piefed.zeromedia.vipThe Wikipedia page for the fediverse describes a den of iniquity
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse#Design
Call me crazy, but I a) think the fediverse probably doesn't have more 'toxic content', harmful and violent content, and child sexual abuse material then other platforms like X, Facebook, Meta, YouTube etc, and b) actively like the fediverse because of that.
But after a few hours carefully drafting and sourcing an edit to make it clear that no, the fediverse isn't unusual in social media circles for having a lot of toxic content, I realised that the entire 'fediverse bad' section was added by 1 editor in 2 days.
And the editor has made an awful lot of edits on pages all themed around porn (hundreds of edits on the pages of porn stars), suicide, mass killings, mass shootings, Jews, torture techniques, conspiracy theories, child abuse, various forms of sexual and other exploitation, 'zoosadism', and then pages with titles like 'bad monkey' that seemed reasonably innocent until I actually clicked on them to see what they were and, well.
I decided to stop using the internet for a while.
I've learned my lesson trying to change Wikipedia edits written by people like that - they tend to have a tight social circle of people who can make the internet a very unpleasant place for anyone suggesting maybe claims like 'an opinion poll indicated that most people in Britain would prefer to live next to a sewage plant than a Muslim' should maybe not on Wikipedia on the thin evidence of paywalled link from a Geocities page written by, apparently, a putrid cesspit personified.
I thought I'd learned my lesson about trusting Wikipedia.
It just makes me so angry that most people's main source of information on the fediverse contains a massive chunk written solely by a guy who spends most of his time making minor grammar edits to pages about school shootings, collections of pages about black people who were sexually assaulted and murdered, etc, and that these people control the narrative on Wikipedia by means of ensuring any polite critics' are overcome with the urge to spend the rest of the day showering and disinfecting everything.
It's pretty toxic toward right-wing pieces of shit that espouse hate toward minorities, women and queer people. As it should be.
And reddit has shifted from that using auto-moderation I think
it looks like somebody who just saw this post edited wikipedia for the first time to remove that. this is why wikipedia's wonderful: it's that easy. i have this quirk where i wanna debate anyone who distrusts wikipedia or claim its rigidity
They did! The change log shows the main section of 'I found a single paper criticising the fediverse so here's 600 words on how terrible the concept is', and also reassured me that I wasn't just being lazy in not wanting to trawl through the text to edit it to be less awful.
I'm bizarrely excited about it too. You can't thank anonymous Wikipedia editors, so I'll throw a vague 'thank you!' out into the world and try to pay it forward.
My next battle: figuring out why I can't edit this post, lol (maybe a mobile problem) and long term, why I didn't think of 'just edit it anonymously'.
lmao wait until it's reverted, argued over, then the editor gets banned.
go on, show me
My ip got banned despite never editing wikipedia, never even reading the talk.
I have seen worse stuff on Instagram and Reddit than I have seen on the fediverse... and I use the fediverse far more.
That's just how the internet works.
As with Wikipedia, I saw the same stuff with articles regarding religious topics that were just heavily guarded by a neckbeard atheist who had unreasonable expectations.
Today you learned any idiot can edit Wikipedia and it is mostly done by pro government entities.
Even worse.
A lot of it just seems to be done by trolls.
Every now and again they have a big push to get more editors from more sections of society and normal humans, because a majority of the edits are done by a small amount of people, and these people spend so much time doing that that they don't have much time for things like jobs, hobbies, socialisation, etc.
They are doing a great service, and most of them are great editors, but they are very very online and aren't always interested in Wikipedia being a collaboration of people from all walks of life.
So they manage to get more random people to make an account and make their own first little edits, and then half those random people get yelled at for not following some hidden rules or for disagreeing with Big Mike who doesn't like to be corrected or whatever and, surprise surprise, most people whose first experience editing Wikipedia never try again.
The ones who stay are the dogged, determined ones, or the ones who don't really care about criticism, and thus the cycle continues.
Seriously though, small time editors are absolutely essential to keep Wikipedia (reasonably) honest and unbiased.
Literally anyone can contribute to the world's biggest shared knowledge hub, and if you're not a troll, a dick, a shill or an extremist then your contribution is really, really valuable.
If you see any page that has incorrect info, or anything that's missing information that you know, or even some clunky grammar or out of date references, please do consider making an edit.
