With the recent happenings in the United States, the dangers of the privately owned Internet is more apparent than ever, and frankly, it’s scary. And so I’d like to make a simple request to anyone who is reading this; Please use the Fediverse, just a little more.
I personally hate it when I’m stuck having to visit say, YouTube or Reddit to get information, or to entertain myself in quiet moments, and if you’re reading this, the likely chance is you’re the same.
All I want to ask of you is to just comment a few more times, press send on that post that you felt wasn’t of enough substance to be worth anyone’s time. We have such a small community compared to everywhere else, but what we do have in common is that, in the grand scheme of things, we are the early adopters. And if we take that to heart and make this space a little bigger, maybe it will be just big enough we won’t have to visit walled gardens so often.
Thank you :)
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I think 90% of my posts are deleted before sending because I just know that someone somewhere will find a way to be mad about it
But OK - here is a post that I would usually have deleted :)
As Someone Somewhere, I urge you to post more.
I cannot believe this account is two years old and not made just for this comment haha.
Oh, I’ve had the name for a lot longer than that.
I bow down to your sense of comedic timing
OMG really? How COULD you…
Neglect to offer your valuable opinion. Hey, you’re a human and have valuable things to say. Haters gon hate. Fuck 'em.
I’ve also been posting less after managing to upset someone. We can have a club. The shy posters club.
You’re not shy, you’re just a normally adjusted human.
It’s normal to want to avoid being abused and insulted for, say, having an opinion which is marginally different to the in-group consensus. But unfortunately that’s what happens when we post on text-based social media. Apparently the medium does something to people’s minds, turning them into nasty vindictive unpleasant versions of themselves.
I’m a pretty self-confident person in real life and even I think twice about posting anything here that contradicts the prevailing groupthink. The inevitable insults and abuse and mockery are sometimes just not worth it.
Personally, I have hope that if a larger variety of people are posting and commenting (typical lurkers and such) then hopefully the echo chamber aggression will weaken a little, and hopefully foster a positive and friendly community. I’m trying to lead by example :)
Refreshing optimism!
if a larger variety of people are posting and commenting (typical lurkers and such) then hopefully the echo chamber aggression will weaken a little
Unfortunately I’m not sure the hope is warranted. Putting a lot of people with different views in front of each other, over text, does not, in general, by default, seem to go that well. At least not going by the experience of the first 30 years of the social internet. You tend to get the worst aspect of human group dynamics and speech-policing without the self-moderation that comes with in-person contact - i.e. the effect of audible voices, and visible faces and body language.
I’m not a complete pessimist or I wouldn’t be here. But I think these issues can only be solved by activist moderation that enforces rules with a light touch while remaining tolerant and always assuming good faith. And, of course, that kind of moderation is time-consuming and very, very hard. It’s a skill that hardly any communities have access to. But it is at least a reasonable goal.
I see where you’re coming from, historically the internet and large communities tend to foster that kind of aggression. I, for one, will be striving to build a positive environment though, and just maybe, we’ll see those fruits lead into a brighter future :). I myself am applying for some moderator positions to help take up that effort!
That’s great news. Good luck.
It’s normal to want to avoid being abused and insulted for, say, having an opinion which is marginally different to the in-group consensus.
Sadly, I see that irl as well - perhaps text social media enhances the effect, maybe by virtue of being anonymous, but it’s definitely not an effect solely restricted to here.😢
Source: me who it just happened to an hour ago.😑
Yep. Not letting abuse get to you is really hard. I’m constantly surprised by this, being a fairly resilient person and not very sociable (to put things politely). I can only imagine what it must be like for more gregarious people. Hardly surprising that people are scared to speak up. So good for you for saying what you wanted to say, there was value in that.
There’s a lot more aggressive unpleasant people. Or bots. That’s the scary things these days, we don’t know what’s real anymore. People we talk to online or see. If it’s fake trumped up hysteria.
Or even takes pictures of videos.
And I don’t see it getting any better.
If we can ensure that all bots are always identifiable as such, i.e. that none of them are successfully passing themselves off as people, then this problem is mitigated quite a lot. In theory that’s feasible. We’re hardly even trying right now.
How’d you tell if you’re chatting to a bot?
Ai a pretty convincing now
Regulation, of course. Unlabeled bot on your platform? $100,000 fine. We’re not completely helpless.
It’s this the law or something you’d hope would happen?
I’m back after a year away. My two favourite niche interests (wrestling & fantasy books) still don’t have hugely active communities but I’ll start pitching in again with some lukewarm takes.
I’m ADHDing as hard as I can already bro
infodump harder
I am trying to. I just found about lemmy today.
Can someone recommend me some other stuff?
