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.

I’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.