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.

(page 2) 50 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] FartsWithAnAccent@fedia.io 29 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I haven't seen any of that shit on the fediverse except maybe conspiracy theories (which are way more prevalent on other websites), wtf are they talking about?

[–] ripcord@lemmy.world 9 points 1 day ago

Dunno, someone finally got around to fixing the article, though.

[–] mlg@lemmy.world 14 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Lol wait till you see any of the Pakistan or India related articles. Its like the Ganges river in text form.

[–] biotin7@sopuli.xyz 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Meaning ?

[–] GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 12 points 1 day ago

it's full of shit and will kill you if you wade in deep enough.

[–] Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 22 points 2 days ago (2 children)

There was a few months where I had to ban server after server every day because someone was really into semi-lolli anime. They were posting it in every anime forum. I asked them why they were non stop posting upskirt or provocative drawings of very young girls and they got angry that I dared ask.

[–] moubliezpas@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

Back in the day, we used to marvel at the mental fortitude of paramedics and war medics, who constantly see and deal with the most extreme accidents and horrors of humanity so that we, the public, don't ever have to.

That burden does seem to have expanded rather. I legit think it might be less traumatic to triage and transport a selection of burns victims, traffic fatalities etc for a living than to moderate busy social media platforms.

At least in an ambulance you generally get fair warning what sort of unspeakable horror you need to attend next, and you can help them.

I suppose in the medical emergency industry you also don't have to inform the disfiguring disease / patch of black ice on the road / tainted drinking water that 'yep, sorry, you can't operate here. Yes I know you're just trying to get by but we do have a No Festering Gonorrhoea sign that you ignored before infecting this lady'.

TLDR: at some point community moderators (not the over zealous type) might need to be recognised as an emergency service

[–] ech@lemmy.ca 5 points 1 day ago

I'm unsure if you're speaking as a previous admin or just as a user, but if the latter, would it not have been easier to just block the user directly?

[–] ozoned@piefed.social 16 points 1 day ago (1 children)

YUP! Can confirm, den of iniquity over here! Just like the fact I've been running Linux for 18 years now, so I'm obviously a hacker and a subversive. We enjoy things here like CHOICE and FREEDOM. You're all fucking DEVIANTS! And so am I! DEVIANTS OF THE WORLD UNITE!

[–] Archer@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

Well the first hit is free with Arch Linux

[–] Skavau@piefed.social 20 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

"Legal reform has also been proposed, most notably around Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, as well as proposed legal requirements for instance operators to engage in good-faith moderation of instance connections."

The source for this is a a paper written in January 2024 by someone called Nikhil Mahadeva.

Lets be clear, any Section 230 discussion will never mention the Fediverse. That implies anyone who wants to erode even knows what the Fediverse is.

[–] goat@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Wikipedia certainly isn't wrong, the Fediverse is filled with so much political extremism, made worse by the Tankie Developers

!meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works to see more of how widespread tankies and their extreme bigotry and violent rhetoric spreads across the fediverse

[–] IndustryStandard@lemmy.world -1 points 1 day ago (14 children)

Note this person is a Zionist promoting a community where they encourage Jewish ethnic surpremacy.

load more comments (14 replies)

[–] 30p87@feddit.org 12 points 2 days ago

That section is just pure Ragebait lol

[–] dontbelievethis@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 day ago

I think Wikipedia itself says that it is just an entry into topics. To confirm the things that are written there you check sources.

[–] wakest@piefed.social 13 points 2 days ago

This article has been a source of so much frustration over the years. I honestly think it should be scrapped and entirely rewritten.

[–] TrojanRoomCoffeePot@lemmy.world 12 points 2 days ago (2 children)

I've just seen your edit and the material added to the Fediverse entry on Wikipedia, your assertions seem well founded although I'm not tied into Wikipedia's Mod community and the motivations of users therein. You're definitely right that the Fediverse isn't exactly a node of objectionable content, frankly I've seen none, although admittedly I haven't plumbed the depths of every single instance. Their assertion should be noted though, that the Fediverse is wide open for abuse despite IMO not already being affected by the same volume as other platforms.

out of approximately 325,000 Fediverse posts analyzed over a two-day period, 112 were detected as instances of known child sexual abuse material (CSAM); 554 were detected as containing sexually explicit media alongside keywords associated with child sexual exploitation; 713 contained media alongside the top twenty CSAM-related hashtags on the Fediverse; and 1,217 contained text relating to distribution of CSAM or child grooming.

