My thought process:
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Post wholesome content. You need to be providing what you want to see, first and foremost. Provocative content is easy engagement, but wholesome stuff is both a little harder to find and to get people to interact with.
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Support other people doing what you like. See a post you like with no or low comments? Leave a comment to show that person other people want more. Likes are nice and all, but I personally post things I’m interested in and want to discuss. If I get likes, but nobody is talking with me, I get bored and feel like posting less.
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Clarify when you post or comment. If you’re sharing an opinion, make that clear. If you’re interested in a subject but understand you aren’t an expert, make sure you’re not coming off as one. If you’re bringing facts, support them with quotes and citations and be sure to credit others where it’s due.
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Respect constructive discussions. If people are rude, feel free to ignore them. No one wants to see 2 stubborn randos arguing in a thread though. If people give counterpoints or ask questions of your opinion, return the politeness given or steer it back to positive interior you feel it isn’t.
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Discipline is required if I can’t stick to my principles that I’ve outlined. If I think what I’m going to post is going to rule people up or if I think I’m saying too much about something I’m not very informed on, am I better off hitting cancel than post?
Bingo.
Each of us doing these things is the key.
That’s what I’m talking about!
It’s a few comments more positive in here already. 😜
You’ve never needed everyone for something, that’s unrealistic. A village doesn’t require the exact same behavior from all people to function smoothly, and any such bottleneck would create weaknesses anyway. You just need that to be the prevailing culture.
You are the most wholesome user i see around here, I love your posts lol =D
If anyone’s fit answering this question, it’s you
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I’ve been doing my best to approach discussions with empathy lately (I’m not naturally good at it). The people interested in mudslinging get bored I don’t rise to it. People not interested in mudslinging but expected it get drawn into a conversation instead
I hear you, your conclusion is valid given your axioms. We agree on these points. But, have you considered someone with different axioms would come to a different conclusion. Neither of us are irrational, incorrect, or invalid. We’re mostly the same, just differ on a few key points.
Does wonders
Can confirm. The trolls get really bord when you don’t flip a lid. Also, if you just ask questions that challenge them to think a little more, the tend to ghost too.
ban Nazi’s and defederate from fascist instances.
Do you have examples of fascists instances so i can block them?
For replying: Give others the benefit of the doubt. If you’re not sure, ask clarifying questions instead of assuming things and attacking first.
I see too many people fall for this basic thing.
My take is that the fediverse is wholesome. Today’s news isn’t but that is our current reality and the topics on a social network will always cover current events.
But when you really pay attention to the people here, they are wholesome. And if what you see is a lot of terrible people in your feed, start watching the instances they are coming from. Frequently the difference between a good and bad experience here is how well you curate your feed and how well your instance is moderated.
Yup agreed. Compare the comments on most of Lemmy to YouTube or Twitter or the like, which very frequently quickly devolve into hate filled cesspools. It can happen here, but it happens far less frequently. But yeah, check instances, block toxic people so you don’t like so you won’t even be tempted to engage with them in the future, etc
Liberal use of the block button.
Sorry, I should clarify: better for everyone*
I want to help improve the experience, not just for my own benefit.
Admittedly blocking isn’t directly effective, but it could be if it generally gets people to stop feeding trolls, thus cutting off reward feedback loops for bad actors.
Just a thought.
In a world where trolling was done as a recreational activity, this was a good strategy. This is not that world anymore, though, this is a world where right wing fight clubs are popping up in dozens of countries. Trolls are no longer recreational, they’re trying to slowly and gradually change the world in their image.
Food for consideration:
- Blocking people makes the place more pleasant for you, which makes you a more pleasant person to interact with and the people you respond to will tend to reflect that.
- Blocking people denies them interaction even in their less acerbic comments, making the place less fun for people who are so inclined.
Since becoming a parent, I’ve learned that sometimes self-care is caring for others because it helps us keep from being ground down to our worse selves.
That’s not to say more can’t be done, but don’t discount the effectiveness of starving negativity of air.
That’s not to say more can’t be done, but don’t discount the effectiveness of starving negativity of air.
100%.
Stop posting world news (unless it’s specifically wholesome news).
From a reader perspective, filter out everything news related (or subscribe to everything you want to see and only browse by subscribed).
When you create a piefed account it asks if you want to filter the “Trump & Musk” keywords by default, that’s pretty cool.
This. Most news sites nowadays are all about clickbait and ragenews while pushing their financer’s agenda (left wing, right wing, whatever)
And there’s always the users whose only purpose is to post these clickbait/ragenews in 30 different communities as if they were karma farming on reddit; just poisoning the global feed with doomposting.
