I never really used Reddit, but I read an article during the API debacle in 2023 that mentioned Lemmy so I gave it a shot.

These folks include presenting a false person as being of age, then switching to underage at the time of meetup when the target shows up.

A group descends upon the target who is now told they’re a pedophile.

Then the group tries to kill the person who was trying to meet what they thought was an adult.

And the perpetrators think this is justice.

It isn’t the medical definition at work, here. It’s the legal one.

Ding ding ding.

Yeah I believe the next step in this process is to make the easy jump into hunting all those people expressing ‘Pedo apologia’. Half this thread suddenly is fair game to ‘investigate.’

It’s a bottomless well, really.

Hell, KiwiFarms style tactics is becoming more and more common and mainstream. It’s on Lemmy too.

There are also users on .ml that aren’t tankies. There are even tankies on other instances(!)

That’s the kind of content instance admins are and need to be concerned with on the topic of defederating instances. However most of the time it’s over whether some user in a shitposting thread was unfairly moderated.

Instances are servers that host communities.

Instances are servers that host user accounts.

Federated instances allow users from one instance to view and post in communities on other (federated) instances. If the instances are defederated there is no connection whatsoever being made between the users and communities.

Now, there are communities that have very strict and often very political moderation policies. Technically only the instance administrator has the power/authority to override communities, but only on the instance they administrate.

This can become an issue, especially when people who get moderated run to the admin demanding to talk with who is in charge. The netKarens get really mad if the admins back up the community, so they’ll start these instance crusades demanding defederation and such.

So as a result there are some natural divisions across the major instances based on how the admins tend to back up community rules.

So for a rough examples: .ml communities have zero tolerance for American Liberalism. Lemmy.world allows communities to be heavy handed against criticism of NATO or Israel. Blahaj.zone has zero tolerance for transphobes gatekeeping. My instance, sh.itjust.works, allows for combat footage and communities dedicated to documenting(harassing) the .ml instance, their admins and the lemmy devs (who admin .ml).

The average user need only pay attention to the communities they post in. The instance of the user is mostly irrelevant, nevermind the butthurt individuals who want a worse and fragmented Fediverse.

I get you. For me after my grandparents passed I realized I wanted to be a grandparent. So I gotta play by some of society’s stupid rules to see if I can see that through.

Careerwise: biggest thing for me was jumping into public service and working in local government–in America, no less. Now I work remotely and have a well-compensated union-represented government job with a pension that doesn’t require me to do management or have a medical or law degree.

I knew to steer clear of the Fed too, and that’s paid off in spades.

All in all though as a former kid and current parent: kids need their cool aunts and uncles, related or not, out there having fun not making them cousins. So there’s zero shame in having no rush or desire for trying to strike that balance.

I did a lot of the fun in my teens and twenties, and then realized I wanted a family and was lucky to find a career that fit.

It’s definitely a challenge to find a balance though so it can often feel like a trade-in. But if you’re honest with yourself it doesn’t have to be nor an unwanted change.

Similar. I had a community from 2001 onward where I was variously an admin and a mod over the decades. A lot of us drifted apart from being kids exploring the internet to adults with families and careers.

But mainly the guy that took over the code maintenance became the sole admin in 2018 and he just chased everyone off the site debatebroing with increasingly racist and misogynistic rants. Dude I played games with and talked with online for 20 years started calling me a genocidal enslaver for trying to explain CRT and want solar power in America.

ByteDance shell company Chrome.

There are workgroups at my job that use it as acknowledgement and for voting consensus as we are allowed to attend meetings camera and mic off.

Eckstein had already sensed campus hostility toward Israel prior to Oct. 7. But after the attacks, she recalled, her friends “started to give me dirty looks” following her decision to post pro-Israel messages on social media.

Classic.

I went to a wedding where they played Bittersweet Symphony as she walked down the aisle.

It always felt slightly offputting.

…And then the groom’s mom made a speech about how love was like a dog, which had some sweet sentiments about loyalty in there. But also… vaguely shady.

Americans have had to invent novel terms to avoid using the ‘s’ or ‘c’ word with politics. ‘Mutual aid’ is a term usually used to refer tk grassroots organizing of communities to cover basic needs like food and medicine.

Referring to a common internet scam as ‘mutual aid’ is doing more work to smear the term than anything.

MBFC does the opposite of elevate conversations. It’s quite frankly a poison pill for conversations. People will apply their prejudices and alter their interpretations based on the ‘bias check’, typically before or instead of any critical thinking or ant article. of any article.

The last time the MBFC bot was going the user pushing it was very clearly aware of this dynamic. They also knew it was lumping everything to website source, despite authors and opinion pieces, for maximum damage.

The first year after the api debacle in 2023 was rife with culture class of redditors tromping through anarchist and communist communities and instances and freaking the fuck out they’re allowed to exist.

Those instances have resulted in defederations or there’s been enough fatigue and migration that these days its really just down to like 3 chronically obsessed users variously spamming about it.

Is this done by teenagers?

Quite possibly. There’d be no real way of knowing. But it does sound like young people trying to find an outlet and seeking change–as ineffectual as it may seem to jaded old timers.