Ask Lemmy

Don’t let the crazies make you self censor.

You see, your problem is that you left a comment on a .ml instance that doesn't align with the hive mind. Those are places where someone will look you dead in the eye and tell you with the upmost certainty that China is a utopia and North Korea is the free-est country in the world. Tis a silly place

I am probably gonna find a pipebomb in my mailbox

Ah, you must have encountered some tankies. I finally got tired of it and just blocked hexbear and .ml stuff. My lemmy experience is much better without it.

The world has a propaganda problem. Fediverse is in the world.

Noob mistake. Been there done that. I'm banned from .ml for saying China bad. Welcome to the team

Ive been here less than a week and have encountered multiple extremists, schizo level posts, and just ludicrous positions to take.

It's clear that things like moderates and centrism dont have much of a home here.

It is what it is but ill say this.

Do not be afraid to just block them, theres not that many people here.

I could just be paranoid but I’m fairly convinced the responses weren’t from patriotic citizens. I think they were paid trolls or bots

Possibly. Me personally, I'm not getting paid to post. Not yet. I'm working up to that. Eventually, I plan to print out pro-China comments I've made and fax them to the Chinese embassy in the hopes that they'll hire me. For now, I'm just padding out my CV.

This whole conspiracy theory is so bonkers. Lemmy was created by communists. You look inside, you find communists, and then it's all this "What!? People who disagree with me!? On the internet!?!?!? Impossible! They must be paid secret agents!!!!"

If you want to avoid the existential horror of realizing that people exist with different views from you, different instances have different user experiences, and you're free to choose one that doesn't federate with communists.

How to reduce Fediverse propaganda by 80% or more:

Note: Replace "lemmy.world" in the URL with your instance. e.g. https://your-instance.xyz/settings

If your instance isn't already de-federated from them, repeat for lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net and/or hexbear.com - whichever they use these days.

the world is full of useful idiots who derive meaning from being propaganda parrots.

it sucks, but just block them. they aren't going away, and in their POV you are the propagandist.

Do they come from lemmy.ml? Just ignore them and move on, to them tearing down the Berlin wall was a mistake.

I see it as a bit of a problem that the biggest communities are in .ml . As a new user if you look up communities based on your interests you basically end up with half your subscriptions being .ml

Depends very much on the instances and connected instances you interact with.

I haven't seen it excessively or broadly in the way you describe. I've seen strong one-sided and often ideological or presumptuous opinions on some tech topics, which may not be deliberate or orchestrated propaganda, but kinda works the same.

If you want to look into or try a save space, take a look at beehaw.org.

Otherwise, I'd check your instance's policies and whether they disconnect from certain other Lemmy instances.

Regarding your self-perception, given your thoughtful, well-formulated, and mindful text here, I believe you that your comments were mindful and not excessively wrong or disrespectful.

Lemmy has a echo chamber problem.

People don't want to challenge their beliefs, their want a space in which all agree on the same stupid thing.

When I joined I was curious about how Lemmy/federation works. When it was explained to me it was said that with this approach there will be no one big Hitler who controls the discourse.

I had a hunch that this means that we will just get a bunch of smaller Hitlers. And... Well..

The problem in itself is that Lemmy means that you host a whole bunch of communities. Thats to much power concentrated in one place.

It should be that everyone hosts one community and all communities can talk to each other.

Then an Ideologie wouldn't have a one-stop-for-all place to fester.

Everyone of us is an idiot in some way. We need other people with different views to make us aware of our idiocy. Otherwise we stay ignorant and stupid.

So I don't think you interacted with bots. You interacted with cultists.

It's usually pro-Russian or pro-Chinese tankies that you can disregard readily as MAGAts. They're worse than that to me, they're pretending to be left for freedom when they're boot lickers.

My favorite though was when I spelled tanki wrong and left it because it was cute, and they were outraged that I would spell it wrong more so than calling them tanki.

Widdle tanki got a sad sad that someone was mean to poo poo