On constructive criticism - definitely rule one is make sure that it's invited first, but second, the best way to "sweeten" a critique and make it more appealing is to put it between compliments. Don't have a bare remark about the problems or suggestions, tell them what you like first, then how they might change things, and then close with something else positive or simply thanking them for sharing it. Even if someone says they want to hear what people think, it's normal to be defensive, so help lower that reaction first, and then leave them feeling appreciated even though you pointed out issues you saw.

I’m not one for religion, but I for one would like to join the Church of Cris.

Are you open to some additional thoughts / feedback on feedback / constructive criticism?

Have a great day :)

That suggests we should be intolerant of intolerance, which is an oxymoron.

I think part of pleasantness is not bringing politics into things that weren’t intended to be about politics.

This is a whole different train of thought (mine is, I won’t speak for yours) and I don’t wanna derail my original thought but that’s a thing I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.

I agree with you, and subscribe to the idea of tolerance as a social contract that, once broken, is no longer owed to the one who broke the contract.

At the same time, I’ve also learned that very explicitly, feeling persecuted is a requisite ingredient in radicalizing people into hate groups. And that at an individual scale, it’s generally undeserved compassion that helps deradicalize them. We know this from the accounts of people who managed to leave hate groups- a little while ago there was really good (and long) interview with someone who used to be leader of a white nationalist group where he talked a fair bit about that idea, since he now works with a nonprofit that helps families and friends support and deradicalize loved ones, but it’s far from the only account

At present I’m really not sure how I personally reconcile those two things I belive to be true. The Nazi bar analogy is real.

I know wading into this more specific conversion runs the risk of immediately derailing what I was trying to start a discussion about, but I figured I’d share my thoughts. If anyone reads this and has thoughts to share (though I’d prefer not to get 50 comments just saying I suck for having complicated views on what we do about the predicament the US and world is in with the rise of fascist ideology. I’m interested in what’s effective in terms of fixing the problem just like you are) I’d be interested in hearing them. I’m still looking for a way to synthesize my beliefs into a coherent whole.

Edit: thought I’d add the interview for anyone curious. I don’t see everything exactly the way he does but I think understanding the problem and exactly how it works is necessary of we’re going to address it, and I think his account is a really useful glimpse into certain aspects of how that world works

i think if someone’s intolerant, pointing out that they’re wrong is something appropriate, but picking a fight over it is not worth it. it makes you like that person in that meme:

<img alt="" src="https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/duty_calls_2x.png">

edit: in bad cases, report it and move on with your life.

Call them out so that resistance is visible, then block them to remove their agency to engage you.

Oh neat, being younger there’s a lot of how folks approached the web in its earlier years that I don’t have any experience with, and think there’s a lot to learn from

I love that!

A nice comment is worth more than 1000 upvotes, emotionally.

Baby steps! :) I found it helped me build the habbit if I kept an eye out for posts that could be cross posted to smaller more niche communities

There are a lot of times where a post only gets posted on a bigger community because it has enough traffic, and smaller niche communities would benefit from folks crossposting it around!

And not just memes and shitposts you find elsewhere

Make things and share

It ain’t gonna be perfect but that’s half the fun

Thank you my friend, you too!

Thank you very much, I do my best :)

By the way I love your username lol. Take care!

I think as early members of this small online space we have to potential to cement a kinder culture that can influence even what this platform is like many years from now, with users that won’t be here for a long time!

People tend to match energy with the people they’re engaging with. When you show people kindness they intuitively respond the same way, and when that’s the culture, I think it can profoundly shape people’s social behaviors :)

And this space being as small as it is, we all have an outsized impact on that culture compared to something like reddit where any given user makes up such a teeeeny tiny fraction of the social interaction there.

We can all create that kind of culture that leads with kindness and prompts others to follow suit

I used to use reddit constantly, and did so for years. That level of hostility took over so gradually that I didn’t even consciously notice. I used Lemmy for a few weeks before it really sunk in that nobody had jumped down my throat over a minor, irrelevant issue (like a careless punctuation or grammatical error).

