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.
First of all, sorry I thought you wanted to use slrpnk as the first link you posted was from there, I forgot that slrpnk doesn’t federate hb and grad
But actually, thinking about it now, does it really matter? LW defederates both, so there would be no way for a hexbear comment to make it to that community? https://hexbear.net/c/news@lemmy.world
Anyway, it doesn’t really matter, it’s still not 100%
I don’t have time for a comparison, but doesn’t Reddit has a similar amount of call to violence today? Intuitively, one would think that if people are okay with reading those on Reddit, they would be okay with those on here too
Correct.
Hrm… you know what, maybe? I mean my first answer is most definitely no, bc Reddit fights hard to censor it, but beyond that, people find ways to convey the same meaning, so there is a certain sense to which your statement could be true? Perhaps I am thinking back to my / our experiences on Reddit from two years ago without updating it in my head to reflect modern times.
But then at that point I want to say no again, for several reasons. One, I do have to read some subs on Reddit bc the content is simply not here - and you go to where that is, and that concept will never change no matter how popular the Threadiverse gets - and I don’t see anything close to the levels that we see here. Then again, it might exist there, just not where I am looking?
However, two, people in r/Redditalternatives say that we are too toxic - which we are - and that as bad as things are over there, we are worse from what they see, and we also have less content. The only thing we have less of here that they like is fewer bots - although tbf we have those here as well, despite how most of us have blocked them and they tend to be properly labeled here (which I would argue makes 100% the difference - one that you know is a bot is not a problem, as it is not pretending to be a human).
All of this is far more complicated than I am able to say cleanly and succinctly - e.g. we do have a higher maximum here of extremists, and also it seems to me a much higher baseline level of it as well, but we also have kindness here, whereas there it seems mostly absent, and we have more intellectual discussions here whereas there the baseline level expectation seems to be either teenagers or right-wing trolls that everyone just seems to give up on keeping our and just accepts the fact that they are everywhere, in every sub, in most posts even though they get ignored.
And yeah, calls for murder appear there - but they tend to be removed. And yeah, some of that content gets removed here as well, but as I showed links to, not all of it, nor even perhaps the majority of it, though depending on which community, on which instance, and which subject matter and in particular which mod (team) is looking at it.
We are definitely a den of iniquity. Perhaps Reddit is too. X/Twitter even more so. Bluesky seems far less so though, so maybe that was the source of that comparative thought process - some journalist who is editing Wikipedia in their spare time, so applying their personal bias to it, which is true but mainly in a highly narrow sense?
Perhaps the focus should not be on whether calls for murder exist - I’ve shown you, they DO, but that overall the Threadiverse provides tools to engage with content in enjoyable ways. Obviously engaging with controversial topics is going to bring up controversial wording, but someone can - as you do - block it easily. Reddit is too restrictive, and 4chan too open, but the Threadiverse provides a nice middle ground. It does require a helluva lotta work though, to understand how to make proper use of those tools. Or rather, Lemmy does, whereas PieFed makes it downright trivially easy with Topic Feeds and keyword filters and such (e.g. “guillotine” and “2A” and perhaps things like “, deserve it” and whatnot). Here at least you can make something work, whereas on Reddit you just can’t.