There’s a github issue request to solve this:

Add a local user setting to filter out image / meme posts, similar to NSFW filtering https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4988

Tildes is NOT a good website to recommend.

I made a Tildes account many years ago when it first started up. I knew the founder was a Reddit admin, and I’d heard that it was a haven for Reddit admins & power-mods, but I hadn’t spent much time there.

I recently made a post about the problems with Reddit, and while there were intelligent people and comments on there, the majority of votes went to people who were being extremely dishonest, and even outright lying; attacking me in every way possible while urging the admin to ban me. Neutral people don’t behave like that. So they couldn’t have made it more obvious that Tildes is merely an extension of authority-figures-of-Reddit with a different UI. All the same problematic people & behaviors exist there.

Based on the accusations one of them was making, and my history they were pulling up, one of them was either a Reddit admin or someone in cahoots with one of the Reddit admins that banned me. Tildes is invite-only, and the main accounts attacking me were brand new.

The Tildes admin removed my comments debunking the lies they were telling, and deleted my account.

I agree. When leaving reddit I weighed my choices between setting up a forum or a lemmy community/instance and ultimately chose a forum due to their software being more polished & feature-rich, and the fact that threads can have long-term discussions. I really dislike the time-based nature of reddit & lemmy for many things.

I petitioned the forum software devs to join the fediverse though. It’s nice to see some of them already joining.

I use Ecosia instead of Google, but I know that Google recently added a “forums” category to the top of their search. Have you tried that? Hopefully it will help bring back to life independent forums.

none of the major providers will deliver your email without your mail server having first built a reputation

There are definitely major, and easily-abusable “features” being implemented by the major email providers, but I don’t think your statement is correct. I have a Hetzner server, and I can receive email from it (to Gmail) just fine, as long as I have SPF, DMARC, and DKIM set up. I can also create a new server with a new IP and not have any issues. The issues may arise with shared IPs/ranges that are also being used by spammers. Otherwise, if you’re planning to send bulk email you just need to warm up the IP.

I’m wondering, is this still your opinion?

I’ve been thinking about updating that blog post but I’m not sure where to add the updates.

I just added a bunch of updates and info at the bottom to help people who are new to the fediverse. Thanks for the nudge.

Yes, I think so.

There are public instances: https://searx.space/

This is one someone previously suggested, and the one I tried that seems to work well: https://search.disroot.org/ - I see it’s not in the list above though. Not sure why.

I’ve been testing other search engines, and I found that SearX/SearXNG and Mojeek both turn up results for smaller websites that Google puts in 50th place for the exact title of the website/page.

About the votes, it might have been because of the opinion I quoted above.

Na, I don’t think people on lemmy are that averse to criticisms of the UI, features, etc. And by “astroturfed” I don’t mean “my thread was downvoted”. The thread was flooded with hostile comments making personal attacks, etc., most of which completely ignored the substance of the blog post. Virtually the entire thread was filled with comments along the lines of “How dare you attack reddit, you are [insert random ad hominem]”.

All the comments making personal attacks on me were greatly upvoted, and other reasonable and on-topic comments were downvoted. There was a delay before it occurred, and then all the comments were up/downvoted the same amount, and new ones met the same fate, so there was clearly a group of people who were notified about the thread at some point who then continually monitored it and voted on new comments.

I guess at the time the mods removed your blog post by mistake, because they didn’t expect personal blogs here.

I doubt that. But if that’s the case, that’s horrible moderation that they would allow all the personal, off-topic attacks against me and then “remove the post by mistake because they didn’t expect personal blogs”. They should have removed most of the comments in that thread and banned the users.

I’ve had a better experience with the reddit@lemmy.ml community so far. I’ve seen lots of criticisms of lemmy.ml, and even attempts to [dishonestly] attack the .ml developers. I wonder how much of that is from the same group/type of people who just want to cause problems and make people leave lemmy. I wonder if the reason I experienced it less on the lemmy.ml comm is because those users are banned there, and that’s why they’re spreading FUD about lemmy.ml.

I really dislike the bloated UI they’re all using, but it looks like there are solutions on the way.

I’m wondering, is this still your opinion?

