OpenStars

Yeah some amount of that is inevitable, but see e.g. https://hexbear.net/post/3820065 for an example of the type of content that you are “missing”, being on lemmy.world that has defederated from hexbear. Also note how it’s not just the post itself but how supportive of the position the comments are (overall), with several of them expressing an explicit desire to do such again, and the overall theme being how “funny” it was.

Now mind you, there is still a lot of similar content that you aren’t “missing”, from places such as lemmy.ml, but hexbear.net is most definitely a special place full of toxic trolls (many of whom continue to troll us after the defederation via their lemmy.ml alts, bc consent means little to them). Here is another example, this time from lemmy.ml that almost no instances have defederated from, since the admins are also the developers of the sourcecode for Lemmy: https://lemmy.ml/post/22043103. The cognitive dissonance is in full display on that instance by declaring that what the Western nations do is “genocide” (I mean…), yet somehow what Russia and China are doing is not genocide - either directly (Uyghurs & Ukraine) or indirectly (the USA has sent support to Israel, while Russia has also sent support to the other side of that conflict). Realistically, both the USA and Russia are supporting genocide, but NOT EQUALLY SO, as one of those two nations is also actively engaging in that activity directly.

Because of so very many posts from this, and toxic trolling from many of their users, I have gone to great lengths to find a way to block both hexbear.net and lemmy.ml, even switching instances to piefed.social that allows a normal user, without needing admin support, to block all users from any instance of my choice (https://piefed.social/post/307636 ). There are also some apps that can do that as well, though you won’t find that option provided in basic Lemmy. I’m not necessarily advocating for such a switch, but it’s nice to know that it’s possible, and it is good to be aware of what content is out there and in particular note where it comes from - i.e. you may want to block at the very least communities such as [email protected], if you don’t enjoy having the above-mentioned content finding its way into your feed.:-)

On top of that though, the world is literally different today than it was then. Some things changed EVERYTHING - agriculture, fire, medicine, even just knowing to wash our hands, etc. The advent of vaccines may have arguably altered our world in beautiful, wonderful, and potentially terrible ways - allowing children to have an extremely high chance to reach 80 years of age, as opposed to an enormous chance (way more than half) of dying prior to 5 years old.

And the information era radically altered our world. Except it also birthed the post-information, or perhaps we should call it the disinformation era. When companies such as Google were playing nice, we had free access to ALL of the information in the entire world. Whereas now… we don’t, but as soon as they can figure it out, they’ll have us sign up with a subscription to be able to “know things”. What came before was always temporary, but we lied to ourselves telling one another or at least acting as if it would last forever.

My proof: https://hexbear.net/post/3820065. I know it’s hexbear, but click it anyway. Hint: it’s dis-information - active retelling of the story so as to ignore the facts and substitute their own presentation of their own… “alternative facts”.

And for someone who isn’t smart enough to know the difference, how can they tell the difference? WE heard the horrific screams of the police officer as they were brutally murdered. We know of the other ones who died, including one who later committed suicide. We have empathy for their families. We saw the hearings. We heard the testimony, of the officers. We have seen the people involved admit their actions, and some apologized.

Or, you know, iT wAs PEacEfUlL, “it was hilarious and looked like tailgating gone wrong after too much booze”, or as one commenter said “I hope it happens again” (11 upvotes as of now).

So… WILL we learn the lessons that we would need to in order to survive? I am not so certain myself. But maybe! Either way, we indeed will HAVE to, if there is to be any hope of the survival of our current way of life IMHO.

Oh I see - I was making assumptions about what you said and I apologize for that. You aren’t saying “eVerY tHiNG iS goInG to BE FiNe”, but rather, the USA could end, and yet… humanity will go on. (that might still be debatable as well…)

Yes, your thoughts exactly mirror my own: the only way is to move forward, and what will be will be - hopefully we can minimize the pain, and things WILL change regardless, and yet we still go on, having learned all the more from the doing.

