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.
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.
Fuck you!
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!
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.
Aka the compliment sandwich. A technique I personally dislike. Be honest and open with your feedback in a positive way, don’t try to hide it between compliments. If your feedback is simply negative, keep it to yourself.
I agree it can be used fallaciously, often found in the business world. My point was to include both good and bad honestly and not hide it, and people won’t shut down if they get the good first. It also depends on the subject - if they’re on the right track and your suggestion leads to better results, that’s not as negative as telling someone they’re doing something incorrectly and offering a different way.
In the end, how you say things is just as important as what is said.
100% agreed. If I see a compliment sandwich, I assume that the person using the technique is lying about the compliments and I lose all respect for them.
Absolutely agree, some folks just wanna share, some folks wanna get constructive crit to try and technically improve! Its important to be respectful of what kind of interaction folks are looking for :)
And absolutely, talking about both good and bad doesn’t just make it less unpleasant or more enjoyable to get feedback, it also makes better, more helpful feedback! (Assuming that’s a thing they’re looking for)
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?
I am! Thank you for asking :)
Ive gotten a lot of assumptions about what I meant and that’s a bit frustrating but I really value honest sincere dialogue, if you have thoughts you think would be worth sharing I’d love to hear them my friend!
I thought I had hit reply on your other comment going into more detail (whoops!).
Like I did in this example, ask if people are open to feedback (if you’re the one giving it).
Often when I am training groups on how to work together, I always try and frame feedback as a gift.
If someone is giving you feedback, they are genuinely trying to help you grow - and that’s a gift. The issue here though, is not everyone is a good gift giver - and we can’t control that.
What we do have control over is how we recieve gifts - often all you need to do is say thank you. Don’t explain why you’re not going to use this feedback (if you plan not to incorporate it). Other than clarifying the feedback to better understand how to incorporate it, saying thank you is the best way to go about it.
As far as delivering feedback I always say “if you can choose to be anything in this world why choose anything other than kind.”
It is important to state that “being kind” doesn’t mean not having the difficult conversations or delivering difficult feedback - you can still do that without being cruel. Being assertive isn’t being aggressive.
A bit rambly but if you’re ever working with folx on delivering feedback, I’ve found that presenting these frameworks with it ste super helpful
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Speaking past each other is IMO the biggest source of friction and division on the fediverse.
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”.
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
- Linux dude bros are just idiots troubling me
- I can’t find content which is though not niche is just is plain not news or Linux
- 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
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.
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.
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 honestly feel like I can do better in this area. Thanks for the post. Gives me something to think about.
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.
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.
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.
I’ve noticed most discussions i have here end with a LOT less anger and a LOT more learning and that makes me happy.
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 :)
100%
Internet by the people, and for the people, truly.
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.
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
Great post.
To add to this, not resorting to calling others tankies or Russian bots when you have differing opinions, especially around politics.
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
yeah i’ve met some thorough tankies recently and wow are they annoying. just completely blind to reality.
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.
1 billion percent agree, not everyone you disagree with is acting in bad faith
when you’re dealing with fundamentalists or extremists things turn nasty very quickly because you’re questioning their fantasy world
doesn’t matter if they’re good or bad faith, often they will just ban you
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Instance admins have pretty good information at their disposal to identify bots.
I have yet to see any instance admin say that there is any significant amount of bots, outside of the occasional spate of spamming. I only see such theories & accusasions come from non-admins, with no accompanying compelling evidence.
well the good news is that everybody - and that includes the US - creates psyops all the time, so that makes it fair.
This is Eglin Air Force Base checking in. 
Most addicted city (over 100k visits total)
Eglin Air Force Base, FL
Oak Brook, IL
South St. Paul, MN?
What I’m saying is that Reddit is packed with US government psyop coming from Eglin AFB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eglin_Air_Force_Base#Department_of_Defense
I’ve had the thought that if I were to design a psyop campaign, a pretty solid option for dominating the discussion would be to come out swinging and accuse everyone else of being an agent. That way, people have to either constantly defend against accusations, or they conclude, rightly, the accusations are baseless and decide to disregard the very idea that there is a psyop going on.
I could be wrong but to me it feels odd to think lemmy is big enough to be worth organizing psyops for.
Not to say it couldn’t be an issue in the future, but it feels much more likely that people expressing pro Russia sentiment are just people who bought into that particular brand of propaganda.
Which like, to some extent all of our individual world views are shaped by the environment of propaganda we’re exposed to. We’re all products of our social conditioning, and ultimately that’s exactly what propaganda is. Media designed to socially condition people to a certain set of beliefs. All we as individuals can do is be aware of it and be willing to look at our own beliefs critically.
But at the end of the day I think the folks praising Russia on lemmy are just people. People I personally think are misguided, but I don’t think theyre generally acting in bad faith any more than the general population here.
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Honestly if anyone is doing that I really feel like it would be the US, not Russia.
Russia’s goal is to sew discord and unballance the populace that drives politics, and for that to work you need a MASSIVE scale that we just don’t really have. They don’t really have much to gain from the IP addresses of a handful of leftists
But Lemmy is exactly the kind of hotspot for people DEEPLY angry about the government of the US to organize that if we’re big enough to be on their radar, the US government would have a vested interest in keeping an eye on potential dissidents. Unlike Russia IP addresses and personally identifiable information would be useful to them, in identifying threat actors, tracking their activity and volatility online, and building cases that would allow them to prosecute should said dissidents escalate
That’s how it looks from where I’m standing anyway 🤷♂️
Lemmy being splintered and opposed to all forms of authority makes it perfect for radicalizing individuals to commit great harm and violence in their community.
All movement starts at the grassroots.
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.
It’s rare and I’m looking for it
Unfortunately not that rare of a POV to find. They just generally don’t do the young account thing. Some are true believers. Others likely state actors. Don’t see as many bots but the greater levels of transparency and lower active population probably makes it less worthwhile of an investment.
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Nah fuck tankies, zero tolerance for the intolerant.
