Just blocked lemmy.ml from my Lemmy account, and I swear to god it’s one of the best things I’ve ever done on this platform. My homepage feels actually clean now.
For the past few months I’d been seeing a lot of tankie posting and pretty much far-left propaganda on my feed. It got tiring enough that I finally checked my blocked-user list, and realized pretty much everyone I’d blocked was from lemmy.ml. So I just blocked the whole instance instead.
Saying this as someone who considers themselves a leftist: I used to think Lemmy itself was an echo chamber. Turns out lemmy.ml was the problem the entire time. Probably the reason I tolerated it for so long is that I agreed with a lot of what they posted, but like an oversaturated meme, I’d had enough. Browsing the platform was starting to feel way too tiring instead of fun, which defeats the point of being here in the first place.
The breaking point was seeing some dude post a “meme” implying North Korea and China are basically communist utopias and that the West sucks. I mean, the West does suck, but come on - you’re saying North Korea is the ideal the West should strive for? What the hell…
It’s FOSS, it’s a federation, like yes crazy people will make instances full of crazy stuff and you block/defederate them. Idk, like it’s part of the thought process behind it, like im sure literal genocidal dictators host a couple instances we probably never heard of. That was always the answer on day 1 of a free and open social network, crazies are free to join like everyone else and they get blocked, what other system would be better?
The structure is important, too. That ultimately colors the community, no matter how “free” it is.
I think Lemmy mirrored Reddit a little too closely. For instance, feeds are structured in a way so that popular and “ragebait” communities rise over niche interest ones, and starve the latter.
Piefed is better, and getting better, though. In some ways.