Yeah. I’m of two minds about it: I don’t like ceding space to the rabble. I think a lot of times, the right response to propaganda is to call it out and be vigorous about making it clear that it doesn’t belong. Anything along the lines of “just don’t engage, that just gives it fuel” winds up as a de facto surrender where every topic will be filled with… well, with comments along the lines of a lot of the ones you see in this topic. Russia tells the truth sometimes! NATO! The State Department lies! Mint Press is well-sourced, I appreciate alternative points of view even if you don’t! Iraq War! It’s just a nonstop avalanche of talking points. If you look at the voting, you can kind of see some battle lines in terms of which of them are getting traction over time and which ones are unanimously seen through, and I’m always a little gratified when someone comes in with some bullshit and it gets solidly rejected. I don’t think it’s harmful to let that happen. I do think it’s harmful to let them just run around doing this stuff unmolested. The bullshit asymmetry principle is only an issue if you let the bullshitter dictate the terms of the conversation and keep introducing new stuff – or if no one challenges the bullshit and the public discourse becomes just a factless free-for-all.

But as far as lemmy.world, it was just too much to salvage any kind of decent space. There was too much synergy between deliberate propaganda, deliberate trolling, godawful moderation, and standard internet cluelessness and gullibility. I suspect that some of the moderation was bad specifically on purpose, actually. Someone pointed out not long ago that except for MBFC, every one of the baffling moderation decisions the lemmy.world moderators undertook was in the direction of providing cover for some kind of propaganda (UM’s “advocacy” for third parties being a good example). It’s really not normal. Even in spaces that have bad moderation, it’s usually just kind of randomly applied, random people being banned and random people not. Lemmy.world’s moderation is extremely consistent in the direction of allowing propaganda - except for FlyingSquid for a while, and FlyingSquid got harassed and eventually apparently driven out. And now, Jordan made a decision that’s anti-propaganda, and look! People are harassing him and objecting to the decision and spreading bad-faith talking points that Mint Press needs to be allowed, because it’s “well-sourced.”