I am SO thankful that there are so many people out there working on projects such as this! I gained lots of momentum in the past weeks protecting my privacy and taking digital matters back in my own hands, i wouldn’t have come so far if it wheren’t for all the other people who have been doing this for years! Thanks everyone :)
I’m a fediverse supporter (obviously, that’s why I’m here), however what you’re looking for requires a critical mass of users that the fediverse (at least the Lemmy side of it) will never achieve as long as two very critical problems persist:
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sign up is confusing. People are used to clicking “create an account,” inputting a user name, password, and maybe an email, and then BAM they’re a user. I realize the whole instance thing is the entire point, but no one wants nor expects to have to do significant research and make a decision about how they want to interact with a social media site before they’ve even started using it.
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the site (or at least lemmy.world) is sooo slooow. Basic functions like loading images take me back to the dial-up era of “click the image then do something else while it loads,” which is downright ridiculous in the 2020s. Again I’ve stuck with it because I want to support the fediverse, but 99% of users won’t.
And no, these aren’t “features not bugs” unless you want to keep the site small and homogenous.
Blaze has put in a ton of work simplifying the former, and while the latter isn’t strictly only related to Lemmy.world, many other servers are much faster.
e.g. click on https://discuss.online/, see how it shows All (rather than Local) by default (that’s an issue with some), and Active. Click posts, see how fast images load, read the pinned posts and imagine how quickly the admin responds.
THEN if someone likes it, join. Many Redditors are in the USA, where discuss.online is also, so it’s a great match.
There are other instances, but showcasing that one is a great way to help guide people to what Lemmy is all about.
possibly the biggest eye opener has been seeing how much the average person knows about computers, it’s seriously hard to comprehend that divide (obligatory xkcd; https://xkcd.com/2501/), I think the best we can do is build a community, and give the loved ones in our lives an onboarding experience where we can. learning anything new is intimidating, but through exposure, it can be done, we’ve just gotta make it worth it.
I honestly don’t understand point 1. no matter how much people say it.
Maybe I’m naive because it wasn’t confusing to me personally, but it is only one extra step to create an account. When people explain the Fediverse to new people they compare it to e-mail anyway, which basically has the exact same sign-up structure. The only difference to me is the way it is advertised. Nobody in general says “you need to join e-mail”, it’s usually “join GMail” or “join Yahoo”. I don’t know how it would be solved without detracting from the “choose the instance that is right for you” experience though, since the instances with the most support and funding will obviously hold the most influence (as we currently see with lemmy.world and lemmy.ml, not to mention pixelfed.social).
IDK maybe I’m wrong, lmk, but I don’t think choosing an instance is all the friction it’s said to be.
The big instances are definitely slower though.
Me too. I don’t get how people can’t get past the choosing a server and I’m not a techie. Like have you ever played a video game and had to join a server? It’s not that complicated! Lol. People are such lame giver uppers.
I think you’re drastically underestimating how even small steps like that can tune a ton of people out. If they’re only sort of on the fence about it it might be enough to make it not worth it. Or maybe they’ll think they’ll check later but never get around to it.
Nobody in general says “you need to join e-mail”, it’s usually “join GMail” or “join Yahoo”. I don’t know how it would be solved without detracting from the “choose the instance that is right for you” experience though
No I think you’re right, give them an instance. They won’t have enough knowledge to choose an instance anyways. If they don’t like the one you gave them then they can move later.
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Just joined and the community already seems pretty vibrant. It honestly doesn’t feel that different from Reddit in that regard which is perfect. Reddit and the rest of them can fuck off
Welcome! A few pointers for you
I was recently banned from reddit.
On all my accounts.
Across four email addresses.
Simultaneously.
Many of which haven’t been used in months. Years in some cases.
So - banned on one account linked to one address. Accounts linked to four other email addresses were banned. None of those accounts have been logged into from any device the account I got banned from was being used on.
The emails are linked to my phone number though.
So. Two steps ahead of you. But. They are either using some kind of NLP to identify the way I write. Or google is sharing that the accounts are linked to my phone number.
Anyway. Reddit can fuck right off. And I’ll be buying a burner phone with cash to make some accounts soon.
How do you know your accounts weren’t part of a ban wave? It doesn’t necessarily mean they linked them through your phone.
Because some of them, and their associated email accountsz hadn’t been used in years.
And there is nothing linking any of the emails / accounts except my.phone number.
Five email accounts, 20 odd reddit accounts. I’ve only used one account / email for the past year. And that’s from a PC / phone that were new around that time
We need to get more people to adopt the Fediverse. The issue is lack of engagement.
It will get better with the massive bans
A lot of times I’ll write out a comment and end up deleting it. Most times it’s because I feel like it’s something that’s already been said or not worth reading but I’ll try to be less of a lurker.
I’m in the exact same boat. But I kind of realized, if I want to see a bigger fediverse, I’ll have to help build it up. As the classic saying goes, you can lead a horse to water; but first there’s gotta be water. So thank you for taking up the cause of building this lake :)
actually i don’t think that’s the saying
Well it is now that you opened the spigot
What is peoples opinions on reposting. Sometimes i see a cool video from a creator i like and i want to repost it to loops but i feel like im stealing and reuploading their work. I think reposting to lemmy is fine since its a link aggregation site first.
!loops@midwest.social could definitely benefit from some nice reposts!
rule
