Fediverse

if I wanted to bring the Fediverse down or at least keep my customers from going there, I would sow this stuff as much as I can

Agree. And that's been my experience here too. I made two posts critical of reddit and they each seemed to have been astroturfed by toxic reddit shills.

I think it would require a lot of active and dedicated mods and admins, which I'm doubtful is doable. I don't know that there's a fix for this but a "true block" (instead of the current "mute") might help; but there are major downsides to that type of feature as well. I wrote in a blog that it might require an advanced AI to moderate everything.

It kinda bugs me when one of the more prolific posters get shitty smartass comments directed at them specifically in return for their contribution. Maybe it's just a side effect of being a small community but for real just shut up and enjoy the memes, if you have nothing nice to say keep scrolling.

I've been noticing the same sort of behaviour that you're talking about. And while I don't know the cause, I don't think that it's caused by trolls or bots. Instead I'm guessing a few potential factors:

1. Demographic concentration in general purpose, lax moderation instances, tailored to attract your typical Reddit user instead of more reasonable people.
2. Lemmy+Kbin users being proportionally more combative, entitled, petty, and/or whiny, due to how people reached this platform.
3. "Powerjanny" mentality being inherited from Reddit, specially given the likely higher proportion of former Reddit moderators here.
4. General lack of mod tools, forcing moderators to take sub-optimal decisions on how to handle users and content.
5. Normalisation of witch hunting, making people walk on eggs to avoid being confused with witches, and assuming that the ones not walking on eggs fly on a broom.
6. Normalisation of stupidity, and subsequent normalisation of oversimplifications, assumptions, genetic fallacies, phobia against uncertainty, decontextualisation, etc.; with those things either making the stupid act in a hostile way, or others act in a hostile way towards the stupid.
7. Natural reinforcement of behaviour in social groups.

This is already a rather large wall of text and I'm trying to be succinct, but feel free to ask further reasoning on any of those points.

Just so everyone is aware, this is the thread OP interpreted as so abusive it would warrant banning this person across multiple instances.

In this thread, you’ll notice that another user dares to disagree with haui_lemmy. haui_lemmy interprets that as trolling, and goes on a crusade to purge the entire lemmyverse of dissent.

As the fediverse becomes more and more of a feasible alternative to corporate social media, it will be inevitable that trolls and spammers will use our platform for malicious things. All we can do is to get better at moderation, maybe somehow bust these farms.

Bots are probably increasing in number. Even without improvements in technology, people’s adeptness at using robots will continue to increase.