Is it just me, or does it feel like Lemmy is being hit with a wave of political spam?

voluble@lemmy.world to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 409 points –

I notice a large number of ragebait-y political communities being spun up by new users with thousands of posts & ai profile header photos. I notice comment sections are more acrimonious, and foreign disinfo talking points are circulating a lot more prolifically than before the US election started ramping up.

Anyone else notice this? Any idea on how to combat it on this platform? Are there any communities built around creating block lists of obvious troll/ai/disinfo accounts & communities?

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I've literally been downvoting nothing but random political posts outside of politics communities and still they somehow worm into the hot feed. Mods should take a more serious "no politics spam" rule.

At best, mods seem overwhelmed, especially of meme communities, while at worst, they are okay with such rule violations so long as they agree with the particular brand of politics. I had to start blocking some when they advocate extremist views that I don't find fun to constantly read. This was long before the election ramp-up - like "wouldn't it be fun to skin a landlord alive?", "the only good landlord is a dead landlord", etc.

But it worms its way into many other communities too, so finally I blocked all of lemmy.ml. Blocking lemmy.ml, lemmygrad.ml, and hexbear.net makes the Fediverse fun to be in, rather than a hellscape of extremist propaganda that constantly makes fun of the USA sponsored genocide, while defending genocide committed by Russia or China. I am okay with content regarding genocide, but I prefer a more... "adult" take on the matter, rather than the juvenile crap I was constantly seeing before those blocks.

They are free to speak however they want - but I am also free to not listen.

They should, but won't. The Lemmy people (or at least devs) aren't exactly apolitical, more's the great big whopping pity. Also downvoting is unlikely to do shit, I would suggest blocking it. I moved to lose .ml, grad, hexbear, slrpnk immediately and this place is so much better for it.

What’s wrong with slrpnk? All the other ones I know enough to understand your reasoning

Most of the content I noticed from there was angry doomposting and news. They're not at the same level as the blatantly malicious ones, I just don't want to deal with that shit as having too much of it blared at me bums me out.