As a trans woman it's really fun getting to be the minority that it's totally okay to just openly hate and dehumanize, the right's newest whipping girl ;-;
People always wonder at my skill in picking up unfamiliar UIs, and its always just that I explore the interface thoroughly and press every likely-looking button
Just because they said they weren't? They just dismissed the claim without linking to any real counter evidence by claiming it's just a random Mastodon user or whatever
I use Decentraleyes and Privacy Badger on top of uBlock
Are you considering making and moderating and equivalent community here on Lemmy? A lot of people here want to start communities or at least for those communities to exist but don't have the time or experience or mental health to moderate them ourselves, so moderators directly moving here from Reddit could make a massive impact!
I think it might for a little while but not for much longer.
When the influx started, the two oldest and biggest Lemmy instances, the ones maintained by the developers, and thus presumably the flagship instances, were lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml. Tankies are definitely overrepresented in those two instances, and since the devs themselves are tankies, there's a lot of moderation bias in favor of red fascist authoritarian regimes even in the nominally "neutral" lemmy.ml — such as them refusing to remove genocide denial or outright genocide justification, while also removing posts critical of China and so on.
You might argue that this doesn't affect you if you just pick a different instance, because the culture of that instance will be different and so will the moderation, but the problem with that is that if the vast majority of users on a network are tankies and are moderated by tankies then that's going to influence your experience of the network as a whole pretty much unavoidably unless you defederate with the largest instances and thereby intentionally hamstring yourself.
So even if you joined another instance, your experience of the site as a whole would be dominated by a tankie leaning culture via comments and posts, and that's where the reputation (deservedly) came from. And it probably did and maybe still does hamper the growth a little bit. It definitely made me, a trans anarchist, think twice about joining.
However, with the more neutral and professionally-run lemmy.world taking over as the second largest and flagship instance, and beehaw as the third (iirc), as well as the overall influx of a variety of users from Reddit, I think over time the dominance of tankies in how the network is experienced by users, even from other instances, will drastically decrease, especially as many instances defederate from lemmmygrad, and so the reputation will also fade.
I really want to exclusively switch to Lemmy, but as it stands I'll probably end up starting to use Reddit again as soon as the the vast majority of the blackout ends (I'm not gonna give in easily, but once it's mostly over, there's no point in me continuing).
The problem for me is that on Reddit even extremely niche communities had a substantial amount of members and activity, whereas Lemmy is smaller than Reddit, so everything scales down proportionally, meaning that suddenly communities that were niche on Reddit are infinitesimally tiny or even just absent on Lemmy. Like, there's no malazan community, elitedangerous and wheeloftime are dead, amiga is dead, and so on.
I actually got a ton of extremely high quality, positive interaction on the subreddits I was on, because I almost entirely stayed away from the really popular subreddits, and I'm losing all that moving to here, where the popular communities have higher quality interaction but the smaller communities have way worse interaction. Also, Reddit is a massive treasure-trove of useful niche information for me.
Exactly this. A long term blackout, especially a user blackout, is not feasible without a replacement place to go to.
It isn't high effort. It's a bunch of canned "gender critical" arguments that we've all seen a thousand times before combined with arbitrarily dismissing all of the evidence in favor of gender affirming care for kids using specious reasoning and then citing long debunked studies like the "80% desistance rate" one.
Their bias is even more clearly demonstrated by the fact that the first study they cite isn't hosted on any legitimate source of medical science, but on "transgendertrend." That demonstrates that they didn't find their data via PubMed or Google Scholar or anything, they found it by looking for cherry picked medical studies from people with an anti-trans agenda.
It's transphobia and perpetuation of misinformation disguised as a polite conversation. It's the same level of "discourse" as "blacks make up 12% of the population and commit 50% of the crime."
Edit: not only is it arbitrary and awfully convenient for cherry-picking purposes to leave out longitudinal studies of mental health, since mental health is what's at stake here, and "objective" measures are susceptible to many confounding variables and often not relevant, and standardized tests of mental health are regularly used to ascertain the efficacy of many procedures related to psychology, there are also studies that use "objective" measures such as the ones he wanted, where applicable. Here's one that's somewhat infamous due to one of the young adults getting a fatal complication from a surgery, but such surgeries are not performed on minors, and are not particularly dangerous, so it's largely irrelevant: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25201798/. Here's a list of 16 studies on this: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/political-minds/202201/the-evidence-trans-youth-gender-affirming-medical-care.
