Just blocked lemmy.ml from my Lemmy account, and I swear to god it’s one of the best things I’ve ever done on this platform. My homepage feels actually clean now.
For the past few months I’d been seeing a lot of tankie posting and pretty much far-left propaganda on my feed. It got tiring enough that I finally checked my blocked-user list, and realized pretty much everyone I’d blocked was from lemmy.ml. So I just blocked the whole instance instead.
Saying this as someone who considers themselves a leftist: I used to think Lemmy itself was an echo chamber. Turns out lemmy.ml was the problem the entire time. Probably the reason I tolerated it for so long is that I agreed with a lot of what they posted, but like an oversaturated meme, I’d had enough. Browsing the platform was starting to feel way too tiring instead of fun, which defeats the point of being here in the first place.
The breaking point was seeing some dude post a “meme” implying North Korea and China are basically communist utopias and that the West sucks. I mean, the West does suck, but come on - you’re saying North Korea is the ideal the West should strive for? What the hell…
I think it’s a combination. There are accounts which run classic FSB style; series of innocuous posts and then ZELENSKY IS A NAZI, then innocuous posts.
Meanwhile, ignorant dumb kids who have been dealt a rough hand with covid, housing prices, ai, trump, climate change etc are pretty susceptible to the dumbest but most appealing simple answers/boogymen.
Add in the Internet’s ability to help you avoid ever encountering an opinion with which you disagree and you’ve got a very toxic breeding ground for the worst and dumbest ideas.
Let’s not forget the 15-year-old nihilistic edgelords who, for a change, aren’t outright Nazis, if only for the reason because there were so many nihilistic outright Nazi edgelords and Wehraboos out there that it had become too mainstream. Also, they read somewhere that the Red Army destroyed the Wehrmacht which automatically makes the Soviet Union superior to the Third Reich. So they went full Stalinist instead.
There must be at least some who have found their way from WoT to Reddit and from there to Lemmy.
At least those who used to run in Tumblr’s “more leftist than thou” rat race that apparently suggested that being enby is more leftist than being trans to such a degree that trans isn’t leftist enough are usually too feeble to go full Tankie and support genocides if committed in the name of communism.
Lord knows they won’t let us forget them lmao
But yea accelerationists are always children or very broken people. Misery loves company.