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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Here are some more specific examples to think about!
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Compliment people’s art and ask about their process
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Teach people about something you’re knowledgeable on
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Give constructive criticism on peoples projects when it’s welcome
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Thank people for posting things you’re glad you got to see, tell them you enjoyed it
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Tell people you’re glad they’re here
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Tell people you hope they have a good day
Thanks for taking the time to read my thoughts :) if you have thoughts of your own, I’d love to hear them!
Have a great day :)
Thank you! You too 😊
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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
I 1000% agree, the design of the space we inhabit shapes our behaviour.
I don’t think collectively we can stop at intentionally being kind, but forming a coherent design vision to effectively shape human behaviour and social outcomes as a community project is HARD and legitimately takes an actual vision and understanding of incredibly advanced design cobcepts very few have the experience to have any realy expertise in. Still important, but I think this is an easy way everyone can contribute. Similar to making donations.
They’re not the only things we need, but they’re a small thing that becomes valuable when the culture decides we collectively prioritize them.
You couldn’t possibly be more right though. Erin kissane has talked a fair bit about that idea in her research. If there are specific design features of Lemmy you wish were different I’d be curious to see discussion posts on this comm about how we can design a space that facilitates more compassionate interactions and healthier community! (Or just to hear about them from you if they’re not fully formed enough yet to post about :)
I don’t think collectively we can stop at intentionally being kind, but forming a coherent design vision to effectively shape human behaviour and social outcomes as a community project is HARD and legitimately takes an actual vision and understanding of incredibly advanced design cobcepts very few have the experience to have any realy expertise in.
Yeah if you want to get a PHD in this stuff, but you could also just become friends with a bunch of artists and ask them how they like this place, and notice how they talk about it feeling free and vibrant or dead and dying.
By the way, we are already doing this work and it barely feels like we are… because the work is a basic product of the world views, shared values and shared explicit ideological and practical goals of this community space.
You don’t need this crazy apparatus to make this place a vibrant garden, having expert gardeners is definitely helpful, but it is about getting out of the way of kindness and empowering kindness, not coming up with some grand unified strategy to manipulate people into being better humans.
Basic things like the way a lot of Mastodon instances don’t by default prioritize showing the precise number of likes a post has add up to a significant difference in how healthy a social network is for the people in it. You can encourage people to obsess over unhealthy aspects to communication by making the numbers front and center, encouraging people to associate popularity and self worth with those numbers, and creating situations where everybody has to become an expert in gaming getting the best numbers possible even in the realm of their personal life (or so we are made to feel)… or you can de-emphasize the numbers and make it a thing people can check if they want to, but the UI and general philosophy of the place doesn’t really encourage or worship that kind of thinking in the first place so why bother?
The reason it feels weird not to have numbers quantifying how successful a social media post/piece of content is that the people who designed these systems were programmers not artists, they didn’t understand the incredible farce that attaching the atoms of communication in a community with direct quantification is… would immediately lead to unhealthy environments, they just saw it as the easiest way to make money and identify who the valuable influencers to pay to do ads are.
What if we had a tribunal instead of moderators? Actually just in the time it took me to write that out I could see it going terribly wrong LMAO
The point of this system isn’t to centralize control under moderators, this isn’t some bug to iron out or a duct-tape solution that is meant to be temporary until we can figure out how not to centralize power.
The point of this system is to encourage communities to create an explicit shared set of values, those values have to be attached to a specific community and thus that community will then have specific people tasked with dealing with grey areas and problems that occur when people don’t adhere to the values.
People need to stop focusing on the moderators and focus on what it means to be explicit with a positive step forward about proclaiming the kinds of values you want to hold in a shared community space. THAT is what gives this place such immense power to shape the world.
It’s hard for me to imagine any system as flexible as Lemmy communities NOT operating under centralized control, outside of notional attempts at democratic procedures held by the community owner themselves.
I have a couple of suggestions to add:
I was considering leaving the other site before the API fiasco because it felt like so many users approach engagement as rhetorical combat, that is, the point of discussion is to defeat the other person. Instead, think one of Covey’s habits of highly-effective people: “Win-win, or no deal.” Approach discussion on the Fediverse as a collaborative act, in which you’re exchanging ideas with another person. Even if you disagree, you can both win by respectfully hearing out the other person. And if the other person won’t collaborate? No deal! Just disengage.