There are a bunch of best practice guidelines on editing (that aren't always very accessible) but the main ethos is to do what you can in good faith and don't sweat the red tape. Someone else can come along afterwards and tidy formatting up or send you a message saying 'hey, I've reverted your edit because you need a source / this type of source / you accidentally replaced the entire page on astrophysics with an emoji', and they'll link to the guidelines you need to follow if so.
I'd love to say it'll be fun and chill and once you've realised how easy it is you'll be evangelical about it.
If you edit a totally innocuous page, it probably will be.
But it's the internet, so there are all sorts of people including the knobs, so I'll just say - by widening the pool of editors you will be benefitting Wikipedia whatever your actual edit is, and by ignoring any argumentative bastards you'll be adding to the majority of Wikipedia editors who are normal human beings and not, well, argumentative bastards.
(Obviously if you are actually an argumentative bastard troll, no offence meant, I hope you have a great life but the applications to be a Wikipedia editor are sadly closed and honestly it's not worth it 😀)
Financial interests pay people to edit.
Mysteriously my ip is banned from editing when I tried to view talk on a suspect edit, even though I have never once edited a page or even accessed that part by this ip. None on former ip's either.
Ip is on some shady brazillian blacklist so maybe that is it idk, everyone just trusting shady internet players.
Beware of unearned knowledge.
You "lose" 100% of the battles that you choose not to fight.
Besides, people here are reporting that the content is already gone. Even if it comes back, it likely will bounce around back and forth but not return to this same state, so this was transient.
Even so, it seems not wrong? "toxic or abusive content being common in the Fediverse", regardless of how precisely that is measured, seems entirely accurate to me. YOU (and I) may choose to block such content, in part by being on an instance that enacts this choice for us, but that does not mean that such does not exist. Head on over to Chapotraphouse@hexbear.net to get a taste of what the Fediverse offers. It does exist, and while Lemmy.World defederated from it, so many other instances including Lemm.ee did not. Or Lemmygrad.ml.
It is so easy to forget about what was shoved under the rug, but the Fediverse is more like 4chan than most of us care to admit. Just because there are no Nazis currently standing in your little corner of a Nazi bar does not mean that you can invite your Jewish friends over to walk (safely) through the front door.
The Fediverse can be quite toxic. So much so that I've entirely stopped recommending it to people irl. We need to be more acceptable to people if we want to change our image, not just pretend that we are fine.
Sounds like you should be recommending specific instances rather than just generally recommending the fediverse.
Which one?
Which instance defederates from all of the tankie instances, and is not already overloaded i.e. Lemmy.world? Also, the name "Lemmy" has tankie implications that most Redditors flee from - hence why so many of us came first to Kbin instead.
Since none such existed, I helped create one by petitioning Discuss.Online to defederate at least from hexbear.net, even though doing so with lemmy.ml is a lost cause. It was successful, and now you can recommend it if you like.
Although America has imploded now and I no longer recommend any USA-based servers, even to people based in the USA themselves (as the average Redditor tends to be).
Though PieFed gives me much stronger hope for the future of the Threadiverse. People still need to set up blocks for instances like Lemmy.ml and politics communities if they want to avoid toxicity though. And even then, it seems virtually impossible these days to read the comments in even a news post that does not include at least one call for murder of someone or another. People have strong opinions, and want to vent! Therefore, highly ironically, leaving no space existing where someone can discuss politics or even news (or for some reason even memes?!) without the toxicity. I am not being a Karen here bc I am telling nobody what to do - only reflecting what I see.
Can you show a recent example? I don't follow news communities, but it seems surprising that every news post would have a call for murder
This deal with Charlie Kirk has people on edge, although so too did Luigi, and the Presidential election, and so on.
Yes here's an example from today - I just sorted News posts by active and scrolled down to find a post with >100 comments on it:
6 hours ago one person said (referring to USA Vice President JD Vance, the subject of the OP)
And someone replied:
Neither received any downvotes, and the latter reply received more upvotes than the one I quoted above it. Am I wrong to interpret that the reply is suggesting that it is unfortunate that the guy has not yet been shot in the throat? Involuntarily in case I need to add that, i.e. not euthanasia but non-consensual killing aka what most centrists would call "murder" (although I am not wanting to debate whether other definitions such as "justice" might also or even rather apply).
