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Admiral Patrick @dubvee.org

Shutting Down on July 31. This fediverse experiment was a failure.

End of the road. Wish I could say it's been a fun trip, but that would be a lie. Running this instance started out as a fun project, but it has been nothing but a nightmare for a long, long time. I'm looking forward to the freedom I will have after being shackled to this mess for the last two years.

This instance is shutting down for good on 7/31/2025.

If you want exports of anything, let me know. After that, I'm pulling the SSDs and going full Office Space on them.

Edit 07/12/25: Thank you all for the kind words, understanding, and appreciation. While I have been consumed by the negativity here, I never forgot about the positives. Unfortunately, the negatives can and do become overwhelming.

If you appreciate what I've been trying to do, then please do not let the efforts die with my departure. The toxicity I've described cannot be solved by any individual alone and requires a group effort.

  • Don't engage with those acting in bad faith or just trying to get a rise out of people. This is basically "don't feed the trolls" but sometimes the trolls are subtle.
  • Don't let emotion cloud your logic and try to remain rational. Always try to see the bigger picture and keep that in focus. Context matters. Ramifications of actions matter.
  • When you see people calling for violence, ask yourself "And then what happens?" Because it's most definitely not going to be "we all join hands in a circle, a rainbow appears overhead, and the world is saved".
  • On the same note, a large percentage of those calling for violence don't even live here. They're just trying to rile people up or spread chaos by feeding on our pent-up anger.
  • There are very few absolutes in this world, but people around here love to speak in them. If someone only speaks in absolutes, then they're missing most of the picture which is in the middle. Beware of those people.
  • If you see someone twisting what other people are saying just so they can attack them, please report them. This is a common form of trolling/harassment which is often difficult for mods to detect without personally investing themselves in every conversation thread. This often manifests as "Oh, so you think X, so you must think Y" where Y = an absolutely insane jump in logic. Then they attack the person as if they had said Y with other people dog-piling on afterward.
  • Admins: Please, please start clamping down on extremism and general toxicity. No psychopath, racist, etc has ever come back from a temp ban a better person. Force these unhinged people back to the fringe instances and defederate from those.
  • Most importantly: be good to one another. At the end of the day, we all have more in common than we differ.

Original plea below, though it's superseded by the above.

I'm gonna get right to the point: I'm burnt out, I kind of hate this place, and I really don't want to be here anymore.

I started it not because I kept getting banned from elsewhere but because I wanted to do and be part of something better. Well, two years in, and I cannot say this place is any better, just differently bad if not worse. Too many people here seem to think that because it's not "corpo social media" that anything goes, and boy do some people really run with that.

The average Lemming has the nuance of a wrecking ball and the maturity of a junior high edge lord, and trying to keep the peace here has become more than what I want to deal with. The worst part is that they're so caught up in their own self-righteousness that they can't see they're just as bad or worse than what they're spewing violent rhetoric at; trying to talk sense into anyone or de-escalate things is immediately met with "bootlicker", wild accusations, and/or worse.

I need help. Well, really, Lemmy needs help, professional help, but barring that, then I need some more referees to keep this place under control.

This instance has a mission, and I am no longer able to deal with the volume of toxic shitheads who do nothing but call for violence, take people out of context and jump to insane conclusions, and just act like petulant fucking children. Seriously, the demographic here is disgusting and needs to grow the hell up.

So this is it: Either some people step up and help to keep this place sane, or I'm shutting it down. Clock is ticking

49 comments

  • Ahh fuck, I figured this was coming but I feel the same and I wanted to help but dont have the energy to fight here on lemmy too. Filtering it isnt enough. This will probably be it for me too.

    I hope I run into you out in meatspace, you seem like our kind of people.

    Sometimes quitting is self-care. Be well.

    • Thanks, you too, and the understanding is appreciated.

      Definitely looking forward to spending some real quality time in meatspace lol. Time without the constant pings of reports or pings in the admin chat for this troll or that troll or this spammer, or some dickwad @-ing me in YPTB because I modded their call for violence and therefore I'm a bootlicking Nazi 😂

      This place had such potential, lol....until it didn't.

      Take care.

  • Took me a day to come up with something to write down.

