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.
it looks like somebody who just saw this post edited wikipedia for the first time to remove that. this is why wikipedia's wonderful: it's that easy. i have this quirk where i wanna debate anyone who distrusts wikipedia or claim its rigidity
They did! The change log shows the main section of 'I found a single paper criticising the fediverse so here's 600 words on how terrible the concept is', and also reassured me that I wasn't just being lazy in not wanting to trawl through the text to edit it to be less awful.
I'm bizarrely excited about it too. You can't thank anonymous Wikipedia editors, so I'll throw a vague 'thank you!' out into the world and try to pay it forward.
My next battle: figuring out why I can't edit this post, lol (maybe a mobile problem) and long term, why I didn't think of 'just edit it anonymously'.
lmao wait until it's reverted, argued over, then the editor gets banned.
My ip got banned despite never editing wikipedia, never even reading the talk.
go on, show me