People here tend to give each other the benefit of the doubt, which had become virtually unheard of on reddit. Even when people make replies I don’t agree with, they’re usually discussing the point rather than the way that point is presented.

I will never, ever go back.

I’d say there’s also some corners of Lemmy that feel like the slightest provocation leads to an absolute dog pile of people being super angry looking for a fight.

That aspect blows but it’s usually helped by making sure that the instance your account is on is federated (or specifically NOT federated) with specific other instances.

Though this place is so much more chill than Reddit it’s fucking mindblowing

I swear Reddit has bots/trolls/AI designed to argue and rile you up to increase engagement. We see it in reposts/titles, why not in the comments?

Fuck yeah! I think that’s the thing that makes the fediverse special :)

We all care enough about the online spaces we choose to inhabit that we leave the big platforms for something kinder. I think that’s worth leaning into :)

Because there’s fewer foreign bots trying to make you hate everyone in your country, and fewer social media engagement bots trying to make sure you stay online arguing with someone.

Hell yeah 😊

And I absolutely agree. Lemmy straight up isn’t as big as reddit, it’s important that there be stuff to see, but I think one of the best things about the fediverse is that it feels so much more like healthy, actual social interaction, and I think that’s a strength we ought to celebrate and actively facilitate :)

Please do tell how to increase the purity tests

Fuck yeah! Absolutely!

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

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.

people are very emotional rn because of everything that’s happening but i agree with you that violence for it’s own sake is never good. the discussion must stay positive.

Agree

Absolutely agree. Fake niceness is worthless and does nothing to make a space better.

We need sincerity.

In fairness reddit also has volunteer moderation, but you’re absolutely right. I think that’s why being intentional about what kind of culture we want is so important.

In a small space bad actors in leadership roles can do so much damage, and people intentionally facilitating healthy spaces can do so much good.

Corporate platforms have to deal with profit incentives and the way those warp what a space is about, but we shouldn’t forget that our “new” fediverse model has its own problems well have to contend with.

The issue of greater variation in moderator/hosts was a big issue in the forum days to my understanding, and whether a space was healthy varried a lot from one to another. Big consolidated platforms homogenized things a lot but that came with its own issues. In a lot of ways it feels like the fediverse will have to address a lot of the unresolved issues of the old internet.

I can only hope we can learn by looking back at that history and build something better now

Sure! Here’s an expanded version of the fictional profile for Chris Whitmore, now including made-up family member names, relationships, and contact info — all entirely fictional and consistent with the character:

You forgot to remove that part of the LLM response…

It was evidently a joke, ffs why is it necessary to explain this?

I definitely agree about the importance of breaking the silence, and engaging with folks who go out of their way to post.

As a culture we want that to be rewarding, it’s something we all appreciate when folks do, so I think it’s worth making sure posters can feel that it’s appreciated. Make it known :)

Lol. Porn does make the internet go round

I already did that, but not on this account >.>

Make any post of quality. More high quality posts reducing reasons for visiting reddit the better

Yeah, I think that was a big issue with the culture of platforms like Voat.

The fediverse doesn’t have it as bad but it’s still definitely a risk. And being decentralized makes it easier to dodge bans and whatnot.

You’re right, and like I said elsewhere in this thread, big corporate platforms definitely have issues but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any unique challenges the fediverse will have to contend with.

Every troll server gets defederated from by everyone. And every troll gets banned on the normal servers. I think the federated nature is a blessing, those assholes have their own part of the internet which is usually far from my part of the internet.

Thank you! ❤️

1 billion percent agree, not everyone you disagree with is acting in bad faith

I came to Lemmy (lemm.ee originally) with this attitude. Tankies really made me regret trying to be sympathetic too them. It was the most vile interaction I’ve had on the Internet maybe? You shouldn’t call people tankies if they’re not but real tankies are by far the biggest problem with the fediverse and it’s growth

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Sometimes they literally just are. Not seen it on Lemmy but on Reddit I definitely interacted with users, age under 1 year, all suspiciously pro-Putin. It’s rare and I’m looking for it, but still.

