Call me crazy, but I a) think the fediverse probably doesn’t have more ‘toxic content’, harmful and violent content, and child sexual abuse material then other platforms like X, Facebook, Meta, YouTube etc, and b) actively like the fediverse because of that.
But after a few hours carefully drafting and sourcing an edit to make it clear that no, the fediverse isn’t unusual in social media circles for having a lot of toxic content, I realised that the entire ‘fediverse bad’ section was added by 1 editor in 2 days. And the editor has made an awful lot of edits on pages all themed around porn (hundreds of edits on the pages of porn stars), suicide, mass killings, mass shootings, Jews, torture techniques, conspiracy theories, child abuse, various forms of sexual and other exploitation, ‘zoosadism’, and then pages with titles like ‘bad monkey’ that seemed reasonably innocent until I actually clicked on them to see what they were and, well.
I decided to stop using the internet for a while.
I’ve learned my lesson trying to change Wikipedia edits written by people like that - they tend to have a tight social circle of people who can make the internet a very unpleasant place for anyone suggesting maybe claims like ‘an opinion poll indicated that most people in Britain would prefer to live next to a sewage plant than a Muslim’ should maybe not on Wikipedia on the thin evidence of paywalled link from a Geocities page written by, apparently, a putrid cesspit personified.
I thought I’d learned my lesson about trusting Wikipedia.
It just makes me so angry that most people’s main source of information on the fediverse contains a massive chunk written solely by a guy who spends most of his time making minor grammar edits to pages about school shootings, collections of pages about black people who were sexually assaulted and murdered, etc, and that these people control the narrative on Wikipedia by means of ensuring any polite critics’ are overcome with the urge to spend the rest of the day showering and disinfecting everything.
it looks like somebody who just saw this post edited wikipedia for the first time to remove that. this is why wikipedia’s wonderful: it’s that easy. i have this quirk where i wanna debate anyone who distrusts wikipedia or claim its rigidity
lmao wait until it’s reverted, argued over, then the editor gets banned.
My ip got banned despite never editing wikipedia, never even reading the talk.
go on, show me
They did! The change log shows the main section of ‘I found a single paper criticising the fediverse so here’s 600 words on how terrible the concept is’, and also reassured me that I wasn’t just being lazy in not wanting to trawl through the text to edit it to be less awful.
I’m bizarrely excited about it too. You can’t thank anonymous Wikipedia editors, so I’ll throw a vague ‘thank you!’ out into the world and try to pay it forward.
My next battle: figuring out why I can’t edit this post, lol (maybe a mobile problem) and long term, why I didn’t think of ‘just edit it anonymously’.
Just wanted to bring up that when its one person and recent you can do a revision to revert to where it was and give a reason why that editor is griefing. Did it a few times on an article of a book called intelligence of dogs and some person took the article to be its about the intelligence of dog breeds (I mean it was in the context of the book and study done) and would change the list. I would revert with a link to what the book had and a comment that the article is about a book and if they wanted it different to run their own damn study and publish it in their own damn book.
Yeah, that generally sounds good. In this case though, it had been up for 6 months and a lot of people had edited the page since, so I wasn’t sure how that would work.
And, to be honest, cowardice 🤣 I don’t know if it’s just the sort of pages I’ve edited, but I’ve found the number 1 indicator for when a reversion will get pushback is when it was put there by someone with an unholy amount of edits that have a troll / far right / aggressive theme. Some people only seem to edit controversial topics, and some push really weird theories and will argue every bizarre claim as nauseum, some are very free with personal insults, and most are totally normal people.
But the ones who’ve made a slightly odd, vaguely political edit to a reasonably banal page, and when you leave a polite discussion on the talk page and carefully edit it to remove the most inflammatory bits they just revert your edit within a couple of minutes - I’ve had a terrible time with them.
Always, they revert your edit and then either make another minor edit right afterwards, or some other account / anonymous comes in and makes a minor edit, within 2 minutes of theirs. And when you check their history and see a vast majority of their edits are on X rated pages, in my experience that means you’re never going to win. Every edit you make will be reverted within minutes. If they put anything on the talk page it will be exactly as personally offensive as you can get without being outright ban-able. And their shadow account will be along right after every comment or action to agree.
It’s exhausting, and it totally made me lose faith in Wikipedia. I know there are channels to report that, but I’ve found that they take months and the discussion is like ‘yeah that was out of line but they’ve made so many non offensive edits, maybe they were having a bad day?’ with the odd essay-length barrage of insults from new accounts that are always deleted, but just remind me that it’s so easy to just create a new account for bad faith purposes that what’s the point wading through all this aggro just to make sure one user gets a stern talking to on one of his many accounts, for the sake of a line or two on a page about a topic you’re not that interested in.