There needs to be a way to tag news posts across instances.
Try to be insightful, supportive, and ask questions that lead to discussion
This is a good point, I like how you’ve simplified it into 3 easy to follow steps; Do you have any more advice?
Thank you. Sure, I will list a few more:
-in general, try to be polite
-make an effort to be an active participant in the communities you are a part of
-donate to the developers if you have the means to do so
Fix the world it exists in.
Welcome folks, be friendly, get to know people. I’ve started a podcast, because I had this exact question. I talk to folks from around the fedi and just have a fireside chat. We need more projects like this that show who and what we are and it has to be shown outside of Fedi as well.
If you’re interested the show is at video.firesidefedi.live/@show . Also on YT, but delayed by months and with new videos I’m pulling some out as a teaser to go to Peertube.
Please don’t, disneyfication is as bad as enshitifcation.
I’d say worse, because it’s delusional.
I’d say it’s not as bad because it comes from (I think) a genuinely well meaning place, but it is definitely destructive, both just on its own and because it will produce a Streisand effect from the people it pisses off and cause them to devolve into full time trolls when they might not otherwise
I’ll go for the technical side: having a distributed accounts manager so you only need one account to use every aspect of the Fediverse.
I thought that was part of the package when I made a lemmy account. Man was I disappointed.
Could this be an XY problem? Maybe instead of having several accounts and a way to log in everywhere easily, the problem is lacking interoperability? It’s hard to follow lemmy from mastodon, for example, but what if that was easy? Then you wouldn’t need both a lemmy account and a mastodon account, one would be enough to use different aspects of the fediverse.
Yes and no. Mastodon and Lemmy and Pixelfed and Peertube and FunkWhale and… have different uses but can be mixed. It would be a dream to have all in the same place so you can have a tab to upload images, another for videos, another for news, another for microblogging, another for DM (Matrix? XMPP?), another for short videos (Loops), … Just like FB has in some way.
It would be neat if different front-ends catered to different types of users who wanted different aspects, but that there was an underlying compatibility that also worked better. If I understand it correctly, mastodon has implemented activitypub in a way where each post doesnt hold a reference to the entire thread hierarchy (as lemmy has), so it’s difficult for mastodon software to construct hierarchies of replies in the same way, or at least it’s more expensive to traverse. There’s some differences in how groups are interpreted, as a hash tag or as a community. I’d rather be able to use one account and have the option to view activities in different ways, but now the implementations differ. That’s the interoperability I mean that doesn’t defeat decentralization.
My biggest issue with the fediverse and all alt social media in general is due to the current social climate and censorship on mainstream SM platforms, every alt platform is inundated with politics. Politics is very hot button, it breeds negative interactions and very often is worded in such a way that its very ragebait-y in order to increase engagement. I have this issue with Bluesky as well, even after blocking bad actors and bad communities, and muting keywords I still find myself overwhelmed with political content and I find it difficult to not engage even if I support the causes.
When I consume media that is not politically related, I find people are very positive and easy to connect with, the problem is that type of content is few and far between.
it’s cool though because the fediverse has no incentives to increase engagement which means our ragebait is all organic and free of the profit motive!
Change the sorting algorithms?
I’m not sure of the details, but the default “Hot” algorithm for Lemmy surfaces ragebait from popular subs first, while Scaled or New Comments are way more wholesome.
This should be an ongoing experiment, but I think “Hot” or whatever is default should boost quiet communities more.
I just started using scaled. Its nice.
“scaled” and “Top - 6 Hours” are pretty decent at surfacing meaningful … well, maybe not conversation but engagement at least.
Top 6 hours is very light on niche communities. Sometimes they’re in top hour, but its still mostly the big few.
Please post more wholesome content
I tried some magic mushrooms the other day, has ab absolute horrible trip and decided to just watch something wholesome and funny.
I went to Lemmy
That did not go over well, all my content was cynical, sad, sarcastic… It made me feel even worse. I went on to try and watch some simply laugh Comedy, couldn’t find friends anywhere, tried to find it on YouTube, big mistake… Long story short, it was the longest night of my life and I’ll bever ever try that shit again but for heavens sake, please try posting more actual positive and or funny content!
Any subs anyone could recommend for that?
If you want something great for being funny wholesome and weird while tripping I can’t recommend a sub but I always really like this Jacob Wysocki video and just sketch comedy channels like Door Monster and Chris and Jack, etc…
Otherwise on here I like the comic communities. They have been pretty good.
