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...

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[–] dustyData@lemmy.world 4 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

This is just an example. They are usually toxic and combative if anyone even slightly disagrees with the echo chamber. The post I took the image from has half of their comments deleted by mods. I've had a couple of instances of harassment, spam and threats. Always users from .ml

But back to the point. Suicide is complex, and again, it has nothing to do with welfare state either. One of the most baffling things about suicide is that it's rate of incidence is also independent of access to mental health care, suicide is almost independent from most of the typical socioeconomic factors we can think of. Look at Guyana and Uruguay. Exactly the same suicide rate. One is a country with development challenges, widespread poverty, troubled government, impoverished health care infrastructure and difficulty with access to mental health. The other is a wealthy country, with a long history of development, strong welfare state with great upward class mobility and mental health pioneers on the region. Both exact same suicide rate.

[–] mildseason@sopuli.xyz 4 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Wow yeah you're right! How interesting. Do you think there's a stigma around suicide which prevents people from seeking help when it is actually available?

[–] dustyData@lemmy.world -2 points 3 days ago

Interestingly, social stigma is one of the somewhat associated factors. But not the way one would think of: high stigma equals high suicide rate. Instead social stigma skews statistical data available. Somewhat under or over reporting. Essentially the more stigma around suicide, and also mental health, the less reliable the data. It is similar to how social attitudes about sexual violence distort the reliability of statistics about rape.