This post is as much for me as it is for all of you. I’m doing some live self reflection and criticism here.
I’ve been growing more and more frustrated with “Lemmy is becoming Reddit!” or more accurately, “the people from Reddit are bringing their bad habits and toxicity over to Lemmy.” But upon closer inspection, it’s mostly one instance that has by far the biggest problem with this and act by far the most like Reddit. Think you all know which instance I’m talking about. I’ve been finding myself writing paragraph or even multi paragraph responses to random people’s hot takes which they probably spent two seconds thinking through before posting, and I have been deleting them because I realized that I don’t fucking care and it’s not worth my own time, energy, or mental health. And I’m the kind of person where if they respond with some sarcastic meme comment or a further bad take, I literally cannot stop myself from engaging further, writing walls of text addressing in detail every one of their points that they probably won’t read before closing with “ok Tankie” or something.
At some point I had to ask myself, why are you doing this? You’ve just ruined your free time on Lemmy because of someone else’s shit take or toxicity. Fennekin, don’t fucking engage the next time you see something that pisses you off, because you could write a book, complete with links to scientific papers (which I have done in the past), it’s not going to resolve your being pissed off and who the hell do you think you’re trying to actually convince with a detailed response when there is clearly a hive mind that’s the genetic clone of the one from Reddit? If I think I actually have a good chance of convincing them or others that might see my comment, then yeah I will still totally write a wall of text to that effort. But in the vast majority of times this is far from the case, and I can more effectively spend my time elsewhere, like maybe actually engaging in discussions with more rational people where they could potentially be convinced by me and I could also potentially be convinced by them. To say that every single non-socialist is like the average Reddit lib would be totally wrong of course, as would be saying there is nothing we can learn from non-socialists, but I actually need to go out and look for those more rational and open minded people, which there are plenty of. Even if I’m not in a debate those people are generally more pleasant to interact with.
If you can go in and debate those people and maintain your own sanity and baseline mood, I applaud you. But I can’t. So I’m just not going to engage at all. That does not actually mean I’m going to start removing my access to lib content by blocking it or anything, I still think it’s important as a socialist to at least be aware of the takes of the opposition. And like I said in a comment just an hour or so ago, I’m confident enough in my beliefs and ideologies that I’m by no means threatened by these people, quite the opposite in fact, which is why I compulsively try to correct them and respond to them. No more of that, I need to keep myself happy first, or if not happy then at least not pissed off whenever I go on Lemmy.
I have found that the ones actually here to discuss things and learn about us aren’t going to be put off by a few snide insults. They react with confusion, because they’re sincere and don’t understand why someone would tease them for that. Because we aren’t teasing people for being sincerely curious, we tease people for having their head stuck up their own ass. So it is really easy to tell who is here to actually learn about a different viewpoint, and who is here to just be a smug asshole, confident in their ignorance of a topic they know nothing about.
The trick is not engaging with them, as you’ve said, it’s very tempting, but it is just a waste of time. That’s why they do it. They’re just attention seeking losers, flailing their arms around and making a scene so they can umm acktually the person telling them to stop.
Hopefully now with the Hexbear federation we’ll be able to learn from the experts when it comes to dealing with lib trolls.
Gonna be honest, it’s probably gonna take a few months to get back into fighting trim. We’re out of practice from peak-r/chapo era, and in general, nicer and more genial people than we were back in those days. We’ll see how long it takes before enough libs annoy us enough to reach that level of true power-posting.
Even the slightest hint of refusing to tolerate their bullshit will probably be enough to scare .world into defederating from lemmygrad. Then they won’t bother any of us!
This is more of a technical question than anything, but if we post on an instance of lemmygrad, can .world people see it? Or because they are unfederated, they can’t see anything we post, even if it is on a posted hosted in lemmygrad? Probably not the correct venue to address this, but I have given this whole federation thing about three brain-cells worth of thought.
.world users won’t be able to see your posts or comments even ones made in instances that they’re federated with, it’s quite annoying I have to check and make sure Im not wasting my time if I try and comment outside of lemmygrad (or hexbear too now)
I’m not entirely sure. I think if they have defederated from us they just can’t see our posts or respond, but neither can we see theirs or respond there. If they want to comment here, or if someone from here wanted to comment there, they’d need to make an account for an instance that hasn’t defederated.
So we probably would still get the occasional troll, they just wouldn’t come from .world anymore, as they’d have to make an account on a different instance.
I’m also not sure how it works if you (Hexbear) are defederated but Lemmygrad isn’t. I don’t know if you can see any comments from .world at all or not, or if they just can’t comment on your instance.
Ah well, regardless, we’ll bully whomever shows up on our feeds. Thanks!