There has been a noticeable uptick in new rightist accounts lately.

Instead of blocking people, I tag the bad actors in Voyager and have noticed that most of the toxicity comes from the same small group of specific people.

For sure. I posted content on selfhosted for the first time and got called a "filthy boomer" because it was a screenshot, then people basically told me to grow thicker skin went I complained. Why be better than reddit huh? Guess people just want reddit 2.0

Check your communities, and what instances they're on. Not all are created equal. lemmy.ml tends to be pretty wacko unless you're of their particular ideological alignment, lemmy.world is very very large and thus has a very very large number of obnoxious shitheads compared to other instances. On the other hand, beehaw.org is intentionally and pathologically positive. I also find lemmy.ca quite friendly, though I might be biased.

I noticed it a few months ago. It feels like a sudden, inorganic shift. Either all the good people have trickled off to a better basin, or someone or something has influenced Lemmy users

Yeah the news are triggering the worst instincts of some users who tend to lash out alot, and some trolls might be taking advantage of that

What the fuck did you just fucking say about me, you little bitch? I'll have you know I graduated top of my class in the Navy Seals, and I've been involved in numerous secret raids on Al-Quaeda, and I have over 300 confirmed kills. I am trained in gorilla warfare and I'm the top sniper in the entire US armed forces. You are nothing to me but just another target. I will wipe you the fuck out with precision the likes of which has never been seen before on this Earth, mark my fucking words. You think you can get away with saying that shit to me over the Internet? Think again, fucker. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of spies across the USA and your IP is being traced right now so you better prepare for the storm, maggot. The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your life. You're fucking dead, kid. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can kill you in over seven hundred ways, and that's just with my bare hands. Not only am I extensively trained in unarmed combat, but I have access to the entire arsenal of the United States Marine Corps and I will use it to its full extent to wipe your miserable ass off the face of the continent, you little shit. If only you could have known what unholy retribution your little "clever" comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your fucking tongue. But you couldn't, you didn't, and now you're paying the price, you goddamn idiot. I will shit fury all over you and you will drown in it. You're fucking dead, kiddo.

It's not a Lemmy thing. People (at least here in the States) are feeling anxious and defeated about the state of the world. That shit makes people irritable. Irritable people are prone to lashing out at anything that trips over their last nerve.

My wife works for a nonprofit that focuses on providing services to families with children who have emotional or intellectual needs. She told me she's witnessed more meltdowns from parents these last 6 months or so than she's seen in her 15+ years in the field.

I have noticed more people inferring things from a small part of a reply and rather than read and try to understand it, they insted get upset about it and reply back about what they think the op said.

I think part of it at least is reaching a critical mass.

Lemmy was definitely a collection of relatively like-minded geeks at the start. Even when we disagreed on issues, we all agreed that we needed to work together to make the community grow.

Now that it's grown to a respectable size, there are more dissenting opinions as well as less tolerance for dissent; and more to the point, there is space for absolutely vile content that used to get choked out. Now to stop this sort of thing, the 'old-timers' are more likely to say "shut the fuck up, sit the fuck down, and behave!!!' before they can get a solid foot hold.

Meanwhile, the worst of those people are feeling both entitled and persecuted, and shouting their garbage louder than ever.

This happens everywhere that gets to a certain size. I remember when reddit stopped feeling like a secret community and more like a warehouse.

Of course, there are other reasons that people have mentioned below: The world is tired, worn out, and PISSED OFF at the half that disagree with them. The president of the United States has broken every rule of diplomacy, grace, and civility that people tended to follow in social life. Social Media has made it far easier (too easy) to dehumanize people and turn them into a one-dimensional pastiche of their posted opinions.

And we're facing the destruction of the planet, genocide, and the global resurrection of fascism.

The world is getting worse, I'm afraid. I really wish it wasn't true and I spent a lot of time emphasizing the good to my mom before she died; but honestly, it's getting worse.

While Lemmy might be getting a larger variety of personalities, some of them being jerks, I still find it a far more pleasant place to be than reddit.

