Call me crazy, but I a) think the fediverse probably doesn’t have more ‘toxic content’, harmful and violent content, and child sexual abuse material then other platforms like X, Facebook, Meta, YouTube etc, and b) actively like the fediverse because of that.
But after a few hours carefully drafting and sourcing an edit to make it clear that no, the fediverse isn’t unusual in social media circles for having a lot of toxic content, I realised that the entire ‘fediverse bad’ section was added by 1 editor in 2 days. And the editor has made an awful lot of edits on pages all themed around porn (hundreds of edits on the pages of porn stars), suicide, mass killings, mass shootings, Jews, torture techniques, conspiracy theories, child abuse, various forms of sexual and other exploitation, ‘zoosadism’, and then pages with titles like ‘bad monkey’ that seemed reasonably innocent until I actually clicked on them to see what they were and, well.
I decided to stop using the internet for a while.
I’ve learned my lesson trying to change Wikipedia edits written by people like that - they tend to have a tight social circle of people who can make the internet a very unpleasant place for anyone suggesting maybe claims like ‘an opinion poll indicated that most people in Britain would prefer to live next to a sewage plant than a Muslim’ should maybe not on Wikipedia on the thin evidence of paywalled link from a Geocities page written by, apparently, a putrid cesspit personified.
I thought I’d learned my lesson about trusting Wikipedia.
It just makes me so angry that most people’s main source of information on the fediverse contains a massive chunk written solely by a guy who spends most of his time making minor grammar edits to pages about school shootings, collections of pages about black people who were sexually assaulted and murdered, etc, and that these people control the narrative on Wikipedia by means of ensuring any polite critics’ are overcome with the urge to spend the rest of the day showering and disinfecting everything.
it looks like somebody who just saw this post edited wikipedia for the first time to remove that. this is why wikipedia’s wonderful: it’s that easy. i have this quirk where i wanna debate anyone who distrusts wikipedia or claim its rigidity
Beware of unearned knowledge.
You “lose” 100% of the battles that you choose not to fight.
Besides, people here are reporting that the content is already gone. Even if it comes back, it likely will bounce around back and forth but not return to this same state, so this was transient.
Even so, it seems not wrong? “toxic or abusive content being common in the Fediverse”, regardless of how precisely that is measured, seems entirely accurate to me. YOU (and I) may choose to block such content, in part by being on an instance that enacts this choice for us, but that does not mean that such does not exist. Head on over to Chapotraphouse@hexbear.net to get a taste of what the Fediverse offers. It does exist, and while Lemmy.World defederated from it, so many other instances including Lemm.ee did not. Or Lemmygrad.ml.
It is so easy to forget about what was shoved under the rug, but the Fediverse is more like 4chan than most of us care to admit. Just because there are no Nazis currently standing in your little corner of a Nazi bar does not mean that you can invite your Jewish friends over to walk (safely) through the front door.
The Fediverse can be quite toxic. So much so that I’ve entirely stopped recommending it to people irl. We need to be more acceptable to people if we want to change our image, not just pretend that we are fine.
Sounds like you should be recommending specific instances rather than just generally recommending the fediverse.
Which one?
Which instance defederates from all of the tankie instances, and is not already overloaded i.e. Lemmy.world? Also, the name “Lemmy” has tankie implications that most Redditors flee from - hence why so many of us came first to Kbin instead.
Since none such existed, I helped create one by petitioning Discuss.Online to defederate at least from hexbear.net, even though doing so with lemmy.ml is a lost cause. It was successful, and now you can recommend it if you like.
Although America has imploded now and I no longer recommend any USA-based servers, even to people based in the USA themselves (as the average Redditor tends to be).
Though PieFed gives me much stronger hope for the future of the Threadiverse. People still need to set up blocks for instances like Lemmy.ml and politics communities if they want to avoid toxicity though. And even then, it seems virtually impossible these days to read the comments in even a news post that does not include at least one call for murder of someone or another. People have strong opinions, and want to vent! Therefore, highly ironically, leaving no space existing where someone can discuss politics or even news (or for some reason even memes?!) without the toxicity. I am not being a Karen here bc I am telling nobody what to do - only reflecting what I see.
Lol wait till you see any of the Pakistan or India related articles. Its like the Ganges river in text form.
Meaning ?
it’s full of shit and will kill you if you wade in deep enough.
