The fediverse is small, and thats both a blessing and a curse - one of its several blessings is that in a smaller space we all individually have a bigger impact on what the culture of this space is like.
On this comm (and on lemmy broadly) there’s a lot of discussion about how to grow the fediverse, what to improve, but an easy thing you can do for the fediverse is right in front of us-
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Be kind
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Ask people what they think, and why
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Approach folks you disagree with with curiosity rather than hostility (EDIT: no, this is not specifically referring to Nazis. I get it, they’re the first thing that comes to mind. I’m not telling you to approve of Nazis I’m just saying be kind to your fellow lemmites)
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Engage sincerely
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Ask yourself if there’s something nice you can say
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Make this small space worth being in
A platform lives or dies by what’s available on said platform and often we have this conversation in the context of “content” or posts - and we may never have as much content as reddit does. But content and posts aren’t the only thing this kind of platform offers- it also offers people. It offers community, and human interaction.
Culture and community is lemmy and the fediverse’s biggest differentiator, and we all have a role to play in shaping the culture of this space.
The biggest thing you can do to help the fediverse is make it a place worth being.
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I disagree, yes being kind is very important but even more important is people engaging and upvoting comments.
Reddit was great because of what happened in the comment section, not the headliners, and I see very little voting engagement even in active posts.
Remember, it’s free to do and it encourages others to engage as well. But yea be kind too
If I’m in a toxic mood, I go to reddit.
I goto tiktok comments
A big problem is too much politics, feels like politics is always brought up even in posts where it’s not the topic of discussion. Just look at this post. Then if someone disagrees with your view they’ll attack you and then they’ll claim they “are on the right side”. People have forgotten the golden rule.
I disagree, if political discourse can’t survive public debate, then it isn’t a very good political ideology.
We have been artificially hampered on other platforms by having to be nice to the nazis, we don’t have to do that here and I fully welcome such debate because none of their abhorrent ideologies hold up under scrutiny
As for left leaning political debate, we have ALWAYS argued with each other. That is one of our greatest strengths that we just don’t all into line with everything the top says. Also one of our greatest weaknesses.
But to stifle that artificially will just force it to bleed into other discussions.
I say up with political discourse and let the marketplace of ideas be conceptually free of bias and the results will be that humanity in general considers nazis pretty bad people
disagree, if political discourse can’t survive public debate, then it isn’t a very good political ideology.
They made it clear they’re talking about spaces and topics not about politics. People who feel entitled and compelled to make everything a political culture war are insufferable. Made worse when they call everyone who disagrees with them a Nazi. The word has lost all meaning now.
It’s very front of mind because these are the “interesting times” from the Chinese curse. Even people I’ve always known to say they don’t pay attention to politics, can’t watch the news it just makes me sad, etc. These people are talking politics every day. It’s hard not to.
Most people know this in some capacity, but it’s not talked about enough: the shape of the platform massively shapes its culture. Every mechanism, intentional feature or not, is a factor in resulting user behavior and should be accounted for.
Reddit Karma was (shitty) reputation from the start, but Slashdot user IDs became one despite being mere sequential identifiers; negative user feedback such as downvotes can be harmful to communities (yet, users without an outlet may lash out in other ways e.g. reports); even how the platform communicates with users influences them; and so on.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t be nice and incentivize others to do the same, but unless the system naturally leads to the desired behavior, you’ll have a bad time in the long term because building culture by interactions doesn’t scale. By the time you realize there’s a shift, it’s too late; interactions will compound and affect how the average user acts faster than you can try to course-correct.
I wish lemmy was more experimental, because by building a clone of reddit, we’ve copied too many of its faults. We’ve already got gatherings to complain about mods, and the one time devs considered changing a core component, discussion was killed by an onslaught of users. Problems with the current setup that were brought up then will likely never see that amount of people thinking about how to solve them.
Contrast with Mastodon, which gets crap for not being a faithful copy of twitter, but their reasoning for not including quote-reblogs is understandable. They’re now putting a lot of thought into how to add them safely. Not ignoring functionality users want, but also not ignoring how it will affect culture, that’s compromise.
I’d like it if we could talk more about how our platforms work and, particularly, how they affect us, because that’s a big way we can build better platforms, right up there with being nice.
People were right to be angry about removing voting visibility.
The surest sign a community is toxic is voting patterns and removing our access to that removes our ability to combat the continuing enshittification of lemmy.
And there are many, many mods that need to be complained about.
Though you are right that no-nuance upvote/downvote is a really shitty metric
Kinda wish we could pin this post to the top of everyones feed for a while! 😅 Lemmy has been a great place so far but think we can do even better. Especially with the points you bring up.
Thanks for sharing 😊
Love your take and call to action. Appreciate it :) and I’m not surprised it’s coming from you either :)
I generally say bullet points are good ideals, but there’s a much bigger issue with mental health.
There are certain people in lemmy that need to learn what “you have no enemies” and “I’m gonna do my own thing” means. It’s fine people are different live on earth is very diverse
Completely right OP, and this is worth repeating as MUCH as possible. More than almost any UX or intake changes, Fediverse will only grow if their experience of the community is good.
Unfortunately, some people have never caught a vibe in their life and it shows lol. A single person with a bad attitude can completely tank your experience in a small community, versus a 20,000 person subreddit where usernames are basically indistinguishable.
OP simply asks people to be kind, People proceed to tear each other apart…
OP now knows how Jesus felt 🤣
Or how Doctor Who felt after asking the master for help.
