Also, to add:

Information hygiene here is bad.

Every day, nearly every time I scroll the feed, some spicy headline goes past. When I go to look it up, it’s often completely made-up misinformation, or a warped ragebait headline, or a literally bot-written Tweet, yet it’s voted right to the front page.

…I thought Reddit refugees would be sick of this, and more careful/skeptical, but apparently not. I’ve even talked to some users who don’t understand the distinction between opinion columns and news.

!birding@lemmy.world mention! Easily my favorite community here too.

My experience is much the same as yours. The Linux community is usually a bit agressive everywhere. I have been banned for questioning things as well. Still, I'd never go back to mainstream social media platforms.

I'm mostly here to argue about politics with people who aren't conservatives or libertarians - just like you, I think engaging with different opinions is healthy, and I've had a hard time finding leftists to argue with elsewhere.

Great post. I'm frequently reminded that 40k people is so much more than it seems as I consistently encounter users who have been here and quite active for 3 years and yet I don't recognize them.

That ban from c/Europe is a badge of honor in my book. One of the nice things about the modlog is that anyone can quickly verify whether bans or comment removals are justified according to their own perspective. It shouldn't always be as necessary as it currently is, but with people on Lemmy constantly throwing around accusations of bigotry, nazism, genocide denial, etc, its quite useful to be able to quickly view a user's moderation history. Honestly that might be the most useful feature that Lemmy has, aside from the ability to federate.

However, I do have one minor quibble with your post.

for me this was quite a shocking confirmation of the intolerance of a certain section of the (mainly US) left.

To ascribe your banning from a European community on a European server because of an opinion on a European situation to the US left is quite unreasonable. Also, the mod who banned you appears to be German. This is one of my pet peeves about Lemmy, that Americans always seem to take collateral damage in the most random threads lol. The Lemmy user base is significantly more international than the reddit user base in my experience, and thus the anti-American attitudes that seem quite common outside of the US are frequently exhibited here.

I don't know that there's anything that can be done about it, but I do know that it's unproductive to blame Americans from the outside looking in. I mean it's unproductive to blame average people for the actions of their government anyway, but it's especially annoying coming from people who don't even live here and often lack a lot of context and empathy with their angry rants. None of this applies to you personally btw, but I'm just saying it for the record.

This reflects my experience, approximately.

Yeah… Lemmy/Piefed is a mixed experience for niche interests. I fear a set of “insulated hyper-political echo chambers,” to put it somewhat crudely, is not going to attract the masses from corporate social media.

It’s kinda my fault, though. I’m not putting enough effort in seeking out those niches, much less posting in them; it’s too easy to doomscroll.

I keep telling myself to dedicate more attention to “specialized” forums like HN or SpaceBattles or DPReview, but alas, my brain keeps failing me there too.

So, you're a debate bro who argues Syrian refugees increase crime and terrorism, trans women in sports and children accessing trans healthcare are legitimate issues, and support Israel and claim there isn't a genocide.

You say shit like "So many hypersensitive thin-skinned vacuum-cleaner owners! Perhaps they're projecting their insecurities because deep down they know I'm right." and argue intolerance that people don't support your terrible viewpoints?

You're peak fucking reddit mate.

To me the good of the Fediverse is that it highlights dishonest people like yourself.

The first - and definitely worst - experience I’ve had was 2 years ago when I got banned from !europe@feddit.org for “racism and gaslighting” on the basis of, well, pretty much nothing except the moderator’s paranoia.

It wasn't me, but looking at your moderation log and the messages in question, I would have called it "islamophobia and downplaying neo-nazi crimes" and banned you just the same. Others are welcome to have a look at those messages and judge for themselves 🤷

Thank you for contributing and for this introspective analysis, but thank you most of all for writing it yourself and not using a random word generator to do it for you. It’s a rare treat to read human prose these days.

So a good time apart from the usual cestpools of life: political and news communities.

I'm eagerly looking forward to more silly, niche communities. Communities like /c/pigeon@mander.xyz & /c/stick@sh.itjust.works are wonderful examples of people providing genuinely human and silly fun content. It shows there's an actual community, not just nerds advocating for Linux.

I do find a few things annoying about the federation system, like opening links directly to lemmy.world on my desktop an having to surgically recreate the link on my instance if I want to interact with it at all. I figure it's part of the growing pains and we will find interesting ways to solve it.

Still, I feel so much better using this platform. I feel like contributing isn't just padding the Reddit admin's pockets and being used to fuel AI models. Y'all are a much more chill group anyway. I'll keep posting my food here.

And then there's the echo-chamber problem. It turns out that when people have an option to avoid dealing with ideas they disagree with (even slightly), very many of them choose that option. IMO this is a major (perhaps fatal) problem with social media. The fediverse is not magically immune from it.

Yeah. Federated social media is even more prone to this effect than centralized. This is the single reason why I believe Lemmy can't possibly become anything meaningful on a global scale. It is a purgatory built in the image of long dead websites where we all wait for the rotting corpses of old media to wither away.

Unfortunately there's loads of reddit style interactions on here. But at a structural level, it's successfully set up differently from Reddit.

Will be good to see it flesh out more, and I hope it keeps growing.

We here all want the Threadiverse to succeed. That doesn't mean that it is going to though - it turns out that it takes a helluva lot of effort, which few to none are willing to put forth (all the way up and down the scale from contributing actual code, funding, moderation efforts, posting more content especially OC, or even just reigning in our most toxic impulses as we reply to one another in comments, smashing a downvote or failing to upvote).

I do think that eventually, as the technology itself gets better, the Fediverse is the only thing likely to be able to hold the tide against the onslaught of for-profit enshittificated alternatives. Even though we make our own kinds of Algorithms here that allow what can be said or done in the various spaces, almost none of which are properly labeled as such, leaving people to always guess incorrectly and then have to find out the hard way what are the unwritten rules.

I'm jealous you're part of the nine percent I'm more of one of the ninety percent of lurkers myself.

Thanks for the community recommendations!