On Reddit, I once bragged about having universal healthcare and got called a Nazi and a communist at the same time.

This is what happens when Xbox kids that use the n-word grow up. They learn new “bad” words and throw them around out of context and contradictingly. They don’t actually know what those things are, though, so it never makes sense.

I’ve been called a tankie here. I didn’t know what it was and looked it up, just to discover it was the literal opposite of the things I was saying. I was very confused and just put it down to frustrated self-projection. At some point they had been called that, it upset them, so now they use it to upset people too but they still don’t actually know what it is they’re saying.

If I see someone defaulting to Russian bot or tankie, I’ve found another Xbox kid and it’s in my best interests to just move on.

Nah fuck tankies, zero tolerance for the intolerant.

Lemmy.ml and lemmy.world are infested with tankies though. It is probably going to make me leave Lemmy. I’ve already started to discourage people in my life from joining because of how bad political and technological communities are. A lot of other communities are just empty.

Yeah but have you thought how that makes you a Nazi

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.

The user you quoted said they would also try Piefed: old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/…/mlbvone/

Isn’t being federated with HB nowadays more the exception that the rule?

IIRC,

• LW
• SJW
• lemmy.ca
• sopuli.xyz
• Blahaj
• programming.dev
• feddit.org

Are defederated

I had pretty much the same experience as that user and it’s why I left lemm.ee when they decided not to defederate with some of the worst instances. Was about to go back to the search if lemmy.world wasn’t any better. Tankies are why I don’t recommend Lemmy to my friends anymore. They are the fediverse’s biggest problem

I’ve had exactly the same experience. Lemmy has been far more hostile than I ever experienced on Reddit. Any opinions which aren’t far left are called “Nazi,” and users are very quick to justify violence against “Nazis.”

“Sensitive” people can be really toxic too. Some people just enjoy being outraged.

Thank you for voting. You can vote again in 24 hours. leaderboard

Aww thanks.

I didn’t even know that was a thing. Neat.

Thank you for voting. You can vote again in 24 hours. leaderboard

sexism does exist on lemmy but the algorithm is less aggressive about pushing rage-bait, so it rarely shows on the front-page. also, the people here are a bit more considerate, i’d say. but that is mostly because it’s a lot of nerds here (heheh).

Well yeah but consider that everyone that doesn’t think like me is a Nazi at best

well i’d argue that setting teslas on fire is property damage, while slashing social security is murder or at the very least neglect of duties that led to deaths of many people.

it is clear that property damage is the minor damage of the two, according to contemporary interpretation of law.

about the guillotining:

same story. talkings about guillotining people is a reasonable threat when the alternative is to let the billionaires upend your roots and your lifes through horrible policy decisions. it’s an act of self-defence at some point, i’d say.

though i agree with you at least partially that the US is different than say europe.

in the US, the mindset of “hard work” is more far-spread, as it the mindset that people who don’t work, don’t deserve to eat. that’s just the US being the US i guess.

I’m not sure I follow- Are you saying you think I want to set people’s stuff on fire and guillotine people, or that you think responders in this thread do?

Let me guess, you voted for that orange cheeto

.

Horseshoe theory is horseshit.

• ‘Horseshoe theory’ is nonsense – the far right and far left have little in common
• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory#Academic_s…
• Funny thing about Hannah Arendt’s construction of “totalitarianism”: She came from a bourgeois family and so was unsurprisingly anti-communist, and she was funded & promoted by the CIA.
  Imperialist Propaganda and the Ideology of the Western Left Intelligentsia: From Anticommunism and Identity Politics to Democratic Illusions and Fascism

  One of the centerpieces of the cultural cold war was the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), which was revealed in 1966 to be a CIA front. Hugh Wilford, who has researched the topic extensively, described the CCF as nothing short of one of the largest patrons of art and culture in the history of the world. Established in 1950, it promoted on the international scene the work of collaborationist academics such as Raymond Aron and Hannah Arendt over and against their Marxian rivals, including the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.

