I came here a few weeks ago after many years of reddit. Altogether I find discussions I enjoy, however, the posts and comments noticeably lean, well, tankie (I didn’t know that term before I came here). It’s not that I am looking for an echo chamber, but I also don’t want to spend my time reading propaganda. I’m really curious about a lot of things outside politics, as well as the opinions and arguments of reasonable people across the political spectrum, but I don’t want to listen to the boring canned lies of fascists and tankies. I realized that people celebrating communist dictators trigger me, and this is something I didn’t have to deal with before I started reading lemmy, I didn’t even know this type existed.
I also notice that accounts created just a few hours in advance come from other instances to brigade political posts. Because of how lemmy works, I can block individual users or communities, but not individual instances. Is there an instance that could be a “safe space” from this kind of brigading and tankie spam? Or a way to use the internet to read interesting things now that blogs died and then Reddit became whatever it became?

Edit: Thanks everyone for the helpful and wholesome comments. Of course, some trolls/wackos showed up as well to say hi.

You can block individual instances, I have a long list of instances that I have blocked.

You're not alone in this. Just keep blocking the offending communities or instances until your feed's balance suits you.

but not individual instances.

You can. If you're using a Lemmy home instance, as you are currently (lemmy.world), in the Web UI, go to your user menu in the upper-right corner, click "Settings", click the "Blocks" tab, and then you can choose instances to block in a panel there.

If what you want is "I don't want auth-left stuff", avoiding hexbear.net, lemmygrad.ml, and lemmy.ml can help. You aren't going to get some kind of ironclad avoidance, but that'll avoid the great bulk of it. Your home instance is lemmy.world. lemmy.world is defederated with lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net for exactly the reason you mention (in fact, I see people who don't like lemmy.world because they consider it liberal, which they don't like) so you already won't be seeing stuff from the first two instances.

I don't think I've personally seen fascist material on the Threadiverse (though there are some people with quite broad definitions of the term), though there are or were some far-right instances out there, based on defederation lists. Most of what little I've seen on the Fediverse seems to me to be on Pleroma, though I haven't spent much time on non-Threadiverse Fediverse stuff.

moderate conservative

The home instance that I use, lemmy.today, has one user (@DonaldJMusk@lemmy.today) that posts a bunch of Trump stuff and a conservative community, !conservative@lemmy.today. I don't know if your definition of conservative and his match up, but maybe you'd find it to your taste; it's probably the closest to mainstream US, Republican material that I've seen with much activity on the Threadiverse. The instance isn't going to be just moderate conservative and moderate liberal users though. But, if that's the kind of community that you might be participating in, I'd imagine that he'd like to have more users.

EDIT: My own personal take is that the long term solution to having people with disparate positions on what content they want to see, above-and-beyond use of moderated communities and admin activity on instances, is to have "curator lists", where people can basically "share" lists of blocks/subscribes/votes or something like that, and other users can subscribe to them. Then you have a list that --- for example --- excludes or includes content on various grounds without requiring effort on a per-user-who-wants-curated-content basis. I think that Usenet pretty much established that killfiles don't really scale well in combating spam and stuff like that, because there was never a mechanism to share killfiles among users. Anyway, today, there isn't support for something like that on the Threadiverse. I understand that BlueSky has something along those lines.

Maybe have a look again, as I at least could block instances if I wanted to.

I am happy with only having blocked some communities, though.
Mainly the too US-centric political ones.

Interestingly enough that also got me rid of a large part of the more ridicously exaggerated tankie stuff I encountered before.

None. Because that would mean that humans on Earth are being reasonable.

Have you met people? People are the worst.

I enjoy that you gave a serious and helpful answer.

Reddit also died. It's now a museum piece of dead internet theoy.

Piefed makes it much easier to block instances.

I use piefed.social because it 's easy to filter out what I consider noise (aka most political content and all kind of excited people ;)

Wow, thanks, such a helpful response! I’ll try the web interface for instance blocking. Another sus instance I saw today was blahaj.zone.
To clarify, I also didn’t see fascist stuff, I just mentioned it because I felt it important to point out that I also don’t want to see that kind of content. I guess I saw one too many “so you are not a fan of Stalin, you must be fascist” comment today.

Are different communities/servers really all that similar? I kinda just assume that people choose a somewhat random instance when they start and stick with it.

That’s what I did, because I didn’t know anything about how it works when I signed up. I guess the big ones near the top of the instance list are more random than smaller ones (reversion to the mean), but even there, mander.xyz users tone seems different to me.