Just like in intimate relationship, use “I” statements instead of “you” statements. Telling people who they are and what they believe is not only disrespectful, but probably wrong, often exaggerated or distorted for rhetorical combat purposes. People get angry when their identity gets poked at. One exception, of course, is when giving advice, like, stick to what you know, and share your thoughts and your reactions to a topic.
Well yeah but consider that everyone that doesn’t think like me is a Nazi at best
Getting better at communication takes time and practice. Depending on where someone is in that journey, a post like this can make a big difference. And I think we can all use a reminder to be kind every so often. So, thanks for taking the time to write this out
It does! Small changes over time can add up to incredible people skills and the ability to win hearts and minds ❤️
Thank you so much for the kind words my friend, I hope you have a lovely day!
Unless you’re a republican or other type of nazi. Then you can absolutely go all the way to hell.
Tolerance got us here.
Except the non-US republicans, they’re cool :D
It’s not about tolerance imo, it’s about discussion. You’d be surprised to learn their reasoning if you actually listened to it. You don’t have to agree with it.
Both sides have this problem right now. Both only converse with their own. Why are republicans not changing? Well if their friends, family and everyone they talk to is a republican, they’ll never be exposed to different opinions.
Don’t forget that both sides can have valid policies depending on how you view the world. I’m not taking about trump and whatever you people are doing out there in the US, but in general, conservatism is the idea that people will manage their money, rather than the government.
Look at Quebec for example. A very socialist government. 2 years ago they invested a ton of money into one electric bus company. Well that company failed really bad and while they aren’t completely bankrupt, they aren’t far. It’s easy then to then see why conservatives would want to vote conservative. If their money had stayed in their pocket instead of going to the government, this wouldn’t have happened.
Same thing with health. The public health system is currently clogged up so a lot of people end up having to pay to go to the private sector to actually get cured in time. So conservatives believe this whole system is a huge waste of taxpayer money. Most conservatives I know aren’t agaisnt the government helping with that, but they’d rather the government just pay the invoice after you went to a private clinic, similar to insurance in the states, rather than try to control a system that clearly isn’t working.
You’d be surprised to learn their reasoning if you actually listened to it.
Turns out their reasoning a lot of the time is divinely ordained racism and sexism. Turns out thats been the reasoning behind a lot of humanity’s choices.
I’m not interested in the reasoning behind bigotry.
That’s the problem. You see the other side in a way they themselves really aren’t. When people say the left is just as bad as the right, they don’t mean in opinions and policies, but in behavior, just like you’re doing. They both think themselves as having the moral high ground while the other side is complete and utter evil.
Honestly of all the conservatives I know, I don’t think a single one of them is remotely racist in any way. One in particular is agaisnt talking about lgbt stuff in schools but he also has a trans friend and thinks as long as they’re adults it’s fine. It’s not being evil, it’s having a difference in opinion.
People said everything you’re saying 30 years ago and used it to justify letting fascism grow unchecked. Now we’re here and you are still afraid to be firm. You are why they’re in power.
No more compromises. No more chances. No more conversations. People are being abducted. People are dying. There’s no time left for patience.
They change NOW. Or they can fuck off.
I have no issues with facists fucking off. The problem is most people on lemmy seem to give just about everyone they disagree with a facist tag. Honestly in the US I agree the situation is different, but here in canada, I haven’t heard of anyone dying or being abducted by conservatives.
I certainly hope your turn to fight it never comes.
So do I.
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 ❤️
There’s a story I heard recently that has really stuck with me. It happened in the Sobibor Extermination Camp during WW2. Basically the camp was structured so that captured Jews would be selected to be Kapos. A Kapo was a disciplinarian that kept the rest of the Jews in line, usually with a whip. A lot of the times the Kapo would repeat Nazi propaganda because the Nazi guards were watching too. The rest of the Jews could understand their predicament. But there was one Kapo named Berliner, nicknamed because he was born in Berlin. The rest of the Jews hated Berliner because he truly bought into the propaganda. Imagine, a Jew… in an extermination camp… talking about how Hitler was a misunderstood savior of the Jews right before he started beating his fellow Jews to keep them in line.
It’s no surprise that Berliner’s end comes in the form of a lynching by the rest of the Jews he was keeping in line.
Thank you very much for sharing, I expect that story will stick with me too.
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.
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.
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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?
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Lol the irony
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
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….
I arrived at LEMMY after what I think we very optimistically called the Reddit Collapse. We wish. And I had toe in LEMMY and a few others at Reddit.
