I feel like things on Lemmy were pretty chill several months ago, and that’s started to change.

People used to talk each other like they would talk to a neighbor. Now I get the sense that people have become quick to be negative, attack, and not be constructive.

Am I crazy in feeling like the vibe has changed?

  • spaduf@slrpnk.net
    24916·
    11 months ago

    Worth noting, the number of people who come here “to escape authoritarian moderators”. Nearly all of them were moderated for good reason.

    I also don’t think the presence of places like hexbear are doing us any favors.

    • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      925·
      11 months ago

      You can see them jumping from Lemmy server to Lemmy server as they get banned from each.

      Eventually, they’ll just set up their own instances so they can bother people with impunity.

          • Mom Nom Mom@nom.momEnglish
            51·
            11 months ago

            It became a thing in Lemmy 0.19 - as long as you’re on an instance that has updated to that, it should be available to you. At the bottom of the settings page in the web ui, but if you use an app they might not expose that to you yet.

          • seathru@lemm.eeEnglish
            10·
            11 months ago

            You can on instances running .19 or newer. Settings -> Blocks -> then at the bottom is an option for blocking instances.

          • Traegert@lemm.ee
            7·
            11 months ago

            Connect has been able to do that from the get go. As well as individual communities within instances.

              • seathru@lemm.eeEnglish
                7·
                11 months ago

                It’s under Settings -> Blocks -> then down at the bottom is the block instances option.

              • Mom Nom Mom@nom.momEnglish
                5·
                11 months ago

                If the apps don’t have instance blocking yet, the webui does (in 0.19)… I haven’t tested it, but it’s there, at the bottom of my settings page 🙂

              • kopper [they/them]@lemmy.blahaj.zone
                73·
                11 months ago

                the 0.19 implementation is so half-assed I genuinely think the Lemmy devs just don’t want that functionality but expected quite a lot of backlash if they outright said as much, so they decided to implement something that ticks the box in the “wanted features” list without having any effect

                afaik it only blocks communities and explicitly lets users from blocked instances through

                • nutomic@lemmy.ml
                  20·
                  11 months ago

                  Feel free to make open an issue to improve instance blocking. Or better yet a pull request. We are only a few devs with limited time, and hundreds of issues to work on.

        • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
          3·
          11 months ago

          …and then they spin up a new instance with a new domain…

          Domains are unfortunately fairly cheap and it’s not impossible to get a different IP assigned to a server box.

          • psud@lemmy.world
            4·
            11 months ago

            I don’t mind costing them the effort or $10 for a new domain

            Incidentally I have several domains with DNS provided by freedns.afraid.net, which allows sharing domains. Everyone who asks for a domain under any of mine just seems so very sketchy. Now I have to worry if they’re a nazi looking for a new domain to get banned

    • Ghostalmedia@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      524·
      11 months ago

      The thing that actually worried me a little bit more was people upvoting the aggressive comments to be top comments.

      I was reading some thread over at !politics@lemmy.world today, and a lot of stuff advocating for political violence were the top comments. Mods yanked it, but nevertheless, people were vibing with some comments about dragging people through the street. I felt like I was on X/Twitter.

    • givesomefucks@lemmy.worldEnglish
      9·
      11 months ago

      Blocking still works though.

      It’s almost always a small amount of people causing problems.

      I still get some ghost replies occasionally, but it’s never going to be anything worth reading. Most of the toxicity comes from reply chains they start as well, so you’re not missing out on any constructive conversation.

    • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      361·
      11 months ago

      More exposure in news and media. More asylum seekers from reddit.

      Definitely. A few months ago, there basically weren’t any crytpo-bros on Lemmy. Now any time I say anything negative about crypto, about six of them jump out of the woodwork to give their big long spiel on “the useful use-cases for NFTs” which I just roll my eyes harder every fucking time over.

      It’s mainly you just have more trolls and aggressive people because we’re beyond the initial group who was actually looking for more community. Admins/mods do a pretty good job of banning trolls, but not until after they’ve shitted up the place for a bit, usually.

      Also, the nature of Lemmy means that someone who gets banned for spamming an article just goes and makes an account on a different instance and then just goes and makes the same post in the same communities literally minutes later.

      Popularity is rising, the bad actors are coming. Oh well.

      • const_void@lemmy.ml
        24·
        11 months ago

        Now any time I say anything negative about crypto, about six of them jump out of the woodwork to give their big long spiel on “the useful use-cases for NFTs” which I just roll my eyes harder every fucking time over.

