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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[–] JupiterRowland@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 day ago

Unlike Lemmy, Mastodon has on-boarding for dumb-dumbs.

Imagine you could simply load an app named "Lemmy" onto your phone. You launch it. You can enter a name, a mail address and a password. There's a field that says, "Server," and it already defaults to lemmy.ml. You don't even have to touch it. You can ignore it. And you're done.

Of course, the consequence would be lemmy.ml still being the biggest server by far.

This is literally how Mastodon's on-boarding goes. Only that the default server, owned and operated by the makers of Mastodon, is mastodon.social (it's about one third of Mastodon and some 22% of the whole Fediverse in terms of monthly active users), and you have two names on Mastodon, a short name for your Fediverse ID and a display name.

There are Mastodon newbies who take months to understand that Mastodon is not just one central website (that mastodon.social is not "the" Mastodon website). Or one central server infrastructure hiding behind a phone app. And many take years to understand that the Fediverse is more than just Mastodon. Some have joined in October or November, 2022, after Elon Musk had bought out Twitter, and who still believe that the Fediverse equals Mastodon.

All because they don't have to deal with any of this when joining.