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 is a feature not a bug. We saw what happened when the Internet was sanitized and welcoming, instead of being a transparent black mirror showing the true nature of humanity - society adopted it en masse without thinking about it or realizing its danger because that filth has a nice façade over it, and society is crumbling as a result. The Internet should not be a clean, universally friendly place because that is not reality and just hiding that behind civility doesn’t do much. In 2008, online Nazis were posting shittily drawn swastikas and talking about how much they love Hitler on fringe websites. In 2025 they’re posting videos on Facebook and Twitter in suits with massive audiences with the same hateful rhetoric hiding just beneath the surface hidden by a false veneer of respectability. This is what sanitizing the Internet has wrought.