Call me crazy, but I a) think the fediverse probably doesn’t have more ‘toxic content’, harmful and violent content, and child sexual abuse material then other platforms like X, Facebook, Meta, YouTube etc, and b) actively like the fediverse because of that.
But after a few hours carefully drafting and sourcing an edit to make it clear that no, the fediverse isn’t unusual in social media circles for having a lot of toxic content, I realised that the entire ‘fediverse bad’ section was added by 1 editor in 2 days. And the editor has made an awful lot of edits on pages all themed around porn (hundreds of edits on the pages of porn stars), suicide, mass killings, mass shootings, Jews, torture techniques, conspiracy theories, child abuse, various forms of sexual and other exploitation, ‘zoosadism’, and then pages with titles like ‘bad monkey’ that seemed reasonably innocent until I actually clicked on them to see what they were and, well.
I decided to stop using the internet for a while.
I’ve learned my lesson trying to change Wikipedia edits written by people like that - they tend to have a tight social circle of people who can make the internet a very unpleasant place for anyone suggesting maybe claims like ‘an opinion poll indicated that most people in Britain would prefer to live next to a sewage plant than a Muslim’ should maybe not on Wikipedia on the thin evidence of paywalled link from a Geocities page written by, apparently, a putrid cesspit personified.
I thought I’d learned my lesson about trusting Wikipedia.
It just makes me so angry that most people’s main source of information on the fediverse contains a massive chunk written solely by a guy who spends most of his time making minor grammar edits to pages about school shootings, collections of pages about black people who were sexually assaulted and murdered, etc, and that these people control the narrative on Wikipedia by means of ensuring any polite critics’ are overcome with the urge to spend the rest of the day showering and disinfecting everything.
It’s pretty toxic toward right-wing pieces of shit that espouse hate toward minorities, women and queer people. As it should be.
And reddit has shifted from that using auto-moderation I think
Do not view Wikipedia as the only source of truth. And please relax your soul in face of online drama.
Today you learned any idiot can edit Wikipedia and it is mostly done by pro government entities.
I have seen worse stuff on Instagram and Reddit than I have seen on the fediverse… and I use the fediverse far more.
it is impossible for an instance to be “removed” from the Fediverse
That’s just how the internet works.
As with Wikipedia, I saw the same stuff with articles regarding religious topics that were just heavily guarded by a neckbeard atheist who had unreasonable expectations.
it looks like somebody who just saw this post edited wikipedia for the first time to remove that. this is why wikipedia’s wonderful: it’s that easy. i have this quirk where i wanna debate anyone who distrusts wikipedia or claim its rigidity
They did! The change log shows the main section of ‘I found a single paper criticising the fediverse so here’s 600 words on how terrible the concept is’, and also reassured me that I wasn’t just being lazy in not wanting to trawl through the text to edit it to be less awful.
I’m bizarrely excited about it too. You can’t thank anonymous Wikipedia editors, so I’ll throw a vague ‘thank you!’ out into the world and try to pay it forward.
My next battle: figuring out why I can’t edit this post, lol (maybe a mobile problem) and long term, why I didn’t think of ‘just edit it anonymously’.
lmao wait until it’s reverted, argued over, then the editor gets banned.
go on, show me
It is pretty fucking toxic if you’re not a Linux sheep or violent-leftist.
Linux wins vs Windows (when it comes to user-control and stability). Immutable distributions allow reset to prior state, can Windows do that? Thanks for the bait by the way.
Love it. Those hypocritical fucks will rue the day they fuck with Tux.
Well, it should be toxic for Reich Wingers
How so?
linux sheep
bruh
ok bye
The crappiness of this section has been noted
Someone put that on in the last 12 hours, and since then, some anonymous person just deleted the entire section lol.
I legit feel really grateful, I’d been going down a bit of a ‘either every source of information is corrupt and there’s no hope, or I’m losing my mind’ rabbit hole. I haven’t quite pulled the plug on Reddit yet, which may be contributing to that.
I prefer the whole ‘major additions and changes should be introduced in the talk section of a page so it can be discussed by the committee of reasonable good faith adults with lots of spare time and patience’ approach to Wikipedia editing, but in retrospect that may be a wee bit idealistic in current times. So the ‘one person complains and documents, another person flags, and another just deletes the entire thing’ is a process that may be a good compromise between The Way Things Should Be and how to edit Wikipedia with consensus and without being harassed by neo Nazis.
Skimmed through the article and something picked my attention, the numbers given in the “325000 posts analyzed”. The way its given, it makes seem like big numbers, but if you calculate what is the percentage of the numbers given, it’s less than 1%. Can’t check the linked source, but it seems like a classical “lying with statistics”.