serious question but how do/could you formalize your rejection of right-wingers? what is it exactly that you take issue with?

i’m asking because i talk to a lot of people (also some who identify as “right-wingers”) and i’d like to know what exactly are the issues that bother people, so i can forward it to them. it would help me bring up better arguments if i know what other people are thinking.

so, i’ve collected the following list of things to take issue with so far:

• right-wingers often think that people who don’t work, don’t deserve to eat, which clearly puts enterpreneurial spirit above human life, which is clearly illegal
• right-wingers often take brunt and direct actions, which can be uncomfortable to more sensitive people.
• right-wingers typically neglect far-sightedness, seeking only short-term profits (looking at you, quarterly profit).

tell me if i forgot something.

Oh, not them. I suppose they meant among non-right wingers. I always found quite explicit they aren’t welcome here. Not today, not ever.

If you’re out there suggesting political stances can be adequately expressed along a single line, then you’re not doing much better I’m afraid. Engage with the nuance, friend, it’ll build understanding and be better for all of us.

‘Left’/‘Right’ need to go, they’re losing any meaning they once had - instead: “What’s your policy on X”? “How do you feel about Y?” “Do you agree with Z’s policy on A, B & C, and why?”.

Curiosity, followed by grounded opinion, over tribalism.

Now excuse me while I go and try to practice what I just preached 😅

If you know what you are arguing and argue with tankies/Nazis in good faith, nine times out of ten they will eventually lose their temper and make fools of themselves. There is no need to be hostile to begin with, they just defeat themselves basically because their ideologies are totally flawed (kinda like in real life).

Don’t apologize.

.

That is a very specific interpretation of what I meant by this post.

To be perfectly honest, I really wasn’t making the point you should approve of nazis. Just that maybe it’s worth putting effort into being kind to one another…

For example, I constantly see leftists online biting eachother’s heads off (including on lemmy) for having slightly different left-wing ideology. Its not like “approach people you disagree with with curiosity” means specifically actual neonazis, and approaching someone with curiosity doesn’t mean telling people “your idea is correct and you’re right for thinking it”

It means trying to understand it. You can dislike someone and still gain from better understanding their worldview. Even if you think it’s harmful. Even if you think it’s illogical. Even if you think they’re wrong. Curiousity isn’t tacit approval.

If you want to think about it cynically you can consider it creating allies and knowing your enemy.

All of that ignoring the fact that if you look around, this platform is almost exclusively left wing 😅 even if it includes folks left of center I don’t agree with, like tankies and neoliberals (who yes, I know, are only left with respect of the US overton window. Thats where I’m from 🤷‍♂️)

I understand we disagree on certain things, that’s okay, these are just my thoughts on the subject, and it’s a profoundly important one, so I can appreciate why people would have different strongly held beliefs on it. Hope you have a good one :)

What is a tankie?

“Tankies”

The irony with this is that Lemmy was founded by communists and it follows a lot of communist principles.

I can’t speak to the quality outlook, but from what I understand about enshittification, it typically requires a self-serving entity like a corporation whose interests are not in alignment with its customers/consumers/userbase. In some of Mr. Doctrow’s writings, he indicates that federating cans be a “circuit breaker” for enshittification.

In a well federated platform, when one node begins to act counter to its users, the users can easily move nodes/instances. This is one of the reasons why there needed to be a law to allow phone number portability. Email is similar, but only if you own your own domain. Look for Cory Doctrow’s writings on BlueSky for more examples.

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I wish too. Unfortunately, the redditors are coming here, and i’ve noticed a pretty big spike in racism/transphobia :D I’ve been trying to keep them on a leash, reporting them to other admins directly and banning them from dbzer0, but the attitude itself being there disappoints me heavily :/

Okay for anyone who is fried at the moment like I am, map-wiki IS NOT ABOUT GEOGRAPHY.