I've heard of something called Facebook that's supposed to be quite conservative. But, I've never visited it.

Unfortunately, I think the same effect works both ways. The reasonable people you are seeking will mostly gravitate towards low-effort instances - after all, they are just looking for funny memes. They heard about lemmy as "reddit, but with fewer bots". They have jobs and hobbies and friends in the real world - all sorts of reasons to care about anything other than the specific instance of a random social media platform they are joining. It is no coincidence that the most tankie users on the most tankie instances oscillate between posting revolutionary content and posting suicide jokes. It will be the rare person who threads the needle of "reasonable enough to have real world perspective, but obsessive enough to create and manage a curated lemmy instance for reasonable people."

As a pretty middle of the road liberal with a few conservative or libertarian sympathies (but a lot of opinions about auto oriented city planning), I'm afraid we just have to wade through the muck until our communities appear via emergent design. Until then, I like the neoliberal comm.

It might be worth adding that there is some backlash on BlueSky for their shared blocklists recently because they can accidentally catch reasonable people or be militarised to deliberately grab extra people. Or at least that's my take. Personally I now consider a lot of social media along the lines of "if I might not feel comfortable with you around the wife and kids, then a block is reasonable like not inviting you to the next dinner party" and that having a block that you can click through removes a lot of these issues (collapsed post /comment with no title unless you click type thing)

Can do it through apps too.

ML is definitely everyone's first and fav instance to block, and it sounds like it's time for you too. A lot of the dumb shit will cut down very quickly just by getting rid of that one.

As someone said, you can block instances but it can be useful to look up an instance on fediseer. It shows endorsements and censures for the instance along with other information:

https://gui.fediseer.com/instances/detail/lemmy.world

What I first did is to limit my home feed to 'subscribed' only. Doing so, I don't see anything from communities I'm not already subscribed to. And since I've made a rather... careful selection of those communities (from various instances), I seldom have have to deal with low quality content/noise. Making it a lot quicker to remove the occasional nuisance that passes through.

I find that the trick - or at least the idea - isn't to go out of the way to avoid such political discussions; it is to seek out spaces with some niche interest. Discussions would then naturally gravitate around the topic of interest, and political discussion usually doesn't make sense in such a space.

An example topic is anime. Most anime are not political in nature, so commenters in ani.social don't have the chance to go off-topic and discuss politics.

To use an analogy, let's say you are a picky eater. You are given some food (think soup, salad, etc), but one of its ingredients is something you don't like. Rather than try to pick out that one ingredient you dislike bit by bit (which can be tedious), how about adding condiments / dressing / etc to the dish? Enough of those and the taste would change, with the newly-added tastes having overpowered the one you dislike.

In terms of implementation, you basically have to curate your feed somehow. On Lemmy, the straightforward way to do so is to subscribe to topics / communities you are interested in, and participate in just those.

I joined about two years ago, and to get the most content I have kept browsing All, however that is annoying when some new guy decide to set up a new NSFW community outside of the NSFW branded instances and I have to block them individually.

When lemmynsfw existed most people went there to post, but some either didn't like the instance or didn't know about it and posted on generic instances.

I don't want to turn on NSFW filtering in general, as it is used in memes and jokes, but I don't want porn on my main account, that is what my alt is used for.

"reasonable is not what i describe conservatives, they are everything but that" they are immediately blocked.

It's so funny that the first instance Lemmy users ban is the one of the Lemmy developers lol

My instance defederates all the tankie instances and considers being a tankie a bannable defence, but we're still very political.

What's sus about Blahaj Zone? I've always found them to be nice people.

I've never watched a non political anime. One of My favourite anime is Kaiji, which is about a desperate gambler fighting to get out of debt. I also enjoy Dr Stone, which is about rebuilding society and technology after an apocalypse, and Frieren, which is about an elf's experiences in a world of humans that moves too fast for her. Those are all political.

Doesn't seem to relate to anything whatsoever. But yes, anyone who isn't a tankie is bad, or something.

It's not really "funny" but ironic perhaps.

I agree that blocking these instances will dramatically improve your experience.

Pretty sure that Donald J. Musk is a Russian Z astroturfer banned from half of Lemmy with multiple accounts under different aliases.

Funny haha vs funny peculiar

"Reason for blocking: 'Too excited.'" 😅

I closed it up and made it a private development instance last year, but you basically just described Dubvee.