And besides, text seems written in a way to give the impression site moderation for smaller sites is too stupid to block bad actors, and that only the paternalism of bigger sites can solve this implied issue.
The entire tone of the article feels… condescending? (not sure the exact feeling). It feels off in the way information is presented, like subtle disdain in the writing voice.
1.) This is part of the background narratives being pushed by the rich and powerful that we need AI and big tech to moderate us when the opposite is true, we need more humans involved in moderation who have a stake in their community.
2.) The prevailing winds in the tech journalism sphere have always been strangely blowing against the Fediverse since the beginning. The simplest possible explanation to me is there is a lot of money in writing off the Fediverse as a cool nerdy space that nonetheless is an unrealistic solution for everybody else and pushing the axiom that a Harvard MBA is needed to translate the Fediverse into a product the public can actually use.
You will NOT notice this same prevailing winds against for profit corporate social networks like Bluesky and Threads… and it is a curious thing isn’t it…
Having everything everyone ever interacts with channeled through the same four fucking websites obviously sucks and doesn’t currently–and likely never can–scale.
Reddit power Mod turning their attention to Wikipedia and abusing its TOS & users of that site as well now too?
Oh you mean like jordanlund?
Ex(?) Reddit power mod, current awful lemmy.world mod?
I will never understand why that person thinks Lemmy should be moderated like Reddit. Reddit’s moderation policy was at the behest of advertisers; we have no such masters to answer to here.
I couldn’t say, as I’m not familiar with them.
i’m so fucking jealous
Youn could follow that link and become pretty familiar with them.
What happened to Wikipedia’s neutrality policy?
Nothing?
The 325,000 tells you it’s 1%, plus the 1% is split into several categories already anyways. I don’t see how these statistics are misleading.
Beware of unearned knowledge.
You “lose” 100% of the battles that you choose not to fight.
Besides, people here are reporting that the content is already gone. Even if it comes back, it likely will bounce around back and forth but not return to this same state, so this was transient.
Even so, it seems not wrong? “toxic or abusive content being common in the Fediverse”, regardless of how precisely that is measured, seems entirely accurate to me. YOU (and I) may choose to block such content, in part by being on an instance that enacts this choice for us, but that does not mean that such does not exist. Head on over to Chapotraphouse@hexbear.net to get a taste of what the Fediverse offers. It does exist, and while Lemmy.World defederated from it, so many other instances including Lemm.ee did not. Or Lemmygrad.ml.
It is so easy to forget about what was shoved under the rug, but the Fediverse is more like 4chan than most of us care to admit. Just because there are no Nazis currently standing in your little corner of a Nazi bar does not mean that you can invite your Jewish friends over to walk (safely) through the front door.
The Fediverse can be quite toxic. So much so that I’ve entirely stopped recommending it to people irl. We need to be more acceptable to people if we want to change our image, not just pretend that we are fine.
Sounds like you should be recommending specific instances rather than just generally recommending the fediverse.
Which one?
Which instance defederates from all of the tankie instances, and is not already overloaded i.e. Lemmy.world? Also, the name “Lemmy” has tankie implications that most Redditors flee from - hence why so many of us came first to Kbin instead.
Since none such existed, I helped create one by petitioning Discuss.Online to defederate at least from hexbear.net, even though doing so with lemmy.ml is a lost cause. It was successful, and now you can recommend it if you like.
Although America has imploded now and I no longer recommend any USA-based servers, even to people based in the USA themselves (as the average Redditor tends to be).
Though PieFed gives me much stronger hope for the future of the Threadiverse. People still need to set up blocks for instances like Lemmy.ml and politics communities if they want to avoid toxicity though. And even then, it seems virtually impossible these days to read the comments in even a news post that does not include at least one call for murder of someone or another. People have strong opinions, and want to vent! Therefore, highly ironically, leaving no space existing where someone can discuss politics or even news (or for some reason even memes?!) without the toxicity. I am not being a Karen here bc I am telling nobody what to do - only reflecting what I see.
it seems virtually impossible these days to read the comments in even a news post that does not include at least one call for murder of someone or another.
Can you show a recent example? I don’t follow news communities, but it seems surprising that every news post would have a call for murder
This deal with Charlie Kirk has people on edge, although so too did Luigi, and the Presidential election, and so on.
Yes here’s an example from today - I just sorted News posts by active and scrolled down to find a post with >100 comments on it:
6 hours ago one person said (referring to USA Vice President JD Vance, the subject of the OP)
Didn’t this guy get shot in the throat? Awful talkative.
And someone replied:
Not yet, unfortunately.