Technically anyone can spin up an instance centered on whatever dark and inhumane topic. That’s the reality of an open network. That’s why defederation and whitelisting are such important tools as Fediverse grows. You don’t actually want access to every last bit of information on the network.

Lol the irony

Except the non-US republicans, they’re cool :D

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.

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.

For that matter, nothing’s stopping the people who disagree with me from creating their own nazi-friendly Lemmy instance. This is not the Nazi bar, and it’s not going to be, so go ahead and open it yourselves. No need to let me know how it turns out, I’m pretty sure I’ve got a good guess.

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.

Ik a few people who lean to the right economically but aren’t in favor of all this authoritarian stuff And they’re not Nazis, you cant just generalize so broadly about what should or shouldn’t be tolerated. Ofc if someone is being blatantly racist that shouldnt be tolerated, but economic discussion is totally fine

Funny how allergic people are to basic truths.

Sucky! sucky! five dolla!

The vast majority of people here are reddit refugees, raised on a website that encourages being a prentious dick(me inclusive, too often, though I’m trying to be better) it’s unsurprising they’d take issue with the message

Its definitely fatiguing not gonna lie 🙃

Clearly I left it too ambiguous whether I meant Nazis specifically when I said you should try to approach people you disagree with with curiosity. That sounds super sarcastic but I don’t mean it that way, I just don’t have the energy to reword it

This problem probably could have been anticipated and avoided, it’s just hard to always do so perfectly on the internet when speaking to a lot of people you don’t know who will interpret what you say in any manner of different ways

I have a shark vacuum, I don’t know the model. It’s really good for two reasons. First, it slides down low profile to go under things easily. Second, it has a three foot long detachable suck stick so you can get bigger stuff or get down in cracks. It’s great for around the litter boxes. 4.5 stars because things could always suck more.

The world is not America, buddy. Also don’t make leftists & liberals seem like they’re somehow above this crap either.

You both want to crawl up in peoples ass & tell them what to do

@orcrist @Cris_Color You needn't be unkind to have integrity, and if your ideas aren't at least considered without force, they're probably wrong.

Kindness is a tool for conservatives to maintain power

Uh… Complimenting peoples art and having sincere discussions about what you think and why with folks on Lemmy grants conservatives power?

I get that lots of folks are frustrated with the constant liberal compromising but a) that’s not “kindness” and b) that’s not what I’m saying you do. This post isn’t about telling people they should approve of Nazis. Its about building a healthy culture, here, in this online space, that facilitates positive interactions worth having.

I wish you and the others who commented along those lines could appreciate how exhausting this is as a person literally just saying we should be kind to the people we share this space with.

Look around. Basically every person here is left of center. I’m left of center. You don’t have to be combative with me just because we don’t exactly agree on everything.

Kindness is not a malicious conservative plot, nor is that what this post was about. And on that note, I clearly need to step away because in the same way that a lot of people’s emotions are high, mine are too now and I’m loosing my ability to engage with people in the way that I want to.

Take care, and I hope you have a good night/day

The Internet was a mistake. Pre-internet life was much kinder.

I’m glad there’s still sane people here.

im having a time. 🥲

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.

❤️

Have a good one!

Or how Doctor Who felt after asking the master for help.

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

some people have never caught a vibe in their life and it shows

Lmao 😂

And yeah, we actually have tangible evidence to support that idea Erin kissane has done a lot of incredible research work on how to effectively design the fediverse and support people in navigating it and one of the earlier things she did was interview people who left Mastodon after having bad experiences and collate that data-

A lot of people’s reasons is that when they joined they were met with hostility. It plays a huge role in people’s experiences here, and even just from a purely pragmatic perspective it’s REALLY important

Don’t kink shame me!

The Internet can certainly lend itself to discord and hostility. I think that makes it all the more important we think carefully about what kind of spaces we want to build

Both in the sense that we should pursue kindness, but also in the sense that we should be designing our platforms to be healthy social spaces! Another commenter made some really good points about how important it is that we shape our platforms in a way that facilitates the kind of social spaces we want to he a part of :)

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

I think there’s a fine line between banter and trying to humiliate folks, and sometimes it’s awfully hard to find.

