I know they’ve always been on Lemmy, but it seems like the past few weeks it’s slowly increasing, making me want to just stay on beehaw /local. Showing up on more communities, even on instances that ban that type of trolling explicitly.
Anyone else notice this?
Note: When I’m saying Tankie here, I’m not referring to far leftists, socialists, anti-capitalists, etc. I’m talking about trolls that act leftist but their actual intent is to cause infighting and support authoritarian regimes. Sealioning, all that stuff.
All good … I’m personally very happy for you to have this chat FWIW. If I came as someone trying to shut down a conversation, I apologise. It wasn’t my intent. I was replying to a comment about /all which resonated with me so I thought I’d add my thoughts.
And if my tone comes off as too negative/harsh … I can see that too.
Otherwise, as far as my personal general motivations are concerned (again, FWIW) … I’m just not sure about this concern over trolls. Yes they’re here, as well as a number of blatently rude people. IMO, a cultural issue that the fediverse can suffer from is context-free drama and rumour milling. Thus my call to actually acting on moderation issues with evidence and cooperation etc. I’m not saying you’re engaging in that sort of behaviour, but this post did seem to me to be heading in that direction (thus my comments).
For me, the issue is that constantly looking out for the “bad people” decays into insubstantial fear mongering and purity policing and eventually “balkanising”. For the simple reason, IMO, that it’s an addictive behaviour with a built in positive feedback loop from the engagement it tends to procure. Within that sort of dynamic, accuracy gets lost, rumours are milled, echo chambers built and a generally unpleasant community may ensue. On the other hand, organising others, collecting information, setting up communities and infrastructure, is likely to do more good and has a built in negative feedback loop from being unrewarding work such that those who persistently do it tend to really care about it (for better or worse depending on the person and cause). Maybe one is better at warding off nazi bars than the other, but I think both are capable and that the relevant factor there is how sensitive one is to “disliked” opinions, which is a valid sensitivity to be had but also an interesting dynamic in how people can disagree on how to form these spaces.
I hope that doesn’t come off as me trying to lecture you (I’d presume none of this is something you haven’t heard before) … just sharing my general background perspective on this if it’s relevant or anything.
That’s fair, I appreciate the insight on it. It tends to be a complicated issue so I don’t think there’s really any right answer to it, all the ways of trying to solving it have huge pros and cons. Guess we do really just have to trust that all of our instance admins across the fediverse are on-top of this stuff at the end of the day
Well, moderation can be a problem too on the fediverse, right? As instances get bigger, the scaling makes moderation harder … or at least it seems that way. That’s where the call for small instances comes in … as it enables more localised moderation across the board. And I personally think that makes a lot of sense. But it’s also unworkable for any open platform/fediverse, IMO, as people tend to aggregate and the instances dynamic just doesn’t work for many (eg BlueSky is full of people that just hated the instances experience on mastodon, which IME can get more toxic than anything happening here, as, I believe, communities help with that sort of thing).
Point being (sorry, clearly I’m ranty) entirely trusting admins isn’t something I’d subscribe to either. I’ve recently pushed off from engaging on the communities on a particular instance on finding out that the mods/admins there likely suck (if you know, you probably know).
If I’d offer any attempts at helping solve the problem … I’d probably say be rules based, be clear and open about intentions and policies, all along the way, to the point of self-examination, trust that a system is better than no system but that they also have to be organic and get strength from cooperative feedback across the system especially when done in line with the other ideas.
Sorry … ranty … it was in my fingertips.
Good chat! All the best!!