Neither received any downvotes, and the latter reply received more upvotes than the one I quoted above it. Am I wrong to interpret that the reply is suggesting that it is unfortunate that the guy has not yet been shot in the throat? Involuntarily in case I need to add that, i.e. not euthanasia but non-consensual killing aka what most centrists would call “murder” (although I am not wanting to debate whether other definitions such as “justice” might also or even rather apply).
Of course it could be a “joke”, though isn’t the recipient just as much the party who determines what a message means as the sender? If it is a “joke” (possibly as in “haha jk except not really”), then there are an enormous number of such, and have been for quite awhile now - especially “joking” about how Luigi needs to save people, joking about the fact that a second amendment exists in the USA, joking about how people can conveniently die in non-murderous ways e.g. their liver goes out (see the posts about the recent Steve Bannon announcement), and just overall about how death is a good thing so long as it happens to “them”, the “other side” (again, I’m not wanting to get into whether it’s deserved, just stating here that such is being discussed, since these topics relate to how centrists from Reddit would view the Lemmy platform).
These kinds of things are likely to get Lemmy banned from the USA as the authoritarian program proceeds forward, but that is a separate issue from centrists (including those who think of themselves as leftists, not realizing what that means when recalibrated on a more global scale) and most especially conservatives (e.g. in the USA, that are currently using Reddit) feeling welcomed here.
So anyway that was the first such post that I examined. The next post has even more egregious and obvious comments, such as this one, from a whole week ago so at this point seems extremely unlikely to be removed by a mod and even if it were, it has already long served its purpose:
As always these pussies will have a big whinge then back down.
Please just make it legal to kill Nazis again, I’d do it for pay if we could claim a bounty on the hides.
(And then s whole discussion ensues about just how okay it is to kill people. Other more… “circumspect” comments to that same OP include such things as “The 2nd amendment works for all sides.”
So far this is 100% of the first 2 posts I have examined, so let’s move on to #3. Yup, I immediately spot this really cute picture of a cat depicting someone being beheaded, in response to the statement “the aristocrats!”, itself in response to something deleted by a Moderator. So this makes 3 of 3 posts, still a perfect 100%. And I did not have to reference anything from any tankie instances (where the frequency is surely much higher), or anything removed or likely at this time to ever be removed by a moderator, one even having been from a week ago. Seriously, calling for shooting/beheading/otherwise killing “the enemy” are extremely common here. You have undergone extreme efforts to avoid seeing it, I understand, but it does exist, and new people visiting here can notice it, not knowing to expect this level of vitriol. Tbf even Reddit these days is exploding with calls to Luigi people, they just work much harder to repress it - which I am not saying is a good outcome, my only interest here lies in explaining what is, not what should be.
Filtered by Top Day on slrpnk
- https://slrpnk.net/post/27764242?scrollToComments=true article about Kirk, no calls for murder
- https://slrpnk.net/post/27736416?scrollToComments=true article about billionaires, didn’t find call to murder
- https://slrpnk.net/post/27745688?scrollToComments=true Disney and Kimmel, no call to murder
All of those posts are mere hours old, and shown from an instance that has defederated from Hexbear and Lemmygrad. And even there, I definitely see calls for outright murder, such as this one, although here it was fortunately caught and removed by a mod:
A guillotine, or just tossing them in a nearby volcano would be cheaper.
That post was of very limited / niche interest though, with only 17 comments total. If you want to disprove my wording that “all” posts have such calls, you can easily find several posts with 0 comments, which obviously disproves my wording choice:-). And likewise those with 1-20 comments - among a community that often has hundreds (e.g. this post from just 10 days ago has >1500) - is low-interest.
This is why I avoided using “Hot”, especially within a 1-day time period. But following your lead, I sorted by “Top Week”, and was going to ignore anything from just the last single day, although all of the top 4 posts are older than that so that makes things easier. The top one could be a bit of a bad example but like in response to “Shoot 'em. Problem gone!” has “it is also a way to end conservatism… just sayin…” - but this one is much more likely to TRULY be a joke, in the spirit of that whole post in general, or at worst a venting of steam (although further down people are talking about “Solutions” that involve “electrowhatever or guns, which seem like the two bodies of knowledge a solution would come from.” - note that guns are very ineffective tools to affect non-violent means of resistance or to destroy property, and chiefly are used to KILL PEOPLE aka “murder”). Another one there is literally “shoot the fascists”, another is “if you need some tips on making firearms out of things easily lifted from home depo, I’m your man”, others stop short of advocating outright murder but still do things inching towards that end such as “When do we start rounding up all the Faux execs and the on-air talent … When do we start doxxing those that support Faux by watching Faux, and start getting THEM fired?” - granted it starts as “fired” but the reply immediately carries it forward with “And then those high profile people would start losing their homes and lives. I would celebrate that as justice served.” The latter is admittedly a stretch to say advocation for actual murder directly, but it is like one millimeter indirectly removed from it so as part of this whole batch I will include it here.