1. bold of you to presume that American democracy will last that long

2. the kids have their own issues, including not knowing or being able to do much of anything, which is not entirely all or even mostly their own fault

We have more people than are necessary anyway. With the combined effects of both globalization and automation, more and more jobs - even middle-class ones such as (low-level) “lawyer” and “manager” - are becoming superfluous.

So I think at this point that the wealthy wouldn’t mind, and based on what e.g. JD Vance is currently saying even outright prefer, to have the mother stay home and take care of the children. While in turn they pay the man lower wages, and possibly also pay in “company scrip”, where both healthcare and potentially even housing (and perhaps starting to add in things like food) could all be tied to the job.

And I am not sure that they care what the children actually learn. Although “they” control e.g. FaceBook, X, Threads, etc., and books that are less trackable are already starting to be literally and physically and actually burned, so they already control what they learn.

And in a couple of months, the USA could switch sides and outright join Russian aggression - or at least significantly scale back the current level of opposition - at which point the Ukranians too, plus ofc Taiwan, maybe Japan, and anyone else that China sets their sights on. Plus with the USA backing those Axis powers, the sky’s the limit really.

Meanwhile companies like FaceBook or Reddit don’t really seem to care, only chasing profits, and Twitter has flat-out joined the fight on the other side, by cancelling itself into becoming X.

These are dangerous tools that we are playing with - far more so than guns - b/c knowledge is power, after all.

The internet, like every other man-made thing, is a tool. And therefore its usage is determined by how people wield it. e.g. much of the anti-vaccine disinformation has been traced back to Russian troll farms - this is a known fact. The movement might have predated that, or it might not, but either way it undeniably received a massive boosting, especially in its formative stages, by such outside agitation.

At the same time the internet also provides tools to debunk such anti-“knowledge”. Though like so many other things, it falls into an arms race where the disinformation can move quickly ahead to cover new ground, while getting properly factual information out to people takes more time, especially if refusing to use tools like rage-baiting that increases a message’s ability to spread quickly.

Sadly, we just don’t seem to have an immune system to attack sources of disinformation - at least not one that could ensure that all or even most people who can and will vote have what they need to be properly equipped to handle the continual onslaughts. Which makes me very much fear for the structure of democracy itself in our current age.

Funny answer: well it’s not like we’re going to pay teachers a living wage, either way!?

Brace yourself for a significantly worse one now: Project 2025 may end teaching almost entirely. Factory workers don’t need “school” like we have had it all of our lives - I mean they would to avoid getting scammed and such, hence why schools would be taken away, bc they lead to such things as unionization, which henceforth is to be consolidated “bad” (bc sharing = caring hence socialism = communism and… fuck, nobody can explain this with “factual terminology”, you just have to turn off your brain in order to feel the Truthiness of it, yeah!? 👍🤮).

Similar attacks on basic infrastructure are ofc also taking place elsewhere across the world as well. And ofc even if any individual attempt to roll back provision of education fails, it will simply continue on with the next attempt, and the one after that, etc.

Therefore I vehemently disagree: learning via computers may be the only method of instruction left to people who cannot afford access to human teachers, in the world that seems inexorably and progressively advancing upon us.

So it is what may offer us perhaps the best source of hope for our future!

Mostly that’s true but not entirely. The common analogy is that the Fediverse is a bunch of pirate or free trading ships passing in the night, each passing messages from one to another until they all have all of the messages - “federation”. However, some captains have some bad blood between them and other captains and refuse to pass messages from them along - “defederation”. And for good reason I need to add, bc if outright illegal material were to make its way onto your “ship”/computer then you could be in big trouble, like literally with the FBI or other equivalent governmental agency in other countries. Or imagine that some captain decides to send out a virus - not all of these captains are apparently ethical!

In practice, any captain of a ship can decide which messages they want to pass along to share with others vs. keep private solely for themselves (their own internal set of users). And likewise they get to decide which messages to receive too - like none from a particular source, or maybe only some if they are structured a certain way. And then on top of all of that, Lemmy.World in particular has decided to edit certain messages to filter out banned keywords that they deem offensive to their users.

