I was thinking about this again after reading https://jlai.lu/post/22505617 and how Tesseract shut down because of people’s inability to behave. And this isn’t the first occasion where I’ve seen people really abruptly leaving Lemmy or the fediverse because of the general atmosphere. Personally I’ve avoided most political communities aside from a few, and I’ve mostly engaged in more niche places, and I haven’t encountered too many issues with people. But I’ve definitely seen very snarky, aggressive comments from some people, and no doubt there are more of those the more political the community is. I guess it’s logical that the fediverse would attract those most opinionated, or those that have been banned on other platforms for inciting (what someone else might see as) hate, violence or other various reasons.
Do you think the fediverse has a civility problem and is there anything we can do about it?
This has little to do with the Fediverse itself and mostly with the people involved. It would be the same on any other platform, so simply switching the software stack or whatever would do exactly zilch.
A fraction of people are going to be assholes. Sad bit inevitable.
You can ban the dickheads, but that’ll only get you so far.
100% agree. It’s a people thing rather than a site specific thing. Politics, for example in the social media arena attracts a certain combative behaviour from some who clearly feel passionately but who also feel that shouting down others is now the accepted norm rather than reasoned discussion though that’s mostly where we are everywhere now.
Then you make a “no politics” rule, after which the very respectable debaters show up to tell everyone that everything ultimately is political, and therefore their ragebaiting, trolling, cancel culture, and general toxicity is totally acceptable! Unless you want an entry in the powerhungrybastards community, ofc.
Anyway, I’ve generally had a positive experience on the fediverse (compared to Reddit, etc.). That said, I’ve blocked and avoid most, if not all, right wing extremists, though I’m having a harder time with the left extremists since we seem to have a lot of interests in common. ,’
And that’s just the people who even read the rules in the first place - many people, sadly, do not (or perhaps do and simply do not care? well, there is no functional difference).
So one thing that is an inherent issue with the distributed structure is inconsistent rules. There are instance rules and community rules and similar communities on different instances don’t have the same server or community rules, and a feed like All or even Subscribed is listing a bunch of things with different rules for interaction and adding a requirement to know all the rules for each individual post is unrealistic. Sure, most comments are fine if someone isn’t a complete jackass, but that mostly means the rules are not relevant the majority of the time.
Did you read and understand both the instance and community rules before commenting here? I did not, and have no regrets.