It was a rather sombering thread, that echoed quite a bit of what I've been saying about .ml, the Triad, general toxicity of their Tankie "ideology" for months now.
I know @ptz@dubvee.org was speaking of general toxicity, but the Triad is a huge chunk of it, the culture they create...festers it. They comprise the bulk of the hostility, I've personally seen it over and over and over again. All the "Just go back to Reddit" or "just another lib Redditor refugee" comments for someone that dared to have nuance.
Hell, I saw hex users fucking cheering .ee's shutdown because it was some sort of psyop/CIA/fed/lib/"They didn't perfectly agree with me" instance. They call feddit.org a "Nazi Zionist" instance for the crime....of not wanting to be arrested and complying with German law...
I haven't looked to see if they've started any "celebratory" posts about Dubvee yet and I also don't really want to, if they're there, I already know what they're going to say in it -_-
Unfortunately, I fear the problem was far worse than I thought.
Ptz speculated that the toxicity has "metastasized". And you know what? He might be right, it seemed to be a lot better off 2 years ago, now....now I feel we might be losing the battle against the toxicity and I don't think PieFed will be enough. Complacency has set in
My hope was that with enough instances defederating from .ml and the rest of the Triad, it would be a tad easier to take down toxic Tankies, trolls and their alts. But, few wanted to burn the bridge with the toxic main devs' instance and now it might be too late. (Cheers to @Illecors@lemmy.cafe and the lemmy.cafe instance, one of the few of note to actually defederate from the entire triad!)
Like ptz said and I fully agree with, this place started with promise 2 years ago, but it appears to be ultimately morphing into 4chan (or like I've been saying, Voat 2.0) after all
Oh well, I've got some thick ass skin so I'll probably be here till the end, till the last sane instance shuts down.
I'll see you there @dessalines@lemmy.ml
/Sadmemerant
Heck, maybe I'll do a hail Mary and start an instance on a custom fork of lemmy with "normie proof" onboarding while dumping a few hundred in ADs (Maybe even on Reddit itself, HA!). I'll flood this place with "normies" LMAO
Yeah, while people can have their valid criticisms of the culture of various instances, we need to be extremely wary of the idea that the problem will be solved if we just isolate outselves from the folks we sit furthest from on the political spectrum. I've seen toxicity from folks on all sorts of instances, even if some have more (though I've honestly seen more from certain instances other than the triad)
Literally every platform has toxicity, regardless of its political makeup. If we want to improve the culture of this space we can't just scapegoat a couple instances (that to be fair, do seem to have big issues from what I've seen from other folks, though my interactions have been mostly cordial)
And leftist spaces seem to chronically struggle a lot with in-group fighting and toxicity because we're all driven by our care for issues of moral importance- which often lets us justify being shitty to one another if we can frame someone as the villain in the story of an issue we care about.
I think creating a culture that is unwelcoming of anti-social, bad faith behaviour regardless of whether we agree with the stance or not would help massively. But that is a difficult thing to create structure around doing.