I don’t feel like I’m being secluded

You probably aren’t… yet, but you will become thus, increasingly over time.

For the past half a year I have defended lemmy.ml, saying that its users are nowhere near as bad as hexbear.net or lemmygrad.ml (just… visit them, you’ll see fairly quickly what they are all about). And that much is still true - the users are quite often innocent.

Though not 100% so, and now this with the admins, I will block lemmy.ml soon. I have already started blocking some of its communities, like all the politically-themed memes were simply not fun to keep appearing in my feed, unlike the many other meme communities scattered throughout the fediverse. I am missing out on basically nothing but contention, which has noticeably improved my experience of the Fediverse.

Yes, I am throwing out some babies along with the bathwater, but I am okay with that. The point is to foster a sense of enjoyment and peace, rather than constantly argue with people who are not engaging in good faith to begin with. I left Reddit for good reason, and believe it or not I would have left it regardless of all of spez’s bullshit.

Imagine my dismay when coming to the Fediverse, I make the mistake of ONE comment in chapotraphouse, and I got like a hundred replies of the most batshit insane, derogatory, bad-mannered and bad-faithed “arguments”, which lasted for WEEKS long after I stopped responding. I was being “dunked on”, which they LOVE, and which - apparently, much to my dismay upon finding out - is the literal purpose of that community. I almost left the entire Fediverse after that.

Well, it did not help that I made the same mistake upon replying to a comment in some political community on lemmygrad.ml. It was those two events together that almost made me leave. However, fortunately for me Lemmy v0.19.3 came out just as I was mulling that issue over, so I blocked those two instances, and now I am as happy as a clam. Honestly this issue with Lemmy.ml is nowhere near as bad as those two instances. But it’s still not great, it still impacts people - e.g. it will impact you far more than me - and it will hurt all of us if we cannot recommend to irl people to come to the Fediverse, b/c they are likely to see that stuff and be put off by it. And therefore all the content that they may have offered for our consumption is gone along with it.

An analogy might be: how much fecal matter is okay to appear in your food? We can spend a large amount of time curating our own experiences here to avoid that, but how likely is a non-Linux-using average person who might want to leave Reddit and come here to be even willing to do that, before they can start enjoying their interactions here? That “shit” demeans us all.

That’s like saying all US citizens are awful because they live there.

I suggest a different analogy instead. Crime in the USA in general has gone down substantially in recent decades, but let’s say that you wanted to walk the streets of NYC in the 80s-early 90s. It’s not “just b/c they are there”, but rather “crime is MUCH more likely to occur there, than other places”. If you choose to go there, you are making a probabilistic bet that you will survive the encounter. Maybe you will… or maybe your child will become Batman after you get brutally murdered in front of him, but either way, past some threshold it becomes a foolish bet to have chanced it, in return for what gain even?

You and I do not get to decide upon the preferences of others. Many will leave Lemmy altogether, rather than put up with this stuff. I at least will block Lemmy.ml, but that leaves the newest and least aware and therefore most vulnerable people to still have to deal with it. In the meantime, we are conversing about it, letting people know about the problems that we all face, together.