Forums still exist, but I hard agree with you. I was so excited when the lemmy devs were considering hiding votes counts from the frontend by default. Unfortunately (imo) it got shot down by the community pretty quickly.

I think "likes" as a socials concept are part of a dark engagement pattern we've willfully brought over from the mainstream, and we won't be able to be much better than them until we're rid of it.

They certainly mislead me. My first year or so was on lemmy.ml @[email protected]

After repeated bans i decided to move to a more relaxed instance. i still interact with lemmy.ml because some of the bigger open source communities are there, but .ml admins now cannot block me from accessing the full lemmyverse, only their diminishing corner of it

It does, since it still federates with lemmy.ml...

I was on .ml first after leaving reddit, because I didn't know this was the case, until I called out straight up state propaganda and defended capitalism with social and ethical policies once. You can imagine how they responded to that.

It can be both. Some need to be told to shut up.

Yeah, I spent a little time cultivating the communities that I subscribed to when I first got here, and now the Subscribe feed is what I use 95% of the time.

What is genuine political discussion? How do you moderate it? Who is going to come when it's moderated? How do you deal with both legitimate and legitimate complaints about biased moderation?

I just don't think it's a thing on social media. I think it can happen in private conversations, but as soon as it becomes more about winning an argument or posturing for readers, I think any hope of earnest discourse is lost. The more public a conversation, the worse it is. It's like trying to argue with a bully in front of their friends. You might be able to reach the humanity in them, but not in that moment.

Duplicate communities posting the same content over and over again.

Communities are tied to an instance. How many communities will die because lemm.ee is shutting down? There is a slightly mad rush to migrate communities already.

Lemmy should have used usent style naming for communities.

Not trying to start anything, I’d just like to point out that there seems to be a disturbingly large group (and growing) that wouldn’t have any problem telling you to shut up to your face. It seems that rude, obnoxious, selfish behavior has become more and more prevalent, and appears to be getting normalized.

Same here! And on a slow day when I finally managed to get through the whole Subscribed feed, there's still the All feed to tackle. I really like that system.

Uh huh, and I'm sure we can take him at his word. It's not like he's ever lied. He never gave a nod to nazis ever, like telling the proud boys to stand by. Yup, good old not racist donnie, I'm sure he totally hates white supremacists.

You wanna talk bad faith, believe anything that comes out of his orange piehole.

Some might say it’s fine because we’re on the right side of history and they’re not, or something along those lines

I say it's fine because if there's one thing I've learned repeatedly since about 2017, it's that the single most effective thing I can do to reduce toxicity in my life is to reduce my interactions with conservative family members, coworkers, 'friends', and social media accounts.

It's remarkably effective. I interact with no conservative or known trump voter more than work or family obligations require. Haven't for years. Best mental health step I've taken in my adult life.

Not my fault they have all forgotten that "loudest asshole in the room" isn't a personality.

I think there is a feature request to allow communities to subscribe to other communities so that their posts and comments are synced.

if you’re going to tell someone to shut up,

But downvoting doesn't mean that. At all. Not even sure how you got that idea. It's also not hiding your comments, it's sorting them. And the reader get's to select the sort order (some which entirely ignore votes).

So yeah, you're not making any sense here.

Since karma isn’t tracked, I don’t think it’s a real big deal having a negative score comment. But since there are people who care anyways I think the downvote does exist, it can suppress people posting certain points of view lest you anger the tankie triad

Not enough people for even slightly niche communities. Wanna talk about smash brothers ? 732 people, only 2 posts in the last month.

This is why people still use reddit on the side.

But downvoting doesn’t mean that.

It doesn't?

At all.

Really? At all?

Not even sure how you got that idea.

Hmm. You mean you don't have perfect insight into other people's minds? Admittedly that's odd.

So yeah, you’re not making any sense here.

And you're coming across as the kind of sanctimonious interlocutor that I can't be bothered to answer properly.

I never downvote opinions and I do not engage with people who downvote mine

But the dearth of genuine political discussion here is a problem for the people who do want it

It's not genuine if we don't want to constantly have to expose ourselves to toxic bigots or "smooth" manipulators who think it's not really toxic bigotry if they are "just asking questions?"

It's not genuine if we don't want to start every single discussion of something bad Trump did with rebutting a half dozen versions of "but whatabout that time when dems..."?

I've said it before and I'll say it again:

I will not be shamed into allowing toxicity into my life, on social media or otherwise, in the name of "avoiding an echo chamber." NOTHING is stopping a conservative from coming here and making cogent, factual arguments, aside from their own fragility.

The conservatives who "can't" post to Lemmy are the ones who don't know how to have an actual conversation and get banned. What fraction of conservatives that represents is an excercise left to the reader. But I've got my own opinion on that number for sure.

That's interesting. But I don't know how you can be sure of that. My own theory (not exactly original) is that text communication - without voices, without faces - encourages people to be worse versions of themselves. When there's ambiguity, the temptation for many is to see bad faith. It takes effort and self-discipline to overcome that, and most (or many) people just don't have that.