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?
I’m so tired of this civility meta.
Lemmy is half as uncivilized as any other social media space I’ve ever been in, including reddit or Twitter. I think people are just confused by a lack of centralized authority to settle disputes on what is or isn’t ‘civil’ behavior - but it certainly isn’t the case that it’s any less civil than just about any alternative.
Maybe this places extra stress on instance admins for constantly addressing complaints of users on and off their server, but that has less to do with the kind of user civility people are talking about and more with a culture of mob justice evidenced by communities like MoG and PTB.
People seem uncomfortable with multipolar systems, and maybe it’s because of my political bent but I think distributed systems are way better.