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 haven’t had any notably negative experiences while using the Fediverse. Even in cases when someone makes an “aggressive” reply to a comment of mine, if I ask a follow-up question, most people respond genuinely, so I often end up having a productive and enjoyable conversation. The situation is probably different when someone is really mad at you: if someone makes dozens of accounts to spam messages and downvotes, that would be really annoying and would make it more difficult to use the Fediverse productively, and I’ve seen reports of that happening to several people (and that might be what happened to the maintainer of Tesseract). Handling that situation would probably be harder to deal with than while using a centralized service since someone could use various servers to target one person, so there might not be one person who can handle all the spam. Reddit probably has a system to automatically block ingenuine downvotes and spam messages (especially if a particular person is receiving a lot of them), but I’m not sure that the Fediverse has an automatic system to achieve the same results, so it might be down to an administrator or a group of administrators to manually detect disruptive accounts/users. In consideration of how a typical person would view typical Fediverse comments, they would probably be put off by how they are probably more political and violent in nature when compared to those from other services. I’ve seen several comments that quite explicitly expressed “rich people should be killed”, and I’ve seen that at least one was removed by a moderator/administrator. Such comments surely do more harm than good: most people surely prefer to talk to people who aren’t calling for violence and are generally civil. To help with this, it’s probably good to report comments that are outright violent or that would be of interest to an administrator and to downvote “aggressive” comments so that people are more likely to be able to peruse comments without having a bad experience. In general, it’s surely a good thing to provide comments that engage with a post/comment in good faith so that people have something/someone that they can enjoy interacting with, but I don’t often have a thought that is coherent enough to be worth sharing, so I don’t expect this to happen very often.