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…
Yeah but making a post about it is stupid, we’re all blocking instances and users we don’t like, it’s like posting “tie your shoes if tripping on your laces feels tirening”. Like what is this? a post for primary schoolers?
People commonly think that everybody else sort of thinks and acts the same way that they do. Sometimes it’s that way, but a lot of the time it isn’t. I didn’t block a single instance until I think last week. (It was lemmy.ml, not too coincidentally.) That includes my six months on piefed, as well as the several years before that on lemmy.world. I had considered blocking them in the past, but it was only recently that several accounts from there started behaving super-aggressively to me.
I’m just reluctant to block entire instances because I feel like I’ll miss out on something. But at this point, I think if you’re still on lemmy.ml, then you’re probably not somebody who I want to interact with. But that’s because it’s just famous for being tankies.
Yeah fomo is a big reason humans do stupid shit wcyd glad you’re getting over it
Blocking an instance just hides posts to communities from there. I have ml blocked but still see posts and comments by their users. I don’t know whether this is somehow magically different for everyone else since every discussion I’ve seen on the matter has at least one person claiming otherwise.
PieFed allows true instance blocking. Lemmy’s “instance block” function is so misleadingly named that it might just qualify as disinformation. While it does hide communities located on that instance, it still allows: users on that instance to see, reply to, and vote (brigade) on your content, and to send you DMs, which originally did not trigger notifications but then the Lemmy devs reversed that to allow these “blocked” users to spam your DMs even while triggering notifications every single time. Which btw I note can last for WEEKS and WEEKS if you make the mistake of saying something remotely controversial (or not supportive enough of their chosen echo chamber talking points).
So PieFed users can do it, while basically nobody else on Lemmy can, at least not very easily (there are some antiquated apps that allowed it, but iirc those have not been updated in years, so then to make it happen you basically have to use the web interface exclusively - which most people dislike for some reason, and then implement a custom uBlock Origin filter code… and even that only hides their comments from your view, while they can still e.g. vote on your content in return).
Actually, now that I think about it, I suppose there is an easy way: simply make a comment that the devs do not like on their instance, and they will quickly ban you from it! That might do the trick, I dunno?
I am sure it depends on what interface you’re using for the content. Like, what app or web UI, and even what are the settings for that UI. For example, I use Voyager on mobile, and there was one build where I blocked a person and could still see and reply to all of their comments. Obviously that was a bug, but it shows that blocking behavior depends on the UI.
At any rate, I double-checked. I used a private window and went to lemmy.ml to find a post there where the OP for that post had also commented, and when I went to that post through piefed’s interface, I was still able to see the post, but it had a message at the top about me blocking the instance, but I was not able to see the comment from the OP under their own post. (Edit: But I could see the other comments, even the one that the OP had responded to.)
So, I can say that, from what I can see, at least in that situation, piefed.social was blocking comments from a person who I didn’t specifically block as an individual, but was a member of an instance that I had blocked.
To start, I’m not trying to have an argument about this.
Your description doesn’t specify much about the origins of OP or the post. Was the community an “@lemmy.ml” community? If so I would expect it to be blocked. Was their account an “@lemmy.ml” account? If so I wouldn’t expect that to change anything.
I see a lot of content from ml users, but no posts to their communities, and I use the default Lemmy UI. I haven’t made a Piefed account before but ActivityPub (the federation protocol) is responsible for deciding what is and isn’t blocked based on your lists AFAIK so I wouldn’t expect any differences. That is to say, the included blocking features prevent the UI from receiving blocked posts, the UI shouldn’t be responsible for hiding them.
It was a lemmy.ml community. I could only see anything because I specifically looked up the user who posted it.
You can try it yourself. If you don’t like the way Lemmy acts, then try making an account on a Piefed instance and see how it’s different. I had heard Piefed was better, so I tried out an account, and decided I liked it better.
When you mentioned this behavior, I actually expected that Piefed would probably handle it in a way that I’d prefer.
And besides, the original Lemmy devs are the ones who run lemmy.ml.
Given that it’s an ml community it would be blocked for me, too. That behavior is as I described. If you’ve seen any ml comments on this post that’s what I’m talking about. (by “change anything” I meant “relative to no blocklist”)
I have considered Piefed due to Lemmy’s origins, although being open source and relatively popular I’m confident its developers will be reasonably held in check (unlike with e.g. Tesseract).
“Guys, check out this thing i just did that improved my experience on this social media!”
bluescluetoothpaste:
But did you notice how irrelephant pointed out that THEY (tankies) should be entirely free to criticize whomever, wherever, however, and at whatever frequency they like…
Whereas in turn you should be allowed the freedom to… STFU about the situation?
It’s almost like there’s one rule applied to one group, while there is an entirely separate rule differently applied to the other “side”?
Watch Innuendo Studios’ The Alt-Right Playbook series (entirely free on YouTube), and you will be very glad that you did. Once you train yourself how to spot these tactics, you will never find yourself arguing with people who user toddler logic again. Ultimately, some people use logic not to arrive at any kind of Truth but instead only as a means to an end, and more often than not as a club to bash their enemies with, which is basically anyone who is vulnerable to such tactics. You cannot stop trolls from doing such, but you can prevent those tactics from working on you.
you know whats really annoying? u
Yeah it’s annoying when someone makes you feel dumb, i get that.
i was being silly because he is overreacting lol people are too serious around here