OpenStars

Yes that works. For you, but doesn't help new people joining here from Reddit. Lemmy requires enormous curation efforts to become fully usable. But it does work... so long as you never mod any communities, bc you can't afford to block those users who would then be able to post invisibly to you.

Does that... matter to you? Okay then, yeah in the narrow sense, you very likely are - I don't know of any such cases occurring within the past few years.

When I was on Reddit I started to become obsessed with winning arguments with people on the internet - many of whom were literal teenagers. So I decided to leave it behind, regardless of whether I could find somewhere else to go. It doesn't lead to satisfaction or fulfillment, I found.:-(

Wouldn't you rather enjoy a conversation here? Well, it's your choice, I just thought I'd share a bit of my own story in case it might help you with yours.

I use it as my daily driver most of the time - it's fantastic! There are some features that are annoying, so like Lemmy it's still in development, but overall it's much better for most things IMHO. Its search function (like Reddit's) is crap, while Lemmy's is amazing, but the whole overall flow with Topics and now Feeds really helps. e.g. if you wanted less political material, then you could just not subscribe at all to those communities (or avoid the largest, most contentious ones), but still access it via the Topic description up above anytime you wanted - basically allowing you to have your cake (no politics appearing in your Subscribed feed) and eat it too (yes politics, via another route).:-)

I mean... that's how they make their money, so... yeah?:-)

By having an external source of truth to compare against. In this case you could spin up your own instance, and as a mod you could see where all the votes were coming from, so you could simulate having the same set of defederations as some other instance. Anything that does not match up then warrants further examination.

People did something similar and found that lemmy.ml was modifying its internal database logs - though it was claimed that it was merely due to the newest software release that it alone was running at the time, before it got rolled out to become public. I never followed through on that further.

That's all somewhat expensive to do, but basically if you run your own instance then you have total control. (Even then, you won't know what's going on inside of the OTHER instances that you do not control!).

Just the fear of that alone was enough to cause dmv.social to shut down, back during the waves of CSAM attacks, before the automated software was implemented to filter it out.

The word you are looking for there is "instance", like for you lemm.ee is your instance.

And if you scroll to the bottom of any page, you can see the instances list of all the other ones that are connected or disconnected (the latter called more often "defederated") from yours. lemm.ee is connected to https://lemmynsfw.com/, although it looks like something is wrong with the connection between it and feddit.org (e.g. it's not reporting even the Lemmy software version for it, plus the encoding for the name looks different than on Lemm.ee - someone may have typed it in wrong?), so @affenlehrer@feddit.org you'll have to contact your instance admins to tell them about that.

Even then, to connect to the communities for the first time is quite a process: you can figure out what the URL is going to be, then try to go there, then request to join, then wait maybe a day and the content should show up (but only new content form then onwards, while old stuff is a lost cause at that point). Most of the time someone else (with more experience) has already done this for you, but if they have not...

Btw PieFed solves all of these issues (except it might not allow porn? I'm not sure but I don't see it anywhere there), whereas Lemmy is quite a bit behind in its software experience that it offers. The entire Fediverse though is more for the '"early adopter" mindset than like Reddit, where everything "just works" (so long as what you want is in alignment with increasing their profits). Using Lemmy is a LOT like using Linux - except here there's basically no documentation that someone is pointed to, you kinda just have to ask or read and find stuff out as you go.

Lemmy.ml is not defederated from Lemmy.world, so new users will see everything by default.

Also, "instance blocking" would be better named as "community muting', bc it leaves users from those instances free to vote and reply to your content, trigger notifications, and you'll still see it in other communities.

To truly block it, someone has to first even know about it, and then the only real options are all rather extreme - move to an instance that has defederated from them all (Lemmy.ml in particular is extremely rarely defederated from), switch to using PieFed, a Lemmy alternative written in Python rather than Rust, or the Lemmy apps Sync or Connect. Or implement a filter like with Ublock Origin or some such. None of these are trivial, and again, none are available to new users to even be told are possible, or helpful to be done.

Yes, all of the Threadiverse (the forum based subset of the Fediverse) has only ~55k monthly active users. So if a significant fraction of a million people were to join, it would put significant strain on things - the hardware (especially network connections) alone would become swamped, and especially the moderation workload would skyrocket.

Check out PieFed btw - its advancements to enable democratization of moderation are fascinating! As just one example, during the signup wizard where someone says what interests they have and get subscribed to communities based on their answers (another feature Lemmy lacks), it asks people how much word filtering they would like to see about "Trump" and "Musk" - a lot, a little, or none (no filtering). Thus, users can define their own expectations as to the experience they want to see, rather than have that dictated to them by a mod.

Being written in Python rather than Rust, PieFed's own scalability is definitely worthy to be called into question, but on the other hand it is already testing out so many features that people have been begging for on Lemmy for many years without seeing any hints that those features will ever come, while PieFed already has them. Things like categories of communities, just recently made user customizable and also shareable, so they act like multi-Reddits.

If I may say, with all due respect (truly), Reddit highly encouraged "engagement" for the sake of those stats being sold to advertisers hence increasing their profits.

But here we are free from such. Breathe a sigh of relief at that... and note how we can choose to do things differently here.

Yes, I am saying this bc you are new, in hopes that it will help bring you up to speed and explain why people are downvoting you (I didn't myself btw). I hope you don't feel I'm picking on you. Okay, I'll shut up now and leave you alone!:-)

Did you do so in a community located on lemmy.ml? Try it, it should be fairly quick, and you'll be banned from communities that you've never even heard of, for violating a rule that is written down nowhere that I can find.

Or maybe after the election seasons, they might not be as quick these days? It might have accomplished its purpose already.

True, but those users on the Big Three are fairly reputable for being contentious. So much so that merely blocking Hexbear alone will improve someone's experience on the Fediverse by ~90%, and then if you are able to block Lemmy.ml (most people using Lemmy cannot, not truly) then that improves it by a still further 90%.

Put another way, yes it blocks too much - that much is sadly true - however when the vast majority of the most batshit insane comments that one sees across the entire Fediverse comes from a user on one of the Big Three instances, then rather than leave the Fediverse entirely to get away from such, it makes a helluva lot of sense to just block users from those instances (which again, most people on Lemmy really can't do, without going to extreme measures).

It's like email spam: what legitimate content are you willing to give up in order to block the vast majority of incoming stuff that you don't want to see? There's enough leftover after blocking it out, at least for me and many others say the same. It does kinda suck for users on those instances, but like... at this point it's very well known, and they've made their choice, so now all that remains is for me to make mine, and my preferences - to avoid nonconsensual insanity thrown at me relentlessly from an instance that not only fails to discourage such but sometimes actively encourages it - should be able to matter too!