It’s sad. I was so hopeful about a defederated aggregation platform. The users have killed that hope and made the platform completely inhospitable.
I think it’s a shit ton of Russian bots and trolls, as well as other foreign bot farms infiltrating this platform. The US election is coming up. Authoritarians are desperate to get their orange ape Nazi back into power. It’s all vicious propaganda to change attitudes/votes. I don’t think there’s enough decent moderators to manage this serious growing problem.
I’ve been suspecting that for a while but then someone starts attacking me, saying I’m being paranoid. Glad to see I’m not the only one whose alarm goes off when someone slyly starts turning the thread into what the West has done, promoting partisan infighting, and ignoring the main topic. There are literally bot farms in St. Petersburg and other places buying ads on running bots dedicated to influencing public opinion and now with AI it’s easier to target smaller communities as well.
Seriously. I feel different. I “used to” (a matter of weeks in reality) open this app and literally feel joy, sometimes thinking “man, really is different than reddit. Visceral!” Now I feel gross like I’m doom scrolling, and cussing at strangers “bc they’re mean or not listening”… With a splash of self awareness on top, simple to see, we’re acting it all out all over again
I don’t feel anything browsing on Lemmy. People post things that are just factually not true, the tribalism is the worst I’ve seen anywhere, and most things in any topic of discussion are posted in bad faith. If you actually get angry at anything, you’re gonna have a bad time. Unfortunately, I do tend to respond in kind when people do that so I’ve called more people “stupid” or “idiot” on here than I care to admit. It doesn’t help that moderation is entirely one-sided and inconsistent. That might be a side-effect of federation, though, since smaller instances with few mods can get overrun by larger instances with orders of magnitude more people.
I hope it evens out eventually but it’s hard to see that when the only answer to mitigate the toxicity is blocking people.
It’s just the human condition. It would be better to just organize and build communities in real life again, honestly. The internet isn’t really bettering anyone’s lives anymore. Corporations destroyed it like they destroy everything.
Yeah… I read an article by a super young dude talking about his social media is primarily text and WhatsApp groups with a few friends, families, or similar circles, and just sharing thoughts and random posts there… I think discord is that for me. I haven’t done anything besides this form factor in like 6 years maybe?
People keep blaming corporations, but corporations go where the money is and they know how the general population acts. Things are only as bad it as they are because the general population allows it, whether it’s not voting or just outright behaving like an idiot that gets views. The only difference between Reddit and Lemmy is Reddit has worse developers.
Federation unfortunately is still susceptible to the professional troll farms over in Russia and Israel and wherever else. They have become exceedingly good at poisoning the well when it comes to online discourse.