It’s a great idea but unfortunately we don’t live in that world anymore. I do hope one day we can get back to that world.
Hey this is a nice post, I wonder what the comments say :3 click
“Oh you think being kind is good? You’re a fascist OP >:T. You can’t make me vote republican”
im having a time. 🥲
I can imagine x3 clicking on this gave me mental whiplash
If I steal your identity I can make you vote republican. But I don’t like to steal. Maybe: lend it to me? I promise to give it back at the end.
Im not a US citizen (or a citizen of any other country that has a republican party), so that may be more work than you’re signing up for on your end… getting a citizenship can take ages :3
Not if you ask Republicans. You can be fresh off the boat than you can run to the nearest voting booth and steal the election
Well wouldn’t know :3 I’ve not tried it x3
I’m glad there’s still sane people here.
You would think the internet is full of bees looking to make honey but really it’s full of beetles wanting to roll their shit.
Don’t kink shame me!
What about people that like to talk shit? I enjoy banter give and take. Reddit is full of soft whiners and I’m not into it.
Ikr, I like pissing people off then making much of them for not being able to defend their position. I think it’s good for engagement
We do not need all the engagement. Just engagement that most lemming users enjoy. The comments of spam bots for example are also good for engagement but are not enjoyable content. I personally hate being pissed of online cause it caries into my real life and people in general also do so most people come to this general idea that they don’t piss anyone of and expect other people to come to the same conclusion of not pissing anyone of. This leads to a less toxic environment which allows them to spend more of their time and energy on more productive stuff. Cause at the end of the day needlessly making other people feel bad for your own entertainment is a downwards spiral if everyone’s doing it.
Agreed, love it!
❤️
Have a good one!
Unless you’re a republican or other type of nazi. Then you can absolutely go all the way to hell.
Tolerance got us here.
Generalizing is a logical fallacy. Not all Republicans are Nazis.
Some are rotten. Some are good people that just got duped.
It’s not black and white.
Nope. They’ve had plenty of time to see the results of their actions. They’re complicit at this point.
I can empathize with your anger but I do think it’s easy to forget just how much propaganda can shape peoples world views and idea of reality. It’s used so heavily because it works :(
Regardless, I’m not trying to start a fight, I can appreciate having no more tolerance for the increasing cruelty of the state of the world. Take care ❤️
Republican core values are anti-human. Right from there, we have nothing to talk about.
Get these lizard people off our planet!
That’s the part that I still can’t wrap my head around. We know it will be shameless shilling and nepotism along with stochastic terrorism and still vote for it anyway? Wtf
Its easy to forget they live in a fundamentally different reality shaped by a buble of media. We all do, but conservative media kinda feels like an alternative universe.
When confronted with the world we live in they reject it as unrealistic because it differs too much from the facts they’ve accepted about the world.
My grandpa is a trump voter and I do my best to still talk to him. At an individual scale he’s a kind, sincere man who has always been welcoming of my queerness and tries to understand me. It’s very painful trying to discuss things with him even though it stays a kind interaction when I lead with kindness. It requires a lot of cognitive dissonance, but he lives in a fundamentally different reality than I do and I honestly don’t know what I can do about it :(
That’s the dangerous thing about fascism. Decent people buy into it. Become complicit or enable it. It wouldn’t be a real threat if they didn’t. But it engineers a reality for people to believe in, and lo and behold, they do. And cruelty ensues :(
Nope. There’s really hasn’t been. A lot of them are waking up. You’re being divisive. And that’s not what the country needs.
I am being clear. This debate is over.
I’m being clear as well. If you want to be hostile to the whole group that’s your personal choice. I’m going to express the reality of the situation though. Bye.
They had 4 years of Trump to see the truth for themselves. And then they got to see Trump break another election cycle’s worth of promises on top of that!
Trump’s first term was nothing like this. It wasn’t full on facism like the current term. The economy wasn’t being completely obliterated and people weren’t being disappeared.
He told people with swatikas tattooed on their bodies to coup the government!
If you’ve been getting duped for 50 years, then maybe you’re just too stupid to vote. People with a bit of a plant in their pocket have been disenfranchised for a lot less
Perhaps. However. on the other side I think of this quote. “Poor people have been voting democrat for 50 years, and they’re still poor…”
MAGA wasn’t formed until 2016, the party was much different before Trump. But who cares I guess. It seems people just want to hate the other side here. Which is no better than them.
Before that was the tea party loons, before that was the airbrushed WMD photos, before that was McCarthyism…
When the other side is always fascist, the answer is always FUCK OFF NAZI PUNKS
(Maybe people wouldn’t hate the “other side” if it wasn’t straight up 4th reich on paper 🤷)
I’m just going to ask you a question. Do you think Mitt Romney was a fascist?
It seems people just want to hate the other side here. Which is no better than them.
🙄
Nazis can always join their own defederated server and have their little circle jerk, nothing is stopping them from going and joining exploding heads; they don’t have a right to be part of federated fediverse and have their bullshit heard.
Lol the irony
Zero irony. Nothing funny here. Nazis fuck off. Republicans fuck off. Trumpers fuck off.
And zero self awareness lmao
Blocked.
Same
Either you’re being intentionally obtuse or you’re being paid by Russia either way….
The nazis during WW2 were defeated with love and kindness 🤗
(lol no, we shot them to death)
Liar. They were destroyed with facts and logic, duh
Except the non-US republicans, they’re cool :D
