I came here a few weeks ago after many years of reddit. Altogether I find discussions I enjoy, however, the posts and comments noticeably lean, well, tankie (I didn’t know that term before I came here). It’s not that I am looking for an echo chamber, but I also don’t want to spend my time reading propaganda. I’m really curious about a lot of things outside politics, as well as the opinions and arguments of reasonable people across the political spectrum, but I don’t want to listen to the boring canned lies of fascists and tankies. I realized that people celebrating communist dictators trigger me, and this is something I didn’t have to deal with before I started reading lemmy, I didn’t even know this type existed.
I also notice that accounts created just a few hours in advance come from other instances to brigade political posts. Because of how lemmy works, I can block individual users or communities, but not individual instances. Is there an instance that could be a “safe space” from this kind of brigading and tankie spam? Or a way to use the internet to read interesting things now that blogs died and then Reddit became whatever it became?
Edit: Thanks everyone for the helpful and wholesome comments. Of course, some trolls/wackos showed up as well to say hi.
You can. If you’re using a Lemmy home instance, as you are currently (lemmy.world), in the Web UI, go to your user menu in the upper-right corner, click “Settings”, click the “Blocks” tab, and then you can choose instances to block in a panel there.
If what you want is “I don’t want auth-left stuff”, avoiding hexbear.net, lemmygrad.ml, and lemmy.ml can help. You aren’t going to get some kind of ironclad avoidance, but that’ll avoid the great bulk of it. Your home instance is lemmy.world. lemmy.world is defederated with lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net for exactly the reason you mention (in fact, I see people who don’t like lemmy.world because they consider it liberal, which they don’t like) so you already won’t be seeing stuff from the first two instances.
I don’t think I’ve personally seen fascist material on the Threadiverse (though there are some people with quite broad definitions of the term), though there are or were some far-right instances out there, based on defederation lists. Most of what little I’ve seen on the Fediverse seems to me to be on Pleroma, though I haven’t spent much time on non-Threadiverse Fediverse stuff.
The home instance that I use, lemmy.today, has one user (@DonaldJMusk@lemmy.today) that posts a bunch of Trump stuff and a conservative community, !conservative@lemmy.today. I don’t know if your definition of conservative and his match up, but maybe you’d find it to your taste; it’s probably the closest to mainstream US, Republican material that I’ve seen with much activity on the Threadiverse. The instance isn’t going to be just moderate conservative and moderate liberal users though. But, if that’s the kind of community that you might be participating in, I’d imagine that he’d like to have more users.
EDIT: My own personal take is that the long term solution to having people with disparate positions on what content they want to see, above-and-beyond use of moderated communities and admin activity on instances, is to have “curator lists”, where people can basically “share” lists of blocks/subscribes/votes or something like that, and other users can subscribe to them. Then you have a list that — for example — excludes or includes content on various grounds without requiring effort on a per-user-who-wants-curated-content basis. I think that Usenet pretty much established that killfiles don’t really scale well in combating spam and stuff like that, because there was never a mechanism to share killfiles among users. Anyway, today, there isn’t support for something like that on the Threadiverse. I understand that BlueSky has something along those lines.
I enjoy that you gave a serious and helpful answer.
Posts like that are the ones that keep me here. There are some really dope people here who want to help and inform other people.
What’s sad is often content like this gets labeled as ‘evil’ and then brigaded by users who perceive it as a threat to furthering their political agenda, because anyone who isn’t on their side, or is remotely nice to anyone on the ‘other’ sides, is evil.
By lemmy.ml logic, if I help my elderly Trump-voting neighbor take out his trash, I’m also a Trump supporter. Apparently I’m if I was a ‘good person’ who was really anit-Trump, I’d beat him or slash his tires or something.
It would be important for people to understand that what separates good people from bad people is decency and basic human kindness, not political ideology. In reality, the good people are in the center, and the bad people are on the extremes. Yet, due to the polarization of public discourse, a left leaning person may be convinced that the good people are to the left, and the bad people are to the right from them. If they keep drifting towards the extreme, and keep thinking that everyone to the right is a bad person, eventually they will hate all the decent people in the center, while everyone still to the left from them is an actual monster. Needless to say, the same goes for people who start right leaning and keep drifting to the right. I wish more people realized that the enemies are the crazies on either side, not the moderates on the other side.
And by the replies and attitudes in the rest of this thread as of today, you’re correct.
Not just lemmy.ml logic. A lot of people on Lemmy would call you a Trump supporter simply because you helped that neighbor. lol The extremism here has been getting really nasty lately.
In mod logs I am seeing a lot more banning for “advocating violence.” I guess the good news about that is that mods are banning people for advocating violence, so there’s that.
Wow, thanks, such a helpful response! I’ll try the web interface for instance blocking. Another sus instance I saw today was blahaj.zone. To clarify, I also didn’t see fascist stuff, I just mentioned it because I felt it important to point out that I also don’t want to see that kind of content. I guess I saw one too many “so you are not a fan of Stalin, you must be fascist” comment today.
