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.
Yes, requiring people to be civil when discussing topics that negatively impact them directly stifles the ability to convey how much they are suffering. Being forced to be polite to oppressors is absolutely awful.
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.
I don’t think the Lemmy software can do anything about it, as it places too much emphasis on manual labor on behalf of the moderators to keep up.
PieFed has some really neat ideas though, on democratization of moderation where users can set software preferences, thereby taking a substantial burden off the shoulders of the mods.
e.g. instead of relying on mods to remove posts, keyword filtering allows individual users to reduce exposure to topics such as “Musk” or “Trump” or “USA”. Or user icons are really cool - e.g. new user account with age <2 weeks, or highly contentious user with >10x more downvotes than upvotes, or potential unregistered bot account that posts >10x more often than they reply in comments. None of those cause “removal” of content except in the recipient’s personal feed.
I do like the idea of leaving the curation of content in the hands of the user.
I think the mentality should be more common, and the tools should make it easy, to filter out content the same way it’s easy and common to follow a community/topic that adds to your feed.
Almost all social platforms have a method at the forefront to “see more content like this” but a lot don’t have “see less of this”, and if they do, it’s a buried setting.
It’d be really interesting for mods and admins to get a list of users’ exclude list, either of post keywords or user blocks, to see trends and stats on the content that people don’t want to see.
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.
If it does, the mods and admin under whose aegis I abide are doing an above-average job removing it quickly.
Or maybe it’s just that I avoid political discussion communities these days.
In the end, I find the lemmy / piefed / *bin network much more civil, thoughtful, and compassionate than reddit was.
I suspect it’s going to depend on the communities you, and/or your instance subscribe to.
I’m on my own instance, so if there’s any instance level removal happening, it’s me doing it. And I find in general people here to be much more polite, much more likely to receive (well made) criticism and useful new information instead of a personal attack than on the other place.
There are likely communities that by their design are going to be antagonistic. But I am unsure even after reading that thread specifically what went wrong. So, I don’t think I’m able to fully comment on what happened and why in this case.
No, it doesn’t. It’s up to server mods to moderate the server.
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.
“A civility problem” is stupid gatekeeping bullshit. It’s not specific in any way.
You know what is an actual problem? Modern Nazis. Corporate bot accounts.
What if you’re uncivil to a Modern Nazi? Is that not OK? What if you’re uncivil to a Corporate Account spamming advertisements? Well, OP would have you castrated, then banned for it. Really? Why?
They’re power hungry, and want to control everything. The level of civility is such that they think if they took over, everything would be back to normal. It’s pretty standard narcissistic behavior. Same as “If people just listened to jebus, like I listen to jebus, the world would be a better place”. No, it won’t. It will be worse off.
All atheists are uncivil to religious people simply by existing. That’s what religious people lie about, anyway. Who’s going to protect the atheists from false accusations? Nobody.
OP’s “I would make everything better with my vague bullshit” - is just vague asshole bullshit. Is that uncivil? I don’t give a fuck. Seems like OP could use some more uncivility in response to their controlling nonsense.
This is the perfect joke answer to this question.
Agree.
Complaining about civility is the first step toward letting morons rule.
If one is making foolish or false statements, one should expect to be humiliated. Come back when you are better educated.
If one is being an asshole for no good reason or making false accusations against another due to losing an argument, they should understand that they are now a legitimate target for everyone to dump on with impunity.
Being confidently wrong, or an asshole without cause deserves equal or greater consequences to the harm caused. Public shaming via humiliation - aka incivility - is more effective than actual punishment or moderation.