I don’t really mind banter or jokes, but the idea that it’s humor is often what people hide behind when they’re being cruel and want to excuse their behavior.

If you can find that line and still be respectful of the human beings you’re engaging with, I don’t think there’s anything at all wrong with that :) enjoy your banter!

I agree, and like with many of the culture issues we have challenges with, I think the extent to which Lemmy is a echo chamber or political and philosophical monoculture really sets us up to struggle with those kinds of problems

You’re not wrong though. Even I sometimes find myself falling into it, it’s hard. And a lot of people believe following the behavior their anger drives them to isn’t just okay, it’s actually a good think and combats the problems they’re angry about. Personally I think that usually couldn’t be any further from the truth

Regardless, I hope you have a good one :)

❤️ thank you!

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 :)

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

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.

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

Dunno maybe you can subscribe to more instances (sublemmies? I don’t know the lingo) and somehow filter out the ones that go bad quickly. My enjoyment of Lemmy went up by a lot once I started ignoring the front page and curating my subscribed instances. Just make sure you visit the list of communities every so often

That’s because politics are getting to the point where people cannot ignore them any longer. Think it’s bad now? Just wait till the grocery gets hit.

D’aww, thanks. Always lovely to see your username and pfp around :) take care!

I had something I was thinking about posting for the soulslke comm, I gotta remember what it was!

I think a lot of folks immediately thought of something very specific when they saw my post, I really meant to be kind to the people you share this space with :). I feel like maybe it would have been best if I had left all these examples in my original post itself instead of moving them to the comments

• Compliment people’s art and ask about their process
• Teach people about something you’re knowledgeable on
• Give constructive criticism on peoples projects when it’s welcome
• Thank people for posting things you’re glad you got to see, tell them you enjoyed it
• Tell people you’re glad they’re here
• Tell people you hope they have a good day

I moved them cause I wanted to keep my post succinct so folks would actually read it (I have a bad habit of being REALLY long winded lol. Can you tell? 😅) But I think they really exemplify what I was trying to get across, and leaving only the more challenging philosophical ideas like “approach people you disagree with with curiosity rather than hostility” I think kinda prompted people to misunderstand what exactly I meant.

I can absolutely empathize with it getting harder to find common ground and build bridges. There’s no easy way to do that when more and more people think your humanity is up for debate. But I still think in this little corner of the internet, it’s worth trying our hardest to uplift the folks we sit shoulder to shoulder with :)

I goto tiktok comments

Lmao, that’s honestly kinda hilarious to me

Based

Voting is boring. Just comment yourself. Thats much better. We want content and discussions, Not just numbers;)

@Angry_Autist

@Cris_Color

It is only "free" if you choose not to pay. Unlike commercial social that's free for you to use BECAUSE you are the product being sold, federated social is only free to you because someone else is paying.

I completely agree that mass adoption requires well primed communities which requires early adopters to put more effort into engaging.

I would also add that clicking on anything linked helps too.. Many news outlets are data driven. If you want them to invest more with federated social, click the links so the engagement shows up in their analytics.

It’s a rough time, not helped by how profoundly important politics is right now. And the more broken the state of things get, the more divided we become, and the harder it gets to look others in the eyes and be okay with what they’re supporting :(

I don’t think there’s any easy answer. But I do think it helps to confront people who are doing harm, and open sincere dialogue with people you disagree with (when theyre willing to engage in good faith. No point otherwise.) And try to understand how they got where they are, and share why you don’t agree with them

The last listening and understanding I had with a Trumper was over whether Haitians were eating cats and dogs in Ohio. They’re not serious and I’m not going to pretend they are.

“Ultra-left” in America has boiled down to not hating minorities.

These days everyone who is not ultra-left easily gets labelled as Nazi, similarly everyone who brings up any rather left argument will be called a woke snowflake.

