I don’t wanna dive super deep into this, but ever since the news broke it feels like this place has become a hub for shit-flinging from literally everybody about the topic. Sure, I’ve seen some nuanced opinions and some people attempting to have a normal human conversation, but I just dislike people using this particular instance as the “place to be” to continue this endless flame war. Isn’t this counter to the goals of the instance? How many of us come here to argue like children about geopolitics?
Plus, a lot of the people I’ve seen pointlessly arguing about this have accounts from other instances… I’ve even seen one person post on their beehaw account, get flak for it, then switch to kbin for no reason.
And at the risk of sounding too conspiratorial, something definitely seems off about a lot of these comments. Maybe it’s how a lot just seem to be infodumping. I dunno.
It’s only been a few days. Maybe it’ll simmer down. But I don’t like the direction this is going.
Edit: I’m not recommending we censor political discussion, however in this particular instance I would say it’s wise to take a step back and think about what we say to each other
I use Voyager, but am assuming this isn’t an app feature, but a Lemmy feature.
Under Blocks & Filters, there is a Keyword filter.
I would suggest anyone trying to avoid the topic add related keywords to your filter. If something comes up after that, examine it, determine why it made it past your filter, and add necessary additional words if needed.
Of course it is major world news, so if you want to see updated news about it in your feed, that’s not doable, but people don’t have to read the comment thread.
I am an Apollo Reddit migrate, and to allow my wife to function, I had an extensive keyword filter in place for her, anything relating to violence (shootings, sexual assault), politics (mentions of certain politicians, or political topics), horror stuff, sexual content, and words she finds generally offensive. It really made such a difference for her, whereas she could never function in such a social platform (without affecting her mental well being) without those filters.
The key feature I am waiting for is the ability of users to block/filter whole instances/servers on their own, as that would allow participating in more difficult nuanced topics like this, while mass filtering communities whose user base one finds to behave badly, or be generally offensive/trollish.
At the current moment, filtering is an app feature and isn’t built into Lemmy itself unfortunately. Lemmy natively lets you block communities and users, but that’s about it (with instance filtering coming up in the next version).