Far left crazies and far right crazies are removed with equal prejudice, though the far right is much rarer (and often just trolls). Regardless, it's moderated here to a, well, moderate temperature. We also don't federate with the Triad (Hexbear, Grad, and .ml) as well as a few other instances (one of them a big instance that throws an error on a calculator) that are centered around and encourage identity politics (another source of what you're describing in your post).

Even though we're "closed" I still keep the instance running in order to develop the Tesseract UI, and if you want to try out the kind of space that's curated here, I would be willing to approve your application. I've toyed with the idea of re-launching and seeking out another admin or 3, but haven't had the time to put much thought into it.

TL;DR is I've always tried to run Dubvee as "normie friendly" and cut out some of the more, uh, rabid parts of the fediverse, and if you want to try it out, I'd be willing to allow it.

https://dubvee.org/signup

I have an excuse: I'm getting old ;)

I tend to not block instances FWIW. I have blocked several communities and found that it works pretty well. For now, browsing /all in lemmy is my preferred view because we just don’t have that many people to keep content coming in the communities I have subscribed to. Plus, it’s more fun to see the variety. Lemmy is small enough still where it’s easier to “opt-out” than there is a need to “opt-in” to limit the noise.

goes on communist website
built by communists that got kicked out of reddit
i like this, but what about all those communists???

Then see people in Lemmy, mostly the .ml type crowd, who rage on about how Piefed is bad and should be avoided for being full of liberals.

Well he's looking for conservative content, and we're a queer instance, so...

I barely can go a day i the fediverse without my pro-peace socialist democratic views being classified as facism or nazi-apologia.

There are a lot of users who are 'eternally vigilant' and think anyone who isn't with them, is automatically their enemy.

the lemmy devs are very clear about their political views.

anytime you are clear about your political views, you are going to invite others to ban/hate/dismiss you on princple, because most people do not believe in a plurality of viewpoints in 2026. Increasingly folks just want to silence and other perspective than their own and create their own instances where they can fully police the views of others and have that instance be specifically for their political persuasions only.

people are great if they think you are like them.

once they get a hint of difference of opinion, or that their assumptions about you were misguided or false. they lose their shit at you.

Posts like that are the ones that keep me here. There are some really dope people here who want to help and inform other people.

What's sad is often content like this gets labeled as 'evil' and then brigaded by users who perceive it as a threat to furthering their political agenda, because anyone who isn't on their side, or is remotely nice to anyone on the 'other' sides, is evil.

By lemmy.ml logic, if I help my elderly Trump-voting neighbor take out his trash, I'm also a Trump supporter. Apparently I'm if I was a 'good person' who was really anit-Trump, I'd beat him or slash his tires or something.

Some are, some aren't.

Federation though, is such that if you say something one community doesn't like... well they are likely to come over from their instance and harass the crap out of you. Or if you random comment in their instance, they will lose their minds at you.

Great answer! Good to see a balanced take.

Lemmy has developed a habit of branding anything it dislikes as “fascist” or “nazi,” even neutral reporting from outlets like AP. I've even seen news articles from AP get called fascist propaganda simply because they reported facts in a neutral tone instead of demanding that all Republicans be removed from society.

Nuance isn't a strong point for a lot of Lemmy ragers. Many users came from Reddit after bans or because they found Reddit insufficiently leftist. Lemmy calling Reddit “conservative” is wildly out of touch.

So it's especially nice to see a reasonable, level-headed reply here.

Not just lemmy.ml logic. A lot of people on Lemmy would call you a Trump supporter simply because you helped that neighbor. lol The extremism here has been getting really nasty lately.

In mod logs I am seeing a lot more banning for "advocating violence." I guess the good news about that is that mods are banning people for advocating violence, so there's that.

There are gay conservatives though. And there are conservatives who support LGBTQIA+ causes.

OP sounds like he's just tired of the extremism of everything, not just left or conservative. So maybe he's just a centralist or something.

They heard about lemmy as “reddit, but with fewer bots”. They have jobs and hobbies and friends in the real world - all sorts of reasons to care about anything other than the specific instance of a random social media platform they are joining.

So much this! Not everyone on Lemmy wants their entire life defined by political news. lol

I've always dug your views and you should bring dubvee back! Do the relaunch!!!

The downvotes on your post, proves your point about extremists. The only people who would be offended by your post, are people who don't want neutral, nuanced discussion.

I just like .world because it's got a simple UI and it's easy to use. A lot of the other instances are very convoluted UIs, and tend to have exclusive/extremist agendas.

Oh

A new user on my blocklist