Of course it could be a "joke", though isn't the recipient just as much the party who determines what a message means as the sender? If it is a "joke" (possibly as in "haha jk except not really"), then there are an enormous number of such, and have been for quite awhile now - especially "joking" about how Luigi needs to save people, joking about the fact that a second amendment exists in the USA, joking about how people can conveniently die in non-murderous ways e.g. their liver goes out (see the posts about the recent Steve Bannon announcement), and just overall about how death is a good thing so long as it happens to "them", the "other side" (again, I'm not wanting to get into whether it's deserved, just stating here that such is being discussed, since these topics relate to how centrists from Reddit would view the Lemmy platform).
These kinds of things are likely to get Lemmy banned from the USA as the authoritarian program proceeds forward, but that is a separate issue from centrists (including those who think of themselves as leftists, not realizing what that means when recalibrated on a more global scale) and most especially conservatives (e.g. in the USA, that are currently using Reddit) feeling welcomed here.
So anyway that was the first such post that I examined. The next post has even more egregious and obvious comments, such as this one, from a whole week ago so at this point seems extremely unlikely to be removed by a mod and even if it were, it has already long served its purpose:
(And then s whole discussion ensues about just how okay it is to kill people. Other more... "circumspect" comments to that same OP include such things as "The 2nd amendment works for all sides."
So far this is 100% of the first 2 posts I have examined, so let's move on to #3. Yup, I immediately spot this really cute picture of a cat depicting someone being beheaded, in response to the statement "the aristocrats!", itself in response to something deleted by a Moderator. So this makes 3 of 3 posts, still a perfect 100%. And I did not have to reference anything from any tankie instances (where the frequency is surely much higher), or anything removed or likely at this time to ever be removed by a moderator, one even having been from a week ago. Seriously, calling for shooting/beheading/otherwise killing "the enemy" are extremely common here. You have undergone extreme efforts to avoid seeing it, I understand, but it does exist, and new people visiting here can notice it, not knowing to expect this level of vitriol. Tbf even Reddit these days is exploding with calls to Luigi people, they just work much harder to repress it - which I am not saying is a good outcome, my only interest here lies in explaining what *is*, not what *should be*.
Filtered by Top Day on slrpnk
- https://slrpnk.net/post/27764242?scrollToComments=true article about Kirk, no calls for murder
- https://slrpnk.net/post/27736416?scrollToComments=true article about billionaires, didn't find call to murder
- https://slrpnk.net/post/27745688?scrollToComments=true Disney and Kimmel, no call to murder
All of those posts are mere hours old, and shown from an instance that has defederated from Hexbear and Lemmygrad. And even there, I definitely see calls for outright murder, such as this one, although here it was fortunately caught and removed by a mod:
That post was of very limited / niche interest though, with only 17 comments total. If you want to disprove my wording that "all" posts have such calls, you can easily find several posts with 0 comments, which obviously disproves my wording choice:-). And likewise those with 1-20 comments - among a community that often has hundreds (e.g. this post from just 10 days ago has >1500) - is low-interest.
This is why I avoided using "Hot", especially within a 1-day time period. But following your lead, I sorted by "Top Week", and was going to ignore anything from just the last single day, although all of the top 4 posts are older than that so that makes things easier. The top one could be a bit of a bad example but like in response to "Shoot 'em. Problem gone!" has "it is also a way to end conservatism… just sayin…" - but this one is much more likely to TRULY be a joke, in the spirit of that whole post in general, or at worst a venting of steam (although further down people are talking about "Solutions" that involve "electrowhatever or guns, which seem like the two bodies of knowledge a solution would come from." - note that guns are very ineffective tools to affect non-violent means of resistance or to destroy property, and chiefly are used to KILL PEOPLE aka "murder"). Another one there is literally "shoot the fascists", another is "if you need some tips on making firearms out of things easily lifted from home depo, I’m your man", others stop short of advocating outright murder but still do things inching towards that end such as "When do we start rounding up all the Faux execs and the on-air talent ... When do we start doxxing those that support Faux by watching Faux, and start getting THEM fired?" - granted it starts as "fired" but the reply immediately carries it forward with "And then those high profile people would start losing their homes and lives. I would celebrate that as justice served." The latter is admittedly a stretch to say advocation for actual murder directly, but it is like one millimeter indirectly removed from it so as part of this whole batch I will include it here.
So using your procedure, though skipping over posts that are less than or only a day old, I have added one more to the pile. We are at 4 out of 4 so far, or 4 out of 5 if you want to count the Hawaii one as a false positive. Moving on to the next one I see like "I would straight up start busting windows out of any vehicle with trump stickers." - which tbf is not murder, just terrorism/violence. So yeah, this one has no calls to murder that I saw. So this is 4 out of 6.