    Thank you for what you've done over the years. I may not have agreed with everything, but you were one of the (very) few who's opinion I actually cared about.

    Thank you for putting a bunch of stuff that has been bothering me - borderline driving me crazy - into words. I miss that skill and it is now clear that this is, in fact, a cesspool we're all in together.

    Such a shame, man. Genuinely. Good luck!

    • Appreciate it, and glad I'm not alone in noticing this.

      I try to remain tactful, but it's often difficult when I have so much pent-up animosity toward all of the users, mods, and admins around here who have allowed this place to devolve into what it is now. We had all the tools and opportunity to truly make something better here. For a while it seemed like we were on track to achieve that, but things started going south and now I'm afraid it's too late to do anything about it.

      FWIW, other than the trolls who camped there (which you dispatched quickly and with gusto), I never had any issues from your end. I think my main gripe is with the larger instances allowing all this toxic behavior to fester. Can't just defed .world, for example, unless I want to be Beehaw (well, i do want to be Beehaw as that's always been my instance's spiritual guide, but I recognized that blocking .world and SJW wasn't feasible for me).

      Anyway, I've rambled long enough. Sounds like you know quite well where I'm coming from, so please take care of yourself and your own mental health. (I feel like the ghost of Jacob Marley rattling my chains as I say this 😆)

  • hi, I haven't used your project, but I saw this thread linked elsewhere, read it, and I just wanted to express two things:

    I agree with a lot of what you've said about people on Lemmy. It's sad, it really seemed promising a few years ago. There are still some good people it seems, but I feel like there is a large (but diminishing) silent majority of people who, like me, don't want to bother engaging because of the people who are too extreme. If you (or anyone else) is aware of some community that is a bit better in this respect, I'd be very interested in joining. (Mostly to lurk and read comments, but perhaps to participate when I have something to add).

    Also I wanted to say how sad it is that you can put a ton of work into something and eventually have the community let you down. It's hard enough to build anything, let alone something that becomes popular, and I can't imagine how disappointing it is to still have to deal with a toxic community despite contributing like that.

    If you have an RSS feed or mastodon account or something then you should let me know, I'd be interested in following it to see what you develop next, or if you have something you want to share. In addition to the technical side, it seems like you have a lot of valuable insight on what is needed to keep a community from going downhill like Lemmy has.

    Aside: I started dumping some thoughts on how to make moderation more flexible, allowing more people to report obviously bad stuff, but also maybe having different "moderation lists" that people can contribute to, to reduce the visibility of (but not necessarily hide entirely) more aggressive comments. If the moderators of these lists seem to become too extreme, users can always find a different list, and instance/community admins/moderators could choose different ones to apply by default. Maybe these lists could be made up of smaller groups of people (to keep each other accountable) and peer together to form larger groups, but the others could vote for or against including other groups.

    I realize this probably isn't the right place to ask this sort of question (apologies, you probably just want a break from all of this)... so I'd be happy to be pointed towards somewhere where people discuss this sort of thing.

    ::: spoiler Long rambling brain dumb of potential ways to make moderation easier and more customizable for different kinds of people

    I don't have any experience with this stuff at all, but I've often wondered about different technical solutions for content moderation that could make everyone happy. Is there any way to have co-existing moderation philosophies? Some way to allow some people to filter out kinds of content that they don't enjoy, leveraging community contributions to different "moderation lists" that people can choose to opt-in to (and possibly opt-out from). Maybe some of these lists wouldn't hide the content completely but simply push it down into a less visible area, or hide it behind a "too aggressive" button that you can only press if you are interested and in the mood to read comments like that. Then if you feel the comment is reasonable, you can choose to apply different moderation lists that better align with your own feelings, or possibly some sort of "I think this comment was incorrectly tagged, people may be misusing this moderation list". Maybe people who don't administer these lists can have those sorts of reports highlighted, so they can re-consider whether or not they agree with the moderators of that list. But worst case if you disagree with their philosophy, you can just find a different list to use to filter the comments you see.

