Obviously, the internet has always been a toxic place, (the phrase “flame war” has been around for decades,) but it seems to have gotten so much worse over the last few years. I used to think decentralization of the internet would fix the worst of it, but Lemmy seems to have gotten worse alongside the rest of internet culture, proving me wrong. How do we fix/improve this culture of toxicity?

Block .ml and don’t engage with .ml users And hexbear and lemmygrad

Shun the toxic people. Block them and don’t look back.

Seriously, block them. They’re still gonna toxic whether you’re there to observe it or not.

Find a well moderated instance that isn’t afraid to show toxic people the door

Block .ml, grad, hexbear, dbzer0, and quokk.au

Block any other instance or person that centers itself around identity politics

Block all the news/politics communities. Just get your news from actual news services. The comment section for most news/politics posts here is worse than an entire garbage dump on fire.And you’ll end up with like 3 federated users left which is basically my /all feed now 😑

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[–] FishLake@lemmygrad.ml 31 points 3 days ago (2 children)

One hundred percent. I was on Reddit for a decade and had a curated sub list I aligned with and participated in. When the API changes happened and the app I used shut down, there was no way I was going to download the official app just to see ads and suggested/sponsored content. I took one look at .world and saw that the most redditiest redditors were also flocking there. So I joined Lemmygrad and was extremely happy with my choice.

The funny thing is that I still need to get on Reddit from time to time, and it’s really normie now. Sure it’s lib as ever, but the culture is much, much more mainstream than even a few years ago. That was probably Reddit’s goal, but I think it’s funny that they essentially orchestrated an exodus all their most insufferable users to .world. Going to .world is like a time machine to 2013 r/all.

[–] AssortedBiscuits@hexbear.net 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

The funny thing is that I still need to get on Reddit from time to time, and it’s really normie now.

I remember someone going, "I use Reddit now because it's like normal now." irl. They were incredibly dismissive about the "boycott" over spez, mostly thinking of them as a bunch of loser cranks.

[–] FishLake@lemmygrad.ml 2 points 3 days ago

Credit where credit is due, a bunch of them were losers who joined the bandwagon of leaving Reddit. A lot of the concerns I saw around that time on Reddit were that the site was becoming “toxic” and “political”. I don’t really think most of the people that left Reddit left because of any principled coherent stance. They perceived the site changing to be more advertiser friendly as a direct attack on their beliefs. Beliefs that 99 times out of 100 were misogynist and/or racist. Those are the losers that made a new home on .world.