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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[–] Soot@hexbear.net 23 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Honestly there were always arguments on the internet, but far and away the most peaceful time in my memory was the time of tens of thousands of independent forums and/or websites that profilerated up to ~2010.

You could just like a thing, blindly wander into a community about it, and spend your days, weeks, years talking to similar, friendly people in personable ways. If you got into arguments, mods just banned you for causing ruckus in their quiet corner of the internet. I find the nameless 'talking to the masses' that all social media does is the issue.

Humans thrive on making interpersonal bonds, and to speak to the same person twice online is borderline impossible today. Hexbear probably straddles the middle-upper limit of an enjoyable community size in that you will repeatedly interact with the same people over months or even years. But once you lose that person-person accountability, you inevitably become a pile of ragebait and nothing else.

That's why IRL community groups inevitably have an upper limit before they federate into subgroups - a sea of voices talking over each other doesn't really achieve much of an enjoyable atmosphere, and overall lends itself to sensationalism.