Well that goes without saying:-), still I would hope there could be found a less painful approach...
I almost left the Fediverse myself after stumbling across them - talking with such people is not what I wanted to spend my time and attention on. Fortunately Kbin.social that I had been on prior to it going defunct and my switching to Lemmy did not promote their posts so heavily (it had, and its fork Mbin still has, its own internal voting system, so its sorting algorithms ignore "upvotes" from the Fediverse and pays attention instead to "favorites" from only other Mbin/Kbin instances, probably for precisely this reason). So I knew that the Fediverse could be better.
The problem is: nobody that I recommend it to irl realizes that - they see the variety of posts from e.g. !memes@lemmy.ml, and think "this is what Lemmy is", and they drop it never to return. And how can I argue otherwise? I myself would rather leave it entirely than put up with constantly having posts promoted everywhere you look from the likes of Donald Trump, Elon Musk, or the same style from hexbear even if they call it "leftist". This, along with the lack of technical development (compared to e.g. Reddit), are the chief impediments to growth that I can see.
But things are steadily improving - e.g. we can do instance blocks now, and e.g. PieFed and Sublinks are coming to join with Mbin and Tesseract to offer alternative codebases to just Lemmy on the Fediverse, which like Kbin's alternative voting scheme may offer solutions to some of the current issues. Therefore as long as I can enjoy sane conversations, e.g. this one with you:-), I will stick with the Fediverse, as it evolves moving forward.
Please don't take Ivermectin kids, it's an extremely horrific way to die. :-(
Quite ironic - what about a black man changing to a white one made you think of MJ? :-P
Words are one type of action - like if someone refuses to say something, that's a choice right there. e.g., I'll say it: "Nazis murdering people is bad", but there are some who won't say those words... and that's really saying something (managing to convey a message of a whole other sort).
Words are cheaper than most other types of actions though. Yet also they can amass in bulk, and there are ways to follow through e.g. if someone says they fixed something in a piece of code, and provide a GitHub link, you can verify that the words match the deeds.
Edit: also I find it hilariously ironic to see these early downvotes, essentially judging these words without even offering an explanation, so perhaps we should say that while actions are more weighty than words, votes (up and down) are the cheapest of all ๐.
๐ธ Microsoft ๐ค got ๐ฐ paid ๐ซฐ so... they managed to come out ahead of this whole ordeal just fine.
The rest of us can go suck a bag of dicks for all they care.
It would be hilarious if it weren't so tragic. This is the mindset that elected Trump, and may yet do so again. i.e. what you say is not half as relevant as who is saying it - e.g. genocide done by Russia or China is perfectly fine - and they cannot begin to see the flaws in that line of reasoning.
But... historically they helped fund the creation of Lemmy, so... I guess genocide done by Russia or China is perfectly fine after all, at least fine for them to say, and for their posts to show up in everyone's feed by default. Or if they are somehow "not fine", then I see no functional difference between how those two extremes are treated.
Tbf, people are trying to improve things, slowly, over time - e.g. the instance admin of sh.itjust.works said that they would automatically user block hexbear.net for all newly created accounts, then send them a PM explaining the process to unblock them. I don't know if that's implemented yet, but that's awesome! Really it harms nobody's ability to read whatever they want, but makes going to such places as Chapotraphouse be opt-in rather than out, which seems to match the preferences of most users of the Fediverse - though as you discovered, not all.
I suspect that when they notice that a substantial proportion of their moderator actions must be taken against people who choose to remove that block... perhaps they may reconsider their position on the level of the entire instance (for the same reason that US anti-terrorist agencies are far more worried about domestic than foreign actions for the last several years - bc if "winning" is literally the only thing that matters to someone...). But that's their business, and anyway the user block solves a great deal of the problem in the short term, so I for one was ecstatic to read that. But, that's just one instance, and there are hundreds if not thousands more.
And now you have to lose yours if you want to participate in the xhittier experience.
And yes, that is the precise spelling of that word that I intended:-D.
Or like... developed some technological method to connect various parts of the globe regardless of physical distance between them - just a crazy thought! ๐ง Now imma go hop onto my hot air balloon and sail around the "world", wish me luck! :-P ๐