No Stupid Questions

Idk, world events got me raging nonstop and I'm sure I'm not the only one. But I'm trying to reset.

No, fuck you

/j

Excuse me?! Are you saying I'm negative?! Are you trying to start a fight with me, bro?! I am THE, I mean THE most positive, fun and likeable person on THE internet, bro. THE.

I've had a private message from a user who's a starting with 'v and ending with n' and that's all I say because if I say the full word I know some angry Internet people are going to show up

They responded with that passive aggressive question tone

I've also run into some lemmy users that spread misinformation about Japan to discredit it which reads like foreign actors intentionally spreading disinformation to discredit a country and its people, the sake kind of misinformation about Japan is much worser on reddit but its not a good thing that it has started to show up here

Lately? Were you not here during elections when a bunch of kids were accusing everyone of supporting genocide?

I haven't noticed much, but I do have a lot of people blocked...

The most important thing for me is that the amount of truly thoughtful comments I've seen is higher than on any other platform I use.

Not that I've noticed, but the whole world is growing more toxic as far-right ideology becomes more and more accepted everywhere, so I wouldn't be surprised.

The world has been deteriorating a lot in recently years and inflation is high.

It seems hostility is the norm across most social media.

Yup, lost of people here accusing others of being "genocide apologists" for expressing even the slightest approval or agreement with Harris or Biden on anything. Yet, somehow, they don't seem to want to criticize the current administration, blaming everything on the liberals as if they're the ones solely responsible for this mess. Curious, isn't it.

It seems like some AI bots with contrarian comments in order to drive engagement or strong arm wild political platforms have started to leak into the fediverse as a whole. Still better than other options though.

There has been a noticeable uptick in new rightist accounts lately.

Instead of blocking people, I tag the bad actors in Voyager and have noticed that most of the toxicity comes from the same small group of specific people.

Yeah. I've enjoyed Lemmy casually for years, but this last year has really killed my desire to read or post here.

Check your communities, and what instances they're on. Not all are created equal. lemmy.ml tends to be pretty wacko unless you're of their particular ideological alignment, lemmy.world is very very large and thus has a very very large number of obnoxious shitheads compared to other instances. On the other hand, beehaw.org is intentionally and pathologically positive. I also find lemmy.ca quite friendly, though I might be biased.

Yes, blocking posts from .ml and dbzer0 helped. Same goes for just liberally blocking anybody, who starts screaming instead of participating nicely.

I've been considering blocking .world, as some of the mods are behaving like power tripping reddit mods. But it's the biggest instance and without it I wouldn't have any content.

Blame reddit. Lemmy is the home for us, the permabanned.

It's not that hard to be a good person. I don't care if you've banned me from your community, if your community exists to spread hate i'm going to do everything in my power to disrupt and derail your community. We're at the stage in humanity where theres no longer any excuse to justify anything less than being a good person.

If you are not going out of your way to improve everyones lives, you are the problem and should just die. Theres way too many people just like you who think the world is just going to improve so we dont need to out the nazis and racists and sexists. Nah fuck that, i see a nazi and im going to harrass them until they die, hopefully by their own hand.

I don't know that I've noticed a real uptick. But in the past couple weeks I have noticed a few ridiculous right wingers and I blocked most of them since seeing their bullshit is bad for my mental health.

I've seen roughly the same time frame. As far as I can tell no, this is just how toxic this place is. There's a bunch of people who continuously claim people from reddit are coming and bringing some form of toxic with them, but as often as not those people seem super toxic. There's a huge community of Linux fanboys who circle jerk over the same exact talking points in different meme formats (the talking point being "windows 11 is spyware, Linux Just Works ad doesn't even require a login -- but don't worry guys, this is the year of the ~~Linux desktop~~ steam deck"). There's a huge circle jerk over whether or not Russia is bad. There's the "liberals aren't leftists, liberals are capitalist genocidal shitbags" circle jerk. None of these have really changed in at least the last year, it's the same people making the same posts on the same topics.

But, it's nice to see a news feed of interesting posts so as long as you ignore the bullshit it still seems fine. Or if you like arguing.

I imagine it can be hard to scroll past someone saying something very off the wall. When you read someone's comment it's hard not to feel like they're talking directly to you, and if you don't align with what they're saying, especially if you're far from it, it can be hard to resist correcting them or giving them your opinion, when I catch myself doing this, I try to reframe it to ask a question, rather than dump opposing facts.

But there's another perspective I try really hard to keep in mind, if I were sitting at a table with a group of people and someone was loudly saying those things to me in person, I wouldn't engage. I'd move to a quieter spot and ask the people I do like at the table to come for a chat there, or I'd acknowledge their feelings (but not the topic) and move to a different conversation topic.

But I feel like I need more practice at doing this when it's in a text form of socializing, as this is.