People are desperately combing through comments, looking for something to be outraged about. That’s what happens in echo chambers - when the outgroup isn’t around to be attacked, people start eating their own. It turns into this insane purity spiral where nobody is ever good enough.

No. Fuck you.

/s

Yea the shitposting has steadily increased. That is probably to be expected on a platform that is also steadily increasing.

However please don’t let the trolls think they turn this into the failure that is now Reddit.

Instead just call out the bullshit for what it is and carry on.

No. Why? Are you accusing me of something? Are you threatening me??

/s

Places would change up and down in tone and attitude since the days of Usenet, BBSes, and FidoNet. It's not the platform, it's the people. How the world is in RL affects how people talk online, and the world changes over time.

The simpler answer may be that your feed has changed some since you started and you're pulling in discussions that have a different vibe than when you started. Just as you can grow your feed by browsing around, you can cull certain places that tend to be darker by blocking people or instances.

Yes, but sometimes I wonder if it is just the nature of what happens when a social media network grows large. I did observe how some subreddits instantly get more toxic as they grow bigger too

... On the other hand though, coincidentally I did see some very recent comments that are decidedly more right-wing than the general Lemmy userbase. I personally try not to judge ppl's political orientation but I do wonder if there's something weird going on

There are trolls. Not as many as other places, but we have them.

Once we isolate key people, we look for people we know are in their upstream -- people that they read posts from, but who themselves are less influential. (This uses the same social media graph built before.) We then either start flame wars with bots to derail the conversations that are influencing influential people (think nonsense reddit posts about conspiracies that sound like Markov chains of nonsense other people have said), or else send off specific tasks for sockpuppets (changing this wording of an idea here; cause an ideological split there; etc).

The goal is to keep opinions we don't want fragmented and from coalescing in to a single voice for long enough that the memes we do want can, at which points they've gotten a head start on going viral and tend to capture a larger-than-otherwise share of media attention.

(All of the stuff above is basically the "standard" for online PR (usually farmed out to an LLC with a generic name working for the marketing firm contracted by the big firm; deniability is a word frequently said), once you're above a certain size.)

https://archive.is/PoUMo

from Bannon:

“The opposition party is the media,” Steve Bannon, who helped run Trump’s 2016 campaign, told PBS Frontline five years ago. “And the media can only — because they’re dumb and they’re lazy — they can only focus on one thing at a time.”

So the solution, per Bannon? Overwhelm them.

“All we have to do is flood the zone,” he said. “Every day we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done, bang, bang, bang. These guys will never — will never be able to recover. But we’ve got to start with muzzle velocity.”

https://www.npr.org/2025/02/07/nx-s1-5289315/trump-week-in-review

The best defense is to call them out on it and then walk away. They'll downvote the shit out of you, but who tf cares about upvotes and downvotes. If someone is getting downvoted heavily, read what they said carefully before piling on.

No, but I do actively block any community designed to rage bait like news, politics, and faith

No, it's not just your imagination. It has become distinctly more hostile in all communities.

I haven't noticed much, but I do have a lot of people blocked...

The most important thing for me is that the amount of truly thoughtful comments I've seen is higher than on any other platform I use.

Hmm... maybe. The state of the world has been pretty awful for the past year so I imagine that plays a part. Aside from trolls, lots of us are on edge as the whole world seems to tilt right with propaganda and AI.

That said, I like us.

I browse bluesky too and find I actually prefer Lemmy because it's a bit more self-policing... Like regarding AI slop, bluesky is fucking rampant with it, like Trump dressed as a clown or Newsom with abs, it's fucking awful. Lemmy has a couple communities for AI but on average, you try that shit and you'll get publicly shamed. That could be considered mean, but I appreciate it (especially if it's AI I can't even tell).

This place (old.lemmy.zip) is downright chill. Then again, I just came off Reddit (after 14 years there..) and that is in full rage-bait algorithm-driven meltdown. Feels like Reddit in 2010 here. Just lovely..

The world is increasingly hostile, but let me still seems more humane than any other social media.

Filter your content to get the vibe you want.

Blocking the porn and impotently hostile makes it quite the chill platform.

Go fuck yourself!

If I don't see that, am I the problem? 🤔

Re: the title: Yes 😔