The crappiness of this section has been noted
Skimmed through the article and something picked my attention, the numbers given in the “325000 posts analyzed”. The way its given, it makes seem like big numbers, but if you calculate what is the percentage of the numbers given, it’s less than 1%. Can’t check the linked source, but it seems like a classical “lying with statistics”.
And besides, text seems written in a way to give the impression site moderation for smaller sites is too stupid to block bad actors, and that only the paternalism of bigger sites can solve this implied issue.
The entire tone of the article feels… condescending? (not sure the exact feeling). It feels off in the way information is presented, like subtle disdain in the writing voice.
1.) This is part of the background narratives being pushed by the rich and powerful that we need AI and big tech to moderate us when the opposite is true, we need more humans involved in moderation who have a stake in their community.
2.) The prevailing winds in the tech journalism sphere have always been strangely blowing against the Fediverse since the beginning. The simplest possible explanation to me is there is a lot of money in writing off the Fediverse as a cool nerdy space that nonetheless is an unrealistic solution for everybody else and pushing the axiom that a Harvard MBA is needed to translate the Fediverse into a product the public can actually use.
You will NOT notice this same prevailing winds against for profit corporate social networks like Bluesky and Threads… and it is a curious thing isn’t it…
Having everything everyone ever interacts with channeled through the same four fucking websites obviously sucks and doesn’t currently–and likely never can–scale.
Reddit power Mod turning their attention to Wikipedia and abusing its TOS & users of that site as well now too?
Oh you mean like jordanlund?
Ex(?) Reddit power mod, current awful lemmy.world mod?
I couldn’t say, as I’m not familiar with them.
Youn could follow that link and become pretty familiar with them.
What happened to Wikipedia’s neutrality policy?
Nothing?
The 325,000 tells you it’s 1%, plus the 1% is split into several categories already anyways. I don’t see how these statistics are misleading.
YUP! Can confirm, den of iniquity over here! Just like the fact I’ve been running Linux for 18 years now, so I’m obviously a hacker and a subversive. We enjoy things here like CHOICE and FREEDOM. You’re all fucking DEVIANTS! And so am I! DEVIANTS OF THE WORLD UNITE!
Well the first hit is free with Arch Linux
That section is out of line with Wikipedia policies because it only relies upon scholarship that isn’t meta-analysis, which Wikipedia considers primary sourcing (an idiosyncratic borrowing that ought to be called firsthand sourcing instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources#Scholarship), making it undue weight.
Its gone now I think
Someone fixed it a few hours ago, yeah. We should also check back periodically to make it stay that way.
deleted by creator
That section is just pure Ragebait lol
I haven’t seen any of that shit on the fediverse except maybe conspiracy theories (which are way more prevalent on other websites), wtf are they talking about?
Dunno, someone finally got around to fixing the article, though.
There was a few months where I had to ban server after server every day because someone was really into semi-lolli anime. They were posting it in every anime forum. I asked them why they were non stop posting upskirt or provocative drawings of very young girls and they got angry that I dared ask.
I’m unsure if you’re speaking as a previous admin or just as a user, but if the latter, would it not have been easier to just block the user directly?
I’ve just seen your edit and the material added to the Fediverse entry on Wikipedia, your assertions seem well founded although I’m not tied into Wikipedia’s Mod community and the motivations of users therein. You’re definitely right that the Fediverse isn’t exactly a node of objectionable content, frankly I’ve seen none, although admittedly I haven’t plumbed the depths of every single instance. Their assertion should be noted though, that the Fediverse is wide open for abuse despite IMO not already being affected by the same volume as other platforms.
out of approximately 325,000 Fediverse posts analyzed over a two-day period, 112 were detected as instances of known child sexual abuse material (CSAM); 554 were detected as containing sexually explicit media alongside keywords associated with child sexual exploitation; 713 contained media alongside the top twenty CSAM-related hashtags on the Fediverse; and 1,217 contained text relating to distribution of CSAM or child grooming.
By their own numbers, the volume of CSAM was 0.03%, the volume of CSAM posted alongside keywords was 0.17%, the volume of CSAM posted with known associated hashtags was 0.22%, and 0.37% contained text related that kid of content. Less than ideal, you could say, given the nature of the content in question. The real crux of the matter seems to be whether or not it will increase, and whether or not Lemmy’s Mods have the capacity to moderate the content like other platforms IMO, but their claim that “toxic or abusive content being common in the Fediverse” is more than slightly overblown even in considering the material.
