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?
It’s weird to talk about the fediverse as a whole having a civility problem. The fediverse is a large and diverse place.
It’s like asking “do bars have a civility problem?”. And like yea, some bars do. Other bars don’t. Depends on the clientele right?
For example, on Feddit.dk we have quite a high standard of behavior and moderation is based on that. Feddit.dk is not a large instance, which probably makes it easier to manage. I would not say that Feddit.dk has a civility problem. Maybe other instances do. But then that’s a problem for those instances to solve.
So I wouldn’t say the fediverse itself has a civility problem. To me, it seems perfectly possible to moderate an instance well and preserve civil behavior. If there is a civility problem, it lies with the specific instance that has that problem and their failure to moderate that behavior.