By their own numbers, the volume of CSAM was 0.03%, the volume of CSAM posted alongside keywords was 0.17%, the volume of CSAM posted with known associated hashtags was 0.22%, and 0.37% contained text related that kid of content. Less than ideal, you could say, given the nature of the content in question. The real crux of the matter seems to be whether or not it will increase, and whether or not Lemmy's Mods have the capacity to moderate the content like other platforms IMO, but their claim that "toxic or abusive content being common in the Fediverse" is more than slightly overblown even in considering the material.

[–] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 23 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

I think this kind of critical analysis of the Fediverse could be completely right in every single one of the details and still miss the more important point that corporate social networks are being used in a directly hostile fashion towards vulnerable people RIGHT NOW to a near catastrophic degree of negligence to put things in the most charitable terms possible. Further the people who own those corporations publicly endorse narratives that invisiblize the violence happening to real human beings.

Realize that by getting lost in a baseball stats esque evaluation of the Fediverse that we cede ground already to people who are disengenous. We have to consider the context of the alternative reality of corporate social media to fairly evaluate the Fediverse.

[–] TrojanRoomCoffeePot@lemmy.world 5 points 2 days ago

You're right, yes, op point. I'm not getting lost in the stats per se, and nearly turned my reply into an essay addressing the information readily available, but it bears saying given the nature of the info in the Wiki edit. You'll find no corpo booster here in my camp, the very purposeful abuse (Mod or otherwise) of some users/groups on social media has been readily observable even beyond the purges of Antifascist and leftist groups.

load more comments (1 replies)

[–] irelephant@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Its gone now I think

[–] ripcord@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago

Someone fixed it a few hours ago, yeah. We should also check back periodically to make it stay that way.

[–] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 9 points 2 days ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

This is ironically an inevitable consequence of Wikipedia's centralization undermining its strategic objective of making knowledge free and accessible to all.

I am not arguing for the opposite extreme, rather pointing out that Wikipedia is simply too centralized to be a durable vehicle of truth.

Federated architecture provides differentiated redundancy and the possibility for existential conflicts to be preserved in splits between elements of that federation rather than require the leaders at the top to be perfectly lucid and uncorruptable by encompassing forces (state or private) or risk cementing problematic lies as truth.

I think this would be a thing worth organizing around, can we mass report (edit ok "report" is probably the wrong word, this is about a broader editorial tone on the fediverse not attacking the particular person) this person or their particular edits on the fediverse? I don't mean a mindless spam wave, more like a well written consistent push from a large, disparate range of people that continually highlights that Wikipedia really doesn't have an accurate picture of what the Fediverse is (to put it charitably for Wikipedia).

[–] Kalcifer@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 day ago

This is ironically an inevitable consequence of Wikipedia’s centralization undermining its strategic objective of making knowledge free and accessible to all. […]

Perhaps you'd be interested ^[1]^ in Ibis ^[2]^?

References

Type: Meta. Accessed: 2025-09-20T03:22Z.
- Ibis ^[2]^ was recommended because of their apparent negative opinion of Wikipedia's alleged centralized structure.
Type: Repository. Title: "ibis". Publisher: ["GitHub". "Nutomic"]. Published: 2025-07-14T12:39:05.000Z. Accessed: 2025-09-20T03:25Z. URI: https://github.com/Nutomic/ibis.

[–] Auster@thebrainbin.org 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

The problem of reporting specific cases is that it could become cancel culture all over again. First option, I think, would be to try to correct issues in the article. Then, if they denied, then start suspecting of the site itself. And if already suspecting, it adds up to the site's untrustworthiness.

[–] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 15 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

What do you mean by cancel culture?

I feel like you are mistaking all acts of boycotting or mass comment submittal for "cancel culture".

I am not arguing for DDOSing Wikipedia, to edit articles with a hostile intent, or of smearing Wikipedia people in public places...

...I am arguing for organizing a campaign to submit feedback on the articles about the Fediverse FROM people on the Fediverse that explain in their own words why they think the way Wikipedia describes the Fediverse is incomplete, problematic and misleading.

Those are two VERY different things and I see no danger in slipping into "Cancel Culture" because the basic objective isn't to silence, hurt or destroy something it is to correct the narrative ABOUT US being pushed by a prominent source of information that should be beholden to people coming to it and saying "this isn't right what you wrote about me". They can disagree, but the more of us that argue the point in a genuine and substantiated way the harder it gets to ignore us and keep the distorted narrative intact.

[–] Auster@thebrainbin.org 7 points 2 days ago

I see. Sorry for jumping the gun.

[–] singingflame42@piefed.social 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

Yeah, this needs to be brought to someone's attention. It's not just someone adding their personal opinion to the Fediverse article, but they're also messing up a bunch of other articles, too. I'd almost call it vandalism. OP, maybe you could get together with some other editors and bring it up to an administrator / mods?

load more comments (2 replies)

load more comments