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 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).