OpenStars

I'm seeing a lot of people call Hexbear a tankie instance lately - they aren't really though, they are an instance full of trolls who are militant against any belief system at all (most especially their own?), or as near to that as makes no difference. They constantly lie - most especially to one another, and have even been caught lying to other instance admins.

I would lump Hexbear in under a name like The Big Three (to block), but I just thought I'd point out that many people are going to argue at its being called specifically a "tankie" one. And ofc it's more than just these three - e.g. Midwest.social has been caught in numerous scandals as well, though unlike the Big Three, the actual users there are perfectly fine, so I don't advocate for blocking it, just avoiding the communities there.

Speaking of, the Lemmy "instance blocking" would have been much better named as a "community mute", since it allows you to see the users from that instance, and they can vote on and reply to your content, triggering notifications, etc. The only real way to do an actual instance block is to move to an instance that has defederated from it (requires admin rights), or use PieFed that can implement a true user block from any instance you ask for (no admin approval necessary), or the Lemmy apps Sync and Connect can likewise do that.

Here is an example of an instance admin abusing the privilege of being able to see who voted for what content. OTOH, this incident was noted, and people started abandoning whole entire communities there and moving them elsewhere.

THIS is the freedom that the Fediverse offers: not that you can do whatever you want, but that you don't have to remain beholden to anyone else (like spez), and instead can move elsewhere at any time, while still accessing the entirety of the Fediverse (unlike Reddit which gates it behind their API limiters, for the sake of profit).

shouldn’t follow you

Do you mean... across communities? PieFed has a community-specific metric iirc, or else it was coming soon, but Lemmy has nothing even close to this.

PieFed also has anonymous voting, but I am personally against that, as it seems too easy to abuse. I'd rather go the other way and make everything fully public. If you want to offer someone a criticism, then why not attach your username to that message being sent? Doing that would make for a much more civil environment IMHO.

Absolutely: the voting systems were out there for a reason:-).

Is it really the fault of the system then, if it was set up with one intention but then was abused?

Btw, reddthat.com has downvotes disabled, so if you made an account there you would never see them again. The downvotes would still affect the sorting of the comments on other instances though, and thereby the frequency of replies.

I for one want downvotes, if I say something incorrect then I deserve it, but I don't want downvotes from people who are just trolling - nor upvotes from them, nor replies either - bc then it takes some of my time and attention to try to guess what is going on, and sort true facts from their fictional views of the world.

So for me, it's not "voting" that I would like to see addressed and fixed, but rather the presence of trolls. Which PieFed (and the Lemmy apps Sync and Connect) provide many tools to help with, e.g. it can block all users from an instance, unlike the Lemmy feature of the same name that merely acts as a community muting but does not actually block the users themselves in any way.

I love how PieFed is heavily pushing towards the democratization of moderation, but that's another subject altogether I suppose:-).

Lemmy.ml enacts censorship in this manner as well

I was talking about censorship in general, but you might be right specifically about Luigi mentions on those instances, I would not know.

There are whole entire communities dedicated to discussion of this effect - e.g. !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works.

Your example removed comment is fair, although done by a community mod rather than as the OP article here suggests done without the Reddit sub mods even being able to see the comments prior to removal. Then again, Lemmy.World is rather authoritian on the spectrum. You can always move your account to some other instance that you prefer better btw, like lemmy.dbzer0.com if you want a more anarchist experience or slrpnk.net for communism.

The beauty of Lemmy is not that we are a so-called "free speech platform" - bc we are definitely NOT that! - but rather that we can easily shift over to somewhere else if need be, even spin up our very own instance (that one takes resources, time, and technical knowledge).

For example, I've given up on most of the largest communities on Lemmy.world, most of the time, and subscribe rather to smaller versions elsewhere.

Yes, but note that it was happening here as well. Certain places here were HIGHLY active in the BoTh SiDeS sAmE activity, just prior to the USA election, and similarly influenced other elections world-wide. Learn which places these are, so that you can take full advantage of the Fediverse, which isn't "a place" so much as a forum software that allows many many places to share their content - but all sides here are NOT equally dedicated to truthiness.

Here is one example:

Judge for yourself what you think might be the intention for making and spreading it... although if we are going by the mantra of the effects that it may have caused possibly being the reason for which it was made, it looks to me to suggest that people in the USA should not be enthusiastic about voting or encouraging others to vote for Kamala Harris.

Edit: to be clear I'm not suggesting that Lemmy is "the same" as Reddit - in some ways we are worse here, being even more authoritian than Reddit was (or rather "is" I guess:-P), but in other ways it's so, so much better, in that we can pack up and move to another instance and simply carry on, having access to the vast majority of content as before (exceptions include defederations and a DM directed to our old account won't follow us), which was (oops, "is" again:-) not true for Reddit.

There’s only one reddit. Only one twitter. Only one facebook. Only one youtube.

Not anymore, on the Fediverse, and I'm here for it.:-)

These are the kinds of helpful comments that made Reddit a great platform to visit, once upon a time. Now, I'm glad that we still get to read this type instead on the Fediverse.:-)

It likely looks to them as if the accounts that remain to be moderated are humans, the same as it was in the past, even though it's no longer that way now.

They've already been caught doing that - well, not for disinformation spreading but for engagement appearance, around the time Reddit was doing its IPO so needed to hike its stats to give to advertisers as quickly as possible. While entire posts, comment for comment, though with different usernames but the identical responses to the identical questions, and then deeper responses to those, and so forth.

So they don't need the appearance of older accounts - they can manufacturer whatever they need, from scratch already. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if they created "10 year old" accounts at will.