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?
.world is the answer as long as you remove the reason able part.
I know of no one who actually esposes conservative principles to me. pay as you go, rainy day funds, infrastructure investment, efficient social safety nets, rule of law (constitution and founding principles respected even seperation of church and state), middle of the road (balancing state power [regulations] and private power). This is a us centric view though were our conservative party has seem to have thrown out all conservative principles. I do see plenty of generally left of center moderate liberals (don’t get me wrong a lot of ultra left too) although again often presented nowadays like ultra left views. Folks who don’t want to see an end to all capitalism but want to limit wealth disparity and the effect of money on politics, have social safety nets like universal healthcare and equitable public education, sensible regulation, progressive taxes, efforts to limit global warming fallout, etc.
I largely use Lemmy because it doesn’t tolerate conservatives.
It’s 2026. There is no such thing as a moderate conservative. They don’t deserve the benefit of the doubt. They don’t deserve yet another platform to argue in bad faith on. They’ve gone too far. Every platform they touch turns into a cesspool of bigotry and garbage opinions they think should be taken seriously or they play victim.
I don’t want them on Lemmy.
Refusing to even talk to people on the opposite end of the political spectrum just makes you another perpetuator of the massive political divide. Do you actually think anyone’s had their vote swayed by someone who refused to even talk to them. You’re not going to bring anyone to the left by demonising the right.
Refusing to even talk to people on the opposite end of the political spectrum just makes you another perpetuator of the massive political divide.
Extremely bold of you to assume I haven’t spent the majority of my life talking to them and trying to understand their extremist views.
I finally stopped because, as I said, they’ve lost the benefit of the doubt due to their own words and actions.
How long would you entertain the opinions and actions of Nazis in the name of getting along?
Also, if you think conservatives are going to start voting liberal if we play nice with them, well, you’re either very young or really haven’t been paying attention.
Lemmy’s pretty left leaning, extremely left sometimes. There was a conservative community for a while but it turned until a place to ridicule conservatives.
Maybe just start a new community, I think there are people here but a lot on here refuse to even tolerate the right.
There are lots of us around. You just won’t see a ton of the content they post or comment because the tankies and other extremists will downvote and report it to try and get it removed.
It sucks. I once was on a thread about trans issues months ago, that was so wonderfully empathetic and nuanced and graceful… I went back and forth and felt so much was shared and learned. But then it was brigaded by a LGBT instance’s users, who reported everything as bigotry and hate speech, and then the mods removed all the posts and all that was left two days later was just a ton of short asinine posts that reduce everything into a binary stance of ‘support lgbt always and forever or you are an evil person’ nonsense.
Which is to say, moderate speech that considers a plurality of views on an issue, or the real world complexities of an issue, typically doesn’t last very long on lemmy, due to the population of extremists who regard it as ‘hate speech’. Because they want to reduce every discussion to name-calling and bumper sticker slogans and false binary choices of being ‘for/against’ things, and a bizarre paranoia about everything being nazi or facist.
but not individual instances.
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.
moderate conservative
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 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?
Pretty sure that Donald J. Musk is a Russian Z astroturfer banned from half of Lemmy with multiple accounts under different aliases.
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.
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.
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.
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)
“reasonable is not what i describe conservatives, they are everything but that” they are immediately blocked.
You can block individual instances, I have a long list of instances that I have blocked.
What I first did is to limit my home feed to ‘subscribed’ only. Doing so, I don’t see anything from communities I’m not already subscribed to. And since I’ve made a rather… careful selection of those communities (from various instances), I seldom have have to deal with low quality content/noise. Making it a lot quicker to remove the occasional nuisance that passes through.
I joined about two years ago, and to get the most content I have kept browsing All, however that is annoying when some new guy decide to set up a new NSFW community outside of the NSFW branded instances and I have to block them individually.
When lemmynsfw existed most people went there to post, but some either didn’t like the instance or didn’t know about it and posted on generic instances.
I don’t want to turn on NSFW filtering in general, as it is used in memes and jokes, but I don’t want porn on my main account, that is what my alt is used for.
Are different communities/servers really all that similar? I kinda just assume that people choose a somewhat random instance when they start and stick with it.
Some are, some aren’t.
Federation though, is such that if you say something one community doesn’t like… well they are likely to come over from their instance and harass the crap out of you. Or if you random comment in their instance, they will lose their minds at you.
That’s what I did, because I didn’t know anything about how it works when I signed up. I guess the big ones near the top of the instance list are more random than smaller ones (reversion to the mean), but even there, mander.xyz users tone seems different to me.
Unfortunately, I think the same effect works both ways. The reasonable people you are seeking will mostly gravitate towards low-effort instances - after all, they are just looking for funny memes. They heard about lemmy as “reddit, but with fewer bots”. They have jobs and hobbies and friends in the real world - all sorts of reasons to care about anything other than the specific instance of a random social media platform they are joining. It is no coincidence that the most tankie users on the most tankie instances oscillate between posting revolutionary content and posting suicide jokes. It will be the rare person who threads the needle of “reasonable enough to have real world perspective, but obsessive enough to create and manage a curated lemmy instance for reasonable people.”
As a pretty middle of the road liberal with a few conservative or libertarian sympathies (but a lot of opinions about auto oriented city planning), I’m afraid we just have to wade through the muck until our communities appear via emergent design. Until then, I like the neoliberal comm.
I just like .world because it’s got a simple UI and it’s easy to use. A lot of the other instances are very convoluted UIs, and tend to have exclusive/extremist agendas.
I use piefed.social because it 's easy to filter out what I consider noise (aka most political content and all kind of excited people ;)
“Reason for blocking: ‘Too excited.’” 😅
I have an excuse: I’m getting old ;)
None. Because that would mean that humans on Earth are being reasonable.
Have you met people? People are the worst.
people are great if they think you are like them.
once they get a hint of difference of opinion, or that their assumptions about you were misguided or false. they lose their shit at you.
Maybe have a look again, as I at least could block instances if I wanted to.
I am happy with only having blocked some communities, though.
Mainly the too US-centric political ones.Interestingly enough that also got me rid of a large part of the more ridicously exaggerated tankie stuff I encountered before.
I closed it up and made it a private development instance last year, but you basically just described Dubvee.
Far left crazies and far right crazies are removed with equal prejudice, though the far right is much rarer (and often just trolls). Regardless, it’s moderated here to a, well, moderate temperature. We also don’t federate with the Triad (Hexbear, Grad, and
.ml) as well as a few other instances (one of them a big instance that throws an error on a calculator) that are centered around and encourage identity politics (another source of what you’re describing in your post).Even though we’re “closed” I still keep the instance running in order to develop the Tesseract UI, and if you want to try out the kind of space that’s curated here, I would be willing to approve your application. I’ve toyed with the idea of re-launching and seeking out another admin or 3, but haven’t had the time to put much thought into it.
TL;DR is I’ve always tried to run Dubvee as “normie friendly” and cut out some of the more, uh, rabid parts of the fediverse, and if you want to try it out, I’d be willing to allow it.
As someone said, you can block instances but it can be useful to look up an instance on fediseer. It shows endorsements and censures for the instance along with other information:
Reddit also died. It’s now a museum piece of dead internet theoy.
