GrammarPoliceLemmy fell off
If you want advice: Maybe unsubscribe from like the political memes communities and specifically join better replacements. Some people are trying to make an effort.
If you want validation… I see shitty things here as well.
Thanks for the thoughts. I’m well aware that there are a lot of good people making a genuine effort to build something and genuine props to them for that; really. I just feel like things have slowed down a lot since when i first joined, and I’ve grown tired of the “sameness”.
Any ideas on what to do? I mean you’ve been here for a long time. I’ve also been here for quite a while. I’ve also made disgruntled posts about the general atmosphere, waited for things (and people) to change. Or a different kind of people join and bring some breeze of fresh air. Some of that is happening, yet on a small scale and usually in niche corners of this place. But I think overall we’re looking at something like stagnation. We have all this potential in the Fediverse… I see sparks here and there, but they never really ignite anything. So overall we more or less stay where we are (or who we are). So, what do we do? Because I think the usual ideas on how to change the atmosphere ain’t working, or we’d see some progress.
GrailI’ve been working to change the atmosphere on the Fediverse and get weirder with all of this reality stuff.
So. Any prospect of the future? How do you feel with what you’re trying? I mean you launched an entire instance… Do you have insight on what works and which strategies don’t work?
Not gonna lie, a bit disheartened since dbzer0 defederated us. They didn’t want the atmosphere to change. But I still believe in the Fediverse and in Piefed. I’ve met some pretty cool people in the Piefed space, like Rimu, and I believe in that guy. He’s got the vision, the skill, and the dedication to build some great communities. I want to support him by being part of the Piefed community. And anecdotally, I see a lot more kind and accepting piefed.social users than on most Lemmy instances.
I hadn’t noticed this until I was reflecting just now, but I banned a lot of people on remote instances for using slurs when MULTIVERSE was new, and lately, I haven’t seen many slurs. I think it done worked, I made a safer space for the people who use this instance. I was chatting with Rayne Blight yesterday, doing an interview about antirealist history, and they put an idea in My head I want to pursue: a soulist breadtube channel. So I’ve been speaking with an amateur film producer I know about doing some collaboration. And maybe Piefed needs some youtube ambassadors too. But I know if this youtube thing gets going, we’re gonna point people to MULTIVERSE, and there’s going to be an influx of weirdos posting into Lemmy’s communities from over here.
But yeah, it’s a lot easier persuading people of antirealism face to face than on a social media like Piefed or Lemmy. People come to quicker snap judgements on here, so you need to react faster by giving up quickly on people you can’t reach. And you need to be patient and just keep putting stuff out there, because people are gonna come to appreciate it slowly with exposure. So it’s speed and patience. Some strong neutral jing stuff, which I kinda suck at and have been practicing.
But in terms of the whole of the fediverse, it’s bad apples. And you know what they say, a bad apple can turn a whole barrel rotten. So our leaders, and I guess that includes Me now, or admins, need to be willing to say no to these bad apples like Hexbear, .ml, lemmygrad. And I dunno, maybe dbzer0, maybe not. Can’t say I’m proud of them for the recent pro-death-penalty drama. But that ship has sailed, I didn’t need to make that choice in the end.
And one thing everyone can do, is just post more fun stuff. Just post more about video games and cool sticks and the stuff that makes you smile. Anyone can make this big community a little bit better by doing that.
Will do. Got a bunch of stuff I think is cool that I can post.
By the way, do you have any advice for someone interested in starting their own instance?
Sure do.
Thanks!
I’m also considering offering a premium contributor tier to reward people who help keep the lights on and Hetzner bills paid, with extra features like scheduled posts (does PieFed have that?)
Huh. TIL. I guess I should look into this. Thanks for the info!
Thanks for sharing your perspective and writing all of this down.
To be honest, don’t worry too much about the dbzer0 users. They’ve defederated from you, I’ve defederated from them. There’s all this other thing going on with them. I share your perspective, I also get to read less slurs and toxicity since I started pulling some ripcords… I don’t like it either. But maybe that’s how it is.
Best of luck anyway. I think the YouTube thing is a good idea. I mean you can probably make quite some impact, considering the current scale you’re operating at. But I also think the entire Threadiverse isn’t huge compared to YouTube people. Larger “influencers” sometimes fill Dicord communities larger than all of us combined. And smaller “influencers” sometimes have a very loyal and committed fanbase/community. All of that is useful and/or positive traits. I see how the hard part is finding someone with overlap and who wants to cooperate. And you’re going to have to welcome them and provide them with whatever their wants and need are… All of this is quite some effort. But certainly worth it in my eyes.