    This might help take some of the moderation burden off of instance admins, and also allow for a greater spectrum of people to be able to co-exist on the same platform. The instance admin could simply choose what groups of people they trust as sort of default moderators, and users could even adjust that somewhat if they disagree. I don't think I could handle the full burden of being a moderator, but I wouldn't mind occasionally reporting content that I feel is overly hostile or rude, or even unreasonable (though this would be a different list). And I would be okay with my submissions to that list being reviewed by others and perhaps gradually being given more permission, but at the risk of having that permission taken away if I abuse it, perhaps with the chance of being steered in the right direction by a more senior moderator (e.g. use list "aggressive" rather than list "flag for removal"). Also perhaps my submissions to these lists don't have any effect unless some other number of users agree or make the same submission.

    Ideally people would be aware of these lists, and try to be more polite and civil if they really want to engage with many different people and try to change their minds. If they (sometimes) just want to rant and be aggressive, that's fine, but they can be contained and limited to other people who want to engage in that sort of thing. Maybe they could even voluntarily tag their own comments if they know that it's not for everyone.

    I'll add that on Lemmy I am sometimes afraid of even downvoting comment that I consider too hostile, at least if others seem to upvote it. This is because I vaguely recall that votes are public, at least to instance admins, and I figure some instance admins could be irrational and doxx me or something.

    ::: spoiler

    • Thanks. It makes my heart happy knowing that I'm not the only one seeing Lemmy for what it's become.

      There are still some good people it seems, but I feel like there is a large (but diminishing) silent majority of people who, like me, don't want to bother engaging because of the people who are too extreme. If you (or anyone else) is aware of some community that is a bit better in this respect, I'd be very interested in joining. (Mostly to lurk and read comments, but perhaps to participate when I have something to add).

      That was the whole premise of DubVee (my instance). We've got a fairly strict set of policies covering extremism and toxic behavior because, from the start, we wanted to be better than where we came from (Reddit). We're highly curated/heavily moderated, and our content policies apply to local and federated users equally (enforced with liberal use of perma bans and defederation from extreme/fringe instances).

      That was going very well for quite some time, but with the recent turbulence in the Fediverse (lemm.ee shutting down and big Lemmy instances spinning up parallel Piefed instances in the same month), most of that curation came undone - probably 80-90% of the accounts that had been identified and banned over the last two years were all back with new alts.

      That's basically when I decided to throw in the towel; I've been doing this alone, and I just don't have it in me to go through it again. When DubVee launched, I had a second admin who helped out, but they lost interest a little under a year in, so it's been a solo-operation since.

      While I've had offers from some amazing people to help lighten the admin burden, they were from admins who also had their own instances to worry about. I truly appreciated the offers, but I just didn't feel it was going to be enough to keep this place going without being committed full time to the mission/vision here.

      As far as I know, Beehaw would be the next best thing (they were basically my spirit guide when I set this place up). I'm not sure they moderate federated content like I did, but the local environment there is very welcoming - only limitation is they don't federate with .world or sh.itjust.works. Similarly, if you're a Trekkie, startrek.website is also well moderated (though, again, not sure if they moderate federated content).

      I'll add that on Lemmy I am sometimes afraid of even downvoting ... and I figure some instance admins could be irrational and doxx me or something

      Votes were never fully public, just restricted to admins and eventually community mods. I never worried too much about that since if I was afraid of a psychotic admin, I'd probably defederate their instance.

      What's worse, though, is some rogue admin from the gregtech instance decided to make a web tool that lets anyone look up anyone else's votes. I feel like that's too much power for the wrong hands to have access to and disagree with their stance that "since anyone can spin up an instance and see votes, why not make this tool available to everyone".

      When I was modding a couple of larger communities that often attracted some pretty psychotic people (news, unpopular opinion), I did very much live in fear that some psychos were going to doxx me for shits and giggles. That's not an irrational fear. I've directly seen them calling for Jordan Lund (LW mod for politics, news, and a couple other communities) to be doxxed and had to mod those comments (which I absolutely felt put a target on my back).

      • ah, thanks for the info! In your original post I missed that you were also the instance admin (though in hindsight that makes much more sense), the post that I saw that linked to this one talked about tesseract.