Sorry for the tragic novella lol, it just really annoys me. Wikipedia could have been so great, but for the fact that trolls and bad actors don’t worry about following the rules, certainly don’t mind conflict, and can write 50 pages worth of bullshit in the time it takes an honest person to fact check the first paragraph, let alone the time and effort it takes to edit stuff by the correct channels.
And when you argue with them, that’s what they enjoy. They can wear people down just by being odious, and even if enough people wade in to help you out and waste their time arguing with someone who’s being deliberately inflammatory, and everyone agrees that yes the page on trees shouldn’t be mostly about lynching black people or whatever - that page is going to be edited again by a new account within days. All the decent people stand to win is a temporary, hard fought knowledge that a tiny piece of the internet isn’t quite as toxic as it was before, and will be again, and they lose so much energy and good will if they don’t like arguing. And for the dickheads, the entire thing is win-win.
I don’t know how to prevent that, other than a much stricter attitude to anonymous/ new account edits and offensive arguments, and detecting patterns like ‘this account always makes innocuous edits within minutes of this other person making controversial ones’, but that’s a bit more tightly controlled than Wikipedia could / should be.
(I mean the other solution is some sort of mandatory therapy and socialising courses for people who actively enjoy trolling / shit stirring / making people angry, but that would be a little beyond my or Wikipedia’s remit, so)
The crappiness of this section has been noted
Someone put that on in the last 12 hours, and since then, some anonymous person just deleted the entire section lol.
I legit feel really grateful, I’d been going down a bit of a ‘either every source of information is corrupt and there’s no hope, or I’m losing my mind’ rabbit hole. I haven’t quite pulled the plug on Reddit yet, which may be contributing to that.
I prefer the whole ‘major additions and changes should be introduced in the talk section of a page so it can be discussed by the committee of reasonable good faith adults with lots of spare time and patience’ approach to Wikipedia editing, but in retrospect that may be a wee bit idealistic in current times. So the ‘one person complains and documents, another person flags, and another just deletes the entire thing’ is a process that may be a good compromise between The Way Things Should Be and how to edit Wikipedia with consensus and without being harassed by neo Nazis.
Skimmed through the article and something picked my attention, the numbers given in the “325000 posts analyzed”. The way its given, it makes seem like big numbers, but if you calculate what is the percentage of the numbers given, it’s less than 1%. Can’t check the linked source, but it seems like a classical “lying with statistics”.
And besides, text seems written in a way to give the impression site moderation for smaller sites is too stupid to block bad actors, and that only the paternalism of bigger sites can solve this implied issue.
The entire tone of the article feels… condescending? (not sure the exact feeling). It feels off in the way information is presented, like subtle disdain in the writing voice.
What happened to Wikipedia’s neutrality policy?
Nothing?
Reddit power Mod turning their attention to Wikipedia and abusing its TOS & users of that site as well now too?
Oh you mean like jordanlund?
Ex(?) Reddit power mod, current awful lemmy.world power mod?
I will never understand why that person thinks Lemmy should be moderated like Reddit. Reddit’s moderation policy was at the behest of advertisers; we have no such masters to answer to here.
I couldn’t say, as I’m not familiar with them.
i’m so fucking jealous
Youn could follow that link and become pretty familiar with them.
1.) This is part of the background narratives being pushed by the rich and powerful that we need AI and big tech to moderate us when the opposite is true, we need more humans involved in moderation who have a stake in their community.
2.) The prevailing winds in the tech journalism sphere have always been strangely blowing against the Fediverse since the beginning. The simplest possible explanation to me is there is a lot of money in writing off the Fediverse as a cool nerdy space that nonetheless is an unrealistic solution for everybody else and a Harvard MBA is needed to translate the Fediverse into a product the public can actually use.
You will NOT notice this same prevailing winds against for profit corporate social networks like Bluesky and Threads… and it is a curious thing isn’t it…
Having everything everyone ever interacts with channeled through the same four fucking websites obviously sucks and doesn’t currently–and likely never can–scale.
The 325,000 tells you it’s 1%, plus the 1% is split into several categories already anyways. I don’t see how these statistics are misleading.
It is pretty fucking toxic if you’re not a Linux sheep or violent-leftist.
ok bye
Love it. Those hypocritical fucks will rue the day they fuck with Tux.
How so?