Next is this one - and I am getting tired so going to rush through this one. There are a BUNCH of comments describing guns like "He is saying arm yourself while it is legal, so you have weapons for when you need them to fight off bad people in designer uniforms… Roughly translated.", "2A for all. Time to resist in other ways". Again these are describing guns not infrastructure-destroying or people-convincing tools, but tools to involuntarily kill people aka murder. So this is 5 out of 7.
Certainly not 100% though, if that is your mark. Which would be fair on your part b/c my literal wording called for it by stating "it seems virtually impossible these days to read the comments in even a news post that does not include at least one call for murder of someone or another.", and my hyperbolic exaggeration is clearly false (in my defense I did not mean per-post but rather like "all the content that I read in a day will include at least one call for murder", but I did not clarify so that's on me). Again, any post that has 0 comments would already have disproven it, as too is any comment with very small number of comments or interest, etc. However, it still seems true that well over half of all the current most active or top weekly posts from News@lemmy.world contain calls for using weapons to kill people or the lesser version of at least celebrating death of "the enemy" however it may happen, even if depicted in cutesy pictures of cats frolicking. Separating aside any judgement of good or bad or neutral or "it's waaaaay more complicated than any of that", it is going to be a turn-off for some people.
Also I looked at meme communities again for Top Weekly and of course the top several posts are all about politics and news, though I am too tired to go through hundreds more comments looking for calls to murder in them as well, even in "memes" communities. It seems likely that they are there somewhere though? Also, we didn't even begin to go looking into the whole Gaza situation... or Ukraine/Russia, or any of the myriad others. I am confident that if you look, you will easily find it. Now in brand-new posts and not in the Hawaii one for sure, but such calls do appear here and there, around the wide Threadiverse.
Hexbear is incredible and you're a cretin for equivalating an instance of goofy trans communists with Nazis.
"The Fediverse isnt squeaky clean, look at Hexbear!!" says the .world poster as he continues to sponsor genocide and imperialism with his rhetoric.
Honestly with how .world removes talks genocide makes them just as guilty as they claim Hexbear is.
It's pretty cool being a member of a den of iniquity.
Meh. I'm holding out for wretched hive of scum and villainy.
I can bring villainy and snacks, maybe some sandwiches or something?
Just wanted to bring up that when its one person and recent you can do a revision to revert to where it was and give a reason why that editor is griefing. Did it a few times on an article of a book called intelligence of dogs and some person took the article to be its about the intelligence of dog breeds (I mean it was in the context of the book and study done) and would change the list. I would revert with a link to what the book had and a comment that the article is about a book and if they wanted it different to run their own damn study and publish it in their own damn book.
Yeah, that generally sounds good.
In this case though, it had been up for 6 months and a lot of people had edited the page since, so I wasn't sure how that would work.
And, to be honest, cowardice 🤣
I don't know if it's just the sort of pages I've edited, but I've found the number 1 indicator for when a reversion will get pushback is when it was put there by someone with an unholy amount of edits that have a troll / far right / aggressive theme.
Some people only seem to edit controversial topics, and some push really weird theories and will argue every bizarre claim as nauseum, some are very free with personal insults, and most are totally normal people.
But the ones who've made a slightly odd, vaguely political edit to a reasonably banal page, and when you leave a polite discussion on the talk page and carefully edit it to remove the most inflammatory bits they just revert your edit within a couple of minutes - I've had a terrible time with them.
Always, they revert your edit and then either make another minor edit right afterwards, or some other account / anonymous comes in and makes a minor edit, within 2 minutes of theirs.
And when you check their history and see a vast majority of their edits are on X rated pages, in my experience that means you're never going to win.
Every edit you make will be reverted within minutes. If they put anything on the talk page it will be exactly as personally offensive as you can get without being outright ban-able. And their shadow account will be along right after every comment or action to agree.
It's exhausting, and it totally made me lose faith in Wikipedia. I know there are channels to report that, but I've found that they take months and the discussion is like 'yeah that was out of line but they've made so many non offensive edits, maybe they were having a bad day?' with the odd essay-length barrage of insults from new accounts that are always deleted, but just remind me that it's so easy to just create a new account for bad faith purposes that what's the point wading through all this aggro just to make sure one user gets a stern talking to on one of his many accounts, for the sake of a line or two on a page about a topic you're not that interested in.
