this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2025
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Fediverse

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A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!

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Call me crazy, but I a) think the fediverse probably doesn't have more 'toxic content', harmful and violent content, and child sexual abuse material then other platforms like X, Facebook, Meta, YouTube etc, and b) actively like the fediverse because of that.

But after a few hours carefully drafting and sourcing an edit to make it clear that no, the fediverse isn't unusual in social media circles for having a lot of toxic content, I realised that the entire 'fediverse bad' section was added by 1 editor in 2 days. And the editor has made an awful lot of edits on pages all themed around porn (hundreds of edits on the pages of porn stars), suicide, mass killings, mass shootings, Jews, torture techniques, conspiracy theories, child abuse, various forms of sexual and other exploitation, 'zoosadism', and then pages with titles like 'bad monkey' that seemed reasonably innocent until I actually clicked on them to see what they were and, well.

I decided to stop using the internet for a while.

I've learned my lesson trying to change Wikipedia edits written by people like that - they tend to have a tight social circle of people who can make the internet a very unpleasant place for anyone suggesting maybe claims like 'an opinion poll indicated that most people in Britain would prefer to live next to a sewage plant than a Muslim' should maybe not on Wikipedia on the thin evidence of paywalled link from a Geocities page written by, apparently, a putrid cesspit personified.

I thought I'd learned my lesson about trusting Wikipedia.

It just makes me so angry that most people's main source of information on the fediverse contains a massive chunk written solely by a guy who spends most of his time making minor grammar edits to pages about school shootings, collections of pages about black people who were sexually assaulted and murdered, etc, and that these people control the narrative on Wikipedia by means of ensuring any polite critics' are overcome with the urge to spend the rest of the day showering and disinfecting everything.

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[–] styanax@lemmy.world 67 points 5 days ago (3 children)

The entire tone of the article feels... condescending? (not sure the exact feeling). It feels off in the way information is presented, like subtle disdain in the writing voice.

[–] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 50 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

1.) This is part of the background narratives being pushed by the rich and powerful that we need AI and big tech to moderate us when the opposite is true, we need more humans involved in moderation who have a stake in their community.

2.) The prevailing winds in the tech journalism sphere have always been strangely blowing against the Fediverse since the beginning. The simplest possible explanation to me is there is a lot of money in writing off the Fediverse as a cool nerdy space that nonetheless is an unrealistic solution for everybody else and pushing the axiom that a Harvard MBA is needed to translate the Fediverse into a product the public can actually use.

You will NOT notice this same prevailing winds against for profit corporate social networks like Bluesky and Threads... and it is a curious thing isn't it...

[–] aesthelete@lemmy.world 8 points 5 days ago

Having everything everyone ever interacts with channeled through the same four fucking websites obviously sucks and doesn't currently--and likely never can--scale.

[–] TrojanRoomCoffeePot@lemmy.world 11 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Reddit power Mod turning their attention to Wikipedia and abusing its TOS & users of that site as well now too?

[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (2 children)

Oh you mean like jordanlund?

Ex(?) Reddit power mod, current awful lemmy.world mod?

https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/53505862

[–] Vespair@lemmy.zip 2 points 4 days ago

I will never understand why that person thinks Lemmy should be moderated like Reddit. Reddit's moderation policy was at the behest of advertisers; we have no such masters to answer to here.

[–] TrojanRoomCoffeePot@lemmy.world 4 points 5 days ago (2 children)

I couldn't say, as I'm not familiar with them.

i'm so fucking jealous

[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 5 days ago

Youn could follow that link and become pretty familiar with them.

[–] aeiou@piefed.social 4 points 5 days ago (1 children)

What happened to Wikipedia's neutrality policy?

[–] ripcord@lemmy.world 3 points 5 days ago