What’s sus about Blahaj Zone? I’ve always found them to be nice people.
Well he’s looking for conservative content, and we’re a queer instance, so…
There are gay conservatives though. And there are conservatives who support LGBTQIA+ causes.
OP sounds like he’s just tired of the extremism of everything, not just left or conservative. So maybe he’s just a centralist or something.
hey, just so you know blahaj.zone is not a tankie instance, it’s an instance aimed at protecting oppressed minorities (it hosts a women-only community, protects LGBT+ users from bigotry, etc.).
I think technically the instance doesn’t take sides in terms of political ideology and is thus not a “political instance”, but the top community on blahaj.zone is vehemently anti-tankie, so I would say they’re the opposite of the people you’re worried about
You can read more about blahaj.zone’s intentions as a space here:
https://lemmyverse.link/lem.lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/14736607
basically you’ll only have issues with blahaj.zone if you’re transphobic, homophobic, etc.
got it, thanks for the explanation. I know nothing about the content and the general crowd over there, but some accounts registered there were definitely brigading political posts over .world, and not in a tasteful way. I don’t have screenshots or names because I blocked them. I’m not saying this is the instance’s fault.
I tend to not block instances FWIW. I have blocked several communities and found that it works pretty well. For now, browsing /all in lemmy is my preferred view because we just don’t have that many people to keep content coming in the communities I have subscribed to. Plus, it’s more fun to see the variety. Lemmy is small enough still where it’s easier to “opt-out” than there is a need to “opt-in” to limit the noise.
Can do it through apps too.
ML is definitely everyone’s first and fav instance to block, and it sounds like it’s time for you too. A lot of the dumb shit will cut down very quickly just by getting rid of that one.
It’s so funny that the first instance Lemmy users ban is the one of the Lemmy developers lol
the lemmy devs are very clear about their political views.
anytime you are clear about your political views, you are going to invite others to ban/hate/dismiss you on princple, because most people do not believe in a plurality of viewpoints in 2026. Increasingly folks just want to silence and other perspective than their own and create their own instances where they can fully police the views of others and have that instance be specifically for their political persuasions only.
Funny in a way, not the first thing I’d say about it though. Makes complete sense, the whole idea of Lemmy and the fediverse aligns way more with leftist ideology. It was the first instance I blocked too, it’s very nice to be able to have a nice space with varied opinions without the one big extreme that’s objectively (IMO) bad.
It’s not really “funny” but ironic perhaps.
Funny haha vs funny peculiar
thanks, I found it now. fwiw, I asked Perplexity if I can block instances and was told it can only be done by the admin defederating with them. can’t always trust that thing!
I agree that blocking these instances will dramatically improve your experience.
Pretty sure that Donald J. Musk is a Russian Z astroturfer banned from half of Lemmy with multiple accounts under different aliases.
It might be worth adding that there is some backlash on BlueSky for their shared blocklists recently because they can accidentally catch reasonable people or be militarised to deliberately grab extra people. Or at least that’s my take. Personally I now consider a lot of social media along the lines of “if I might not feel comfortable with you around the wife and kids, then a block is reasonable like not inviting you to the next dinner party” and that having a block that you can click through removes a lot of these issues (collapsed post /comment with no title unless you click type thing)
Yeah, that’s why I mentioned votes — I think that it’d make sense to be able to maybe do something like build a score aggregated from multiple lists or something.
Another thing I’ve mentioned in the past is using this as a mechanism for tagging. The NSFW flag was a hack that Reddit put in because some people wanted to browse Reddit at work and some people wanted to post stuff that wouldn’t be considered acceptable in most work contexts. There are many, many different categories that someone might want to “tag” things on. Some people are fine with nudity. Some people are fine with gore. Some people are fine with suggestive content. Some people object to specific items in the above. I think that it will never be the case that everyone will manually tag their own content in all the same areas, but it could be the case that someone could create “lists” that one could subscribe to that could permit that sort of tagging; same mechanism.
Yeah, tags/labels are useful but do run into:
scaling issues
abuse
disagreements
Still, agreed they’re a useful addition
I barely can go a day i the fediverse without my pro-peace socialist democratic views being classified as facism or nazi-apologia.
There are a lot of users who are ‘eternally vigilant’ and think anyone who isn’t with them, is automatically their enemy.
Could it be cause you say shit like this?
https://piefed.social/comment/10584215
Great answer! Good to see a balanced take.
Lemmy has developed a habit of branding anything it dislikes as “fascist” or “nazi,” even neutral reporting from outlets like AP. I’ve even seen news articles from AP get called fascist propaganda simply because they reported facts in a neutral tone instead of demanding that all Republicans be removed from society.
Nuance isn’t a strong point for a lot of Lemmy ragers. Many users came from Reddit after bans or because they found Reddit insufficiently leftist. Lemmy calling Reddit “conservative” is wildly out of touch.
So it’s especially nice to see a reasonable, level-headed reply here.