        It's encouraging to hear that the existing moderation techniques can work for a while, but to me it still feels like a lot of work and stress to expect people to put up with for fun in their spare time (in addition to paying for the hardware and maintaining it), so it would be nice if there were ways to distribute the load somewhat, perhaps giving you the option to take a break whenever you need or want it without major consequences (I assume). Part of why I wanted to respond to your post is because I relate to this feeling of "I've had enough", even from my day job, which pays me and still allows me to disconnect when needed, and sometimes from hobby projects, but at least I can step away from them from weeks or months if I want to.

        Anyway, good luck with whatever you decide to do next! (In my case, I would be happy to have a break from work for a few weeks or months, so I hope you get the chance to do the same if that's something you want, at least as a break from side projects like this Lemmy instance). If later you decide to start another sort of community on whatever might pop up after Lemmy, I'd be interested in joining it. (I may finally give Beehaw a shot too.)

  • WHAT?!?!

    I have wanted to quit Lemmy / the Threadiverse too, several times, but meeting people like you (and there are damn too few of such!) have restored my faith and allowed me to stay.

    I want to say some stuff, if it is okay:

    1. you are not alone. See above. Beyond that... we see it too. This place is so much worse than irl, it is "the internet" (a place not just for sharing pics of cats, but somehow also for those who thought 4chan was too lame... and now demand to share the same place as those wanting to share pics of cats?!).
    2. this was inevitable: I read somewhere, when I accepted my second mod position on Reddit, that all the good mods leave their communities after ~1-2 years. Dealing with the cesspool of humanity is draining. Trying to clean up an entire instance - whew, this speaks to your success that you made it this far, rather than a failure that you could not go further. Do you want to know the definitive proof, in my mind, that confirms this for me? It is the fact that you haven't shut it down already, but gave a deadline and are willing to stick it out to the end of the month. This is the end result of a CONSIDERED and THOUGHT-OUT deliberative process, not an emotional breakdown. Yes you feel emotions about it, obviously, but your decision is also supported by logic.

    1. please take a break (I mean after you shut down the instance, not in lieu of it). You deserve it! No really: you truly do! (though I cannot promise to be here myself when you return - this soul-sucking void has a way of burning us all out) After that... selfishly: I really, strongly hope to see you here as a regular user. But if your mental health would benefit from the opposite, then I would rather see you not - wait, does that make any sense?

    1. PieFed has a number of features that sound like ideas that I've heard you say that you implement manually, although it offers ways to do them automatically, e.g. auto-collapsing, auto-hiding, even auto-removing content by people with extraordinarily low reputation scores, and with the option to measure reputation within the specific community in question - e.g. someone cannot run up a high karma on hexbear and then come here and use that to troll piefed users. The really cool thing is that while setting up those "rules" takes effort, their implementation then scale up to however many / all users you want. Caveat: I have never tried modding a PieFed community so I do not know how much of that remains theoretical vs. is available right now. Anyway that's a thought for the future - I mean as a mod, on some existing PieFed server, not necessarily spinning up your own although that's obviously an option as well, but I figure not a likely one given your burnt-out status. Yes, trolls will complain that you have blocked them from participating in it but... this was inevitable. It is your house: you have the right to run it however you please.
    2. whatever you do, do it because of who you are, not for others. I... well this is easy to say, so very much harder (impossible?) to implement, though I need to keep trying! Oh wait, but we were talking about you here, yeah, totally, "you"... yeah...
    3. at the end of the day, the Fediverse still has merit, imho, simply b/c it is out from under the heel of the oppressors. Yes it attracts children here, but also those of us yearning to be free. This takes EFFORT - as you more than most of us know - but it has its advantages as well. Case in point: Reddit simply is not worth my time to comment in, these days, I find. I read - b/c some things can only be found there - but do not engage, b/c it is not welcoming. (Sadly, most of Lemmy is not very welcoming either... - and yes, I have ABSOLUTELY tried to be the change that I wanted to see, to promote "engagement" everywhere, as compared to people posting but then nobody wanting to comment, so I try to help even if I am literally the only one who does so)

    With lemm.ee shutting down, and hexbear losing its license (yes it got it back but it really and truly did LOSE it before that!), now more than ever it is quite obvious that the Threadiverse is struggling under the weight of the toxicity burden. Though I do have great hopes now that PieFed is replacing Lemmy. Take your break, rest, heal, and I hope that you will return stronger than ever before! (as a regular user, possibly a mod) You deserve it, internet stranger friend.