Recently with their abusively patronizing redesigning and gamification and just ugly bullshit, I can’t stomach Reddit at all. So LEMMY grows increasingly important, not just to me but to folks who haven’t yet even heard of it.
So, I’ll just say thanks for your post here. I have, I confess, engaged with a couple bullies on LEMMY and I always try to say… I don’t like to do this on LEMMY— and I say that precisely for the reasons you mention.
And as you encourage: I will try to be kinder, even in when feeling… hmm… less than kind.
Thank you for considering my thoughts ❤️. I think when our anger is justified and we are feeling less than kind is when kindness can have the biggest potential impact, and is most worth being proud of.
Undeserved compassion is a powerful thing. But I don’t think that means you can’t confront bullies and tell them their treatment of other people is unwelcome here. Those things aren’t mutually exclusive :)
One my favorite ways to summarize this kind of thinking is with the Bill & Ted quote “Be Excellent To Each Other, and Party On Dudes” (mostly the first half applies to this post though). The part that applies to this post, Keanu Reeves said he interprets as follows:
I think that the sentiment of it is really just be the best person, the best human being you can be, and if you do that, then you can party on and live life to the fullest, but you’re gonna be safe… You’re going to be supported, you’re going to get the gift of giving, you’re going to get the gift of receiving, you’re going to get to the gift of sharing. We’re all just some humans on a rock in space, and so it’s kinda nice to kind of promote that idea of ‘give a little, get a lot’, kind of bring it in for a group hug."
Fuck yeah! I wasn’t familiar with that quote, that’s lovely! Thank you for sharing :)
The thing in this post about curiosity isn’t just a lemmy/online thing.
The vast majority of people are mainly interested in themselves. Like - if you have trouble on dates, making friends, getting along at work, anything to do with people in general - approaching them with a sense of sincere curiosity will completely change things overnight.
Get people to talk about themselves, be supportive in your discussions with them, and shut the fuck up wherever possible and suddenly you’re interesting, a good person, kind, whatever - traits you’ve done exactly fuck all to demonstrate, but that people will swear are true because you seem interested in them.
It’s fucking bonkers but it’s true. Curiosity can change your world.
“Be curious, not judgemental.” - Ted Lasso (via Walt Whitman)
Active listening is a powerful skill!
Improvisational Comedy/Theater is the study of how comedy and theater can be produced out of thin air by putting people on stage who are good at active listening to each other. It is shockingly beautiful to behold when you see it click live.
The only humane, sensible and practical definition of intelligence that actually gets you anywhere productive is defining intelligence as a practiced and maintained sense of curiosity about the world around you, especially the world you know little of.
For example, Trump is a fucking idiot, because he never does this ever and neither do people who worship him.
If I’m in a toxic mood, I go to reddit.
Based
Lmao, that’s honestly kinda hilarious to me
I see you around a lot, and you’re consistently doing exactly this. I really respect that.
Thank you very much, I do my best :)
By the way I love your username lol. Take care!
Thats absolutely horrifying, thank you. 😂
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
I notice tons and tons of hostility in comments. And I think it’s from people jumping to the worst possible conclusion.
I knew that would happen, but you’re not wrong 😅
As I’ve alluded to, there’s a lot of justifiable anger about the state of the world, and you can see that hurt reflected in people’s immediate response. The feelings driving that “conclusion jumping” valid and understandable, even if I don’t think it’s productive
There is no easy way to cope with fascism on your doorstep, or taking over your home and threatening to throw you out of it :(
Originally I listed all the extra examples/suggestions I put in my comment in the actual post itself, but I have a bad habit of making things way too long so I moved all the smaller more specific things to the comment. I think maybe it would have been more clear I’m not saying you should approve of Nazis had they still been in the post.
Yeah but have you thought how that makes you a Nazi
OP simply asks people to be kind, People proceed to tear each other apart…
OP now knows how Jesus felt 🤣
i gotta lead by example. I gotta lead by example. Lead By Example. IM GONNA LEAD BY EXAMPLE 🥲🙃
we’re doin our best out here lol. But that’s what it takes! There is no perfect, no “I literally never make mistakes” or “never let my frustration dictate shitty behaviour when compassion would yield the outcome I want”
You gotta decide you care more about what’s effective than how good it feels to act on your anger, and then you gotta do your best :)
That’ll do it
Highly upvoted comments like “Elon Musk should commit suicide” or “X group of people are all mentally retarded” or even popular posts themselves make me feel uncomfortable.
