Liberal in the traditional sense, as in, believing in liberty, I’m being technical. Not meaning “leftist” the way the word has been rebranded by right-leaners. So, their adoption of “no rules” is ultra-liberal, or libertarian perhaps.

And all social consequences are social. Drawing a distinction between legal and social is arbitrary. Suffering is suffering, and employing it to control dissenting voices is fundamentally illiberal. If you can prevent certain messages from appearing on your platform, you have successfully executed a form of control.

Thus, their ultra-liberty is an illusion. It’s not real.

Sure. Go over into 4chan and try any behavior they would describe as “white knighting” or “simping”. You will rapidly experience some social consequences intended to dissuade that behavior.

Lemmy is a big place. You think anywhere online is going to be perfect like your picture of heaven or something? Get real.

So, I’m not a woman, nor am I overly feminine, and I still call out toxic bullshit when I see it. If you want to say the problem is women/feminists though, fine whatever, if we cleaned up our own shit first, we might be able to make that stick. But when we’re bastards and they’re bitches, and we complain, we’re kinda the fucked up ones, y’know? Since we were supposed to be strong in the first place.

Unless you just think life is shit and everyone should get used to it. Then, just move to Russia or something, for everyone’s sake.

No, it is specifically illiberal spaces that encourage more toxic masculinity, in a bit of a cycle. While the space itself may be extremely liberal and rules-free, a local culture can take over and enforce those same toxic norms in place of any set of rules. And frequently does. While the space may be ostensibly liberal, in effect it is not, due to the behavior of its community.

This is the majority of mens spaces, unfortunately. Online anyway.

So, spaces that encourage toxic masculinity do exist, and they are fully aware of their ruination. See: 4chan.org.

edit: I see some of the confusion here, since 4chan is seemingly liberal, due to having no formal rules. However, that is an illusion. A man is not actually free to say anything they like without consequences there. It’s just that the norms will be enforced by the community, instead of any kind of authority. This is not actual liberty and freedom, simply indoctrination cloaked in an illusion of freedom.

Real freedom would allow a man to express something like sympathy, or being against gamergate, and express that opinion in peace. The reality of such spaces does not actually permit this.

It seems liberal and free, but in effect it is not. This is similar to how Trump seems to be strong sometimes, but in reality is weak and cowardly. Toxic masculinity loves its illusions.

Lemmy is pretty good, for the most part. Depends which community of course, decentralized and only loosely controlled and all.

Neo-liberals, actually. Winston Churchill wasn’t doing any of that shit. Classical liberalism is fairly centrist, economically. Some things private, some things public.

Liberal, as in, believing in liberty. Freedom. How many mens spaces do you know of, where a man is completely free to open up, with full liberty and freedom from immediate consequences, about feelings they may have inside of them?

There’s actually not a lot. It’s a reflection of masculine indoctrination, where men in many places are made to feel like they almost need to be ready to become a soldier at any moment. Guarded, careful. It’s no good, unless your country is actually at war.

Yea that’s a legit complaint. That’s not all of them though, it’s pretty common to hear an argument for community consolidation.

YES. And yet people keep complaining about duplicate communities existing, like they want one mod team to be in charge of an entire topic of discussion.

You know how when you let your dog off his leash, and he bites someone, you get in trouble for it? That’s RICO, basically.

I would argue we should wait until the software we’re on does not feel like an alpha release. This is not some window of opportunity that will close soon, we have no strong incentive to rush this process.

They’re bots. And people simple enough to basically be bots. All the people worth a damn left already, or are perhaps sticking around out of some combination of masochism, morbid curiosity and dogged stubbornness. This latter group would admittedly be a pretty huge segment, probably.

But yea, I still check in sometimes too. The specific video game subs are mostly unchanged in my experience, and reddit still has us soundly beat in that arena. It’s a major source of their remaining strength.

While you wait for someone to type one up, here’s more of an ELI14:

https://lemmy.world/post/583669

It most definitely has. Bots too. (sorry, couldn’t help myself…)

It is unlikely that even reddit themselves are able to conclusively answer this, as the protests made many people leave and many other people come or come back.

The userbase “churned” a great deal, which serves to obscure the specifics.

To add to this, if I were spez, and I was bleeding users rapidly, I would be willing to employ bots to inflate my numbers. I sincerely doubt spez is more ethical than I am, and it takes no genius to come up with this idea.

I’m not sure an ELI5 answer to this set of questions is possible. Even just “what is it” is challenging with something so counter-intuitive. While I’m interested in seeing someone try, it’s well outside my abilities to even attempt.

One by one, shall they fall to the trolls. Most of The Wise have already departed to the West. For those that linger, one can still see that tiny spark of ancient internet rebellion, as they prepare to watch their world darken, and then smolder, and then ignite into bloody warfare and strife…

It’s time is almost at an end, for in this story, there is no One Ring.