        This seems to correlate with the sudden rise in promotion of the Brave browser I’ve been seeing here.

        • Omega_Haxors@lemmy.mlEnglish
          31·
          11 months ago

          Yeah I don’t trust anyone using that pedo browser. If I see that shit on their desktop they’re not getting a second date.

        • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
          171·
          11 months ago

          It’s a quality video, but I bowed out about halfway because I was already familiar with about 90% of the stuff he was discussing.

          Great source for anyone looking for a good breakdown of the whole situation.

          I usually just point to this quote from NFT co-creator Anil Dash:

          https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/nfts-werent-supposed-end-like/618488/

          But the NFT prototype we created in a one-night hackathon had some shortcomings. You couldn’t store the actual digital artwork in a blockchain; because of technical limits, records in most blockchains are too small to hold an entire image. Many people suggested that rather than trying to shoehorn the whole artwork into the blockchain, one could just include the web address of an image, or perhaps a mathematical compression of the work, and use it to reference the artwork elsewhere.

          We took that shortcut because we were running out of time. Seven years later, all of today’s popular NFT platforms still use the same shortcut. This means that when someone buys an NFT, they’re not buying the actual digital artwork; they’re buying a link to it. And worse, they’re buying a link that, in many cases, lives on the website of a new start-up that’s likely to fail within a few years. Decades from now, how will anyone verify whether the linked artwork is the original?

          All common NFT platforms today share some of these weaknesses. They still depend on one company staying in business to verify your art. They still depend on the old-fashioned pre-blockchain internet, where an artwork would suddenly vanish if someone forgot to renew a domain name. “Right now NFTs are built on an absolute house of cards constructed by the people selling them,” the software engineer Jonty Wareing recently wrote on Twitter.

          Meanwhile, most of the start-ups and platforms used to sell NFTs today are no more innovative than any random website selling posters. Many of the works being sold as NFTs aren’t digital artworks at all; they’re just digital pictures of works created in conventional media.

          The limited number of bits in the blockchain is a massive limitation on doing anything functional outside of bookkeeping with the crypto on the blockchain. It’s the most fundamental aspects of NFTs and it has been broken since Day One.

      • Omega_Haxors@lemmy.mlEnglish
        31·
        11 months ago

        Man one of them was trying to bring their crypto bullshit here and I fucking ripped their ass a new one. It’s probably still sore to this day.

      • HerrBeter@lemmy.world
        11·
        11 months ago

        What are you on about? If anyone is interested, read my comment history

        Edit: if we store the shitty pictures on blockchain, literally nothing changes, except a big and bulky blockchain. “I can just save the picture lmao” will still be the answer… Are we supposed to store every software on blockchain too? I don’t think it’s viable

        This article too is flawed

  • june@lemmy.worldEnglish
    47·
    11 months ago

    People have been asking this for as long as I’ve been on lemmy.

    It depends a LOT on which instances you interact with. It’s a challenge of the fediverse in that every person has their own unique experience, some bad others good.

  • Sekrayray@lemmy.world
    381·
    11 months ago

    The vibe has gotten much more negative, to the point that I don’t really want to post anymore. I came here in early June with the Reddit API stuff, and was shocked at how communal it was. It actually got me to start posting again (I hadn’t posted on Reddit since the early to mid 20-teens because it had gotten so toxic).

    My last three posts (nothing inflammatory) have gotten flamed. Someone actually hunted me down based on my post history and I had to take the time deleting most of my old posts.

    So from my perspective it’s not just you. I’m back to being a lurker.

  • Rentlar@lemmy.ca
    34·
    11 months ago

    No you. /j

    What I found is that hot topics come with the season, in June/July about Ukraine, in July/August about Meta, in October/November about Gaza, in December about Biden. There’s been plenty of charged discussion on these topics, and internal Lemmy dramas.

    However, one thing I see more often here on Lemmy than other places is people updating their comments, being willing to admit they’re wrong or that their comment came off as hostile, and open negotiation in general. Consider the near defederation of programming.dev and lemm.ee, it was resolved amicably to everyone’s benefit.

    I also see people thanking others for softening their tone and being kind, to them I say, keep doing that and encouraging good behaviour and ettiquite online!

  • Grammaton Cleric@lemmy.world
    331·
    11 months ago

    Law of probability. The more people join, the more of a chance someone will say some stupid shit.

