End of the road. Wish I could say it’s been a fun trip, but that would be a lie. Running this instance started out as a fun project, but it has been nothing but a nightmare for a long, long time. I’m looking forward to the freedom I will have after being shackled to this mess for the last two years.
This instance is shutting down for good on 7/31/2025.
If you want exports of anything, let me know. After that, I’m pulling the SSDs and going full Office Space on them.
Edit 07/12/25: Thank you all for the kind words, understanding, and appreciation. While I have been consumed by the negativity here, I never forgot about the positives. Unfortunately, the negatives can and do become overwhelming.
If you appreciate what I’ve been trying to do, then please do not let the efforts die with my departure. The toxicity I’ve described cannot be solved by any individual alone and requires a group effort.
- Don’t engage with those acting in bad faith or just trying to get a rise out of people. This is basically “don’t feed the trolls” but sometimes the trolls are subtle.
- Don’t let emotion cloud your logic and try to remain rational. Always try to see the bigger picture and keep that in focus. Context matters. Ramifications of actions matter.
- When you see people calling for violence, ask yourself “And then what happens?” Because it’s most definitely not going to be “we all join hands in a circle, a rainbow appears overhead, and the world is saved”.
- On the same note, a large percentage of those calling for violence don’t even live here. They’re just trying to rile people up or spread chaos by feeding on our pent-up anger.
- There are very few absolutes in this world, but people around here love to speak in them. If someone only speaks in absolutes, then they’re missing most of the picture which is in the middle. Beware of those people.
- If you see someone twisting what other people are saying just so they can attack them, please report them. This is a common form of trolling/harassment which is often difficult for mods to detect without personally investing themselves in every conversation thread. This often manifests as “Oh, so you think X, so you must think Y” where Y = an absolutely insane jump in logic. Then they attack the person as if they had said Y with other people dog-piling on afterward.
- Admins: Please, please start clamping down on extremism and general toxicity. No psychopath, racist, etc has ever come back from a temp ban a better person. Force these unhinged people back to the fringe instances and defederate from those.
- Most importantly: be good to one another. At the end of the day, we all have more in common than we differ.
Original plea below, though it’s superseded by the above.
I’m gonna get right to the point: I’m burnt out, I kind of hate this place, and I really don’t want to be here anymore.
I started it not because I kept getting banned from elsewhere but because I wanted to do and be part of something better. Well, two years in, and I cannot say this place is any better, just differently bad if not worse. Too many people here seem to think that because it’s not “corpo social media” that anything goes, and boy do some people really run with that.
The average Lemming has the nuance of a wrecking ball and the maturity of a junior high edge lord, and trying to keep the peace here has become more than what I want to deal with. The worst part is that they’re so caught up in their own self-righteousness that they can’t see they’re just as bad or worse than what they’re spewing violent rhetoric at; trying to talk sense into anyone or de-escalate things is immediately met with “bootlicker”, wild accusations, and/or worse.
I need help. Well, really, Lemmy needs help, professional help, but barring that, then I need some more referees to keep this place under control.
This instance has a mission, and I am no longer able to deal with the volume of toxic shitheads who do nothing but call for violence, take people out of context and jump to insane conclusions, and just act like petulant fucking children. Seriously, the demographic here is disgusting and needs to grow the hell up.
So this is it: Either some people step up and help to keep this place sane, or I’m shutting it down. Clock is ticking
Yeah, user tagging was always a feature I had planned to add to Tesseract but never got around to. They wouldn’t have been crowd-sourced or otherwise shared, but it would at least let you flag users to keep an eye on and eventually block or report.
The problem with that, from an instance admin perspective, is that even though they’re flagged with a big “Warning: Highly Radioactive” sign , I’m still platforming them; the toxic waste is still on-site and out in the open. Everything they say and troll is still showing up under a domain registered to me, hosted by hardware, bandwidth, and electricity I pay for and visible to local users. That’s neither the look nor environment I want here.
I’m not saying I have to agree with everything that shows up on DubVee via federation (lord knows I don’t), but there are people and rhetoric that I definitely don’t platformed here because it runs counter to the mission I’m trying to achieve and/or is flat out illegal and could have black vans show up at my house.
And that account (I saw it in the replies and immediately banned them) is tame and just obnoxious compared to the extremism that’s become commonplace here and has pushed me over the edge and out the door.
Yes and no. Lemmy used to have scores/karma in the API, but the devs yanked that out in 0.19.0. Considering some of the disgusting things that get a lot of upvotes and how anyone who tries to de-escalate or talk sense gets downvoted to hell and called a bootlicker, it’s not necessarily a good indicator. Which, to be fair, the Lemmy devs kind-of mentioned when they removed scores from the API, so they were right (though for the wrong reasons).
I’m not saying the Fediverse is a lost cause (and if I am, then I hope I’m wrong), and I applaud the efforts Rimu and Piefed are doing to improve things. But the whole “censorship resistance” aspect of it is certainly working against it by way of making it effectively impossible to truly ban anyone. Like it or not, there’s a reason Reddit (and probably other platforms) does things like fingerprinting browsers/devices to enforce ban evasion. Here, you can troll all you want, call for violence, stir the pot, and then just hop to another account / instance and start again. This is a a feature, not a bug. 😡
I genuinely feel that instances were so preoccupied with seeing their own or Lemmy’s overall MAU counts go up that they didn’t stop to look at who they were platforming. Then there’s instances that flat out endorse violence so long as the admins agree with the target (cough midwest.social cough).
