cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/24954593
It’s rough right now politically in the US. A lot of people around me seem like they’re ready to give up hope. It makes me incredibly angry seeing Zuck up there with all the other billionaires, and Elon is a parasite that has infected the government.
I often find myself wondering how I can make a difference. How can we regain control of our world?
Idk if I’m being dramatic, but the Fediverse really seems like it could be our response to these fuckers controlling the narrative on social media. It could be more than just an interesting decentralized social media platform. I really think this could be a key step in reclaiming our democracy.
Am I being dramatic lol? Do you all feel the same way? I was kinda getting emotional even. Like we could bring real change. That gives me hope, which is something we are desperately lacking right now.
It’s not just Lemmy. It makes me happy to see all the Fediverse platforms (specifically activity pub based) blowing up.
Friendly reminder if you have the financial means, donate to your instance, donate to the Lemmy devs, donate to Pixelfed or any other social media app fighting big social media. And better than a one-time donation, set up a monthly contribution even if it’s just $2/month. It really helps open-source developers when they have a steady income.
Lmao lemmy’s a super toxic place with a userbase worse than reddit for the most part. The further you get from world and ml, the better it is. Hard to say it gives hope when people can be so shitty.
I believe you that this is your experience. From the discussions I had in the past years I assume its a minority standpoint. A large portion of the people commenting are fairly decent and generally dont complain harshly. I dont have any domains blocked except threads iirc. I do use blocklists by fediseer and such but I dont remember if its only for mastodon or for lemmy as well.
I have to stress though that the fediverse is much more like real life than facebook and xitter.
If you dont like someone, you just dont meet with them (block them). This forms a strong social bubble that interconnects over many people.
The fringe people in every bubble (strong intersection with other bubbles, weak connection to yours) are the „federation“.
They judge if you would like to meet this other person you wouldnt normally hang out with. If they were like facebook they would constantly recommend you the most vile bastards and keep you from interesting and calming people to drive „eNgAgEmEnT!“ This is called a false, abusive „friend“ or a drama queen.
seems wierd to hang out in a worse place though. like I find reddit worse so I went here from there. Im not saying toxicity does not exist but irc had trolls going into rooms in the early nineties. seems like more of an internet artifact if not a human one. Like you have that great place you hang out in till annoying people start hanging out there and then you find a new place.
I have .world and .ml blocked so I’m spared from the worst of it. Still see users from those instances in comments on posts but still far better.
that might get me to move to lemmy actually. I like mbin better but domain blocking does not seem to work which might not be quite so bad but many times the language preference does not seem to work. So I have to block each community sperately which does seem to work. I prefer to work bottom up. users then, communities, and domain last. This depends though. I block communities I have zero interest in and domains usually based on the language thing not working but again it does not work anyway so I don’t know why I bother.