From what I have read, I believe this behavior will change when they finish the update changing from websockets to HTML. Last I saw they said they were about 80% done so it seemingly is fairly close but that is relative as I don't know the pace of development. Then presumably you'd still have to wait for your instance to be updated.

As far as I know that's the only solution unless somehow someone made a script that prevents the page from updating.

I don't disagree with your points or perspective, personally I didn't bother investigating much of the viewpoints in the communities on lemmygrad to the degree that you did. Mostly I knew it was more based around communism and beyond that I wasn't necessarily interested in specifically what the communities were about.

My mention of echo chamber was not to criticize you for wanting to exclude, which is why I mentioned I had already blocked their communities. It was more of a general statement about how I blocked them, but overall my intention isn't to just block everything I disagree with and put myself in an echo chamber. But what you described is why I was comfortable blocking it without doing the investigation you did. Because I saw on join lemmy that the instance was specifically labeled as "a collection of Marxist communities" and I disagree with the notion that people should collect together or identify collectively in that way because it often leads to the type of activity or thinking you described you encountered. People often begin to allow their identity to tell them what to think about something or view about something and in an echo chamber of other people doing that in my opinion it often ends up becoming like the flanderized characters on shows that run too long. It usually is something like 'I'm an artist, so obviously I take the side of whatever I think most aligns with what I think being an artist is because it reinforces to me that I'm an artist' and people don't even consciously realize that they're doing it. That's a lot how flanderization of characters works. So without diving into lemmygrad, I could reasonably guess that the type of content or viewpoints you described would exist there because I understand how humans who gather together around identities end up behaving.

As far as Nazi's holding the door or whatever the case is, if someone who identifies as a Nazi is capable of respectful and responsible behavior in public and follows all the rules of being out in public, then why should I restrict them from going out in public? Mind you I know you didn't say you wanted to restrict them, I'm not claiming that was your argument, but if we try to compare it to IRL then generally speaking either you have to inconvenience yourself to avoid a Nazi in public, or you have to restrict a Nazi from going out in public to avoid them, there's no realistic way to do it otherwise for IRL. Now on the internet, there's an expectation that there is a middle ground because it's not bound by the same limitations of real life and I think that's what you're saying that you're wanting. Again, I also blocked their communities so I don't think it's crazy to want that, but the development of the platform is starting from scratch and as I mentioned in my other comment, there is an open issue for it on github but it could take time before it gets implemented.

I don't know that there's really much more to say on it other than dessalines seemed to OK the idea, and there's sort of a "plan" for it to be implemented in that there's an open issue on github, and all anyone can do is either be a developer and code the solution themselves, or wait patiently for someone else to do it. Beyond that, in the meantime the only other thing you can do is sign up on an instance that is not federated with lemmygrad. Sopuli.xyz and feddit.de were some others mentioned that aren't federated with lemmygrad.

I think the community duplication is fine to an extent, people will begin to gravitate to the communities that have more activity and better moderation. If for example technology@lemmy.ml moderation became subpar, people might flee to technology@beehaw.org.

Yeah there is some fragmentation right now, but people learn quickly. They post to one, don't get any replies, then post to another one that has more users and activity and get more replies so they keep posting there, and eventually that community ends up being the default.

Even on reddit there was some fragmentation of subreddits usually because of different moderator influences. How many "True" whatever subs did you see on reddit? That was all because the original subreddit ended up having some kind of controversy or disagreement and people split off and made a new one. In fact the reason you may not have seen it more on reddit is because you weren't necessarily aware of alternative subreddits. If you were using r/gaming obviously the moderators aren't going to tell you that there is an r/truegaming but at least in the fediverse you're already kind of forced to be aware that there's often alternative/duplicated communities so in the back of your mind you can kind of be like "eh I don't really like the moderators on here, let me see if technology@someotherinstance.com is better".

As for the instances that have already blocked us, it’s unlikely they will ever federate with us again.

I could see that being the case only because they would likely get a huge influx of people complaining even if a feature was introduced to allow individual users to block, the mods/admins of that instance would have to keep replying to people telling them how to block the instance. But I do think many instances reluctantly did it because there was not really any other option and I think if such an option were ever added those admins would rather not de-federate for content purposes because it sets a bad precedent. I bet most instance admins don't want to have to keep blocking other instances because of differences of opinion type things.

What's worse, or maybe not worse but more detrimental, is that you can't see chains of comments on replies to a lemmygrad user. I have this account on lemmy.ml and there was a thread about the UI that I commented in from my lemmy.ml account where I replied to another lemmy.ml user, who had replied to a lemmygrad user. Looking at that post on sopuli.xyz and beehaw.org both my comment and the other lemmy.ml user's comment were not visible on sopuli or beehaw because they were nested comments to the lemmygrad user.

It's really bad for lemmy that individual users don't have the ability to block instances so that these instances could federate with lemmygrad again.

Thank you for this. I set it up myself but I just cloned it 3 times and added a few of the most popular domains as I've kind of been going between them seeing as there has been some downtime issues on all of them at one point or another.

Also just an FYI, I found out that your comment and subsequently my comment is not visible to any other instance that is not federating with lemmygrad because the comment you replied to was a user from lemmygrad. So even though beehaw.org federates with lemmy.ml and we are both lemmy.ml users, beehaw.org users cannot see our comments in this particular chain because it was a reply to a lemmygrad user.

