OpenStars

No - bc the continual floods will keep putting them out:-).

There's only one way to find out, hey let's GOOOOOO!💪🕜👉🫠

I mean, tbf we kinda are. If they are willing to lie, cheat, steal etc., but meanwhile nobody is willing to oppose them, then we aren't players in their set of strategic moves.

The only thing required for evil to flourish is for good people to do nothing to stop it.

That is why I try to think now in terms of disinformation, more than merely misinformation, when it seems intentional.

And this right here is why I like the Fediverse. Not immediately presuming the absolute worst case scenario and confidently asserting such, refusing to hear anything to the contrary? Offering kindness as well as accuracy in your answer? You didn't go for the jugular in trying (even if failing) to "pwn" your victim!? You, sir, would make a very bad modern Redditor 🤪. Which is why I hope you stay here, where I can keep getting to read amazingly kind replies like these:-).

I never said that that image proves that the originator is a tankie. For one, such content turns people away from the Fediverse, regardless if offered by a conservative, a leftist, a tankie, or whoever. Mainly why I included it is that it is an example of content offered on an instance known to have tankies. See e.g. https://feddit.nl/post/16246531.

What "makes" them a "tankie" instance is that they literally deny that the Tiennamen Square massacre involved any fatalities (and ban anyone from every community on Lemmy.ml, even ones that you've never posted or commented in) if you say otherwise. They are really quite open about it too - it definitely is no secret, though you won't see it immediately upon looking at the sidebar for the instance, so usually people from the Western world (which they seem to be so against in many of their more politically aligned communities) have to discover that fact on their own, then get disappointed (especially those considering themselves liberal and therefore a bit "left-leaning", not knowing just how far left the scale really goes, i.e. nearly every American is fairly right-leaning, when using the global rather than USA scale).

But more generally, if that instance wants to make fun of the West, particularly Americans, that's fine - do their thing - but then why is it so shocking when Americans get offended by that? All the more so when reading the sidebar of such places as e.g. Lemmy.World and Lemmy.ca, but then the content federated from Lemmy.ml's communities work according to an entirely different set of rules.

As we try to entice people over here from Reddit, it's confusing to them to have all these conflicting sets of rules and behaviors - e.g. in some instances people are allowed to behave as trolls, even encouraged to do so apparently by their admins, but then they also come out and do it here as well, where it is a violation of the rules.

Anyway, again, I'm not using that image to try to prove tankieness - that's already been established. This is content from tankies, as the person I replied to said "that place is full of whack jobs", and this whataboutism seemed a kind of illustration of that, not proof.

Oh I've seen it - some people receiving downvotes between replying to me and me seeing their content, which I thought was odd so I checked out their post history and literally everything had been downvoted. Obviously that's a sort of troll attack (except one case where the person said that they were doing it to themselves, so as to imprint upon themselves how worthless those scores really are). Admins can see such and ban accounts doing it, but some instances allow automated signups so there can be an unlimited number of accounts that would need banning though, if someone were determined enough to keep making new ones.

But that's not what drove my irl friends away - that was content that e.g. made fun of the Western world & society, and which they considered "extremist", and did not want to see so they left. And as others have noted, if you remove politics and Linux, then other than Star Trek what else do we even have here?

A community, that's what. But that takes awhile to see, yet they were already gone.

PieFed is odd in both having several features that Lemmy lacks - categories of communities, tags on posts, and most pertinent here, the ability to truly block all users from a specified instance without requiring admin approval (which neither Lemmy nor apparently Mbin offers) - while at the same time lacking in several fundamentals, e.g. user tagging such as @openstars@piefed.social generates no notifications, and the UI is highly difficult to work with for posts with many comments and especially deeper chains that are nested (there is no option to go one level up, the only choice is to start all over at the top level, at which point browser searching does not work when the comments are buried too deeply, as is our very conversation here).

Yes there is a request for a PieFed API. In the browser the display options are a List, a Tile, and a Wide Tile. Off the top of my head, Lemmy seems the most polished - e.g. there are many apps providing choices for how to access it - followed by Mbin and PieFed that each offer different feature sets.

Sorry to hear that. It sounds like you would have to switch to PieFed (which can do it but the UI isn't as polished, plus then it can't also read content from Mastodon) or use an app (which I thought none were available that worked for Mbin?), or as you say put in the effort for every single community and annoying user who is trying to push their agenda.

On the bright side, you've done it now so henceforth it is merely maintenance:-).

Thanks for letting me know.

Ah, so URL link-type posts pointing to that domain. Have you ever tried it though - might it also block users or communities from that instance as well, even if it isn't obvious just from glancing at that page?

I would try it myself but I don't have an account on any Mbin instance. But if you are positive that it does not also block users - as multiple people kept telling me - then I need to remove that wording from my post telling people that Mbin can do that.

That... makes no sense to me.

Meh, at this point, do we really want to live forever? :-P