Well, it should be toxic for Reich Wingers
linux sheep
bruh
Lol wait till you see any of the Pakistan or India related articles. Its like the Ganges river in text form.
Meaning ?
it’s full of shit and will kill you if you wade in deep enough.
Financial interests pay people to edit.
Mysteriously my ip is banned from editing when I tried to view talk on a suspect edit, even though I have never once edited a page or even accessed that part by this ip. None on former ip’s either.
Ip is on some shady brazillian blacklist so maybe that is it idk, everyone just trusting shady internet players.
Do not view Wikipedia as the only source of truth. And please relax your soul in face of online drama.
It’s pretty toxic toward right-wing pieces of shit that espouse hate toward minorities, women and queer people. As it should be.
And reddit has shifted from that using auto-moderation I think
I haven’t seen any of that shit on the fediverse except maybe conspiracy theories (which are way more prevalent on other websites), wtf are they talking about?
Dunno, someone finally got around to fixing the article, though.
This is ironically an inevitable consequence of Wikipedia’s centralization undermining its strategic objective of making knowledge free and accessible to all.
I am not arguing for the opposite extreme, rather pointing out that Wikipedia is simply too centralized to be a durable vehicle of truth.
The problem of reporting specific cases is that it could become cancel culture all over again. First option, I think, would be to try to correct issues in the article. Then, if they denied, then start suspecting of the site itself. And if already suspecting, it adds up to the site’s untrustworthiness.
What do you mean by cancel culture?
I feel like you are mistaking all acts of boycotting or mass comment submittal for “cancel culture”.
I am not arguing for DDOSing Wikipedia, to edit articles with a hostile intent, or of smearing Wikipedia people in public places…
…I am arguing for organizing a campaign to submit feedback on the articles about the Fediverse FROM people on the Fediverse that explain in their own words why they think the way Wikipedia describes the Fediverse is incomplete, problematic and misleading.
Those are two VERY different things and I see no danger in slipping into “Cancel Culture” because the basic objective isn’t to silence, hurt or destroy something it is to correct the narrative ABOUT US being pushed by a prominent source of information that should be beholden to people coming to it and saying “this isn’t right what you wrote about me”. They can disagree, but the more of us that argue the point in a genuine and substantiated way the harder it gets to ignore us and keep the distorted narrative intact.
I see. Sorry for jumping the gun.
Yeah, this needs to be brought to someone’s attention. It’s not just someone adding their personal opinion to the Fediverse article, but they’re also messing up a bunch of other articles, too. I’d almost call it vandalism. OP, maybe you could get together with some other editors and bring it up to an administrator / mods?
Oh god, I didn’t even look to see what changes they’d made to other articles.
Actually that should make things easier, there are processes for reporting repeated vandalism, and they’re much more efficient than ‘this person wrote one article badly’. I’ll have a look.
That sounds like a good idea! I thought this was just someone with a grudge until you started talking about the other articles they’d edited. I can’t say for sure if they’re all bad faith edits, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were others besides what they added to the Fediverse article.
This is ironically an inevitable consequence of Wikipedia’s centralization undermining its strategic objective of making knowledge free and accessible to all. […]
Perhaps you’d be interested [1] in Ibis [2]?
References
- Type: Meta. Accessed: 2025-09-20T03:22Z.
- Ibis [2] was recommended because of their apparent negative opinion of Wikipedia’s alleged centralized structure.
- Type: Repository. Title: “ibis”. Publisher: [“GitHub”. “Nutomic”]. Published: 2025-07-14T12:39:05.000Z. Accessed: 2025-09-20T03:25Z. URI: https://github.com/Nutomic/ibis.
- Type: Meta. Accessed: 2025-09-20T03:22Z.
“Legal reform has also been proposed, most notably around Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, as well as proposed legal requirements for instance operators to engage in good-faith moderation of instance connections.”
The source for this is a a paper written in January 2024 by someone called Nikhil Mahadeva.
Lets be clear, any Section 230 discussion will never mention the Fediverse. That implies anyone who wants to erode even knows what the Fediverse is.
This article has been a source of so much frustration over the years. I honestly think it should be scrapped and entirely rewritten.
I have seen worse stuff on Instagram and Reddit than I have seen on the fediverse… and I use the fediverse far more.
it is impossible for an instance to be “removed” from the Fediverse
That’s just how the internet works.
As with Wikipedia, I saw the same stuff with articles regarding religious topics that were just heavily guarded by a neckbeard atheist who had unreasonable expectations.
I think Wikipedia itself says that it is just an entry into topics. To confirm the things that are written there you check sources.
