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.
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.
Wikipedia certainly isn’t wrong, the Fediverse is filled with so much political extremism, made worse by the Tankie Developers
[email protected] to see more of how widespread tankies and their extreme bigotry and violent rhetoric spreads across the fediverse
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.
I think Wikipedia itself says that it is just an entry into topics. To confirm the things that are written there you check sources.
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
lmao wait until it’s reverted, argued over, then the editor gets banned.
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’.
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 [email protected] 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
There was a few months where I had to ban server after server every day because someone was really into semi-lolli anime. They were posting it in every anime forum. I asked them why they were non stop posting upskirt or provocative drawings of very young girls and they got angry that I dared ask.
Back in the day, we used to marvel at the mental fortitude of paramedics and war medics, who constantly see and deal with the most extreme accidents and horrors of humanity so that we, the public, don’t ever have to.
That burden does seem to have expanded rather. I legit think it might be less traumatic to triage and transport a selection of burns victims, traffic fatalities etc for a living than to moderate busy social media platforms.
At least in an ambulance you generally get fair warning what sort of unspeakable horror you need to attend next, and you can help them.
I suppose in the medical emergency industry you also don’t have to inform the disfiguring disease / patch of black ice on the road / tainted drinking water that ‘yep, sorry, you can’t operate here. Yes I know you’re just trying to get by but we do have a No Festering Gonorrhoea sign that you ignored before infecting this lady’.
TLDR: at some point community moderators (not the over zealous type) might need to be recognised as an emergency service
I’m unsure if you’re speaking as a previous admin or just as a user, but if the latter, would it not have been easier to just block the user directly?
That section is just pure Ragebait lol
Its gone now I think
Someone fixed it a few hours ago, yeah. We should also check back periodically to make it stay that way.
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