this post was submitted on 07 May 2024
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The Chinese Great Firewall (GFW) has already been using machine learning to detect "illegal" traffics. The arms race is moving towards the Cyberpunk world where AIs are battling against an AI firewall.
Careful criticizing China you will awake the Tankies.
Drums, drums in the deep ...
You can conviniently block a whole instance from your account now, it reduces this kind of disagreement a lot.
Should you though?
I get it, it's annoying, but the entire "let's block people with opinions I don't like" is probably the single source of pillerization and increased extremism on the internet.
If I'm not allowed to have a discussion or disagreement with you, and get kicked out instead, I'll just go to places where they will talk with me and where it's chock full of other idiots like me who are much more extreme and in our safety bubble we can all continue not beat the same dead horse and circle jerk and make eachother more extreme because there are no dissenting voices, there are no voices or reason and calm, there are no cooler heads around.
This entire moderation where we simply started dumping people with who we disagree has made the world a.much, much worse place.
Granted, it sucks to have to deal with crazies and extremists, but at least whilst they're in the group we can all keep them grounded in reality.
I actually tried to, and if it was possible to have rational and polite discussion, without straw man arguments, dog pilling, personal attacks and finally threats of violence, I would have continued to try. But sadly all of this happen, multiple times.
At some points I considered leaving Lemmy, thinking that this federation as a whole was not safe for debating. But then I started understanding patterns, either it was from the users from a specific instance, or it was communities from a specific instance that turned like that. Overall the pattern seem to be that if the instance mentions extreme political ideologies in its description or if the profiles of its admins do, then debating is not possible.
If they want to stay connected to people to avoid the circle jerk, they have to work on themselves too (ex: learning to debate politely), you can't except us to absorb all the damages to help them avoid radicalization. It's like walking towards a terrorist group with flowers while they are shooting around and expecting them to be inspired by your pacifism.
I do enjoy debating and questioning my own beliefs, but I am not on Lemmy to consume my mental health, so I need to take some actions to protect it.
I'm not on the internet or lemmy to make the world a better place, I'm on here to kill time/enjoy myself/learn some things. I dont have the mental space to deal extremists, and particularly extremists that have a world view thats incompatible with itself if taken at face value, and I certainly dont have anything valid that I can learn from tankies, and as such, my block list has gotten quite large, and my general mood has increased because of it
This is my thinking for using .world. I don’t get all my news or interaction from Lemmy or the internet as a whole, and Lemmy is small enough that it has an almost zero impact on broader society. I respect those who try, but if my internet experience was antagonistic or frustrating I’d probably just stop using it.
I also feel that conversations of that nature are best had in person, where there’s a higher chance of changing minds. I’ve no proof but it feels like internet discussions are taken less seriously and thus merely end before any opinion changing can occur.
You also have far less info on internet conversion on whether or not its being had in good faith, which is an extra hurdle on opinion change
I “blocked” hexbear, because a mod didn’t take the time to use their brain, labeled me a “pedophile apologist” and banned me from the entire instance. If they moderate based on “I don’t care what actually happened, I’m mad” then I’m not going to bother interacting with them.
Hexbear mods are paid to spread propaganda, not use their brain, two fairly exclusive activities.
I was planning to, but ultimately didn't. I have handed out personal blocks to obvious trolls and a brunch of hexbear users that spammed gifs in every single thread though.
Not even grad? Wow.
Nope. I have filtered both grad and hexbear out of my feed though, I don't need their shit there. And don't forget that many instances already are defederated with them, so there's also fewer of them through that!
This operates under the assumption that there are good decent people on every instance, but instances like Hexbear and Lemmy.ml are inherently corrupt and run by people who want to sow misinformation and chaos to negatively impact western powers. I'm not saying the whole thing is a Chinese operation, but if it were then it would be run exactly the same way it is now.
Yeah, I don't block instances, just individuals that have proven to not act in good faith. I try to expose myself to as many diverse opinions as possible, but know if the people holding those opinions can back it up with facts, or are at least willing to consider the possibility that they're wrong, and I try my best to do the same.
Problem I see with this is that a lot of "I block people who act in bad faith" have hair triggers when it comes to what they consider bad faith. I see their comments all over the place where its a disagreement and 6 comments in they're claiming the other person is acting in bad faith and they're blocking them
Yeah, that certainly happens.
I personally have only blocked like 2 users. It takes a lot for me to do it.
I very well get what you're saying but a lot of people don't understand the difference between "has a valid opinion I disagree with" and "is a flame troll LLM" and just block anyone with an opinion they don't like, loudly proclaiming"you are a bad fatig actor!"
I think it really made the entire world a worse place to be in, everyone is in their own echo chambers now, nice and safely shielded from scary opinions that don't align with their warped world view.
Being able to block what you want is great, having other people decide what to block for you is not.
blocked
Exhibit a
Instance blocking is dependent on client implementation, as it isn’t provided by lemmy itself.
edit: no longer the case
Huh, neat
I think you are correct, but not having the opportunity to participate in a thread on those instances because you can't see them anymore is part of the ways to avoid troubles.
Okay, which instances should I block to get rid of the tankies?
Lemmy.ml, lemmygrad.ml, and Hexbear.
Lemmygrad and Hexbear are the most obvious ones, sadly lemmy.ml is also part of them in my experience despite not being obvious about it (you have to check the admins and mods profile to see the link) and having some good content when it's not about politics such as tech. There may also be some defederated by my home instance admins that I may not be aware of.
HI WINNIE POOH! How have you been, have you had your daily dose of honey yet?
I have some first hand experience with this. Brand new XMPP server, never before seen by anyone in the world, blocked within about 12 hours. Wireguard VPN on AWS lasts for a few hours on some networks, more on others. Never longer than a few days though.
From China?
I was there in 2017 or 2018 and set up a Shadowsocks server before I went with whatever the latest mitigations were that I could find at the time. My server wasn't completely blocked, but ended up getting throttled to hell after a few days.