Oh man I don’t know how I would use this place if I couldn’t block communities. First few weeks I try to use Lemmy every single post was just memes so I’d end up blocking like two dozen communities to stop it.

Me too but clearly Lemmy.ml doesn’t like me xD

*Besides the ones your instance has defederated from

When the admins spend more time banning people for speaking against fascist russia than developing lemmy it doesn’t matter what the userbase is like. And not wanting to participate in an instance where the admins religiously scan every comment for wrongthink is pretty reasonable and not tribalism.

It’s full of Tankies spewing disinformation and ban you for moderate stances. Take their news community for example.

I don’t have anything against .ml users as a whole. As you say, every instance has its bad apples.

But .ml has the most hostile and heavy-handed admins of any instance I know of. It makes it impossible to have real conversations because talking about certain topics will get you instantly banned from the whole instance. It’s not about socialism either. In fact that’s part of the problem—I’m a leftist myself who would like to discuss leftism there and I used to enjoy doing so, but at this point that’s only possible if you follow the admin’s ideological beliefs on practically everything to a tee. It’s a toxic environment where real conversations can’t take place.

Ignoring reality doesn’t make it less true. Certain groups of people or environments are worse than others, acting like that isn’t reality is pretty naive.

If there was a pro slavery, racist group would you say they deserve to be respected, of course not. There is a line, we just disagree on where it is. And calling that disagreement tribalism is simply trying to hand wave away valid criticism.

I’m only an idiot when I fully intend to be one.

This is the biggest flaw with Lemmy at the moment.

I think I’m on my 4th account . Mods tend to block me befor I block them, because I don’t adhere to tribal rules.

I’m probably anarchist / socialist politically but I call out bullshit when I see it. People don’t like that.

Moving communities is always an option.

We moved !casualconversation@lemmy.world to !casualconversation@lemm.ee a while ago, it worked fine, it’s even more active now that it used to be as there is no delay due to LW size

For me it was a blanket ban that finally caused me to unsubscribe from every ml community. If it wasn’t for that then it might be OK to keep hosting a non-political sub but the censorship over there is so aggressive and widespread that it’s very difficult to avoid.

I would say think about migration because if anything the problem is getting worse over time.

I do agree that art subs in general are among the most politics-free areas of lemmy, (speaking as a moderator of traditional art)

Thanks for this info, I didn’t realize you could block an entire instance.

You are a very active poster here, so moving it to that instance would also be convenient in case you need to mod

Also, that instance is very well managed, always impressed with the other services they offer.

Based on the comments, it seems like we should definitely suggest this. Would you like to make a meta post or do I do it?

DBZero is a great option if you like something slightly edgy

Meanwhile the Hexbear users saying that “crackers” should be murdered are welcome to continue their discussions on .ml.

Our based opinions aren’t allowed over there. You have to bend left until your view is broken.

Same, but Gyna.

I only block communities. I don’t want to see half of conversations, and haven’t encountered a whole server where they refuse to admin properly.

That’s bc you are an established user who knows their way around how to use Lemmy. Perhaps you even use Arch btw? (/s, but only partway, bc those of who enjoy the customizability of Linux really are a breed apart from the mainstream, in terms of our value judgements in particular)

However new users to Lemmy find it very off-putting. Also, people in the USA are touchy, watching our democracy crumble before our very eyes - there is something like a 50% chance that it won’t survive even though the next year, regardless of who wins, but if it does, then we’ll simply repeat all of this again in the next one, and so on. So for those of us who watched e.g. Innuendo Studios’ The Alt Right Playbook, to now see those identical patterns of behaviors on display (by “tankies” or whoever), is more than a little disconcerting.

And tbf, the likes of lemmy.ml is nothing at all on the scale of Lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net. So if you want to remain federated with some or all of those, then power to you and I am very glad that you can enjoy your time on the Fediverse.

However, not all of us are in the same boat and some of us would rather only see the half of the conversation that we don’t have to mentally parse and decode what it means before we throw it away. Without having to block hundreds of individual trolls I mean. Ofc we are prevented from doing so since user level defederation does not exist, and the only instance I’ve ever even so much as heard of that blocks all of the big 3 is Lemmy.cafe. So rather than wait for Sublinks/PieFed/Mbin to improve, perhaps I should move there?

Maybe this is all intellectual laziness? I dunno, I truly don’t, but also I don’t see the harm in allowing people to have their preferences met?

I just know I am capable of recognizing a shit take on politics anywhere

Not when the “shit take” in question is the arbitrary, capricious, unjustified removal of thoughtful, insightful, accurate, reasonable posts and comments. You (generally) can’t recognize the “shit take” of removing good content unless you spend all day reading the mod logs.

Fwiw, lemmy.cafe defederated from lemmy.ml, and is even running a 0.19.6 beta codebase so even if there’s only a single admin they seem really on the ball.

Tesseract also has implemented a way to ban all users from lemmy.ml.

And PieFed allows personal bans on any custom instance you choose. Plus it has “categories” of communities so that you don’t have to keep searching on All, though you can do that too if you want. It seems really polished these days! Not 100% - e.g. you can’t easily search for a user in the same form as a keyword - but it looks extremely usable, so I am switching to it today.

Meanwhile, on Lemmy we were promised that 0.19.3 would allow user blocking of instances, which turned out to be not quite true, and when your instance upgrades from that to 0.19.6 when it comes out (most other instances, like mine, are already running 0.19.5), the protections that it offers will be further rolled back - e.g. on 0.19.3 I did not receive notifications from those users, whereas now on 0.19.5 I do.

And maybe some apps allow blocking of an instance, I dunno about that aspect.

Lemmy.ml was one of the first instances in the Fediverse… but that doesn’t mean that we should be forced to listen to the stuff spewing forth from it unless we choose that for ourselves, especially in the next few months as the trolls go into overdrive due to the ongoing USA election (and likely subsequent “constitutional crisis” event).

Anyway, I just wanted you to know that there are options! Not many, but they do exist!:-)

Pasting from another comment in this thread:

The only way I know how to ditch the users, besides blocking each one individually, would be to make a new account on either dubvee.org or Lemmy.cafe where all 3 of the big 3 are completely defederated. Think of those instances as troll-blockers, working hard to keep the Fediverse pleasant to converse in:-).