Context: Admiral Patrick replied and included this gem:
And might I add that not one person complained until db0 went internet Karen with his hissy fit because I took his toy away from him.
“Not one person complained about my explicitly obfuscated blacklists! Damn internet Karens making a big deal!”
Literally every person that I’ve ever recommended this space to irl has outright chided me for having done so. And eventually I saw that they were correct to have done so.
It did not help that (1) a Google search (remember, I’m talking to mainstream normies here, okay?) for “Lemmy” at that time returned Lemmy.ml (nowadays it shows Lemmy.world iirc, but a year or so ago it behaved differently), (2) the default sort for Lemmy.ml is different than most instances, and instead of showing Global it shows only Local, (3) combine this with fluctuations that seems to occur just before any Western election and you get a feed that is very different from what 99% of us here experience for ourselves. Unfiltered Lemmy in this manner is truly bOtH sIdEs SaMe bullshit (of the kind that lets just say discouraged voting for Kamala Harris), and virtually nothing else (again, showing LOCAL rather than GLOBAL on Lemmy.ml).
Mainstream non-technical normal folks are never going to come over to “Lemmy”. It simply has too much historical baggage - and this on top of the continued toxicity still existing in the present. Just one conversation with a hexbear user… by a white, Christian, straight, centrist, “normal” (/mainstream) person is enough to send most of them back to Reddit (or sometimes Bluesky). Whereupon they bitterly complain about us here, warning others against making the same mistake. Oh and yeah they take their OC with them.
Some even stuck around here for a LONG time - like a year or more. Before they too succumbed and went back. I don’t even blame them, and presume that when (not even an “if” in my mind) Donald Trump refuses to step down and this place becomes an absolute shitstorm I am very likely to do the same. Tiny Reddit subs are not the same as the large ones, whereas there are virtually no tiny ones here - at least, not enough to take more than 5 minutes a day to fully catch up on.
Incels will never learn that no means NO, rather than that they simply need to push forward even harder. At which point the issue wraps back around to us, who thereby have to answer what we will actually DO about it.