I think the biggest problem the fediverse has is a lack of diversity. This is the same problem platforms like Bluesky have. It’s chock full of Americans, so most of the content leans American. I’m not American and don’t really have too much of a problem with American content (it’s entertaining), so while I’ve gotten slightly used to Americentrism on the internet, at least on Reddit there were niches and local communities i could use to detox when it got too much. This is lacking here.
I’m not really sure what the solution is. Back when i first joined, the niche communities were burgeoning and quite active. Now it seems like they’ve mostly stagnated.
Hmmh. Thanks for your perspective.
By the way, the Germans kinda established their own niche with (I think) with a noticeably different atmosphere and behaviour towards each other. Not necessarily better, we’re also doing mostly politics and the meme/shitlords are very active… But yeah, maybe we need some niches which aren’t just because of some language barrier.
Oh nice i see. Maybe i have to start learning German just to see whether what’s going on on your side is more to my flavour😅
I’ve stopped following most of the politics communities, but more often than I would like, there’s some thing going up about how this niche tech babble is the end of all things, and it’s a bunch of terminology that I know nothing about.
bizarrolandWaves go down before they come up.
I’ve been here almost 2 years…
That’s nothing. Go look up adoption curves for various technologies
Right, and reddit has been around for how long? I know I was introduced to it by a friend in ~2012. Give lemmy time. Maybe it’ll be this weird, small niche for a long time, maybe it’ll grow.
Schwim Dandyfull of politics and tankieism has become more commonplace.
Not if you use filters and blocklists. This platform has been full of politics and porn since the first day. On day 2, I created a short filter list and blocked a few instances and communities and now I see absolutely 0 posts daily regarding it.
As for stagnant, that’s what you get when you move to a platform that doesn’t use an algorithm and ragebait to keep you engaged. For all the people that say they hate the manipulation used against them by the big platforms, they have been conditioned to want it and many move back or keep visiting while here. You can either choose to catch up on your feed here and then go touch grass or you can doomscroll reddit with the assurance that you’ll never run out of psychologically tailored content to peruse.
As for stagnant, that’s what you get when you move to a platform that doesn’t use an algorithm and ragebait to keep you engaged.
I do wish they could make the ‘hot’ and ‘active’ calculations a little bit better. Hot quickly becomes ‘scaled’ after just a few pages, it seems, where older posts are very quickly pushed down.
I agree completely. I use my adblocker to block the sidebar, since it’s of no value to me. I appreciate the extra post space more.
Mugita SokioThat I can indeed confirm. However, filters and blocklists do work if you don’t need that sort of thing.
I think the biggest issue is that most people don’t know what to block, but they know how to block.
Maybe i do need to try that. I’ve only ever blocked specific users/belligerent communities. Any ideas on what filter out?
It depends on what the truth is to you, and you want to avoid what’s considered lies.
In my case, I don’t really tend to do well with those who aren’t intellectual (to the level of philosopher Vox Day, for example).
this reminds me of im leaving reddit posts. when I left I did not post about it. I just left. now im here and i have blocked enough communities and users that its a fine experience for me. granted my instance does some blocking to so we will see if I ever get off my tuckus and move over to zip.
when I left I did not post about it. I just left.
You didn’t post about leaving reddit because you didn’t feel any need to.
I didn’t post about leaving reddit because I got shadowbanned.
We are not the same.
The average American has the weirdest, silliest of takes. Go back to Reddit where Western imperialism is praised and political discourse is within your acceptable limits. 🙄
The average American has the weirdest, silliest of takes
Are you calling me American?
Humans are the most political species. Politics is group decision making, and humans have the best group decision making processes. They even have organised structures for passing on knowledge and wisdom, which have ensured that nearly every generation of humans are smarter than the previous.
You know who has just as much raw intelligence as humans, but no politics? Octopuses. Fucking apolitical savages. They’re capable of learning so much, I saw a youtube video where an octopus learned to play the piano. And by now he’s probably dead, and his knowledge lost. Octopuses aren’t political enough to teach each other. That’s why they’ll never get as much done as humans.
Billionaires are trying to convince you that you don’t like politics, so you’ll be as easy to control as the apolitical animals are. Do you want to be used for labour value by a smarter animal, like oxen are? If you aspire to apoliticism, you will be!
