In the past week and a half, I’ve noticed Reddit behaviors starting to try and poison all of the places that people are taking refuge in to get away from the toxicity, myself included. They’ve started to DDoS Lemmy for a while, which is a Reddit thing to do and what they’re notorious of doing whenever they feel they don’t like something.
And now they’ve been trickling in numbers, these incredibly toxic users that behave as they would on Reddit. The reckless shitposting, derailing open civil discussions with unfunny and irrelevant jokes. The downvote brigading and banding together to get you banned. This exact thing has happened to me on Lemmy, that I had to leave because the toxicity was gradually building.
We should reject Reddit toxicity in general, tell them they don’t have a place here or anywhere. They know where they can dump their shit in, but they feel that because they’ve made mountains of it, that they’ve got to come over to other places and do it all over again.
I left Reddit because the toxicity levels have gotten unbearable. I really am yearning for a place where I can talk in and not be antagonized. I’m sure others are too.
Kbin and Lemmy are better built than Reddit in several ways to handle those behaviours to a certain point:
Karma: it’s hidden on Kbin, and I can’t find it on Lemmy. So, there is no pressure to post or comment something. Do you know that feeling on Reddit when you have 500 karma, you write a comment, and later you have 480 karma? That’s what I’m talking about.
Instances with their own rules: every instance has its own administrator(s), and they can set different rules for them and apply them. Some are more tolerant than others, so in the end,your experience depends on what instance your account is. Besides, some instances don’t have downvotes, so that’s a big plus too.
People: we all, or the most of us, know how situation was on Reddit, how we struggled to make our experience be positive, with no success. Because we know that, we don’t want that situation to replicate on these places. It’s difficult sometimes, but we do what we can.
Defederation: as someone said here, if situation inside an instance is too hard to tackle, to the point that those bad entities harass users on other instances, then defederation is key, until the situation comes back to normal.
And there are other things, like algorithm (or lack of), code open sourced to fork if you wish, etc.