    Also: SUCK MY BALLS

  • forgotmylastusername@lemmy.ml
    321·
    11 months ago

    Lost among the “internet sucks now, it used to be better” discourse is that the old internet was heavily moderated. The laissez faire parts of the old internet were known as the seedy corners of the web. Social media and its modern derivatives like lemmy take on that latter philosophy.

    It’s no wonder it’s chaos every where. The libertarian tech bros have really impressed their world view on everyone. So the prevailing philosophy is these “digital town squares” should be absolute free speech zones. Except town squares in real life do not work like this anywhere. At least not in most liberal democracies. In real life there is bureaucracy. There are police, fire, ambulances. There is the simple matter of neighborly social contract. You cannot go into a real life town square and do whatever you want. You cannot just up and fight strangers, engage in lewd acts, set up encampments or what have you without permits. In the same way internet requires structure. Counter intuitively it used to have a lot more of it on account of sites being run by a real human being. Not the mega conglomerate investor groups feeding off ad/engagement profits.

    Those users unfamiliar with the old internet yet pine for the good old days would have hated it. Power hungry mods is a meme as old as the internet itself. It’s a necessity of the internet. Hardly anybody gets banned for being an asshole anymore. Sometimes (often more like) people need to be forced offline so they can go outside.

    • b_n@sh.itjust.works
      5·
      11 months ago

      Say something dumb in an IRC channel? Get banned.

      The good ol’ days when I was young and irresponsible and got banned for it. I learnt how to converse with people online through this. Talk shit, get banned. I also feel like I forgot some of this on later platforms.

      I hated it at the time, but like most learning experiences, grown to appreciate it later. I can’t believe I had free and unmoderated access to the internet’s back in the early 2000s. Shout out to those mods for putting a teenager in their place!

    • auzas_1337@lemmy.zipEnglish
      58·
      11 months ago

      TL;DR - A millennial goes on a tangent about the good ol’ days.

      I remember being permanently or temporarily banned as a kid/teenager with simple messages like “go outside”. Mostly for being too rude or annoying, or edgy. As teens and kids often are.

      Idk if it’s a thing on Lemmy, but I’m all for extended temporary bans for simply repeatedly being a dick to others.

      The “old internet” for me was something like 2006-2012. And I agree, people who pine for it probably couldn’t hack it in 2024, it was racist, it was homophobic, and threads went off the rails with people giving unsolicited advice on how to please your gf, but it was fun, it was dynamic, often complete strangers behind phpBB nicknames felt more real than your closest friends on Instagram do now.

      I yearn for those days. Not because I particularly want to deal with racist, homophobic idiots, but because I miss the dynamic internet before mega social network sites. I miss the nuance, people knowing each other on forums and whenever someone who’s known in the community would post something that on surface level is banhammer-worthy per the rules, the community would talk it out and the hammer would fall when people call for it, not always strictly adhering to the rules. And yes, that did produce the power-hungry mods. But it’s not like much has changed.

      I feel like I’m going off on a tangent. I just miss the randomness.

      I recently had a chat with a new colleague about how you can’t joke with a lot of Zoomers about race/nationality/sex because they don’t perceive nuance. I think it’s a cultural thing imprinted by the internet content coming from America. We’re both from Eastern/South Eastern Europe and people don’t immediately get their panties in a knot over offensive jokes because they realize that a racist-sounding joke does not make the person racist. And I feel that’s the state of the internet now too, and it’s ok, but I miss the sharp edge that it used to have.

      I also miss the weird smileys.

      • unreasonabro@lemmy.world
        58·
        11 months ago

        tldr a child gives us his wisdom lmao

        first by mocking and then by doing the thing he mocked

        well played asshole

        the internet only existed for like eight years before you started using it and you pine for your past but shit on those who were alive for the first part

        just fuckin retarded man, snap out of it and quit being a cunt

        • auzas_1337@lemmy.zipEnglish
          51·
          11 months ago

          Your comment nicely illustrates OPs observation.

          Anyone can feel free to disagree with me or poke at inconsistencies in what I wrote, I know they’re there, but I don’t have the time to write an essay. But calling me a retarded child while misinterpreting what I said is exactly the kind of aggressive commenting I believe OP is pointing out.

  • robocall@lemmy.world
    30·
    11 months ago

    My suspicion is that a lot of redditors migrated over here about 7 months ago when certain apps shut down, including myself. At first, they were polite in an unfamiliar environment, but they’ve grown comfortable and act out, or speak less thoughtfully, like they originally did on Reddit.