I think you underestimate how many mainstream users want political news, but otherwise yeah all good points. Though also a user not logged in does face quite a different experience than one who has e.g. realized and blocked ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆. That one action alone can make such an enormous difference in terms of what posts are shown to a visitor to the site, with multiple posts per hour and spread across many many many communities, and sometimes cross-posting in Hexbear.net and Lemmygrad.ml.

This post appears in [email protected], despite being explicitly political. I suppose it must be “funny” bc the West does wars, but China in no way has threatened any nation ever (Ta…), or offered aid to another nation that is actively doing genocide (Ru…), or even done such activities directly by themselves (Uy…).

Or what about I’m sick of liberals pearl clutching over January 6th, claiming that:

the whole thing as an absolute joke, but they’re treating it like it was an actual terrorist strike or something. “An AtTaCk On DeMoCrAcY”, fuck off, it was some people wandering inside the Capitol because the cops let them in.

I found such things as these by browsing by All, especially since I had not subscribed to any communities yet. It’s a toss-up what you’ll see in All for sure, but that’s the point - to see what’s out there. And then mainstream people don’t like it and leave Lemmy. It would be nice if there were at least warning for this. Because it’s not just about seeing content - when someone makes the mistake of replying, oh oh! right directly inside of Chapotraphouse, wow, that’s when the fireworks begin, and the replies just keep rolling in for WEEKS and WEEKS.

So, yeah it’s possible that someone will manage to avoid running into someone from LG or ML or HB long enough for them to get to like this place and decide to stick around, but it’s also entirely possible for them to do the opposite and walk right into one of these places immediately. Likely even?

Here is a interesting conversation I had with an admin at sh.itjust.works 5 months ago. What makes it interesting is their suggestion to make:

something like autoblocking the instance on user creation… which might make more sense than outright defederation. A bot could probably be made to do that and send them a DM with instructions on how to change it off they so wish.

This is exactly what I was hoping for - making such posts opt-in, rather than have to opt-out! However, I don’t know if it was ever implemented, and even if it was, it would only affect new accounts on that one specific instance. Though it could serve as a model for others to follow, to provide an alternative to either defederation (not going to happen, not with ML) or retaining what we have now which is to treat their bad-faith posts the same as all the good-faith ones.

Yeah and right now the web UI lacks significant polish. e.g. in the deeper threads, it is easy to get “lost” and not find what you are looking for, especially with all the collapsing and Continue thread elsewhere stuff going on.

But wow it does give me strong hope to see what it’s doing already.:-)

Please do!:-)

Oh I did not know that. Tbh the interface is a little confusing to me - but I suppose I could get used to it, and actually most of that affects the mobile rather than desktop. Anyway, every single thing I continue to hear about it continues to impress me still further - e.g. they now have “post flairs”, which act like the Reddit ones i.e. they are basically “tags”, which Mbin and PieFed also have but Lemmy lacks - and yet even while still running on “Lemmy”, Admiral Patrick made it happen. Plus it runs YouTube videos natively inside of it. It’s basically an open-source app that doesn’t need you to download it but instead runs inside of the web browser - not an easy accomplishment by any means. And then there’s this little gem:

I built Tesseract in my spare time as a hobby, learning excercise for Svelte, and to address my own personal annoyances with Lemmy and other Lemmy UIs. That said, I do not feel the need to accept donations for its development.

Also, he will switch the back-end from Lemmy to Sublinks when that becomes available. Or maybe Sublinks will use something more like Tesseract natively, I have no idea (I never hear about Sublinks anymore these days - I seem to be the only one that continues to mention it, that I see at least).

But anyway, it’s impressive AF. And yet it might disappear at a moment’s notice - well, dubvee.org might, whereas Tesseract is open-source code so anyone could take it up and continue that if they wanted. In terms of blocking a custom instance such as Lemmy.ml, I would naively guess that what it took to implement that would be a combination of both Tesseract (the software making it possible) and dubvee.org (as the instance admin) - i.e. if someone else were to run Tesseract then they could decide differently, as admin of their own instance.