I don’t think that anyone should be “humiliated”. If someone expresses an idea, it’s likely that they are making use of that idea in their life (or that a reader might start using that idea in their life), so if you think their idea is harmful, it’s surely better to provide an alternative idea rather than only question their dignity. Expressing that someone should “come back when they are better educated” makes me think that you want people to stop making comments as frequently and to read comments more often than they did before. I think that reading more comments can be helpful, but suggesting that someone should avoid commenting deprives us of an opportunity to understand that person better, and if we want to cooperate with someone, it would be better to have a better understanding of them (and if we don’t cooperate with someone, we will probably have to compete with them: “When goods don’t cross borders, soldiers will”). The only reason I know of to stop engaging with someone is if they’re acting in bad faith: if someone is trying to distract you by trying to get you to make uninteresting comments instead of allowing your attention to be focused on something more productive, it’d be a help to other people to make that clear. In essence, this is “trolling”. Something like Bluesky lists might be useful in that situation. I don’t see how targeting someone to “dump on” is helpful: that seems like a distraction from more productive activities, which is probably exactly what a “troll” wants. I suspect that the best “consequence” in response to harm is to start ignoring someone and to make it easier for other people to ignore that person.
Maybe I’m toxic, but the Fediverse has been incredibly kind. I find a lot of people on here are a lot more sincere than on other platforms, which is refreshing.
I’ll see a lot of cringy memes or someone sharing a bit too much, which is something that I’d downvote or hide on other platforms. On here, I tend to approach things a bit kinder, maybe because the community is smaller or I think the person posting is being genuine.
there is definitely a civility problem. the solution is temporary bans that get longer if the incivility is refrequented.
I don’t believe in permabans for anything except stuff that would get the admins arrested, and even some of that maybe not.
Do you think the fediverse has a civility problem?
Short answer: yes.
Long answer: social media (and humans) have a civility problem. And I wonder how much of it is astroturfed. When Trump was first running for the 2016 election, social media was flooded with racism. I don’t thinknit was grassroots. I think it was Steve Bannon’s troll army or some other coordinated institute. I also wonder if the violent leftist rhetoric is feds, or reddit’s goons undermining the competition. They’ll post “murder all pigs” or “shoot fascists” and get like a thousand upvotes, and their arguments are belligerent and idiotic, and they pile on you for disagreeing. Feels coordinates. Feels like 2016 honestly.
is there anything we can do about it?
Downvote, report, block. Don’t engage (trying to learn that myself). But I bet they’re still driving people away.
if you don’t think fascists should be shot, what do you think should be done with them? or cops?
My biggest gripe with the rise in violent talk is that it comes off like those commenters trying to get other people riled up into do that violence for them.
If you feel the justice system has failed and there is no other recourse, than that is one thing. But I keep seeing all these comments saying “why aren’t you out there doing anything about it?” and my first thought is always “well I haven’t seen your face on the news…” As far as I’ve seen it’s still all right wing nutters doing all the violence. If you aren’t out there doing something dangerous, why are you here telling others to go do that thing while you sit at home?
You’d call someone a hypocrite if they were on here every day telling other commenters they should feed the homeless, but you found out they don’t volunteer or donate or whatever. But I got to scroll past a bunch of keyboard warriors on every political or news thread throwing tantrums about why “nobody is doing what must be done.” Justified or not, if people start going after others, it’s going to go badly for both sides. If you won’t put your money where your mouth is, why are we all forced to read it?
If you’re serious, spouting off about it on a public forum is pretty stupid. If you’re not serious, you’re making the rest of us look stupid to anyone checking out this platform. I feel that’s a pretty fair assessment without judging your opinions or anyone else’s. We’re all wrestling internally with where our limits of tolerance are these days, but we can talk with each other productively about it, or we can rant and rave like a bunch of violent cavemen, but I know which one of those environments I’d rather be in.
and who gets to decide who is a fascist, you?
this doesn’t answer the question.
It does, because it’s implicit in “shoot all Fascists” that agreeing with the policy might one day get you shot for thoughtcrime.
It’s more civil than reddit and every other forum I know.
Probably it depends which corners you look at.
A tiny niche subreddit I would presume would be more civil than a politics community here.
It’s also a lot easier to dox people IRL here. e.g. self-host something, get someone to click, and there you go.
Do you think the fediverse has a civility problem
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.
and is there anything we can do about it?
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.
