rather than opt-in, though at least it would move things forward in the tiniest manner. Otherwise, for good or ill, Lemmy remains relegated to basically users of linux who will put up with such things, whereas mainstream users will simply not bother.

Most instances - e.g. Lemmy.World - have already defederated from those two, though almost no instances do that also for Lemmy.ml. So it's a matter of just how much of that style of content that someone prefers to block, and in particular if blocking merely a handful of communities from them will be sufficient, or if someone wants to block the user replies in every community as well. It's nice to have choices, and I hoped to help streamline the learning process to figure out which option will have which effects.:-)

I almost dropped the Fediverse entirely, after making a comment in Chapotraphouse (that at least Biden was at the time bringing gas prices down which wasn't nothing to combat inflation -> yup, I absolutely stepped into it, never having heard of that community before, and with me previously having been on Kbin.social, I was extremely naive to expect anything close to the level of reasoned and factual discourse that I had come to expect from most other places on the Fediverse).

Blocking hexbear.net and lemmygrad.ml immediately improved my experience on the Fediverse by >95%. Then blocking Lemmy.ml months later improved it substantially further. Yes, blocking individual users one by one is one approach... but there is also merit in trying to salvage someone's situation by large leaps as well.

Also, nobody that I tell about the Fediverse irl can handle it - the level of violent rhetoric here is not normal, for mainstream people. And most are therefore unwilling to stick it out for months until they can make it become closer to what they want. Even computer programers. People talk a lot about wanting to see the Fediverse grow, but I'm saying that federating with such instances is already turning away mainstream people.

It would be different if such content were opt-in, as in like users say yes show me these "categories" of topics, but as it is, the number of world-wide votes places it higher in people's feed than less offensive content, created slightly longer ago, and as we are saying it takes much effort to have to opt-out, all the more so if done person-by-person (and even more when you have to take time & attention to realize that "a meme is not always just a meme", but that it's not due to an individual user or ten, but an entire community that consistently behaves a certain way).

Blocking hexbear.net and lemmygrad.ml and Lemmy.ml helps make the Fediverse more palatable to a mainstream audience. They can always reverse the decision at any time, whereas if they leave the Fediverse, they are unlikely to return, their first impression having already been tainted by their earlier experience.

Oh is that why so many seem to ignore it?! Lemmy is still very unpolished, though still leagues ahead of Reddit, in our hearts! 🥰

That will never end... they will keep creating new ones! On the bright side, that's a sign of a healthy Fediverse. On the other hand, it shows how desperately we need technical advances like "categories" where we can turn on/off whole classes of communities, which is coming in some newer non-Lemmy Fediverse exploration tools (I don't know how high a priority it is but perhaps it will come to Lemmy as well, eventually).

In the meantime, we make do with what we have.:-)