Depends if you’re hungry.

The modlog is public. You can see exactly what comment led to the ban if you search for it.

The US state department lawyers and the British House of Lords have evidence. That’s why they’re pursuing convictions of the Chinese leaders involved. No, wait— sorry, I misremembered. They both concluded there is insufficient evidence.

Right. Sus, like I said. You can’t trust people willing to use their authority to protect kids.

Although, when it’s put like that, it seems people are also sus who want to or would use their authority to force users to accept the risk of seeing porn and gore by allowing NSFW communities. You know. They could always go somewhere else that already allows it but no they’ve got to cry that they want it here or there, a place they already don’t like and don’t want to visit.

I have a feeling everyone involved in those equations would disagree.

Censorship is certainly the kind of thing that drove people away from dotworld for preemptively defederating from Hexbear by fiat.

You should read some communist literature before pronouncing about it.

Historically, who funded fascists and who fought them?

Because liberals sleep in the same bed as fascists and both are ready to fight socialism tooth and nail?

Other than, you know, the millions and millions and millions of them organised in parties throughout the world.

That’s right, not wanting to have SFW communities interrupted by porn and gore is sus.

That is not what happened.

When the Lemmy software was first created, the original Hexbear (it had a different name, then) created a fork. A development or two down the line and the two forks were incompatible. The Hexbear devs started working on a fix long before the Reddit API-debacle exodus. It wasn’t easy because the fork added features that were incompatible with, let’s say, vanilla Lemmy until recently. The Hexbear devs eventually made the fixes, which made federation possible again. And the long-planned re-federation occurred. The timing is a coincidence.

As for federation, Hexbear asked it’s community which instances should be federated. To maintain the friendly culture of Hexbear, there was an agreement to only federate with a few instances. Before that happened, dotworld defederated preemptively. Since then, I have no idea whose federated or defederated with who because I quickly lost interest with the drama.

I should say that I’d never used Hexbear before federation with my instance. I learned all this because it’s publicly available knowledge. After federation, with all the drama, I searched ‘federation’ and some similar search terms on Hexbear communities and learned what I’ve just explained. The key point is that you don’t need a conspiracy theory to explain motives for and the chronology of federation because, like the modlogs, the relevant conversations are still available to read.

Richard Seymour talks about the dangers of social media platforms in The Twittering Machine. This isn’t trifling. It leads to real harm. One factor is downvoting, as you say.

It’s so easy to click it nonchalantly because you disagree. But to the person who only sees potentially thousands of downvotes, it can hit their mental health hard. Maybe this depends on the kind of content, but idk. I’d expect someone to feel more down if they’re being genuine, giving advice about a hobby, something else that is personal in some way. This probably includes politics, as politics reflect values and can be wrapped up in a how someone sees themselves as a ‘good person’; which makes it difficult if you’re then made to think you’re wildly off the mark and, possibly, a ‘bad person’.

If downvotes are getting you down, you may want to reassess how you engage with social media. The best antidote is logging off for a while. Touch grass, get some fresh air. Don’t engage with the communities that give you grief.

More broadly, yes, Reddit is toxic af. More so than many other places. Twitter can rival it at times but the format can take the sting out of some of the pile-ons. Some of that toxicity has come to the fediverse.

It’s been especially noticeable since the API thing as new users have just seen the fediverse as a Reddit alternative. As in, Reddit but on a different server with a different brand name. Many seem not to have cared whether the culture is the same here. Or they haven’t realised that an instance might have instance-wide rules (it’s not only community rules that one must understand).

Up until the API thing, Redditors occasionally brought Reddit toxicity with them, but they were outnumbered and tended to change their ways or disappear. Now, they might get support for that kind of behaviour from other new users.

In fact, if you look at some of the user accounts of the people chastising you – for (a) being concerned out yours and others’ wellbeing and (b) for wanting to improve/maintain a positive culture – or dismissing your concerns, they’re new accounts, probably come from Reddit recently with some of that toxicity. Maybe this would have happened two months ago? I can’t remember anything like it around here, though.

Here’s hoping the Reddit culture a swift end.