Just blocked lemmy.ml from my Lemmy account, and I swear to god it’s one of the best things I’ve ever done on this platform. My homepage feels actually clean now.
For the past few months I’d been seeing a lot of tankie posting and pretty much far-left propaganda on my feed. It got tiring enough that I finally checked my blocked-user list, and realized pretty much everyone I’d blocked was from lemmy.ml. So I just blocked the whole instance instead.
Saying this as someone who considers themselves a leftist: I used to think Lemmy itself was an echo chamber. Turns out lemmy.ml was the problem the entire time. Probably the reason I tolerated it for so long is that I agreed with a lot of what they posted, but like an oversaturated meme, I’d had enough. Browsing the platform was starting to feel way too tiring instead of fun, which defeats the point of being here in the first place.
The breaking point was seeing some dude post a “meme” implying North Korea and China are basically communist utopias and that the West sucks. I mean, the West does suck, but come on - you’re saying North Korea is the ideal the West should strive for? What the hell…
I think that many people reflexively speak out against perceived unfairness. Why should they stay silent when they see people from a problematic mainstream instance constantly complaining about other instances that they see nothing wrong with, the vast majority of the time without evidence, I might add? I mean, it adds up to endless whining, even in completely unrelated threads. I often see it go like this:
Person 1: “Hey, did you hear about this new scientific discovery? Pretty interesting, huh?”
Person 2 (very often from .world or piefed.social): “Well, just stay away from the DaMn tAnKiEs! They’re horrible!”
Person 1 (or Person 3): “Huh? I didn’t say anything about any tankies. Besides, .world or piefed has plenty of idiots too.”
I’ve rarely ever seen anyone grumble about .world in a completely unrelated thread without cause (i.e., in response to a .world person saying something stupid), but I see that all the time against mostly the socialist/communist instances with some spillover to the anarchist instances. After a while, people start to react automatically to any complaints about other instances.
Then Person 1 should block those accounts for being idiots, like I most likely did years ago…
That’s easy, its all over this thread, if you don’t recognize it here, you’re not recognizing it elsewhere.
Like a colorblind person insisting the color red isnt real…
But that’s appropriate in this thread, since it’s specifically about a person on lemmy.world complaining about lemmy.ml. The scenario I was describing was of someone chiming in about the “tankies” in a thread completely unrelated to Lemmy instances or politics, like gardening or movies. I feel like I see this all the freaking time, but I suppose I could be wrong. It’s always a possibility.