    Edit: omg the people downvoting this post... how is dubvee.org shutting down "not relevant" to a community literally called Dubvee Meta [email protected] ? The obliviousness is astonishing to me... and only serves to reinforce OP's point about ignorant behaviors poisoning the well here on the Threadiverse.

    • Thanks. At this time, I have no plans to return in any capacity (though if I do, it might be on my spiritual guide instance Beehaw).

      The only problem with Piefed is....it's the same demographic as Lemmy and thus is going to have the same toxicity problems. It may make it easier to sweep it under the rug but it doesn't address it at the source.

      My honest, no-longer-gives-a-fuck-what-people-think, opinion is that instance admins across the board need to take a much, MUCH harder stance against toxic behavior if the Fediverse is to succeed and not collapse into a cesspit singularity. No more slaps on the wrists, temp bans, etc. I'm (all too) aware there's a revolving door of shitheads, but the behavior remains the same and they often get to fly under the radar after putting on a fake mustache and hat and coming back in.

      I'm as upset as anyone about the state of the world, but I'm a functional adult capable of expressing myself without every second comment being "guillotines, Luigi, violence, violence , revolution!". I'm on the spectrum, though classified as "high functioning" but I learned a long time ago that neurodivergency is not an excuse for toxic behavior. I mention that only because it's a common excuse that gets thrown around, and i don't buy it for one second.

      You and many other good people, yeah, I'm gonna miss. I'm also gonna miss TenForward terribly; it's one of the very few communities that actually feels like a community. But, unfortunately, I gotta do what's best for me and that's get the hell away from this place.

      • I'm terribly sad to see you go. You've been one of my favorite people on Lemmy. I'm glad I could help in a small part on tenforward. I totally understand your reasoning and support your decision. Feel free to reach out any time.

      • I have been fairly open - though not quite outspoken - in voicing my concerns that I do not think that the Threadiverse will succeed. Though the extent that there is even the tiniest glimmer of hope, it lies with PieFed (or Sublinks etc.), rather than Lemmy.

        When I petittion to get Hexbear.net defederated from Discuss.Online, thereby opening up a generic instance that would be open to all incoming people fleeing from Reddit from Huffman's shittiness, I started to have a brief hope. It did not last long, b/c the USA elections happened, and more importantly the trolls seemed to switch their strategy, no longer remaining constrained on the Triad servers and instead appearing everywhere, by which I mean Lemmy.World, lemm.ee, sh.itjust.works, etc. - though importantly not truly and literally "everywhere" e.g. dubvee.org, beehaw.org, and the like. Anyway, before that I would see ~90% of the most batshit insane comments coming from hexbear.net, and then after their removal still ~90% of the most insane ones leftover coming from lemmy.ml, i.e. defederating (even if only by personal blocking since the Lemmy version of an "instance block" is laughably ineffective) really did have a chance of cleaning up >99% of the Threadiverse. But then after the elections they started coming from more normal instances, and I gave up that hope that the tide could ever be turned.

        And now I have little hope that the Threadiverse will ever grow - obviously it will "survive", but like as a Linux forum where people circle-jerk about Arch Linux (I love Linux too but... dayum, can't we talk about something else as well as that?) and leftist politics, but nothing else that is worth talking about.

        I have even had to resort to going back to Reddit - damnit the events happening in the world are IMPORTANT, and so when I've blocked most of the toxic communities on Lemmy, or even when I don't block anything at all, that NEWS often simply is not here to be found and read, much less discussed! :-(

        The Threadiverse is simply in the process of becoming the next 4chan - we had hope that it would be the next Reddit, and unfortunately that too is becoming the case, but on a speed-run to its current state, it would seem, with both AI scraping every instance and power-hungry moderators and instance admins (especially Lemmy.ml), and also somehow even more authoritarian control such as lack of modmail or even notification that an action has been taken against someone (except on Lemmy.World where they seem to have modified the code to send such a notification - yet Lemmy.ml refuses to do similarly across all of Lemmy, either because they are too overwhelmed with other priorities or more likely they simply do not care: Lemmy.ml works as intended, the rest is everyone else just piggy-backing off of their efforts made for themselves for their prioritizations, while if we want better then we have to go and build it for ourselves - which is fantastic to see that YOU have done just that!:-).