So like an irl example is that a few years ago a bunch of people/captains decided to create Alt-Right instances, and these spewed forth violent rhetoric and pedophilic content throughout the Fediverse - which in addition to being not nice was highly illegal. So rather than allow that to get us all in trouble with the FBI, in response all the other captains/instances decided to block/defederate from them. In theory I suppose you could spin up your own instance - becoming captain of your own ship - and you could choose to receive to those messages (but again, be careful about content that is literally illegal!). Although actually I think those instances may have shut down in the meantime, deciding to switch to the likes of Truth Social, so they probably are not around anymore to be federated with even if someone wanted to. Still, to be on the safe side, every instance I’ve ever seen has defederated from them, I guess in case they ever decide to come back.

So one practical way that this affects you personally is that Lemmy.world has decided to defederate from hexbear.net, a known nest of trolls (they enjoy a highly contentious argumentation style, but they don’t stop that even outside of their communities where it is consensual, and it is this refusal to consider consent of people outside of their echo chambers that makes them trolls). So no, this content in particular is not “everywhere” - it is blocked quite often from many/most instances.

If you truly wanted to experience the Fediverse with as few filtering of messages as possible (although remember that not all of it is offered in good faith), then you may want to make an account on lemm.ee rather than lemmy.world. But otherwise lemmy.world is a great instance - it is where ~80% of all the people on Lemmy are located.

Hahaha absolutely yes! That series is hands-down my absolute favorite of all of YouTube, which is really saying something next to the likes of Kurzgesagt and Crash Course series. Also Ian Danskin’s other videos like the agency / protagony one - chef’s kiss! 😘

It seems that Discuss.Online keeps archival copies of such older messages rather than delete them after a defederation action. Try viewing them on that instance.

On a separate matter, this is a brand-new message that for that and perhaps other reasons I doubt you’ve seen but that you may be very interested to know about: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/6127949/5423163. The post itself is talking about the upcoming defederation between jlai.lu and lemmygrad.ml, which I’m sure you know about, but what I wanted to call your attention to is in the OP’s comment where they immediately start talking about a method to use a 2nd account or some other method to bypass that defederation attempt. They also float an idea to change the Lemmy sourcecode so that admins can no longer control which instances their users can access - this seems like an enormous security issue to me though (e.g. CSAM and other outright violent rhetoric that could get someone in trouble if it were on their machines).

Anyway no matter how you slice it, it is uh… “interesting”. The more of such discussions I see, the more glad I am that I switched to PieFed that does not depend upon the Lemmy sourcecode at all - even though Discuss.Online was great.

Right! Except regardless of your wishes, “they” don’t seem to want for us to have that ability to block “them”. For a LONG time Lemmings begged, pleaded, and cajoled for the ability to make blocklists. The answer, as I see in the historical archives (hehe just older posts I mean:-), was always “just wait - we’ll implement this in 0.19”. Fast-forward to when that happened: it barely does anything at all.

A block of a “user”/account is iirc as full as it gets - I am not even certain that they can downvote you after that. A block of a “community” is likewise solid - those posts will not only not show up in your Subscribed feed, but even from your All one. However, a block of an “instance” merely blocks the communities from that instance, but the users themselves are still free to troll in other communities, free to reply to and ping you thus generating notifications, free to downvote you, and otherwise carry on almost as if you had done nothing at all wrt that particular instance. It is extremely weak.

Also I’m skipping over the details here but what little it used to do is steadily being rolled back so that it is even less effective than it was before (irt the generation of notifications). And since the developers of the Lemmy sourcecode are also the admins of Lemmy.ml, despite all the pitiable outcry from the users affected - there was one here just this week where an admin literally told someone to kill themselves, over a silly misunderstanding of something that happened inside of a video game - absolutely none of the largest instances will condone defederation from lemmy.ml.

And I get it: we are running their software. Abuse or no, we are the guests, and they are the masters of this Lemmy project. Yes it may be open-source, but if we want their future code releases, the boat cannot be rocked too awfully hard.

So, you can either block every user from that instance that you ever see, one by one, or… suck it up and take what “they” offer to you. Or find another solution.

