Don't forget the insult. I've been banned from so many AI communities, none of which I'd ever heard of before, most of which had zero posts even, and all of which called me an anti-AI troll.

On PieFed actually, anarchist.nexus.

When you're a mod or admin, they let you do it dontcha know, grab 'em right by the gonads! Say whatever you like to go into the permanent modlog, you won't be stopped!

Here is an example community that refuses to migrate here: https://www.reddit.com/r/fossdroid/comments/1uiywal/should_we_switch_to_lemmy/.

The top-upvoted comments are... eye-opening, to say the least. In this arena of man vs. bear, they have chosen the bear (Reddit), rather than subject themselves to our overall lack of moderation to make a place that mainstream normies - even ones technical enough to be interested in F-droid - can stand to exist in.

That said, actually I thought that programming.dev was fairly chill though, so I am not certain that I understand the reasons why, if we are specifically talking about the instance you are on? Many communities on hexbear, and some of the more extremist content on Lemmy.ml, are even hidden by default for a new account.

Perhaps it is the overall lack of transparency about such matters? Someone browsing by https://lemmy.world/?dataType=Post&listingType=All&sort=Active would still see "funny meme" content such as https://lemmy.world/post/50297816, even without an account, which can be quite off-putting.

And there are so many people who have come here, remained for literally years, and then decided to leave. We stayed, so it's a bias effect for sure, but their stories are quite a turn-off to new users.

Many instances have put in a great deal of effort to make the Threadiverse more palatable to new users. But... when you read the responses to posts like this one, it does reveal how large swathes of this place go mostly unmoderated, or at least what is left is annoying and tiring to have to wade through.

Example comment: "What a fucking chud loser you are", which aside from representing a personal attack on the user rather than their argument (a direct violation of that community's rule #2), also detracts from rather than adds to the subject under discussion.

The people in that subreddit are already having discussions in that space - Reddit is getting more annoying all the time, but they can persist. Is there is any particular reason then that they should come here and subject themselves to our toddler fights over whether Russia invaded Ukraine vs. the other way around? (which isn't even something up for debate, realistically speaking?)

Anyway in case you are interested, there is a !ask_experienced_devs@programming.dev community that you could join, although there has been only one post within the last four months, so while not quite dead it is definitely struggling rather than thriving. There is also https://programming.dev/c/cs_career_questions and https://programming.dev/c/no_stupid_questions, although they are also struggling.

Maybe we can do things to reduce our toxicity level, but I fear that the word is out about Lemmy being mainly a tankie bar, and I don't know how to convince anyone (especially myself) that it is not the case - especially bc that is well and truly what we are, and yet I also think that it needn't be all that we could ever be?

You are one of today's lucky 10,000!

I'm so envious of you right now

Absolutely

I've used it many times as a lurker, and I would have loved to add answers buy it was just not usable for that