        That said, I still do have some hope for PieFed. Its focus on "trusted instances" can help provide a separation from those that are merely "present but not trusted", providing the ability for votes from e.g. Beehaw to count more (exclusively if the moderator asks for that feature?) than votes from e.g. Lemmy.ml, assuming that the latter has not already been defederated from.

        Like an immune system, I believe that we are under attack - it is both a signal that we are doing something of importance here, and also an enormous burden for those who have to fight on the front lines, as you have been doing. I can well understand your desire to sit back and rest for a good bit, before (if ever) returning even fractionally to that fray.

        But even then, the Threadiverse might not succeed. Or if it does, it may have to be without such people as you (or I), who would rather have nothing than have to wade through fecal matter in order to find a glimmer of a tiny nugget of something worthwhile. There are libraries, there are books to read, there are TV shows to watch - we don't need to read crap shoved into our faces virtually all of the time, on that point I am with you. Afaik, this may be how actual adults behave? (though especially after seeing the results of virtually any USA election, I have to add the caveat: regardless of physical age!:-P)

        Go rest my friend, I hope to see you again, perhaps, one day when you've healed a bit. :-)

  • Thank you for everything. You have been a positive force here. Is there a chance you will release the amazing UI work you have done for those of us that are still holding on?

    • Thanks. You, too, are one of the positive constants around here. Wish I could just hand-pick all the good people and restart my instance, lol, but that ship has sailed.

      The repo is archived now, but I merged in and released the work-in-progress branch that had a few bugfixes . It's fully open source so anyone who feels like it can still fork it and pick up where I left off. https://github.com/asimons04/Tesseract/

  • Well this sucks, but I understand and share your frustrations. You're one of the names I'm always happy to run into around lemmy (and of course in TenForward). I hope stepping away takes a source of stress out of your life.

    I've never tried to run an instance, but I've been fielding reports as a mod in a few communities and have seen a lot of the behavior that you're talking about - that awful combination of viciousness and righteousness. I've had to remove hit-lists, calls for somebody to murder politicians, cops, or advocating violence against various people perceived to have failed someone's "purity test", and much more. And I only help mod in a handful of meme communities, not anything serious. I can't imagine how much work must go into managing anything remotely political.

    My worry is that this is happening everywhere on social media, and that we're just on one of many platforms grappling with it. If you want my theory, stuff like this is downstream of social media being personalized and curated by opinion, either by algorithms (like TikTok, Twitter/X, etc.) or manually by moderators (like here or reddit). When you get too many people agreeing with each other, it creates an echo-chamber that amplifies the most extreme takes about everything and views differing opinions - or even tempering voices - as "trolls", "bootlickers" (as you mentioned), or worse. The news has been full of people radicalized from various bubbles on the internet until they act in ways they might not have if exposed to more diversity of thought. It begins with people hyping each other up with extreme language that lacks nuance, maturity, or reason, and then ends with a small % of impressionable people storming the capitol, firebombing Teslas, or maybe becoming that one anti-natalist murderer that got Lemmy a mention in the news recently. It's absolutely unhinged behavior, and I think these are all symptoms of the same thing.

    In short, the fediverse needs normies. We need diversity of thought and opinion, or else more reasonable people are going to burn out or feel pushed out by all the noise and toxicity.

    • In short, the fediverse needs normies. We need diversity of thought and opinion, or else more reasonable people are going to burn out or feel pushed out by all the noise and toxicity.

      I said this before, but in a way, it's ironic that there's "diverse" in the word "fediverse", the whole fediverse doesn't feel diverse.

    • I've had to remove [list of awful stuff] or advocating violence against various people perceived to have failed someone's "purity test", and much more

      Yep, to all of that. In spades. From one to another, I do appreciate the work you do both modding and contributing to communities.

