this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2026
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People are claiming reddit is doing it as well.
https://icelist.is/
reddit has been trying to help bots/propaganda astroturf anti-trump, anti-republican content for the whole last year. i have heard there is significant amount of comment and post removals over it, and some bans.
I'm curious as to just how easy it'd be to get around the censorship.
Like, just find one article from a news outlet that links the site, and share that article.
Or otherwise share a fediverse link to a post to the site.
I thought fediverse stuff was getting blocked on reddit too.
Only if it portrays Lemmy in a positive light. You can criticize our toxicity and left-leaning political biases as much as you like in r/RedditAlternatives though:-P.
Narrative control is entirely in the hands of who can hand out bans.
I don't think we're particularly toxic, insult matches between MLs and other lefties aside and even then it's usually infinitely better than your average 4chan thread.
Then again Hexbear being blocked by so many instances prolly helps.
Blocking hexbear.net and lemmygrad.ml improved my experience on the Threadiverse by 90%. Blocking lemmy.ml improved it a further 90%, so yeah, blocking hexbear does so very much. I get that someone who intentionally chooses that should have the right to, which nobody is stopping anyone there, but definitely hexbear, like 4chan, is not for the uninitiated.
Yeah Hexbear at least from what little I cared to look really did just radiats lefty pol energy. Pointless trolls that were just kinda being annoying and were five irony poisoned in jokes deep that they basically couldn't interact with everyone else functionally. If that's you're vibe fine but it can and will get old for everyone else right fucken quickly.
They are free to have whatever kind of vibe they want, but yeah their rights should end where mine begin and all of that. Except they don't, as even outside of their local communities they constantly violate the rules of other spaces, then their admins refuse to police them, even going so far as to be caught lying to the admins of other instances.
At that point, defederation remains the only available option, except even that is not the end of the matter when so many instances choose not to do that. Leaving the vast majority of the moderation burden to be placed upon the end user causes people to flee the Threadiverse like the 4chan-style place that we legitimately are.
People who do that truly don't actually want an alternative, huh?
They just want Reddit under new management
Digg...
Tbf, most don't seem to realize what they want, and some are literally and actually children. It hurts the Threadiverse that upon having a bad experience here, they go and talk about us there in that highly negative light. And it helps us here to know what is being said over there - i.e. it's not solely the onboarding experience being difficult (having to choose an instance, getting through the sign-up process, then community discovery, which never ends, nor does the need to continually block new toxic users), but even for people that remained here for months to a year did not stay, and it's good to know why (mainly lack of niche content plus toxicity).
I've been here a while, I prefer this over reddit.
Sure, niche content is missing, but that's because it's niche, and comes with time and a larger group of people on here. Reddit didn't start out with the niche content either.
I haven't noticed the toxicity myself, I'm sure it's there, but I'm likely privileged not to have noticed it. Or perhaps I'm one of the toxic users, because I'm too leftist for some (though I'm no tankie)
At least personally I don't really see how the threadiverse is more toxic than reddit. Though it may be because my instance is simply good at blocking the toxicity away, and the instance their chose isn't. Which could be something to work on I suppose, but moderation is always a big discussion in these situations, with some people not liking moderation but also, in reality, wanting it
As for niche content, that, unfortunately, is just a catch 22 situation. No simple solution other than to simply get more people to join
Yeah Ada is pretty amazing, ngl that is likely why for you - not many spaces have such a fantastic person looking out for them. There is occasional drama like the 196 situation in the last year but even that she handled with grace and class and a deft hand.
About Reddit, there's a lot there: mainly it's a network effect, and so people are just looking for any excuse to justify not having to move, and go somewhere with less content that is "different".
Also a big part is that while the main subs are toxic AF, the niche ones there are mainly free of toxicity (people say? I haven't been back to see personally since the Rexodus!), so it's a bit of an apples to oranges comparison - but on the other hand, the niche subs here have barely any content, like after you spend 5-10 minutes reading every single comment even across every cross-post for the 1-5 daily posts (or worse, weekly, or worse still, monthly) posts, then there's nothing left. So remaining in the niche subs here might leave you with zero to a couple upvotes mainly per comment, and almost no to possibly 0-3 mainly critical replies to a post.
So here, people - especially new users - really are going to be drawn mostly to the largest communities, which ofc are going to be those with the most toxicity. Especially since Lemmy does not federate moderator reports so there is such a small pool of mods who are on that exact instance where the community is and willing to absorb that burden - and even then we keep chasing them off, saying how "we" (in terms of the Threadiverse as a whole) are better off without such, but then a new user takes a look at a mostly unmoderated 4chan-style discussion and nopes right back to what they are most comfortable and familiar with: smaller, niche subs on Reddit that have good mods, even despite how Reddit admins control things from above.
I wish we had more like Ada here. But we don't, so please just enjoy having her where you are at and don't take her for granted:-).
It's not about hiding it, it's about bending knee and placating tyrants.
Looks like it's getting close to the Streisand kiss of death.