Sorry for the tragic novella lol, it just really annoys me.
Wikipedia could have been so great, but for the fact that trolls and bad actors don't worry about following the rules, certainly don't mind conflict, and can write 50 pages worth of bullshit in the time it takes an honest person to fact check the first paragraph, let alone the time and effort it takes to edit stuff by the correct channels.
And when you argue with them, that's what they enjoy. They can wear people down just by being odious, and even if enough people wade in to help you out and waste their time arguing with someone who's being deliberately inflammatory, and everyone agrees that yes the page on trees shouldn't be mostly about lynching black people or whatever - that page is going to be edited again by a new account within days.
All the decent people stand to win is a temporary, hard fought knowledge that a tiny piece of the internet isn't quite as toxic as it was before, and will be again, and they lose so much energy and good will if they don't like arguing. And for the dickheads, the entire thing is win-win.
I don't know how to prevent that, other than a much stricter attitude to anonymous/ new account edits and offensive arguments, and detecting patterns like 'this account always makes innocuous edits within minutes of this other person making controversial ones', but that's a bit more tightly controlled than Wikipedia could / should be.
(I mean the other solution is some sort of mandatory therapy and socialising courses for people who actively enjoy trolling / shit stirring / making people angry, but that would be a little beyond my or Wikipedia's remit, so)
I mean my experience has been different. When I revert it reverts it and the person I think could go revert your revert. There are higher level people that can lock the article or whatnot but I don't think they see the reversion of their edit unless they go look or maybe when logged in they get a message. I think if enough reversions go through one of the higher level folk maybe get pinged. I had to revert it back to the book list like 3 or 4 times then it stayed for awhile. Although I should look and see if its accurate but then I have to go look up the book and ugh.
Do not view Wikipedia as the only source of truth. And please relax your soul in face of online drama.
I think Wikipedia itself says that it is just an entry into topics. To confirm the things that are written there you check sources.
we are a den of scum and villany. You know. Places where like han solo hangs out.
Wikipedia certainly isn't wrong, the Fediverse is filled with so much political extremism, made worse by the Tankie Developers
!meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works to see more of how widespread tankies and their extreme bigotry and violent rhetoric spreads across the fediverse
Note this person is a Zionist promoting a community where they encourage Jewish ethnic surpremacy.
It's true, check the various pages of info collected by other users. And he'll ban you for calling it out.
But he won't ban the nazis! He was on Voat for a reason.
There are no nazis in my comm and they’re not allowed either. I was banned from Voat
That's not at all true
https://lemmy.world/post/35824465/19372031
Is that the same person?
I got banned by Goat for reporting that person. That person did not get banned.
Goat banned you for calling out fascism, unheard of.
So no?
I don't think the conclusion you have reached is reasonable. By the logic you are running on every community is every bad thing anyone has ever posted and every ban would be grounds for de-federalization.
You got banned for specifically using "Zio" -- A term coined by David Duke. I asked you to use a different phrase instead, such as zionist, zionazi or anything else, but you insisted on using Zio.
Your ban has expired by now anyway, I don't dish out perm-bans unless it's absolutely neccessary
For more info see my my post about previous ban there where Goat got banned on DB0 for going full Zionist himself and somehow DB0 is tankies.
https://lemmy.world/post/35172737?scrollToComments=true
Is this the part you wanted to highlight? Because this seems to be about you being a pro china genocide denier who was down voted for that point. I don't get how you are getting "full zionist" from this.
Are you telling on yourself? I asked you to stop using Zio because nazis specifically use it.
People try to act like Wikipedia is some kind of miracle when it's founded and run by fash.
Good luck editing anything on that site. Total shitstorm.
wait what? that's new to me. what's the deal?
Sounds like nonsense hyperbole
Source? I donate both my time and money to Wikipedia, so pretty invested on making sure it's a force for good.
It is pretty fucking toxic if you're not a Linux sheep or violent-leftist.
Love it. Those hypocritical fucks will rue the day they fuck with Tux.
bruh
Well, it should be toxic for Reich Wingers
ok bye
How so?
Thanks, another recommendation for my block list then :3
i'm a peaceful leftist and support criticism of fascism. if that makes me toxic then you're the problem :3
Linux wins vs Windows (when it comes to user-control and stability). Immutable distributions allow reset to prior state, can Windows do that? Thanks for the bait by the way.