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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[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 1 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Isn't that only PieFed.zip, but not Lemmy.zip that has the default instance blocks? I am fairly certain that this is the case, but even so could still be wrong:-).

Tangentially, the transparency surrounding this issue is abysmal.

Oh, it is also remotely possible that simply nobody on that instance has signed up to those communities yet - it requires at least one local subscriber to pull in new content.

Another possibility is the admins having blocked the specific communities even if not the entire instance. There is no way to tell which these are, as the Lemmy devs decided to not expose that information to users (fwiw, neither does PieFed).

[–] swizzlestick@lemmy.zip 0 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Unsure about our piefed side, but default blocks are definitely in for the Lemmy end. See this post:

https://lemmy.zip/post/43

To help new users settle in to Lemmy, we’ve added some of what we call “Default Blocks” to your account. These are instances where the content is quite graphic (NSFW) or very political in nature.

[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 0 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Oh that's really neat, thanks for sharing!!:-)

From other comments here, I am piecing together the fact that - probably since instance blocks don't truly exist in Lemmy - the Lemmy side implements these blocks as "community" ones, while the PieFed side either does the same and I simply did not comprehend the difference at the time or else it might use PieFed's instance blocking functionality. Someone on the PieFed side could test this by looking at this OP to see if comments from people on a blocked-by-default instance (Hexbear.net?) are visible, since those would be hidden by an instance block but not a community one.

Either way, having such optional functionality even further strengthens my respect of the .zip pair of instances - those admins seem really on the ball, working hard to truly care for the people who join:-). Lemmy vs. PieFed software seems far less relevant than having such a great admin team vs. not.

[–] swizzlestick@lemmy.zip 2 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

Rick and the gang do look after us well, and always pop in monthly with server stats & news etc.

I feel like we've got the balance right by leaving some training wheels on for the more contentious topics, with the user choosing to remove the blocks if it pleases them to do so.

[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 0 points 4 days ago

Which makes it the only instance on the entire Threadiverse that does that, afaik.