Mastodon, apparently /s

Show up at 6:00 to find out!

Thank you for voicing your support.

Survivorship bias: those who live through the encounter have lowered stress.😁

Pure water would be bad, but salt somehow works, just like going to the beach (even if you are thousands of miles away:-D).

It is such a fantastic series, which goes so much deeper than TOS or TNG were able to.

You are also going to enjoy Babylon Five as well, but imho DS9 is so much better.:-)

Try squirting salt water. No, really!:-)

Something that really helped me understand is Innuendo Studios’ The Alt Right Playbook, especially if you, like me, have a more literal mindset and communication style.

Basically, there is a lot more going on than shows on the surface, and it helps explain how people who don’t oppose a fascist movement will ultimately end up bringing it about, bc of the insidious nature of how those types of movements come about. You’ve heard the saying “First they came for…”, but this helps explain when and where and how that applies.

Even so, I’m not advocating here for the trans movement, which as you say has caused such pushback among centrists and basically along with the economy is one of the major tenants that propelled Trump to win - and more importantly also conservatives all across the nation and thereby into controlling the House of Representatives and the Senate - I’m just trying to keep my reply brief enough to be readable. i.e. there are most definitely counterarguments that could be raised to the precepts explained in that video series, but on the other hand it does such an enormously stupendous job at explaining the basics that I think it would behoove you to start there, then see how it applies to irl. Aka, it is worth watching all of it even if you find yourself disagreeing with some of the points along the way.

And one reason for that is that Lemmy skews more towards a European audience, which represents a much more heavily liberal viewpoint, whereas the USA skews more towards conservative. Hence a “centrist” from the USA is treated by Europeans as a “conservative” would be inside of the USA, which is exactly what you are seeing happen to your communications. And this video series will help explain why. Right or wrong (and I think the series is pretty spot on, note that it barely mentions the trans issue per SE as it is more about general concepts than specific applications of them, and each one of the latter will ofc have its own unique challenges - e.g. what “right” does anyone have to demand usage of any particular words to describe them, or to regulate thoughts inside of my head!? but again, save such thoughts for later, after getting up to speed on the general concepts), that series will help you to understand the European POV and thereby to communicate more effectively with this audience.

Also you may want to start your own centrist community if instead of wanting to learn how to converse more with people on Lemmy overall you are looking more for people who already share your particular views. I think especially after the election people inside the USA may be more reluctant to talk about such but who knows. I see a !centrist@lemm.ee that you could post to and try to revive.

Thank you for sharing your story - it helps to hear such perspectives:-).

The incident where the mod said to the poster that he wanted to kill / shoot him, and that he hoped the OP would die soon was on !stardewvalley@lemmy.ml - a game community that afaik people would not expect to have a “struggle session” on (nor do I see how such language would be helpful even if it were?).

And hexbears constantly brigade people in other communities too, sometimes self-admittedly switching to their alts that allows them to get around Lemmy.World’s defederation of their hexbear accounts.

These problems go far beyond one or two communities - they are institutional in what their admins allow, and sometimes even encourage. e.g. in this post I find this language very revealing:

As an admin team we have never wanted to prioritize growth, and we wanted to give federation with liberal instances a try, however we consider providing a safer browsing experience for marginalized users more important than the opportunity to dunk.

Not the opportunity to talk with, discourse, engage in Socratic dialogue alongside, or communicate via back and forth exchange of messages, but “the opportunity to dunk” (implication: onto them, sharing with them the righteousness of your own cause, but in a manner not to convince and rather to look down upon while doing). Is it a wonder then that every conversation with them feels adversarial, when the very self-stated purpose (sidebar text and messages like these from the admins) of hexbear is to provide its users “the opportunity to dunk”?

It also is confusing to people to not see the instance name in the blocklist and yet not be able to access those communities either, so there’s a transparency issue with that approach. Thank you for sharing it though - I thought that StarTrek.Website had been trying something funky all on their own as I tried to diagnose this issue with Farid there (in DMs), not realizing that was a provision in the Lemmy codebase. Still, while I don’t think it’s a viable solution to this problem, either for hexbear.net or for lemmy.ml, it is good to know that it exists:-).

That’s a megathread so it makes a bit of sense to be written in a different style. The comments are… odd yes, but I don’t care about “oddness” - I am weird myself and celebrate that fact!

AI or human, I only care if they are “toxic”, i.e. follow our rules of behavior to encourage rather than shut down conversations.

I tried as well, until I realized the same.

The instance block feature is misnamed imho - it only blocks communities on that instance, but as you see the users can still reply to you, triggering notifications, and vote to influence the visibility of your content.

As it should be for any member of the Fediverse, except they do not abide by the rules set forth on most instances, nor are we able to block them, leaving defederation as the only, last resort.

They will still continue to come, via their alts, but it will still help a bit, like having a spam filter for Lemmy - every step helps.

Thank you for adding not just your vote but your voice.

Well ofc he is NOW!? !? !?:-P

Totally agree on the “alternative facts” point, though I wanted to add that tbf I think what they are using the word liberal as a negative for is how it does not go far enough. Which… it doesn’t. e.g. in the USA, neither conservatives nor liberals are doing much of anything at all to stop gun violence i.e. school shootings.

However, after that is when they lose people I think, espousing that nothing short of violent upheaval of all society will ever work - although would even that work, when the other side has all the guns and technology and money and power and at this point even legality on their side?

Hexbears most often use a number of childish argumentation forms - such as “bOtH sIdEs EqUaL” - as extremely well-explained (imho) in Innuendo Studios’ The Alt Right Playbook series. That is aimed at explaining how conservatives such as Elon Musk and Joe Rogan and Alex Jones and The_Donald talk, but I notice those identical patterns in arguments from supposed “leftists” on hexbear.net and to a lesser degree lemmy.ml also.

Although to be clear, that is not why I want to defederate from them. Why I want to be able to block them - which Lemmy software does not allow except for full defederation - is that in addition to their childish forms of argumentation, their behavior is also childish as well, and more precisely they often act as trolls, notably even outside of those well-known communities where such behaviors are encouraged by their admins and mods. If they want to refuse to learn from history - and thereby be doomed to repeat it - that is their choice, but I don’t like how they are taking all of Lemmy down that path along with them, especially when new users who don’t know much about “instances” can’t tell the difference and just thinks of all of Lemmy as “that place where trolls are allowed to exist”.

1. yeah, for those of us who stuck around here it’s already in the past
2. so far this has happened 100% of the time I’ve told people about Lemmy irl - they not only don’t join us but they outright chide me for even having mentioned it, always citing the “political extremism” that they see, which I thought was odd b/c while it’s here it’s easy to block and not that prevalent, EXCEPT…
3. DYK that in a Google search, the top hit for “Lemmy” that is an actual instance (4th hit for me) is indeed “lemmy.ml”, which notably offers a default sort of Local rather than All - so indeed the anti-capitalistic, anti-Western society propaganda (apparently) IS precisely what people see when they search for “Lemmy”
4. A DuckDuckGo search will show first Lemmy.World, but how many mainstream normies will use that approach rather than Google? Lemmy has a huge reputation problem, and it doesn’t help that a new user can simply walk into CTH or the_dunk_tank and experience all of that first-hand - and worse yet, there really is no way (short of defederation) to block all the users from an instance that encourages such behaviors.

Thank you - I am glad that you will give it serious consideration, which ofc will take awhile.

I am too tired right now to figure out why this isn’t 9 hours+lunch.