What the hell are you smoking? Have you turned on the news? Paid attention to politicians? Check in with how exactly companies chose to sustain and expand DEI (A <- where did the accessibility go we wonder?) after Trump and DOGE attacked it?

You are so wrong, if the universe repeated at the edge of itself like in the old Asteroids arcade game, you would have long ago crossed into Very Right by slamming straight past the most extreme extent of Completely Wrong.

That’s an interesting and specific actionable idea, I love to see those! Thanks for sharing your thoughts!

Don’t hesitate to talk about that idea (or others) more often with folks here on the Fediverse!

@Cris_Color@lemmy.world being nice helps establish the “tone”, but I’m not sure that wouldn’t change with another “API event” on Reddit that results in another, larger mass migration.

The way I see it - the early adopters set the tone of a place and new arrivals are more likely to adopt that approach. So it is important to be kind now, so people will be kind later.

Love you too bro.

Love you too man! ❤️

Group hug!

Hey just so you know Love is actually not up-to-date with the current upstream branch and there are tons of security issues with that, you are going to have to manually upgrade your empathy drivers to keep up with the main One Love development branch.

I prefer to use Spite and just set up my own Love emulation environment within it and honestly because I like to DIY stuff I can’t understand that not everyone else wants to DIY everything. People say this isn’t something they “love” about me, and to that I repeat what I have repeated here.

Best part about Lemmy is it actually seems like I’m talking to a real person.

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!

“Be curious, not judgemental.” - Ted Lasso (via Walt Whitman)

Active listening is a powerful skill!

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.

Fuck yeah! I wasn’t familiar with that quote, that’s lovely! Thank you for sharing :)

I’m a member of the Church of Bill & Ted.

I think given the existing culture of this space and the reasons people are drawn here it would be hard for that specifically to happen, but that’s not to say we won’t have our own cultural and platform challenges

I think in a worst case scenario we’re more at risk of growing toxic and unhealthy in a new and different way than 4chan did

The ban hammer is too strong here for that to happen

I mean, there is kind of already 4chan-like spaces on the fediverse, they are just mostly off in their own corner because nobody else wants to deal with childishly incomplete visions of how moderation should work in a community to keep the most vulnerable people safe.

as long as lemmygrad or hexbear don’t become urban terrorists

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 :)

Thats when I came here too. Sadly, spez had his yes man ban a lot of people and some really bad ones broke containment because of it. Most places I’ve been on here I haven’t seen any chronically online shit but if this post is being made it must be getting worse.

Same. I’ve engaged in some stupid ragebait here too a little bit. To my chagrin. ._. We just have to remember to breathe and take a step back if we feel angry. And stay hydrated.

Thank you! 🥰

Hope you have a good day!

I fuckin love the hear that, I hope we can foster even more of that. It can be so hard online but I really think it’s worth it. This space is only as good and as worthwhile as we make it ❤️

Are you even reading the comments on this thread LMAO 🤣

<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/c05bedd7-3396-4803-940d-697b660204b3.png">

I am sorry surph_ninja, but I have to be honest, I was the one that stole your bubblegum

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.

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!

I should give quiche a chance…?

I like quiche okay 😅 very eggy but it can be pretty tasty 🤷‍♂️

Yeah, if I don’t have the answer I usually just stop in to say I hope someone more knowledgeable can chime in and wish them luck.

That way the post at least gets a little engagement for visibility. But the “rtfm” attitude, while understandable, can be really miserable to be met with when you’re out of your depth doing your best to learn about something new and need some help from another actual human.

We all begrudge the automated phone systems that try to reduce the need for human beings by helping people with simple problems, and that approach to helping people exists for good reason but it does feel like sometimes we’re too eager to leave people to figure things out by themselves just because it’s a lot of work to actually help them, human to human. None of us enjoy being treated that way when we need help.

RTFM is always a good strategy, the manual/wiki/source code will almost always have more info than a comment can reasonably contain.

Doing a quick look through your comment history paints the picture that you’re likely the issue since your responses are often vaguely or overtly aggressive. Snide and snark.