I have never not enjoyed any conversation I have ever had with Admiral Patrick. Others hint that they have seen differently but nobody will respond with any details or links to anything so… I can only go by what I see, which is impressive.

Yes and as I wrote up the first draft for this I definitely included that disclaimer but it got too long and so I took it out (along with a bunch of other stuff). Whether someone wants to block any particular instance at all - whether hexbear.net or lemmy.ml or midwest.social or whatever - is up to them, and I covered that already in the previous post in this community.

Talking more about it now though: I agree that it is more than a little unfortunate then that such users would get lumped in together with the kind of “spam” that comes out to us across the Fediverse from inside that instance. It isn’t their fault, either directly, nor do they have anything to do with either the other users on their instance or the policies of their admins. I can well imagine having discussions entirely locally inside of lemmy.ml on communities such as [email protected] or [email protected] or [email protected] etc., but never once encountering such users as I have mentioned elsewhere here - and perhaps they have likewise blocked them even.

But for myself, and many others, the trade-off is worth it. It narrows our experiences of the Fediverse sure, but I no longer wish to participate in a community where their content and userbase are held hostage by the tankie philosophy. This approach increases the false negative / type 2 “misses” of federated content, while substantially decreasing the false positive / type 1 “spam” that can get blocked.

You for instance do not participate in political communities. What we want to do or not do is up to each of us, and may even change over time. Therefore what I am a HUGE fan of is the democratization of that choice: how can someone take matters into their own hands, even without support of an admin, and improve their experiences on the Fediverse?

And although I deleted from the OP, I would have loved to have included an entire section on why blocking is inferior to merely “labelling”. What if instead of the binary yes/no there was a third choice? PieFed already provides such btw, in the form of “reputation” labels that are put onto user accounts. e.g. if you have received more downvotes than upvotes you will get a label that, while not restricting your activities in any way, will alert users (of instances running PieFed) to that fact. Similarly there is a new account label, etc. The advantages are numerous - e.g. rather than taking equal time to parse every single comment that you see, only realizing at the end that someone is spewing propaganda (or gish gallop, reverse gish gallop, controlling the conversation, strawman, the card says moops - the list goes on and on and on and on), you can see the label and deprioritize it.

This is a fully game-changing advantage that restricts the users of an instance in no way, yet still allows for something in-between full defederation vs. full allowance, as if they were speaking in good faith when in fact they may not be. However, this sounds to people like it is “karma” - notably it isn’t, not really, b/c e.g. there need be no difference between +1000 vs. +10000 - so I don’t expect people to be a big fan of this. But still, it’s there if someone wants to use this rather than blocking.

And Mbin does similarly, by while still allowing upvotes, also adding “favorites” from people on instances running Mbin, which tend to be more pro-Western oriented, therefore the large number of upvotes for a post in something such as hexbear.net’s ChapoTrapHouse will not necessarily make that content appear high up in a list sorted by Hot or Top, and instead content gets sorted by the favorites / alternative votes.

Anyway, it’s a super complicated subject. Lemmy is in beta, and the entire concept of Federation is being tested right now, on the fly. And some people cannot wait for perfect solutions to come out and be vetted - so for those of us who simply want the spam to be GONE, I am glad that I finally found a way that doesn’t mean that, like all of my irl friends, I have to leave the Fediverse entirely to make it happen.

I see it: Settings -> Appearance -> Display Votes, set to Hide.

The votes will still be there, affecting e.g. how your content (posts and replies) will be sorted, you just would not see them anymore.

Although that might (I don’t truly know) be how instances that disable downvoting work anyway? Or at least when interacting with other instances even if not internally.

What happens if you hide them in your Lemmy settings? But maybe a question to ask on the Voyager community