There's already an open issue on this on github - https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2397 - but it's been open for awhile and there's 163 open issues of varying degrees of priority. There was a closed issue where dessalines voiced support for it so if more contributors happen to get involved it seems like they would be willing to include it. Unfortunately for those of us that didn't learn coding/development we just have to be patient when it comes to open source projects that people aren't necessarily getting paid to work on.

Looking at the block page in settings, it's interesting that you can't just wildcard block communities of an instance. If you could just do *@lemmygrad.ml in the community blocklist, that would be what users need.

In the short time that I have been here I have seen multiple arguments in the comment sections that have arisen as a result of (in my opinion) lemmygrad users instigating those arguments. I don’t want to be even tempted to join into these arguments by seeing that they exist. And even if I do ignore them all and don’t get rage baited, knowing that they are there has the potential to negatively affect my mood. I will not do that and it would be silly to think that I am alone in feeling like this. Assuming there are waves of people coming from reddit many others will feel this way also and it absolutely will be one of many obstacles that make large scale adoption a challenge.

To counter that, I've seen plenty of lemmygrad users that were friendly and helpful.

I think the thing you have pointed out about users not having more control over instances has created some tension that probably bleeds over into how users interact with each other. You have users who are trying to avoid lemmygrad in their content feeds, which is fine, but have to be very vocal about it in order to get instances to block or remove federation linking with lemmygrad to better match the content these users want to see, even if lemmygrad users aren't breaking any rules. For lemmygrad users, that seems kinda unfair that they're getting excluded from federation simply because people don't see eye to eye with their world view and don't want to see much of the content they post regarding their worldviews. The lack of control given to users to block an instance quietly causes tension that shouldn't need to be there.

I'm saying this as someone who actually went through the effort of blocking most of the active communities on lemmygrad, so I also don't particularly want to see the content but I so far haven't felt like I had a problem with seeing comments from users on lemmygrad. I would much rather have had the option to just block the instance with a single click than spend more time having to find and block numerous communities.

I really don't even have a problem with seeing that particular ideology or perspective in content feeds, I don't like echo chambers so I'd rather get some exposure to different ideas and content even if I don't particularly agree with it rather than having some algorithm drive me into an echo chamber that causes problems in society and on a personal level mental health problems for people. But at the same time, I think that makes me not very fond of an instance that is centered around that identity, I think it encourages poor thought formation and poor personal growth for people to focus too much on what their identity is rather than just address individual ideas as they come on their own merit.

Edit to add: I'm no coder but I at least looked this up on github and here's the issue. https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2397 In that particular open issue it didn't show support from nutomic or dessalines, but you can see there was a closed issue mentioned in there where dessalines did voice support for the idea. Only problem is there is 163 open issues with varying degrees of priority, and that one has already been open for a long time so it seems like it is considered lower priority than some other issues. Maybe if more contributors hop in it might get addressed.

Well thank you for the info. I wasn't aware that Hexbear was that unique in having forked off an old version. I was hoping that there were other federated instances using that UI.

That’s what mods are for on reddit, so I’m currently failing to see the problem. Moderators exist on Lemmy servers right? That’s how reddit solves the problem, why can’t that work the same way on Lemmy?

I think the difficulty with a place that has such a low userbase that then grows rapidly is not having a lot of established active moderators. There's a lag time to some extent to getting active and responsible moderators. Plus not being a moderator nor an admin on Lemmy, I don't know the capabilities they have at hand, but I know with reddit the moderator tools were built up over time. All of the automodding capabilities they have now didn't exist at the beginning, and the automod tools are what allow them to handle such high numbers of users. I suspect Lemmy probably doesn't have extensive automated moderating tools at their disposal at the moment if I consider other deficits that Lemmy has at the moment.

I don't know that it is meant to be a drop-in reddit replacement. That's an assumption that goes too far IMO. I think it's certainly intended to have a lot of similar functionality as reddit, but the nature of it being decentralized tells me right off the bat that it's not a drop-in reddit replacement. That being said I do think there is a balance in striving to make it easy for people to onboard, especially reddit users looking for something else, but I also understand that keeping out bots and spam is critical.

It's easy to say it should be changed because we don't know what would happen if they changed it, but if the site did become overloaded in spam, that would be even more of a detriment than slowing the growth because people have to wait for approval. At least while others are waiting for approval, the people already here can use and enjoy the platform. If you get rid of that and it becomes loaded with spam, then no one gets to enjoy the platform.

I actually have an extension on my browser called Dark Reader that makes all websites dark for me. So I didn't even know there was a dark mode either.

I originally asked this question because I'm new to Lemmy and wasn't sure if I was missing something about why the design was this way. I didn't know if there was some setting or other way to modify to get it to have a different design.

Having looked into it a bit more, just seems there isn't a way to do it ourselves, perhaps as the userbase expands there might be someone who eventually develops extensions.

What I have noticed is there's apparently other Lemmy instances that run a different UI, but maybe they aren't really federated with everyone else. Hexbear.net was one I just found out about. Basically I'm wondering if anyone knows of other instances that are part of the fediverse.

Is there a way to make use of all the white space? I don't understand why the content is restricted to such a small portion of the page.