That post is a decent intellectual overview of what happened throughout june, but it doesn’t really hit home as an explanation of why it broke my heart.

Basically everyone lost their empathy. Disagreeing with the mods decision to protest suddenly justified being a complete monster to people there. I’ve never seen that much vitriol in a place that’s supposed to be an emotionally supportive place. They’d say they were upset that they were losing a safe space, but they were actively working against it being safe.

I posted saying that I didn’t agree with the mods decision of “just post eggs”, but that it sucked because without 3pa’s i can’t keep myself emotionally safe on reddit and will have to leave no matter what, and i did support protesting the API changes in some way. I also said I thought the best form of protest would be considering egg_irl “bigger than reddit” by supporting versions of it here on lemmy, and on the mods’ preferred alternative (even tho i don’t think their raddle platform choice is a good one, which i was also clear about), so that those who had to leave had a supportive place to go. I was repeatedly attacked, called awful names, told to “just gtfo and go to raddle”, called a mod shill/bootlicker, told that i was an acceptable loss when 3pa’s go away, etc.

The mods made a decision to protest without consulting the community, but they didn’t break egg_irl. The small subset of the community who turned it toxic afterwards are the people responsible for it turning from a safe space to a hate haven. It wasn’t really a lot of people, but they were spewing hate and vitriol all over the sub for weeks, thinking they were saving the sub.

It was really awful to watch, and be on the sub when it happened. In a matter of days it went from a supportive place to pure toxicity, and the most toxic people were so convinced that they were fighting a righteous justified battle for the good of the community against oppressive fascist (that word was thrown around like confetti) mods. And if you weren’t just as toxic towards the mods, you were just as evil as the mods.