Fediverse

I usually try to until the other person shows me that there's no reason to be.

Speaking past each other is IMO the biggest source of friction and division on the fediverse.

I honestly feel like I can do better in this area. Thanks for the post. Gives me something to think about.

I disagree with your premise.

It should be "The best thing that you can do for humanity is to be kind".

Seriously. We're living in a time when fascism is in an upswing and at least one religious leader has publicly called empathy a sin. Kindness and empathy are rebellious acts.

Love this post!

@Cris_Color

offtopic:
Test to see if from here it is possile to engage the friendica server of @utopiarte and @requeteche.

btw and ontopic:

We also need people sharing their niche interests and creating discussion... Reddit thrives on these small communities that only find an accessible entrypoint on their platform.

Okay I agree, so let's start from Linux related any post, tell them if somebody asks a problem don't tell them just install mint , or how one is crazy because they are facing the problems in Linux or if you are not using Linux what idiot are you. I stopped participating because

1. Linux dude bros are just idiots troubling me
2. I can't find content which is though not niche is just is plain not news or Linux
3. It's very confusing to use fedverse as I don't know of i can go all subs via my boost app or do i need something else , if so where to access them.

So let's make it ACCESSIBLE, NON DERAGORTY FOR ANON LINUX USERS ALSO

Fuck you!

I have mysteriously vanished for like 2 or so months now (which is a good thing, please take breaks from the internet every once in a while), I don't really remember NOT being kind here.

And this post reminds me of why Lemmy is a good place to begin with.

I'll add: "be supportive and helpful if you can, and just shut up if you can't".

Fediverse is sometimes suffering from the same kind of people that Linux has - "oh you have a problem? Well, here's the GitHub repo and a project Wiki, figure it out".

Best I can do is rewind.

Yeah try telling people here to be kind

This place is still nicer then reddit but it's still got problems with a**hole users

• The ones that spam a certain viewpoint amd downvote people who disagree with them and I'm not talking about bigoted users who you should downvote as they want dystopia but users who have different viewpoints to them

• People who act like assholes if you don't share their holier-than-thou viewpoint that they try to enforce everywhere

• The users here who insist everyone here be atheists, I'm not atheist nor am I religous (I also have a dislike for organised religons) but I still do dislike those kinds of users

• The people here who act like like a**holes when you critique something or give feedback

I'm sure there's more I'm missing but those are what I remember from the top of my head that I dislike about certain lemmy users and why I think not everyone here is capable of being kind

So I can't be myself?

The thing that I appreciated most about Lemmy and my transition from Reddit is how cordial everyone has been. Even if a comment is taken out of context, people tend not to jump down each others throat and assume the worst, or make bad faith arguments full of fallacies. I've had legitimate back and forths with people, something that basically never happens on Reddit.

Here are some more specific examples to think about!

• 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

Thanks for taking the time to read my thoughts :) if you have thoughts of your own, I'd love to hear them!

This applies to real life as well. Results may vary.

When I see small, I see potential. More people know each other which fosters genuine relationships and understanding, ingredients missing from the toxic environments of the big social networks.

My ex used to call me a very small dude with a big city attitude. She didn't mean it as a compliment, but I took it as one.

The fediverse is just a beautiful place to be you. It feels calm, relaxed, intellectual and full of supportive people. It's a refreshiong alternative to the sprawling and sometimes impersonal nature of vast social networks.

One thing we should all agree on, we all have a role to play in shaping the culture of this space.

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

This place is becoming very Reddit, if you post anything that deviates from someone’s beliefs they call you names and insult your intelligence. So many people can’t have a debate or discussion without jumping to personal attacks and hate. It’s really disheartening. I love political debate but there’s no such thing anymore, only name calling

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.

Sometimes being kind doesn't necessarily mean being nice.

On the one hand, yes, yes, yes, absolutely.

On the other hand, way too often people are absolutely vile here and nobody sticks up for themselves or for others. Really a shame that r-word-it bullshit behavior is often times totally accepted and approved and even rewarded here.

Everyone's been really nice as long as I don't touch anything political - then it becomes a fart sniffing smug fest.

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.

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."

There was a movement in the blogging community ~15 years ago to leave positive comments on posts you like. It was an approach to conquer negative comments and a general destructive nature of online conversations. I still do it to this day. If I really like something or appreciate someone's work, I leave a nice comment.

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

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.

I've noticed most discussions i have here end with a LOT less anger and a LOT more learning and that makes me happy.