Bye
You crazies won and proved me wrong. The fediverse isn't worth saving after all.
Over the course of the last several days, I have received a constant stream of harassing messages, death threats, and threats of doxxing over DM, Matrix, Github, and Codeberg. All of it instigated and eggged on by another instance's top admin. This is unacceptable for all of the reasons in the world, and while I won't give you the personal satisfaction of having won, you've definitely proven me wrong about the fediverse being something that even can be saved from itself.
Even people around here I'd interacted with positively for years and had grown to respect because they seemed level headed and above the immature and sociopathic bullshit that dominates this platform showed their true selves. That completely shattered any and all illusions I had that this place has a hidden core of users that I should try to make more visible amongst all the rage, rage baiting, propaganda, harassment, rumor mongering, trolls, conspiracies, purity testing, and violent rhetoric.
Like many of the rational people before me who called this place home, I'm done with this place.
I tried to carve out a space where those people and other rougher edges were not drowning out niche communities and hobbies and where people who choose to use the platform to harass others were also out of sight, out of mind. Apparently only three people who aren't me actually want a place that's not just a circle-jerk of rage and hate. Thus sayeth the mob.
Then you have entire instances whose admins call for the death of others, harass other users, and lead harassment, brigading, and DARVO campaigns against those who dare call out their bullshit or decide to disassociate themselves and their work from them.
Lemmy.World was so close to doing the right thing after instance-that-will-not-be named's admins were calling for the death of LW's admins while spreading rumours and labeling others in such a way that painted them as targets for murder. All of that, mind you, with absoultey no evidence other than specuation and their own cooked-up conspiracies about modlog actions or taking and twisting things wildly out of context to fit their made-up narratives so they had someone to say they 'caught' and should be killed.
.world was on the precipice of doing the right thing and disaccociating themselves from that psychotic shit show, but silently dropped the issue and carried on as usual after wringing their hands for maybe two weeks.
"We have to worry about the optics or the politics of it." they probably said.
Bullshit.
I'm one person and have held my fucking ground, mostly with dignity and grace, in the heat of my own shitstorm of trying to disaccociate from the extremist elements of the fediverse. If I can stand up for what's right and deal with the blowback, so can you.
Fuck lemmy world's admin team for condoning that behavior and letting the human skidmark db0 DARVO his way out of the situation while brigading with his army of malcontents whom he wields like a cult leader. He knows exactly what he is doing, and you all continue to allow him to get away with it.
Nah, fuck this whole place. I've let too many things fall by the wayside IRL because of dealing with all this fediverse bullshit and trying to give it the slightest bit of polish both visually and atmospherically. Mythbusters may have proven that you can, in fact, polish a turd, but at the end of the day, it's still a shiny ball of shit.
For the few people left who didn't turn out to be psychotic, I'll think of you from time to time when recalling something you've posted or commented that genuinely made me laugh, made me think, or otherwise put a smile on my face or in my heart.
Everyone else, though, enjoy your toxic, xenophobic, knee-jerk-to-violence, purity-testing, and harassing-anyone-who-doesn't-fall-in-line cess pit. One day you, too, will do or say something that doesn't toe the line and you'll be right where I am.
P.S. Rimu, you owe me a beer. No one is talking about the Piefed vote quotas anymore, so you're welcome.
EDIT: forgot to add:
EDIT2:
Removed the link to the original message because the douche included a Javascript on the page to DDOS Dbzero0
That's actually really sad. Not because I agree with him, but because it's always sad to see this sort of falling down. Like imagine, a parallel timeline where this person's parents hadn't abused them, and they hadn't had been bullied or whatever, or had faced repercussions for poor behavior, or had gotten the help they needed years ago. Right? Like if something hadn't gone wrong, they wouldn't have ended up like this.
Knowing that all the magas, Nazis, real tankies (the ones that REALLY want to just slaughter anybody that disagrees, iron fist style), all the bullies and buttholes out there, and all the other messed up of us, who fall down into evil or extreme burnout... Knowing this happens at all, is still sad, to me.
I'm American and think you know who needs to be you know what'ed. But even then, knowing that he grew up in such a disgusting environment, ruining him, not ever really allowing his upper brain functions to fully come to, and the past-but-then-future path for him that was inevitable of bad behavior and responses from society that would drive him to be exactly like this..... Knowing that shit happens to humans, in our species, theoretically within our control, is sad. And seeing obvious predictions and fears come to pass in real-time is never fun.
With the admiral patrick guy, it's pathetic and gross and shitty and honestly good riddance, but still the human part of me is like, that confusion and frustration he's obviously avoiding and coping with ego and trying to fill the sadness with "you are all sociopaths harassing me and at least I tried to stand my ground"... Like he obviously doesn't quite understand, and honestly, truly, neither do we. He stood up for his shitty moderate centrist beliefs for some real goal, behaved like an outcast petulant child, and handled it relatively poorly. But like, I see this shit all the time from all SORTS of people, in all sorts of capacities, public or not.
I won't miss him. I don't use an html lemmy interface. I luckily don't have to run an instance (thank you, Ada). But it would be inhuman of me to absolutely, irresponsibly condemn this dude to shitty-hell for trying to do something that his twisted mind probably thought was right. Will he change? Probably not. Will he get worse? Probably. Will he directly hurt somebody? I hope not. Will he likely fall in with a worse crowd? Happens ALL the time.
So I beg of everybody here, to stop, and consider what went wrong for this guy. Put yourself in his shoes, I know that's too big an ask for most people - but that's kind of my point, and the problem here. He fucked up, he based it on fucking up, and somewhat kept fucking up even after he left (a ddos script? Really?). But pain only begets more pain. Really try to figure out what went wrong, what the points in time were where he REALLY could have been recovered by any of us or somebody in real life. You aren't going to get the right answer. A lot of us are going to get the wrong answer. But just try to incorporate empathy into your life going forwards, because there's a lot of bullshit and horror and hate and pain happening in the world today, and we are all trying to do what we think is best and most efficient to do the right thing. And we need to, at least, learn from this event and be better.
It's also sad the reaction of loud minority of crazy people that will send stuff like that. No one should receive death threats.
We all make mistakes.
Plenty of us survived rough childhoods and now deal with cptsd, got bullied, the whole jazz, and somehow managed not to become insufferable assholes. They could have done that too but chose not to.
This probably makes me sound like a conservative... but their inability to make more pro-social choices makes me think they're fucking weak and insufferable. Like I feel like Principal Skinner glowering down at them, saying "Pathetic."
Because it is pathetic to take being hurt and spin into more hurt. About as pathetic and weak and shallow as can be.
As someone who was abused and didn't grow up into a pile of shit, it's really hard for me to agree with this.
I think if your choice is to get worse, it says a lot about you that experiencing abuse will never excuse.
Like all those guys who turn extra right wing because someone had the audacity to call them out on shitty behavior. It speaks to who they are.
They still have agency, they still have choices, and they still choose to make make shitty ones.
Nah I can't, this mod sucks. No excuses need to be made for shit behavior.
I think that a person gets a little sympathy for their bad childhood when they show a willingness to be better than that, not before.
Like, I am capable of an absurd degree of forgiveness, but the person in question has to show that they're worthy of it—they don't just get it for free.
Aka the kind that only exist in liberal campfire stories to justify their self conception as "reasonable moderates"
Thank you for this reply, wish I could give this one a badge of some sort.