I’m done, I’ve been banned for expressing a different opinion (without insulting or personally attacking anyone), I’ve been accused of evading a ban with multiple accounts (this is my only account I’ve ever had on any lemmy instance), I’ve had people selectively ignore my comments and accuse me of things which I never said, and I’ve had people ignore valid criticisms and keep attacking me.
Reddit has many issues with trolls, one-sided discussion, and just general bullshit, but many Lemmy instances are way worse. The newfound freedom of Lemmy has attracted many extremists, from both sides, and many of them are moderators, who are more than happy to remove any contrarian opinions. This results in discussions being echo chambers
Lemmy is getting bad FAST with virtue signaling in particular. It’s like the worst of the worst when it comes to things like that left Reddit and came here. So much tiny little bullshit gets twisted in to what a horrible a disgusting person you are and blah blah blah.
I really do like this alternative but… It’s turning pretty fucking toxic fast. I’m scared what road it’s going down.
I just had a discussion this past week with Lvxferre who convinced me that I was wrong and this is actually true, but I still think it is not equally distributed everywhere. Some communities are more known for it than others - in particular, Hexbear and Lemmygrad are so bad that I just outright blocked them, personally, and lemmy.ml (edit: I don’t personally know the deal with lemmy.ml, it just seems to often get floated as the name of an instance whenever things like “witch-hunting” come up, though I am not sure if that is an admin-level deal or more like users who happen to be on it, or what - or maybe it’s just its large size that makes it inevitable to come from there? at which point you would think lemmy.world too…) I put up with it. You cannot avoid all of the nonsense, but the fact that I am able to have a proper conversation with someone sometimes already puts Lemmy LEAGUES ahead of Reddit, where that just became outright impossible, near the end (even before spez ignited the protests).
And if someone wants to put in the work to moderate a place where we can have more fair & balanced conversations, I think I would like to join it? But I am not willing to moderate it - I did that on Reddit, and I am just done with that. If we want nice things though, we need to put in the effort to build them. :-)