It feels toxic like X. Or what Voat (an older Reddit clone, albeit not a federated one) turned into. So much of y’all upvoting posts like that, normalizing it, does not make me want to stick around, as that culture of hate will only get worse.
It may not do much depending on the mods/admins, but it never hurts to report and downvote comments or posts like that.
Emphasis on reporting there, as I think sometimes that stuff lingers around because people have made a habit of only downvoting and blocking those doing that regularly. I realize in your examples it’s more likely bias or bigotry respectively, but still.
Report first, then downvote and block. Doing only the latter only makes your experience a little better, the former may help the community.
I do report them, but some communities seem to encourage it and leave it up.
I guess I can block the community, but it’s still affecting the “Lemmy culture” at large…
I can definitely understand that. I think in a lot of ways that problem is driven by how much of a political echo chamber lemmy is. Any time there’s a narower range of beliefs I feel like you can see those beliefs getting more extreme, or expressed in more extreme and toxic ways.
I honestly don’t really know how to improve it given the state of the world. It feels like the range of political beliefs keeps getting compressed into two groups and it makes it harder and harder to tolerate the beliefs of those further from yourself. And for valid reasons.
And the more justified the contempt for people of other political views gets the harder it gets to figure out how, culturally, we manage the justified anger that comes from how deeply broken everything is.
Elon musk is doing actual literal Nazi salutes and peoples anger about that is justified. And at the same time I’m not sure what way of acting on that anger (and acting on the problem) yields anything other than radializing people teetering on the edge of extremism.
I’m glad I don’t really see actual Nazis on lemmy. Its nice that there’s less debate about the legitimacy of people’s humanity.
And at the same time anger is deeply toxic to healthy interaction and drives behaviors that I genuinely don’t think make the problems prompting people’s anger any better.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts candidly, a lot of this thread is a love-fest and that’s wonderful and puts a smile on my face, but it’s at least as important to talk about the unhealthy aspects of the fediverse’s culture
Yeah don’t get me wrong, I love Lemmy. But I don’t like, well, that sort of thing. Or straight up disinformation being posted along the lines of that vitriol. It makes me worry about the Fediverse, as that culture only goes one place, and I feel like we shouldn’t stick our heads in the sand and only talk about the love if the culture is getting radicalized to an extreme.
Great comment
Everyone’s been really nice as long as I don’t touch anything political - then it becomes a fart sniffing smug fest.
Unless I know the other person has the same intent to respectfully listen and try to understand rather than argue I won’t engage in any sort of political discussion. Polarizing opinions have been completely normalized online and it’s literally ruining society.
Happy Lemmy anniversary! I’m glad you’re here :)
And yeah, I can very much understand that, I try to do the same. Sometimes it feels productive to talk with people you don’t share perspective with, but if it’s just gonna be a flame war I don’t wanna go throwing gasoline, nothing is gained by that
I love talking with people with a different perspective, and I love playing the devils advocate to try to understand other points of view better. As you said, if it’s just going to become a fight it’s completely meaningless.
It sounds like we share very similar approaches :)
Oh and happy Lemmy anniversary. Is it really today? Weird coincidence that I joined today.
I got temporarily banned from Reddit for saying that using ivermectin might kill you, and that was it. I’m done.
It must be, your name shows up highlighted with a little birthday cake in my client :)
And interesting, ivermectin has that intense of side effects when taken orally? Or do the pseudo-science people who think it cures covid just advocate dosing it ridiculously high?
By coincidence I actually use ivermectin topically for my rosacea, a skin condition. Being a anti-parasitic its useful fro reducing the amount of demodex mites that can aggravate rosacea in some people! I know in people it’s mostly used for lice.
I was replying to someone that said they could use it to treat covid, which has lead to people dying. Guess I got reported by them and for some reason an admin thought it was meant as a threat?
That’s really interesting! Did you have any problems getting your hands on it when people started buying it for covid?
I really want a better formalized framework for argument/discussion of a topic that either participant can feel safe in. Currently, we have courtrooms, our old schools have Debate Clubs, but I’d want something far easier to pick up on that allows for time to research/validate discussion points.
You sound exactly like the kind of person I want in my community: !actual_discussion@lemmy.ca
Check the sidebar to see if it suits you too!