I notice some amazing people on here, whom I aspire to learn from, that handle conflicting opinions with grace, and inclusion.

And I understand the dehumanisation that text conversations, present, it can be easy to imagine a hostility that may not be behind the comment. We're all filling in the blanks of the personality behind the commenter. I worked a checkout for a good decade, so I'm very familiar with positions that can become dehumanised. Especially seeing as that seemed to be throughout a time when a huge bulk of people felt like they were only going to get righted the situation they believed had wronged them, by yelling or getting massively agro at the poor checkout chick who was gunna set that right wrong, because fk corporations, I enjoyed giving as much free stuff away as possible, any excuse, within the rules I could muster.

I absolutely understand tensions being high, currently, with world events being what they are. And there's so much propaganda trying to brain wash us into being an army for their cause, and it's all rage baity. So there's even more rage and tension built up. I get it.

I really feel for people who can't, and haven't been helped to learn how to help and sooth their emotions, and then those emotions fester into all consuming things. And they find a cause to funnel that emotion into. Without really addressing that emotion, therefore not actual helping, processing or soothing that emotion.

See, we feel a feeling first, and then we ascribe a meaning, after. Except those two parts of the brain don't actually communicate. The emotional brain is essentially non verbal, and the thinking brain, is verbal, but obviously it doesn't do emotions. So you have this thinking guy in your head trying to tell you what emotions mean, except that guy is not an expert and knows nothing about them.

Your emotional brain is essentially a, very detailed messenger system for checking the temperature of the room. If shit feels off, it sends an alarm. Your emotions are a message to you that the shower temperature is too hot. It's not really about that argument you had with your sibling last fortnight.

And to top it off, your emotional brain is non verbal, so all that ranting that you do, thinking that you solve the anger (or whatever emotion) you feel isn't! It's actually making it worse.

Your emotional brain is super primal, and very simplistic. All it wants is to know you took your hand out of the broiling hot shower water, and now your safe, and it's message worked. It feels the environment and let's you know if that's vibing good stuff or danger. Sometime all you gotta do is change environment, or do a couple of jumping jacks, to help that emotional brain know, dangers gone. If you sit in the same spot and stress, your brain can even learn, that's a stressful spot to sit, every time we sit here, bam, gotta be bad, and spits up those same feelings, even if it's about nothing, just habit.

It also believes anything you tell it, because it's listening to vibes. So even if shits fkd, right now, you have to keep telling yourself, everything is OK, you are safe and a capable bad ass, who has handled all the shit life threw so far, so you absolutely got this. Time to shine.

Your emotions are a message for you, and you alone. And if you expect others to sooth your emotions, all the time, you tell yourself that you don't trust yourself to be capable of helping yourself process emotions. Obviously, we also need connection, so at the same time, it's not at all about doing it alone. But it's more about feeling safe to sit in emotions, rather than, fixing them. The way forward is sometimes the way back, sit in the emotion. Don't try and put it out like it's a fire, or distract it with shiny things. Just be, and listen, feel. Sometimes you need to sit with someone and not feel like you have to create a false front. Just sit and feel, for a bit.

If you're getting stuck in emotions for elongated periods of time, there's people who spend multiple years at school learning how to try and show you all the tips and tricks we've learned so far. Have a chat with one (or two if you don't vibe with numerous uno) of them.

It's literally all about emotional regulation. The mean people, haven't been able to process their emotions, have never been taught how, their parents didn't know, themselves, to tell them. And they're being bombarded with proverbial tornadoes from all sides. And there's so much rage baity propaganda, all designed to fuel and feed off that.

It doesn't feel unique to Lemmy to me. I'm seeing higher levels of hostility in just about any environment broad enough to include left and right wingers

well have you noticed (waves at everything) in the world?

I also noticed how every post just has 5-10 random down votes. Like perfectly fine post in the correct community, not controversial, no rules broken, -10 down votes.

Go fuck yourself!

You suck! (im sorry im just kidding)

For sure. I posted content on selfhosted for the first time and got called a "filthy boomer" because it was a screenshot, then people basically told me to grow thicker skin went I complained. Why be better than reddit huh? Guess people just want reddit 2.0

Post quality go down. Echo chamber go up.

Hmm... maybe. The state of the world has been pretty awful for the past year so I imagine that plays a part. Aside from trolls, lots of us are on edge as the whole world seems to tilt right with propaganda and AI.

That said, I like us.

I browse bluesky too and find I actually prefer Lemmy because it's a bit more self-policing... Like regarding AI slop, bluesky is fucking rampant with it, like Trump dressed as a clown or Newsom with abs, it's fucking awful. Lemmy has a couple communities for AI but on average, you try that shit and you'll get publicly shamed. That could be considered mean, but I appreciate it (especially if it's AI I can't even tell).