Its definitely rough, I can understand why. I live in the US and as a queer person whose loved ones are almost all minorities the outlook is feeling pretty bleak, but its definitely frustrating that it feels like even slightly different left wing ideas, or thoughts on what we do about our problems can spawn flamewars.

Literally with people you’re in the exact same camp with :/ I’m also big on political debate, I think democracy can’t function unless people can discuss with eachother what problems we have and what we think we should do about them. (And yes, I know we increasingly may not have much of democracy here in the US. I still think my statement is true of how democracy functions in general)

I think it’s really valuable to learn how people arive at worldviews other than mine.

Spez had his gestapo admins ban a bunch of people after Elon had a fit so you’re getting a lot of the terminally online types coming here. My suggestion is just don’t give them any attention and they’ll eventually give up. I was semi active in a few lefty subs and holy shit you could smell some of the people there just from their comments.

Honestly I’d expect nothing less. Almost everyone here is a Reddit refuge. We’d need a solid balance of different internet groups to not feel like Reddit. Tumblr, 4chan, Instagram, Twitch chat… for better or worse all have a very different feel from one another.

Report it - people jumping straight to insults are trying to shut discussion down which really isn’t acceptable.

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!

At least we don’t have karma here, that would make it so much worse

With the aggravated issue of moderators being far less ““professional”” here than in Reddit. At least in some big reddit communities there was a big admin team that tried to keep things more or less professional (not that they would always achieved that but they tried). Here mod teams are very small and mods mostly just got their position by just being here first, so I have found out a lot of very biased moderation and mods just using mod tools and position of authority to defend their own particular opinions.

If you are debating something with a moderator alt account, or with a moderator friend you are in for some unfairness going your way. At least that have been my experience trying to debate even very small deviations from a Community main political stance.

You know what, I can respect that take. I was trying to tailor things to my audience, you’re not wrong though :)

I can get behind the Kindness Rebellion.

Yeah, let’s show them! … how to be decent human beings by example.

The first was in reference to when someone expresses an idea you don’t understand or a perspective you don’t share, and the latter was about the tendency to just keep scrolling and say nothing even when you like a post or comment, but I can see why you interpreted them that way.

In my experience when someone is expressing their thoughts they generally take kindly to folks asking them about why they see things the way they do 🤷‍♂️

No, fuck you!

I wish you pleasant sexual encounters as well, most esteemed stranger.

You have the power to curate your feed and block problematic users. There’s no algorithm that’ll do it for you here.

this

The amount of times I’ve been blocked on the fediverse because I’ve mentioned that I find the mechanics behind AI interesting, or the math behind crypto, its actually insane. Or anything positive about spacex or the benefits of a free market.

What the hell does that even mean

What do you mean? To me the two are synonymous

No. You can go to hell!

Pete, we know you’re a big softie inside.

No. But you can work on yourself to become a nicer, better person and we will support you all the way. Then, you will be allow to be yourself.

With love,
Pseudo

Highly regarded behavior has been an internet staple for decades

Second best thing you can go is to report unkind people.

The only problem is lemmy seems to be hostile to certain niches specifically ones closer to spiritual realted stuff

And just to make this clear to idiots who want to be idiots SPIRITUALITY IS NOT RELIGON

thx @jesuisatirebitpickup, this now came over, no idea why the inicial post by search didn't show up, some Lemmy/friendica issue, or maybe the it's because squeet.me is on the dev branch.
(upss, nope 2024.12 database version 1576/1576)

Also, your mention wasn't notified, this just appeared in the stream. Let's do a general reshare so this is ported over to diaspora too.
👍

@requeteche @Cris_Color

Then just stop responding to them.

Your reasoning matches with some of the most hostile people out there because they have alarms that are very easy to trip. So virtually everyone “shows them there’s no reason to be” kind.

For example, someone disagrees with you? They must be far too stupid to understand what you’re writing or intentionally missing the point just to attack you, so there’s no reason to be kind to them.