I also noticed how every post just has 5-10 random down votes. Like perfectly fine post in the correct community, not controversial, no rules broken, -10 down votes.

It seems hostility is the norm across most social media.

As the space becomes more popular, the level of social cohesion goes down.

Also, every space on the internet where users talk is now infested with shit chatbots trying to keep poor people angry with each other to prevent us from flaying rich people alive

Isn't it just people? Why did Rome fall? They had better tech, more people etc. I think they fell because the glue that held the society together dissolved. They had enough success that the human impulses that tear things apart were no longer suppressed. Lets kill people for sport, someone else should deal with the invaders, etc. A big part of that glue is apparent need. That guy in my way is the blacksmith that I need or I don't know that guy get the F out of my way. Our major challenge has shifted from trying to survive to competition with other people.

I think this is where a lot of the hostility comes from. Now add in another force, marketing and business. It's not like they are really worried about your well-being. They prey on these things like a con artist preys on trust. Feed the easy things that everyone wants. A kid is going to choose the candy bar over the brussels sprouts most times. You deserve a break today, you deserve everything. Feed this and you end up with a lot of believers. I deserve everything and those people are preventing it. Plug in a system (AI) that only purpose is to get more of your attention and what will it feed you? Trolling, anger, hate are all easy. The feelings from them are strong, addicting even. They feel powerful. Stir well and spread widely. Pretty simple recipe.

For the final topping, the people who rule us. Yah rule us. Do good people chase power in this environment? Can a good person stop the mob of 50 people that are gonna do some damage? At what point to people start giving up resisting those impulses and joining the mob. I want to do some damage too. As we see our leaders and the things they do, our examples, the people we trusted to do the right thing, the people who get the make the rules, who are so removed from the people they rule as I am from that ant I just stepped on. As this snowball gets bigger and faster it's harder and harder to stop. Rolls over most things except that cliff where it will go splat. Everyone feels it. It's hard to miss if you look. Any attempt to stop it creates a conflict between the stoppers and those that are fine in that snow ball and the people that are actively pushing that snowball. It will eventually stop and most times it's a very messy stop.

Why hasn't there been a successful civilization that has lasted, people and who are people... ?

From a neutral viewpoint, the world is more divided than ever, no matter what values you have, there's someone who opposes them with few, if any exceptions. Those opposing viewpoints have only grown in strength and number on the Internet, for years.

Additionally, the "us vs them" mentality of everyone is blinding them to even understanding why someone would disagree with their viewpoint. Of course that's not everyone, but it's a growing and very loud group.

Political violence is also starting to run rampant. Escalation after escalation. It keeps building.

So in this time of having a global voice, that can reach hundreds of millions of people with a single tweet or comment or thread or post or whatever, and with so much growing hatred among different political groups, it's unsurprising to me that conflict is rising.

Additionally, Lemmy is growing. Not everyone that joins Lemmy will be the same type of person that joined Lemmy after the Reddit API incident. That influx of people had a very similar value set, because they almost all came here from Reddit for the same reason. So there's at least a good amount of overlap in everyone's values.

Over time, more and more diverse people have been joining Lemmy, and it's not surprising that they have differing opinions on a lot of things.

This outcome was pretty much inevitable.

As far as I'm concerned, as long as it's done respectfully and civilly, then disagree. Debate. Try to understand the opposing viewpoint, even if you don't agree with it.

I first joined and started using Lemmy probably a couple months before you.

Back then, when anyone was being uncivil, needlessly hostile, rude, or aggressive, there was a very high likelihood that other users would call it out quickly. Many, many wonderful folks did it on my behalf multiple times and that's one of the big reasons I stuck around, because that's cool as hell if you ask me. I'm here to enjoy myself and have a little fun, not to be verbally abused because some problematic person lacks reading comprehension or prefers to make wild assumptions based on very limited information.

I won't say there's been a recent uptick in hostility, unless your definition of lately is a lot more lenient than my own. However, I will say that with each new outrage from Reddit comes an influx of new users and with each new influx, it's only a short period of time before I notice things are suddenly a bit less nice, friendly, and casual.

Sadly, things are at the point now where I rarely bother to read any responses, replies, or messages in my inbox. I usually just go in there to click "mark as read" to clear the notifications without reading them and move on. There's just too much negativity directed my way, often super randomly to the most innocuous stuff, or random users I can't recall ever interacting with who somehow seem to have a chip on their shoulder. It's actually kind of bizarre at times. Regardless, for my style of participation, which is mostly parodying old people facebook and sharing random anecdotes, feeling like I need to ignore replies is still okay, I guess.

Anyway, glad I'm not the only one who has noticed the shift. Wish there were an easy button to get things back to the welcoming place Lemmy used to be.

It doesn't feel unique to Lemmy to me. I'm seeing higher levels of hostility in just about any environment broad enough to include left and right wingers

Facism is making the people that would normally be reasonable get really emotional and people love to lash out anonymously.

They got tired of harassing people on Bluesky and changed things up a bit

I haven’t noticed it lately, but I’ve experienced what you’re talking about. As far as I can tell, it ebbs and flows.

I've seen roughly the same time frame. As far as I can tell no, this is just how toxic this place is. There's a bunch of people who continuously claim people from reddit are coming and bringing some form of toxic with them, but as often as not those people seem super toxic. There's a huge community of Linux fanboys who circle jerk over the same exact talking points in different meme formats (the talking point being "windows 11 is spyware, Linux Just Works ad doesn't even require a login -- but don't worry guys, this is the year of the ~~Linux desktop~~ steam deck"). There's a huge circle jerk over whether or not Russia is bad. There's the "liberals aren't leftists, liberals are capitalist genocidal shitbags" circle jerk. None of these have really changed in at least the last year, it's the same people making the same posts on the same topics.

But, it's nice to see a news feed of interesting posts so as long as you ignore the bullshit it still seems fine. Or if you like arguing.

It seems like some AI bots with contrarian comments in order to drive engagement or strong arm wild political platforms have started to leak into the fediverse as a whole. Still better than other options though.

Didn't notice anything like this, not even slightly.

Yes, blocking posts from .ml and dbzer0 helped. Same goes for just liberally blocking anybody, who starts screaming instead of participating nicely.

I've been considering blocking .world, as some of the mods are behaving like power tripping reddit mods. But it's the biggest instance and without it I wouldn't have any content.

As a platform grows, you tend to get more diversity of voices. As voices become diverse, conflict becomes inevitable.

Such is life on the internet sometimes I guess

well have you noticed (waves at everything) in the world?