So using your procedure, though skipping over posts that are less than or only a day old, I have added one more to the pile. We are at 4 out of 4 so far, or 4 out of 5 if you want to count the Hawaii one as a false positive. Moving on to the next one I see like “I would straight up start busting windows out of any vehicle with trump stickers.” - which tbf is not murder, just terrorism/violence. So yeah, this one has no calls to murder that I saw. So this is 4 out of 6.
Next is this one - and I am getting tired so going to rush through this one. There are a BUNCH of comments describing guns like “He is saying arm yourself while it is legal, so you have weapons for when you need them to fight off bad people in designer uniforms… Roughly translated.”, “2A for all. Time to resist in other ways”. Again these are describing guns not infrastructure-destroying or people-convincing tools, but tools to involuntarily kill people aka murder. So this is 5 out of 7.
Certainly not 100% though, if that is your mark. Which would be fair on your part b/c my literal wording called for it by stating “it seems virtually impossible these days to read the comments in even a news post that does not include at least one call for murder of someone or another.”, and my hyperbolic exaggeration is clearly false (in my defense I did not mean per-post but rather like “all the content that I read in a day will include at least one call for murder”, but I did not clarify so that’s on me). Again, any post that has 0 comments would already have disproven it, as too is any comment with very small number of comments or interest, etc. However, it still seems true that well over half of all the current most active or top weekly posts from News@lemmy.world contain calls for using weapons to kill people or the lesser version of at least celebrating death of “the enemy” however it may happen, even if depicted in cutesy pictures of cats frolicking. Separating aside any judgement of good or bad or neutral or “it’s waaaaay more complicated than any of that”, it is going to be a turn-off for some people.
Also I looked at meme communities again for Top Weekly and of course the top several posts are all about politics and news, though I am too tired to go through hundreds more comments looking for calls to murder in them as well, even in “memes” communities. It seems likely that they are there somewhere though? Also, we didn’t even begin to go looking into the whole Gaza situation… or Ukraine/Russia, or any of the myriad others. I am confident that if you look, you will easily find it. Now in brand-new posts and not in the Hawaii one for sure, but such calls do appear here and there, around the wide Threadiverse.
First of all, sorry I thought you wanted to use slrpnk as the first link you posted was from there, I forgot that slrpnk doesn’t federate hb and grad
But actually, thinking about it now, does it really matter? LW defederates both, so there would be no way for a hexbear comment to make it to that community? https://hexbear.net/c/news@lemmy.world
Anyway, it doesn’t really matter, it’s still not 100%
Separating aside any judgement of good or bad or neutral or “it’s waaaaay more complicated than any of that”, it is going to be a turn-off for some people.
I don’t have time for a comparison, but doesn’t Reddit has a similar amount of call to violence today? Intuitively, one would think that if people are okay with reading those on Reddit, they would be okay with those on here too
Hexbear is incredible and you’re a cretin for equivalating an instance of goofy trans communists with Nazis.
“The Fediverse isnt squeaky clean, look at Hexbear!!” says the .world poster as he continues to sponsor genocide and imperialism with his rhetoric.
People try to act like Wikipedia is some kind of miracle when it’s founded and run by fash.
Good luck editing anything on that site. Total shitstorm.
Source? I donate both my time and money to Wikipedia, so pretty invested on making sure it’s a force for good.
founded and run by fash
wait what? that’s new to me. what’s the deal?
Sounds like nonsense hyperbole
That section is out of line with Wikipedia policies because it only relies upon scholarship that isn’t meta-analysis, which Wikipedia considers primary sourcing (an idiosyncratic borrowing that ought to be called firsthand sourcing instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources#Scholarship), making it undue weight.
scholarship that isn’t meta-analysis
I am confused by these words, and do not understand their real meaning. I think I need to read.
I think Wikipedia itself says that it is just an entry into topics. To confirm the things that are written there you check sources.
Lol wait till you see any of the Pakistan or India related articles. Its like the Ganges river in text form.
Meaning ?
it’s full of shit and will kill you if you wade in deep enough.
I haven’t seen any of that shit on the fediverse except maybe conspiracy theories (which are way more prevalent on other websites), wtf are they talking about?
Dunno, someone finally got around to fixing the article, though.
YUP! Can confirm, den of iniquity over here! Just like the fact I’ve been running Linux for 18 years now, so I’m obviously a hacker and a subversive. We enjoy things here like CHOICE and FREEDOM. You’re all fucking DEVIANTS! And so am I! DEVIANTS OF THE WORLD UNITE!
Well the first hit is free with Arch Linux
