Automod bugged out and banned me forever from reddit, i want to explore more Lemmy now but am not sure if Im missing anything good im not directly looking for–i am also kinda autistic and oblivious so if there are instances with a bad history or full of chuds or something a heads up would be swell
My old ass is over here with the anarchists and pirates at lemmy.dbzer0 and we’re just a jolly bunch of assholes.
The entire vibe of lemmy seems to be way jollier from my experience but Im wondering if it just is because I havent come across some kinda dark underbelly yet or if it really is just way more chill here
There always seems to be drama between instances.
Of course it looks that way to you, since your instance already defederated from lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net and other toxic cesspits - see recent example (Lemmy.World’s statement and reasoning for defederation from Lemmy.org). The LW admin team does a lot of work to keep things this chill.:-)
It is way more chill. Feels like 2014 Reddit.
There absolutely is a darker side to Lemmy, but for the most part, many of those “legacy” instances have already been pruned from the federation that we are in now. (I suspect there are smaller, highly niche, “Lemmy” bubbles that even I wouldn’t want to go looking for that have never federated with the larger group. There are also various branches you can explore via instances that keep their doors mostly open.)
On the surface, and depending on what you consider toxic, the misinformation campaigns that are run on Lemmy seem fairly normal, but can get fairly dark if you understand the sources and start to do broader geolocation estimation of some of the participants.
There are still the occasional DDoS’s and the occasional CSAM posters, both of those are only a degree or two away from the really nasty shit.
The biggest issue now, and probably will always be, is how easy it is to avoid bans. Some seriously troubled users have generated hundreds of accounts across multiple instances just to troll and appear to generate traffic to specific communities. (“you_emm” being one of the worst, but its posts are fairly easy to sniff out still. It will actively search for untagged mentions as well, hence, my obfuscation.)
But for the most part, the bullshit is easy to filter out. When you stumble across a specific niche, they tend to niche themselves super hard, so beware. All-in-all, Lemmy is chill and fairly quiet which is why I still use it.