I’ve gotten used to it and I like that many instances default to a dark mode. I used to use the old.instance UI, but I think I ran into problems with it and ended up just using the standard Lemmy UI.

Regarding lemmy being complicated, I’ve mostly learned how it works and I definitely think it’s the #1 reddit-alternative at the moment, and the most promising option for the future as well. Along with independent forums of course.

I also set up a Mastodon account, but unfortunately most people are still using Twitter. I also petitioned the Xenforo developers to join the fediverse, and I like that other forum software like Discourse, etc., are joining the fediverse. I definitely think federation is the future.

I’ve been thinking about updating that blog post but I’m not sure where to add the updates.

I agree. The best option now is to look for specific sources of trustworthy reviews.

Regarding rtings, the two monitors I purchased myself had completely different results from the monitor RTINGS showed. What does that say? RTINGS is totally unreliable? I got ridiculously unlucky? https://hardforum.com/threads/why-are-ips-monitors-popular-the-ips-glow-ruins-a-third-of-the-screen-along-with-any-color-advantage-it-may-have.2032852/post-1045814690

I agree about reddit, but unfortunately, I don’t think lemmy is free from astroturfing. Myself and others have noticed that there are many users on lemmy who seem to be purposefully antagonistic towards other lemmy users. The possible reason may be to drive people away from lemmy and hinder its growth.

I’ve experienced pro-reddit astroturfing on lemmy. I posted this criticism of reddit on the reddit@lemmy.world comm, and it was heavily astroturfed and then deleted by the mod for a bogus reason.

A year later, someone used that post to attack me while insinuating purely from the title that I was at fault because the reddit admins would never do something like that (despite all the public information to the contrary).

I’d like to read this because I think one of the biggest problems with reddit is that it’s now basically a free-for-all for disinformation. So I’d like to see their arguments and evidence that decentralized alternatives are superior in this regard. Unfortunately, the article is paywalled.

The ideal scenario would be to download your data, then upload it to your own static website before deleting it.

Here’s an example of it: https://www.rareddit.com/

But you’d need a static site generator built to do that, and I haven’t been able to get a response from the person who made that website. I’ve tried posting about it elsewhere, and didn’t get any solutions.

It should be simple enough for someone to make a template or instructions or an SSG for people to use. Unfortunately, no one has.

I ran into a similar problem with snapshots of a forum and email server – if there are scheduled emails when you take the snapshot they get sent out again if you create a new test server from the snapshot. And similarly for the forum.

I’m not sure what the solution is either. The emails are sent via an SMTP so it’s not as simple as disabling email (ports, firewall, etc.) on the new test server.

Yep, that was one of them. Do you think that’s a good mechanism to automatically delete all user’s content when they get banned? Those example titles you shared don’t seem like obvious trolling nor obviously worthy of an account ban, and the collateral damage of deleting valid & popular threads seems bad.

How are you supposed to link to a source when it’s completely deleted?

You can see it in my profile though:

@MaximilianKohler to Ask Lemmy Ex Redditors of Lemmy what made you come on over? What happened at Reddit that you made the switch? • 5 days ago

This is the link and it looks like it’s been restored https://lemmy.world/post/17593614

I looked in the mod log https://lemmy.world/modlog/3106 and it says:

4 hours ago mod Restored Post Ex Redditors of Lemmy what made you come on over? What happened at Reddit that you made the switch? reason: restoring post as it was deleted as a result of the user getting instance banned from lemmy.ml

There is no log of why/when it was removed.

I looked up another one from https://lemmy.world/c/nostupidquestions titled “Where’s all the intelligent discussion at?”, which was removed for rule 7. I don’t agree with the removal reason, but none of this is relevant to the point of the OP. You guys are sidetracking.

That’s a lot of effort you’re putting into something that can easily disappear at any point.

That is the point of this thread. You’ve chosen to deceptively magnify one part of it to twist things for your own purpose, which also seems to be a primary purpose of a lot of people on Lemmy – antagonizing other Lemmy users.

Why would you want a lemmy.ml link though?

That’s where the thread is. It was created on lemmy.ml and crossposted to lemmy.world. When crossposting from lemmy.ml to lemmy.world it says “crossposted from lemmy.world”, which is wrong and confusing, and defeats the purpose of crossposting (informing people about similar communities or other instances).