I think the crucial thing that's missing from traditional social media is actual freedom of association, and I think thats the underlying thing that causes all these issues around "free speech." Freedom of association is the natural counterbalancing mechanism for "freedom of speech" in any form, and without the former the latter must either become incredibly toxic and damaging or be suppressed.
One of the interesting things we've lost (up till now) compared to physical, offline communities is that if someone was being a never-ending dick or a sealion, the rest of the community could just start naturally avoiding them and not inviting them of their own individual accord, and over time that would lead to the person being excised from the group — unless there was a reasonably sized contingent of the group that disagreed with that, at which point the two groups would just split, all without totally banishing anyone.
Or you could yourself choose to leave the group and find another one, if they consistently refused to deal with or helped bad actors, while still maintaining access and contact with some people from that group, and the common social setting and contacts you and the group exist in.
In other words, you'd have a natural, gradiated, and horizontal system of social self-policing that could take care of these kinds of things in a distributed manner. There's a natural outlet besides just trying to shut someone down entirely by removing their access to any community in the area at all or trying to shout over them.
These mechanisms are very hard to implement on centralized social media because it is essentially one gigantic social group that you are either fully a part of or fully separated from. Thus any decisions made about who is and isn't part of this social group are made unilaterally for everyone, and there is no room for diversity in norms and expected behavior, because everything is technically this one giant group, so there has to be this centralized compromise set of one size fits all rules. And because of the unilateral and centralized nature of everything, you need a unilateral and centralized decisionmaking procedure, which in practice and up just being faceless top-down moderation either descending to band someone or ignoring people's pleas.
So it ends up being very difficult for social media communities to self-police in a coherent way, because the platforms operate at two coarse-grained a resolution to see those communities, and it's difficult for people to disengage from toxic stuff they don't want to interact with.
This has created all of the problems we see with speech on social media now, where people who want to be dickheads perceive themselves as being oppressed, victims of authoritarian censorship, because community policing has to come centrally from above, instead of happening naturally and horizontally by a bunch of people either telling someone to leave or leaving themselves; meanwhile people who just want to live in peace and share their joy and interests online find themselves with a very little recourse to reliably avoid such dickheads and find places that feel right for them.
Reddit has this problem to less of a degree because it lets you create different smaller subunities of the social network that all have different moderators and different rules, but it's imperfect.
I think the solution to this is partly decentralization and federation, because they allow people to naturally associate and disassociate with one another on a very individual level that more naturally mirrors how communities and social groups work in real life. Communities can form their own rules, norms, and cultures, and push people out in a meanongful way without having to totally banish them from the entire social world, and people can also naturally move between them until they find one that aligns with what they need and their values, with the right degree of openness and closedness to the rest of the Fediverse, without losing contact with everything else and thus avoiding network effects and isolation effects. The fact that instances can de-federate or mute other instances creates this really interesting ability to partially fragment the network without fully fragmenting it so that you can get truly different experiences on different instances.
I'm honestly very excited about Lemmy and Mastodon.
With federated and decentralized technology, I think there's a real hope of taking the internet back from the tiny selection of corporatized, monetized, sterile silos we have now, where everyone is forced to abide by the same compromise rules and everything can be co-opted or changed at a moment's notice without the userbase's consent, and giving it to smaller, more fun, radical, unique, and interesting internet communities, run by volunteers who really care, for like minded people.
I think it will lead to a much more diverse and richly textured internet, maybe even a more human internet, since each place you go will be a smaller, more intentional community which policies itself and can develop its own interesting culture and set of norms, while still being connected to everything else so the rot of pure isolation doesn't set in.
Technology — especially how it is structured — is never neutral, and I think for the first time in a long while, we've stumbled on technologies in federation and decentralization that actually tend towards good things. The inherent benefits of federation and decentralization to autonomy and resilience and diversity and resistance tocorporatizationn are stunning, and as long as we don't fuck that up by assuming that those benefits are sufficient, don't rest on our laurels thinking we don't need to maintain a culture that is consciously and intentionally oriented around preserving the things we want to see, I think we'll be okay!
The poor snoo look at its sad face :(