      It's easy to become not quite numb but...acclimated(?) to that as just "words on a page" and swipe it away with the mod button, but when you step back, two things stand out to me:

      1. A person said those things. A person typed those out and thought to themselves "This is a perfectly acceptable thing to say." That's scary.
      2. The massive number of upvotes those attract and the score representing the number of people who saw that violent rhetoric and thought "yes, I like this. I agree with this". That's downiright terrifying.

      If you want my theory, stuff like this...the fediverse needs normies ... or else more reasonable people are going to burn out or feel pushed out by all the noise and toxicity

      (Not cherry picking those points specifically, just shortening for brevity.)

      Couldn't agree more. I've tried to provide a "normie-friendly" space with my instance (based on my own experience here as well as feedback from some former Reddit colleages who briefly tried Lemmy and nope'd right out). But things have become so extreme here that I honesty don't think any normie in their right mind would want to stick around and dilute the unhinged behavior. i.e. The toxicity has metastasized, and I don't think there's any going back.

      I hope I'm wrong. I really do. Despite the animosity I have toward what this place has become, I still want the idea/concept of the Fediverse to succeed. But until admins, far and wide, start taking this extremism and toxicity seriously, start de-escalating this stuff from the top down, and forcing these unhinged people back to the fringe instances (which can be de-federated from), I just don't see how this place is going to become anything but the next 4chan. Again, I genuinely hope I'm wrong.

    • In short, the fediverse needs normies

      I am sorry but this will never happen. Normies use Windows, are Christian, from the USA, and mostly centrist. Or perhaps use Mac, are Muslim, from the UK, and were formerly right-leaning. Or even if they think they are leftist, they will learn here just how wrong they were, as in finally being exposed to how deep that rabbit hole goes. The wider Threadiverse can be quite punishing to anyone who does not share hard enough the groupthink mindset. Especially if they accidentally respond to a post, shared in All, from Chapotraphouse (which Lemm.ee famously did not defederate from, nor does dbzero, nor lemmy.zip, etc.). Or make an offhand comment in most lemmy.ml communities?

      r/Redditalternatives is full of people who were looking to leave Reddit, actually decided to take people's advice to come here, but could not stand us (we are a Nazi bar, showcasing tankie philosophy and various other purity tests as you noted) and so gave up and returned to Reddit. They felt the opposite of being welcomed here.

      And people seem to actively like it this way? We have echo chambers for a reason... and it is far easier to simply continue them than to put in the enormous and continual efforts required to do otherwise.

      Btw, brace yourself: people are talking there that there will very likely be another Rexodus in the next few weeks as Reddit is about to once again screw the pooch and break everything by doing away with modmail and replacing it with... get this... their chat bots. Oh boy, I do not envy mods of most communities on Lemmy right now...

      If we wanted normies to feel welcomed here, it would need to start with us actually wanting them to feel welcomed here, collectively rather than individually, imho.

      Edit: I find the upvote/downvote ratio on this comment hilarious 😂. When I say that people do not feel welcomed here, somehow the response by some people is to specifically NOT leave a comment either welcoming me or at bare minimum politely expressing disagreement and perhaps even make an attempt to edumacashiate me in the intrinsic errors of my philosophy, but instead to smash the drive-by downvote button and move on. I can only imagine the thinking process behind that: "THAT'LL show them!"... and obviously I am j/k there, as there is no thinking process behind that, I would strongly wager, which has been my own point this whole time. 🤔😂 By all means, rather than attempt to be different, let's instead aim to be exactly like Reddit, just shifted further left.

      • Or even if they think they are leftist, they will learn here just how wrong they were

        I remember being so confused when I first joined, because I saw the hexbear communities constantly posting insane stuff like hoping Biden would die, or using "lib" as an insult, and I assumed they were a conservative instance.

        I worry that you're right about it being too big of an ask to hope everyone becomes more welcoming and open-minded, but I'm still personally going to try to be a tempering voice on here. Part of the reason I post memes and stay out of political stuff 99% of the time is because I want there to be more content that's just here for people wanting to have fun.

  • Thank you ptz for putting in the effort to make this place much more enjoyable, for running a great instance and building a very advanced frontend 🫡

    I'm very dishearten to see you go 🥺 but you must put yourself first.

  • Really sucks to hear, though I understand you gotta do what's best for you. Tesseract has been a massive improvement over the Lemmy UI, it will be missed

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