So, it seems like PieFed is becoming a real alternative to lemmy.
What are the differences between these two? From a tech perspective, and also morality/ethics, if you want. Any differences in vision for these services?
Say whatever is on your mind. I want to know.
On which one should we put our weight?
Edit: I will leave this post here, which is a post by one of the devs of Lemmy that enumerates some of the things Lemmy 1.0 has. Lemmy 1.0 seems to be already in alpha stage and is already testable. The feature selection does look fantastic. Here is the post I am referring to: https://lemmy.ml/post/40744781
I’ve tried to participate on their threads a number of times, all ending in them trolling me and me having to ignore them to end it. Just when we had this conversation I went on one of theirs, got some agreement, until one of their guys posted a link to the original comment I mad that pissed them off when I didn’t know they are tankies. We would still be at it if I kept responding.
So what I’ve noticed, they seem to have guys in charge, it’s not a group of independent dickheads, it’s like a hierarchy, with leaders and a chain of command of sorts. That they somehow found a random person commenting, garnering a small amount of agreement, nothing pulling downvotes, and they somehow ended up searching that user in their archives.
There is no agreeing with them either for long. They lead their people to have contempt for the western left. While themselves coming across as “woke” which is odd because their biggest sponsor over there is in league with fascists and themselves run by fascists and the like.
I don’t quite get that part, they are all using pronouns and supposedly against bigotry (which they define as anything critical of the governments they support,) while championing all of these governments that are the opposite. Like it all seems a organized effort, maybe a rather dumb and palsied arm of russian intelligence, so what is their game with it all? It doesn’t seem like they are just killing time for fun they are being led. Idk, fuck those guys though.
I know this may be difficult to believe but some people will lie on the internet, haha! 😆 In their defense, they primarily lie to themselves, although then they also still do continue to do so to others. It’s exactly 4chan behaviors, where much study has been done into the psychology behind the disassociation effect.
Echo chambers are dangerous - anyone who disagrees gets kicked out, leaving only those who either genuinely agree or at least do not go against the prevailing trends very much. Hence why those edgelord teenager types focus more on the appearance of logical argumentation practices without the reality of it - i.e. “the dunk” (aka slam) where someone says something with an attitude of utter confidence that only betrays a complete lack of deeper thought (bc real thinkers continually question everything), and that Lord of the Flies crowd just eats it up, never realizing that there are any other ways to be.
As for whether it’s a Russian psy-op I have no idea. I doubt it though - they seem quite willing to be that way entirely without either payment or help from outside. Although it is baked into many cultures of the word to be more cunning, so that if you are the dumb-fuck who fell for their false arguments then they look down on you for being so gullible, rather than on themselves for having mislead others. In any case the answer is always the same: just like an instance dedicated to CSAM, they are entirely free to do whatever they please, but then others MUST also be free to not have to consent as well.
Everyone learns what hexbear is about, eventually, and then it becomes a rite of passage. Or it seems more often, people simply leave the Threadiverse altogether, complaining on r/RedditAlternatives how toxic we are here, not being able to distinguish the nuances of “here” or “there”. By not merely allowing them the freedom to exist (trivially easy, in fact that takes zero effort) but actively platforming their content, helping them to spread it around, while having to ignore the lies told at the instance admin level and all the reports about bullying behaviors and accounts who violate the existing rules of other instances, yet passing on those reports to the hexbear instance admins to do something about it, but then nothing ever gets done…
It’s like an abusive relationship - what they chose to do is on them, but our response is on us.
Btw true leftist instances exist, like slrpnk.net, and LGBTQIA+ friendly spaces, like blahaj (Ada is an outright awesome human being), it’s just that hexbear happens to claim these properties without bothering to realize that they are doing active harm to them - although in their defense, to the degree that they are aware of that fact, and care, they probably find that funny as hell. They are edgelord teenagers (of whatever physical age), pure and simple.