But notably, I don’t want to just block users b/c of the moderation practices of the admins - it’s the users themselves that, trained within that echo chamber as to what they can get away with, troll people all across the entire Fediverse (unless they specifically defederate from that instance). From another comment I made elsewhere:

so e.g. I get to see Cowbee responding to people discussing tankie behavior with the “just trust me bro, no I refuse to share my references instead why don’t you hit me up in my DMs, hey why don’t you share YOUR references hrm, no I’ve never asked anyone to hit me up in my DMs in my life bro whutyoutalkinabout?”. As funny as it may be to watch, it does disturb me that “normies” as we are talking about in this post will be exposed to such, and have to learn first-hand what types of behaviors to expect from which servers that the admins of most instances will not defederate from.

You were not the first that this happened to - they’ve even kicked out mods without any warning (and literally told people to kill themselves), nor will you be the last. At this point it seems to be a right of passage that people must go through, bc it is administered by the Lemmy sourcecode developers so very few instances seem to want to risk pissing them off.

Blocking especially Hexbear alone solved 90% of my issues with toxicity on the Fediverse, and blocking Lemmy.ml brings that up to like 99.9% - there are trolls elsewhere ofc, just like there are some people who might have been worth talking to on Lemmy.ml, but overall it acts like a spam filter that much improves my happiness here.:-)

Oh yeah sorry, I took that as a given. Liberals != Democrats, especially on matters such as gun control where even conservatives (~90% of Americans want some, limited forms of gun control), and conservatives != Republicans. Ahem, sometimes politicians LIE to get elected!?!?!! (How you can tell: their mouths move 👄:-) So yes you are absolutely correct, I meant the particular brand of lie that is attempted to be sold to their constituents.

And some (politicians) I assume may even be real believers, but not the ones who end up making it into the halls of power. Hence while I agree with all that you said, I don’t think that it will ever happen. RCV would allow someone other than those who are willing to literally kill to get in power win, hence it won’t be allowed to happen. I mean, it already has started happening, but it won’t be allowed to get as far as being able to sway the election overall. Wow how I wish I was wrong!

Historically, no nation has ever survived having devolved into a 2-party system afaik, so I don’t hold out much hope for a long-term future. Especially since governments themselves are starting to take a back seat to multinational corporations that have more money, power, and ability to control things than the countries are allowed to retain. The EU is able to resist this, the USA refuses to for the most part but it can in a pinch if it wants, but who else could hope to?

After all, the wealthy control the very sources of news that we all consume, and if we don’t even know what’s going on, how can we make decisions - like what would they be based upon? Which ironically is why the open-source Fediverse made so many of us excited, to think about breaking free from underneath the control of the Almighty Algorithm. But then we accidentally walk into a community in lemmygrad.ml, hexbear.net, or some lemmy.ml posts and we begin to see the downsides to that - as this OP discussion is attempting to illuminate. Reddit at least allowed blocking of trolls, whereas if we want that here, we will need to expend the effort to make that happen.

The memes community on Lemmy.ml is anything but non-political, pointing to how it is not so easy to completely separate those concepts.

In addition to lemmy.cafe and quokk.au and Tesseract on dubvee.org that have each defederated from it (though as Blaze mentioned they are all single-admin instances), iirc the apps Connect or Sync will let you block any custom instance you want (I don’t have either, but from what people say?), or the Lemmy alternatives PieFed or Mbin likewise plus they have neat features that Lemmy lacks such as Categories of Communities.

Note that that approach doesn’t actually block the users from that instance, only the communities.

To block user content leaking through that block, there’s apps like Connect or Sync, or the Lemmy alternatives PieFed and Mbin, which additionally offer a number of advanced features that Lemmy does not have such as Categories of Communities (but you’d have to switch instances to access those).

This is the way. Although I also block e.g. sports and hexbear - I already know that I don’t want any of that.

They do. I’ve seen some - heck I’ve posted some. Sort a community by Controversial and you’ll see them.

If you had said “rarely” or “mostly” rather than “don’t even” then your statement would have been correct. As it is, you are using hyperbolic claims that are easily refuted by a handful of counterexamples, thereby turning people away from listening to your POV.