I think this kind of critical analysis of the Fediverse could be completely right in every single one of the details and still miss the more important point that corporate social networks are being used in a directly hostile fashion towards vulnerable people RIGHT NOW to a near catastrophic degree of negligence to put things in the most charitable terms possible. Further the people who own those corporations publicly endorse narratives that invisiblize the violence happening to real human beings.
Realize that by getting lost in a baseball stats esque evaluation of the Fediverse that we cede ground already to people who are disengenous. We have to consider the context of the alternative reality of corporate social media to fairly evaluate the Fediverse.
You’re right, yes, op point. I’m not getting lost in the stats per se, and nearly turned my reply into an essay addressing the information readily available, but it bears saying given the nature of the info in the Wiki edit. You’ll find no corpo booster here in my camp, the very purposeful abuse (Mod or otherwise) of some users/groups on social media has been readily observable even beyond the purges of Antifascist and leftist groups.
“Legal reform has also been proposed, most notably around Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, as well as proposed legal requirements for instance operators to engage in good-faith moderation of instance connections.”
The source for this is a a paper written in January 2024 by someone called Nikhil Mahadeva.
Lets be clear, any Section 230 discussion will never mention the Fediverse. That implies anyone who wants to erode even knows what the Fediverse is.
This article has been a source of so much frustration over the years. I honestly think it should be scrapped and entirely rewritten.
This is ironically an inevitable consequence of Wikipedia’s centralization undermining its strategic objective of making knowledge free and accessible to all.
I am not arguing for the opposite extreme, rather pointing out that Wikipedia is simply too centralized to be a durable vehicle of truth.
Federated architecture provides differentiated redundancy and the possibility for existential conflicts to be preserved in splits between elements of that federation rather than require the leaders at the top to be perfectly lucid and uncorruptable by encompassing forces (state or private) or risk cementing problematic lies as truth.
I think this would be a thing worth organizing around, can we mass report (edit ok “report” is probably the wrong word, this is about a broader editorial tone on the fediverse not attacking the particular person) this person or their particular edits on the fediverse? I don’t mean a mindless spam wave, more like a well written consistent push from a large, disparate range of people that continually highlights that Wikipedia really doesn’t have an accurate picture of what the Fediverse is (to put it charitably for Wikipedia).
This is ironically an inevitable consequence of Wikipedia’s centralization undermining its strategic objective of making knowledge free and accessible to all. […]
Perhaps you’d be interested [1] in Ibis [2]?
References
- Type: Meta. Accessed: 2025-09-20T03:22Z.
- Ibis [2] was recommended because of their apparent negative opinion of Wikipedia’s alleged centralized structure.
- Type: Repository. Title: “ibis”. Publisher: [“GitHub”. “Nutomic”]. Published: 2025-07-14T12:39:05.000Z. Accessed: 2025-09-20T03:25Z. URI: https://github.com/Nutomic/ibis.
- Type: Meta. Accessed: 2025-09-20T03:22Z.
The problem of reporting specific cases is that it could become cancel culture all over again. First option, I think, would be to try to correct issues in the article. Then, if they denied, then start suspecting of the site itself. And if already suspecting, it adds up to the site’s untrustworthiness.
What do you mean by cancel culture?
I feel like you are mistaking all acts of boycotting or mass comment submittal for “cancel culture”.
I am not arguing for DDOSing Wikipedia, to edit articles with a hostile intent, or of smearing Wikipedia people in public places…
…I am arguing for organizing a campaign to submit feedback on the articles about the Fediverse FROM people on the Fediverse that explain in their own words why they think the way Wikipedia describes the Fediverse is incomplete, problematic and misleading.
Those are two VERY different things and I see no danger in slipping into “Cancel Culture” because the basic objective isn’t to silence, hurt or destroy something it is to correct the narrative ABOUT US being pushed by a prominent source of information that should be beholden to people coming to it and saying “this isn’t right what you wrote about me”. They can disagree, but the more of us that argue the point in a genuine and substantiated way the harder it gets to ignore us and keep the distorted narrative intact.
Yeah, this needs to be brought to someone’s attention. It’s not just someone adding their personal opinion to the Fediverse article, but they’re also messing up a bunch of other articles, too. I’d almost call it vandalism. OP, maybe you could get together with some other editors and bring it up to an administrator / mods?
I see. Sorry for jumping the gun.