And when you see that, then tankie philosophy also makes a great deal more sense. That one at least has some logic behind it - which I reject, but at least it’s there. It’s not “honest” to outsiders, but it is there. Maybe. I think the logic goes: other people are dumb as shit, so it’s okay for them to be exploited - those who see through the false statements will be okay and rise to the top regardless, while those who cannot deserve their fate (literal death, and worse, slavery). Hexbears are just funning around, but real tankies are deadly serious. They too borrow the leftist language, without meaning it in the same way, but rather in the way that “everyone else should be forced, at the point of a gun/tank, to be equal, so long as I am MORE equal than them” (which I would argue is the exact opposite of leftism, but remember: if you fall for their ruse, then that’s on you, according to that philosophy, while for themselves the only thing that circumscribes their actions are defined in the language of power).
The theory in question is how easy it is for organized interests to manipulate people into ill ends.
A bunch of them are just there for fun - whether their actual leadership has an agenda I would not know about, it sounds as if you’ve studied that aspect more deeply than I.
They defer to some users that act as enforcers and police the threads, and if called on something by one fall over themselves apologizing, which I didn’t do which is why they presumably told me to fuck off their threads last message I got from them.
It’s like they need permission to like something new as well. I have limited information obviously but am curious to know the story on them.
It sounds like you already know: that’s simply how echo chambers work. Ultimately the admin (team) does have the literal power and authority to decide what goes into their machine, obviously, and then to a lesser degree the moderators, but beyond that, at the conceptual level those in charge can either serve at the will of the people or become enforcers. Those who choose to comply underneath such a system are allowed to remain, whereas those who prefer to think for themselves leave. It is thus an evolutionary filtration/selection system, ensuring that the system itself will continue forwards along those lines, likely indefinitely.
They have drunk the kool-aide on the whole Might Makes Right ideology. Except only choosing to use that whenever it suits them (e.g. they kick out those who they do not like), yet cry unfair when they believe that same exact mode of thinking is leveraged against them. All the while ignoring the consideration of any other possibilities - such as that it is not the “righteousness” of their ideology that turns people away, but the vehemence with which they push it, even when it violates the rules of other communities where they are speaking. It is toddler logic, crying “unfair” even when the aspect in question is the epitome of fairness. Most of us move beyond that stage quickly in our lives, but for some reason that internet space chooses to revel in it.
And making everything a lot more confusing, some communities there have fine discussions within them. But overall it is an instance with problematic users, and more germane, problematic admins who protect the bullies rather than curtail them in order to fit in more with the rest of the Threadiverse. If you want some more of the intricate details, although as with anything historical some things have changed in the meantime, I wrote this post https://discuss.online/post/13916278, which contains lots of links to as close to primary sources as I could find about each matter.
Good to know my experiences are not out of the ordinary. You guys are right, as against censorship as I am, these guys can’t be with everyone else. They follow people onto other threads, they did that with your linked article guy too, they did that with me too, and I’m not sure some of them don’t have alternate accounts on our instances here that they troll the same people with.
Like one with 60 total comments over a few months that has popped up twice spouting incendinary accusations, asking people to chalk my reasoned argument as trolling and block and move on and accusing me of being a russian troll or .ml kind of shit. One of them I got into it after the first time I wandered onto their instance, guy just popped back up out of nowhere doing it again, I recognized the username, about the same period of time after I got into it again with their trolls there. Orchestrated something anyway.
Not only do they do this, they also admit it, they even brag about it, and they laugh about it and plan for ways to do it more effectively inside their echo chambers and safe spaces (e.g. lemmygrad.ml, another instance that is very friendly with Hexbear.net).
An excerpt from my aforementioned linked post:
It seems counterintuitive but sometimes in order to preserve freedom of speech, certain types of speech must be curtailed. Not everywhere, but in at least some spaces, to allow for quieter voices to speak who otherwise would not feel comfortable doing so when the background level of toxicity is too high.