I used to post/comment in politics communities, but I’ve never been here with a political agenda and tend to block or ban those who are; I just want to stay informed with the facts. There’s just too many users, mods, and admins here who give extremism and shitty behavior a pass so long as the behavior is in line with whatever flavor of “leftie” the instance subscribes to.
And therein lies the problem (described better in another comment by ThePicardManeuver). People see this as a “leftie” platform and viciously enforce an echo chamber. Those who don’t pass the, quite often insane, purity tests get harassed:
“Oh, you think X, so you must think Y” (where X = anything not 100% in line with an extreme, absolutist staement and Y = an absoltely insane leap in logic). And then proceeds to attack the user based on the faulty assumption that they said Y when they said X. Then other people pile onto that and futher attack as if the original person had said Y.
“Patrick modded me because I was advocating violence, and I was, but it was against someone I think is a Nazi. So Patrick must be a Nazi and is over here creating a safe space for other Nazis”
“I got banned for saying ‘[Blank] and their family should be lined up and shot’’ but I think [blank] is complicit in genociding, so the mods clearly support genocide.”
“That’s such an enlightened centrist thing to say” and trying to discredit anyone who disagrees with their extreme take. e.g. If someone says “I agree with you in principle, but maybe take it down a notch” to which they reply “Oh, did I hurt the enlightened centrist’s feelings?” For those unfamiliar, the ‘enlightened centrist’ straw man argument is a false equivalence that posits that if the Right wants X and the Left opposes X, then the enlightened centrist would propose a compromise of ‘let’s just do a little X’. It is used to discredit anyone who is not fully in line with the person’s typically extreme take by falsely suggesting they support the thing.
And so on and so on. Even if Piefed had bright, flashing warning labels on all those accounts, not everyone would see them due to people interacting from different platforms, different apps/UIs, etc.
And Lemmy loves to dog-pile, so all those accounts have to do is plant the seed and then sit back and let the average Lemming’s overly-inflated sense of self-righteousness take over and amplify the harassment.
Why this kind of behavior gets a pass around here, I do not understand. But it’s common, it’s toxic, and needs to be addressed. It’s only gotten worse because it’s been allowed to fester and desensitize and futher radicalize people. (Again, see TPM’s comment in this thread for a clearer version of what I’m saying).
Take some of this rhetoric from Lemmy, remove the nouns, and it reads exactly like what you’d see on right-wing boards.
So yeah, I again applaud the efforts of Rimu and Piefed, but this is a people problem (the people doing it as well as the admins/mods who turn a blind eye, etc). Better tools can help, I agree, but they’re not going to fix the underlying problem without the people running instances saying “this kind of toxicity and extremism are unacceptable”.
Ah, thanks. That was almost exactly a year ago to the day. I remember writing that now, and can safely say in the last year, things have gotten worse. Much worse.
Edit: Broke this up into sections.
Yup, I just had a discussion with someone I considered rational and got all of those answers thrown at me: “you said X and since sometimes X leads to Y and then sometimes those Ys lead to Z I am going to confidently assume that you said that you support Z even though you explicitly said that this was not the case, and now I won’t even consider the possibility that you merely meant that you support X but not Z”. I did not desire to leave Reddit only to find Reddit 2.0 here, now twice as authoritarian yet somehow also twice as illegal and piratey, but somehow both at the same time?!
There truly is a middle ground… most of the time, but it takes blocking every single one of the largest and most active communities on Lemmy. (Which iirc was true of Reddit as well?:-P) People are still people, so like true snowflakes do exist I guess, who somehow are the ones most active in arguing against everyone who does not share fully 100% of their beliefs, even if they share 90% of them. And I can only imagine what you as an instance admin have been exposed to.
Separately, I think it is a good idea for any instance admin operating inside the USA to shut down. Waves hands, you know what I mean - truth sometimes takes a back seat to expediency and optics, so if Lemmy is where “leftists” congregate (and remember that “leftists” means like “pedos” and “luigi proponents” and the like, or at least someone could try to claim that) then… we should not exist, some may say (and you as the admin carted off without even so much as a warrant needed). So we who know, we who get it, we support you remaining safe.
Btw the user labels I mentioned are just one way to automate it, but the same identical backend calculations supporting that can also be applied at a moderator level to e.g. automatically block such a reply from such an account to a community that has stricter rules for “nice behavior” than the common meme comms. Lemmy did away with karma, but PieFed did not - so if people want the karma-less 4chan experience, they can have it… but not here, where the mods (or instance admins) have decided that minimum standards must be met in order to participate.
And yes I mentioned also to TPM that I have started calling those who use the same tactics as the Alt-Right, but ostensibly to apply to the left, as the Alt-Left. They exist in their alternative facts echo chambers, and then sadly come out of those emboldened thinking that they have every right to exist in the real world espousing those beliefs - even when they get kicked out of those spaces (as e.g. Chapotraphouse) and yet still somehow demand that the less extremist places bend to their wills? However, this is just human nature - specifically it is childlike behavior, where unless someone is willing to stop them, they will continue. After all, it works for “insert politicians name here”, so why not for them as well? The world as we knew it is gone - we are now “old”, and those standards of decency have died, it would seem.