I didn’t mean for this post to cause a bunch of arguing in the comments =(
I thought this was just some gallows humor (e.g. “Everything’s lovely except that I have to fear for my safety all the time”) type of shitpost that sounded similar to comments I’ve heard from women irl a lot.
Ah, a blanket denial of everything I said. How glad I am that I’m above petty things like pointing out the comically stereotypical behavior of users from other instances. It’s nice up here, on the Mountain of Sarcastic Moral Superiority.
As an actual counterpoint, the primary way that new users get onto lemmy is always going to have the highest concentration of toxic users. Society is, if you haven’t noticed, incredibly toxic. Commonly espoused ideas like trans people being human or civil rights being important aren’t commonly supported by society at large (source: the entire world right now). The easiest way for people who support those things to find their way to instances where those ideas are popularly held is to join the most popular instance and see both the need for other instances with heavier moderation, and what those instances are. How many people hear about blahaj or sh.itjust.works before signing up to lemmy, vs. sign up there as their second account? Personally, I’m pretty grateful that the most toxic opinions are largely self-segregated into a place where people aren’t required to interact with them. It’s less pleasant, sure, but it’s also the best place in the fediverse to get an accurate idea of what the real societal opinions are. And if it gets to be too much, I can always just flee .world (or .ml, I mean seriously guys) like a base coward and spend time under one of my alt accounts on a more heavily moderated instance like .blahaj instead.
that isn’t necessarily true though: you don’t see other popular instances of fediverse platforms having these problems when they actually put effort into enforcing rules that protect the community and discourage disinformation and hate speech, and it doesn’t make them any less of a gateway for new users.
the staff on lemmy.world promote disinformation, and that does not benefit any of us, especially when disinformation has a way of spreading that the separation of instances alone isn’t enough to prevent. most are still either directly federated to lemmy.world, or federated to instances that are federated to lemmy.world.
toxicity itself isn’t inherent to society but a consequence of how our current society is set up, and social media platforms that deliberately proliferate disinformation play a role in that. if you want to actually counter hate and disinformation the first step you should take is to stop outright encouraging it and fight it at the source.
also, implying people are cowards for wanting to flee your hate instance is despicable and privileged-ass take. fuck you.