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No, it's the episode of discovery where he is mentioned. It feeds his ego directly.

If I remember correctly they got bought out by an analytics company at some point. So you know, ads and data collection.

Personally I am fine using the tools available to me right now to filter and block things I do not want to see. And I assume with the upcoming personal ability to block entire instances, the brigading issue will resolve itself too. So in that regard, keeping them federated or not won't make much of a difference.

However... The Kremlin propaganda stuff you talk about seems to be quite prevalent. And while they may not all choose to actively brigade, when they show up in thread comments, they tend to completely dominate the thread and specifically all seem to post very similar things. And while I have seen plenty of levelheaded comments from their users, i have also seen a ton of trolling as well.

So again I don't know if defederation is the solution. I think there's a place for discussion of people with differing opinions, and curating a completely safe space doesn't do anyone any real favors. But when interaction goes beyond polite discourse it just breeds hostility and makes places toxic. And at the very least, some of their views and the way they choose to interact with others has been creating a feeling of toxicity to the point that I have seen many many users sick of that instance and to the point that posts like these seemingly need to be made.

I'm enjoying it so far. It doesn't have the same user base or niche communities of reddit yet, so for now I'm just doing more general browsing. There just doesn't seem to be enough of a diverse set of interest yet. So at first it was a ton of posts about sync, currently it's a ton of posts about LTT. And it's just full of memes. Definitely could use a wider range of topics and interests.

That said there are a couple of really obnoxious instances that are highly political and as much as I am trying to avoid that, the users of those instances seem to dominate any thread even remotely political. It's quite annoying.

I was wondering the same thing too. Hexbear and lemmygrad seem quite toxic and I would prefer just not to interact with those instances at all. Did some searching though and it doesnt appear that this is something that can be done in lemmy at a user level (at least for now), only at an instance level. So I guess the best bet is to either find an instance that isn't federated with them, or just block their communities whenever they show up in your feed.