Block everyone! Block every instance! Block me! Block yourself!

Or maybe… just spend some time using the platform until you start to get a feel for the vibe. If you can bear to listen to opinions that don’t already align with your own, you’ll probably find that most people are pretty chill and discussions are mostly pretty civil. Disagreement is not the same thing as hostility or trolling. I’ve never blocked anything on this platform and I still find it to be miles better than reddit in terms of vibes. Rather than preemptively curating your feed based on whatever someone else’s idea of bad content is, you can form your own opinions. Block if you want, but you can also just… not engage.

There’s a lot of leftist spaces around here. I don’t mean liberal in the USA left, I mean actual socialist, communists, and anarchists. Most are fine with discussion but read the rules first. They’re usually in the side bar.

We like beans and soapy tits.

Welcome.

You may find stronger opinions here, and you may find them more popular than you’d expect.

It’s more leftist than Reddit, but just as insufferable.

People around here really love Linux.

Not saying it’s a bad thing. Linux is great.

But people around here reeeealy love Linux.

Might want to block the .ml instances if you don’t want to see too much weird chinese propaganda… (Tankies are weird).

Be aware that many of the instances (ml, hexbear, etcetera) can be rather full of authoritarian leftists. Politically, there are few far-right people, but quite a few authoritarians and quite a few anarchists. That said, not everyone on ml is a tankie.

Beans and powdered milk are important.

They banned me for absolutely no reason.

Because fucking u/spez uses full bot automation for moderation to mete out penalties – even permabans – for even the slightest casual remark of violence or anger or merely reading a post.

Be wary of tankies. What are tankies? It’s a pejorative term for authoritarian communists who will claim Pol Pot, Mao, and Stalin have done nothing wrong. They also support modern day Russia even though they’re supposedly a liberal democracy because they’re likely Russian psy ops guys.

We’re still a pretty small community here and you’ll see a lot of familiar usernames but you’ll eventually fit right in to our tapestry of performative outrage and bickering. Depending on your home instance, you may not be able to see all the fediverse communities. I recommend hopping around until you find one that fits your style, like dbzer0.

lemmy.ml is actual proud communists. If you hang around here for too long you might start thinking that there are lots of communists in the world. But no, fortunately. They’re just all here.

You can turn off displaying of scores from the preferences.

What is Lemmy?

Lemmy is a social media network that works just like Reddit - but is decentralised.

Reddit is a proprietary closed source platform that strictly enforces how you interface with said platform and ls owned by a publicly traded corporation who are currently trying to speedrun the enshitification (or monetization) of their platform in order to increase shareholder value.

Lemmy is an open source project that lets everyday people run and control their own platforms on servers across the globe, who connect with each other to share users and content through the ActivityPub and ActivityStream protocols, which are public web standards recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

The big difference being that major proprietary social platforms run by multinationals have a tendency to monopolize, control, exploit and otherwise abuse their users, where as Lemmy let’s pretty much anyone be a vendor of a social media platform - which doesn’t eliminate abusive platform holders, moderators or users - but you can block any of these if you’d like, in effect giving you control over what ends up in your feed and how you access that feed, since it’s all done through a public protocol and not some proprietary client or API.

Other than that, all social media platforms are information sources, disinformation sources, entertainment hubs and voids we scream into in the hopes that somebody hears us. They are a mirror, a megaphone, a vice and a boon.

But it’s better to use a social media platform run by everyday people rather than the goddamn Epstein class. Tell your friends; make your own social media by switching to the Social Web (also known as the “Fediverse”) in order to force Reddit, Twitter, Facebook and Threads into obsolescence - shareholders be damned.

My 2 cents: Don’t be afraid to use the “block community” and curate your “home” from time to time, don’t keep it static. There are a lot of awesome things here that can get buried easily.