I think the problem is that people get politics fatigue after a while on the Internet. Our brains weren’t prepared to handle any and every political event all of the time. Even the experts whose job is to keep up with politics can’t do it, so they focus on particular regions. And those who try to have an opinion on everything end up not having a well-formed opinion on anything.
I think rich people brainwash us into thinking politics=controversy, and then inundate ourselves with controversy, as you say. But we spend the entire rest of our lives engaging in uncontroversial politics, and we love it. Human beings go insane and die if they aren’t given enough politics.
Good point. I guess the solution is to promote politics that isn’t drama/controversy, then. Things most people can agree on, such as getting lobbying out of government and getting rid of mass surveillance and Silicon Valley tech monopolies.
We can think even more pleasant. This conversation here is politics. Deciding what to have for dinner, that’s a group decision, which makes it politics. Fandom discussions are politics. Agreeing that a cat gif is cute, that’s politics. And it’s nice and fun and sweet.
That’s a pretty broad definition of “politics”, at least compared to the common one or the dictionary one - and its one that waters the term down to the point of uselessness.
Wikipedia: Politics[a] is the activity of settling affairs in an organized society.
Merriam-Webster: the art or science of government
Collins: Politics are the actions or activities concerned with achieving and using power in a country or society
We live in a society where power is concentrated in the hands of the few. In other words, an authoritarian society. This society wants us to believe that the power to govern society can only be wielded by an economic and/or social elite. If we’re going to move on to a libertarian society, where everyone has the power to change their circumstances and help govern their community, then we need to accept that politics is something we do every day when we work together to make decisions.
I believe that the unfairness of our society is maintained by a mind prison. This narrow definition of politics trains us to think of ourselves as powerless. That’s one brick making up the walls of our mind prison. Let’s smash it.
Still, “agreeing that a cat gif is cute” is as far from politics as it gets.
By all means, power to the people. But surely that doesn’t mean EVERYTHING is politics?
We agreed to make a decision: to collectively call this kitty cute. In so doing, we reaffirmed our social values: The young are to be protected. Cats are to be kept as pets. We contributed towards the maintenance of certain conditions of our present society. If tomorrow everyone instead agreed that kittens are annoying pests, cat ownership would fall. People may perhaps devote themselves more strongly to solving the feral cat problems we have here in Australia. Instead of sterilising stray cats, programs would simply kill them. We would become a harder and less empathetic people. We would make different big decisions.
Everything you do with others matters. No action is without consequence. You are powerful.
That’s an interesting and in-depth perspective.
Thank you! I got to it through evolutionary psychology. Because it seems like just about every culture thinks small fluffy animals are cute to some degree. Mainstream science tells us it’s a side effect of needing to think babies are cute, and I buy that explanation. But what that means is, thinking small animals are cute is so imperative to the survival of the species, it got genetically hardcoded. Anything that ALL humans do seems to be in the genes, seems to bear some relationship to survival. And I know kittens aren’t human babies and the reasons aren’t the same, but the impact is still visible: our political instincts for young-preservation have a big impact on our world. Our genes gave us these politics because they’re important.
Makes sense to me.
“If not baby then why cute” - our brains
That’s the thing. I don’t mind politics on my feed. It’s only when it’s nothing but politics that I start blocking and adding new content filters. It’s a forced binary choice. I’d consume a moderate amount of that kind of content if it was an option, but it’s not. It’s all of it or none of it.
Maybe make a curated non-political feed, and access political communities on your own terms? At least that’s what I kinda did on Bluesky (removed the “Discover” feed so I only look at the feeds I am already following)
I’ve been building such feed for over 2 years already. I have over 250 keyword based content filters and I don’t follow any political communities and I’ve blocked most of the news communities too. It helps but the issue still remains quite bad.
Also, blocking only removes content but doesn’t replace it with better one - it just slows down the already slow feed even further.
The thing is, though, that the people on Lemmy aren’t even united by common political views - just common enemies.
I care about politics, but not enough that it saturated my feed. I think these two can coexist👍
Then get back to Reddit or X and stay in your right-wing bubble.
It used to be interesting before all of you snowflakes crying about tankies.
It used to be interesting before all of you snowflakes crying about tankies.
Case in point ☝️
What? You don’t want to spend the whole day talking about things that you don’t like and make you angry?
Are you sane?
Different platforms, same problems
Diva (she/her)Idk though, maybe it’s just me
i’m having a great time
Good for you
why thank you, it’s pretty awesome. i have almost completely cut out other social media at this point.
NotyouThe what?
There are better examples but I’m struggling with the search.
Jeez, I think i joined right when this was dying, or something similar