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So here’s my story about exploding heads. I was new to Lemmy and stumbled across the instance. I poked around and quickly saw that it was not my people. That’s whatever, but I wanted to see if I would be banned for simply dropping by. I know the right loves to rag on liberals about creating safe spaces, but in truth, there is no one that thrives off having safe spaces more than the modern conservative internet warrior. So I poked around a bit, mentioning that I wasn’t a conservative, and to my surprise I wasn’t banned and was even invited to stick around and ask questions. So I did.

I tried a couple of times to engage. And not in a trolling way, but in a genuine, “you have this opinion, let me share mine and maybe we can see where we differ” type of way.

The first guy I responded to straight up ignored me. Which is fair, but it did seem like he wanted to have a discussion, just not with someone who disagreed with him. That’s fine.

The second guy disagreed with me, started off by calling me names, and when I didn’t come back with aggression, ended up calming down and we did have a fairly civil discussion of 5-6 messages each. Lengthy multi-paragraph messages. And the last message he sent, which I didn’t even bother to reply to basically boiled down to the idea that he didn’t take any of this Reddit/Lemmy stuff too seriously and only came here for fun and to blow off steam by posting silly pictures and memes and whatnot. That’s totally normal and fair, but for him, his subject of choice, more often than not was to post hate speech about transgender people. I just…I mean I’m not the most pro-trans person out there, but I think that posting hate speech about any marginalized group makes someone a really shitty person. And I say that with no real emotion or anger or anything like that. I just think he’s a shitty person. Maybe not 100% of the time and if that’s all that he does, it’s not as bad as going out and actually committing hate crimes, but at that point in time, I didn’t want to engage with him any further.

I had a third guy that started off by pretending to engage me genuinely, but he wouldn’t directly respond to any of the points I was making and ended up telling me fairly quickly on that nazis were better than liberals. So that didn’t seem to be a conversation that was going anywhere.

I ended up being 0/3. And in poking around I just saw a lot of hate speech and slurs being thrown around extremely casually, and nobody seemed to care or push back. I really try not to generalize groups of people if I can help it, but I have to say that anyone that uses that instance is either a really shitty person, or at the very least, they don’t mind being around large groups of shitty people, which in my opinion is enabling them and isn’t functionally different from being a shitty person directly.

I also came across a different community that appeared to be a standard funny video/meme community. My Lemmy app of choice doesn’t immediately show what instance a community is hosted on without digging a little deeper. This community didn’t have any political keywords in it and at a quick glance didn’t appear to be related to hate speech. Someone had posted a video about twitter or x or something and it was a skit of a guy talking so I clicked on it and watched it for a minute or so. After a while he started talking about defeating the woke mob or some other right wing nonsensical bullshit nothingspeak, and I immediately closed the window and went back to look closer at the community and saw that it was hosted on the exploding-heads instance. So it appears that y’all are trying to be subtle about getting your hate messages out to as many people as possible. Even to people who have blocked the more obvious places of hate.

So in short, I can’t wait for Lemmy to offer up a way to block entire instances from reaching me. The faster I’m able to block everything hosted on that awful instance the better. I think everyone that posts there is a horrible person and the world would be a better place if y’all would stop being so hate filled and ignorant.

Since you asked.