There have been a couple of posts somewhat recently asking what can be done to attract new users to the Fediverse. My answer was basically “make it something new people would want to see and stick around for”. The crux of that was basically less news, less politics, less rage and more, well, anything else.
So, I would like to propose a challenge to all: Let’s try that. At least for a week.
Sound good? Here’s how you can participate:
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If you’re one who posts a lot of news/politics…stop or at least slow down. Post literally anything else. Or try to post less rage-inducing news and try to dig up the good news that’s happening. Sorry !upliftingnews@lemmy.world but it’s the regular news communities that are flooding the zone with every single bad thing that happens anywhere in the world, so we may be stealing some of your content with this one.
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Think before posting something. Are you only posting it because you’re mad about it and you think other people should be mad about it too? If so, maybe post something else. Is there already similar coverage of that? Chances are, we don’t need more of it.
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If you’re a lurker, post something. Add your voice.
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Refrain from upvoting / booting all the negativity. Yes, it may feel good to upvote for visibility because “people need to know this” but the end result is the feed turning into a list of things to rage about. If you see good/non-rage news, upvote that for visibility. I’ve seen many posts like that languish with a few tens of upvotes at most while the rage-inducing news gets hundreds of upvotes.
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Post what makes you happy rather than what you’re angry about.
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Avoid dogpiling on people if they express a different opinion. I’m not saying feed the trolls or pat them on the head, just merely “disengage” or avoid the impulse to virtue dump on them and such.
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If you have a hobby, share it! There’s plenty of hobby communities that would greatly benefit from additional contributors. If you’re boring like me, well, there’s !Dullsters@dullsters.net or !dull_mens_club@lemmy.world (the latter welcomes all as the name is just a reference to the original)
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If you’re already doing the above: THANK YOU ❤️. Maybe consider posting a little more unless you think additional contributions would be spammy.
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Anything else you can think of to make the homepage/experience feel more welcoming and less like an angry mob (suggestions in the comments are more than welcome).
I know not everyone will participate, and that’s okay. Simply adding more positivity and posting/boosting less rage can have a positive effect on what shows up on /all which is what potential new users see by default.
So, let’s try this for a week and see what happens. Who knows? Maybe the established userbase will find it refreshing as well.
Who’s with me?
Yeah, to pretty much all that.
My experience here is generally pretty pleasant, but it took a LOT of work blocking untold numbers of communities, users, and instances to get here. Other on-boarding difficulties aside (for less savvy users), it’s just a big ask to expect them to do all that work just to not be hit in the face with all the negativity and raging and dig deep for everything else. Reddit may have numerous flaws, but at least I can go to the front page and it doesn’t feel like I’m walking into the midst of an angry mob.
My two cents is basically this: We did this to ourselves here. Elsewhere, we might have blamed the algorithms for pushing rage-bait front and center, but here it’s 100% organic (unless there’s just a massive bot problem which I don’t have reason to suspect).
Actually those are known to exist - see e.g. https://lemmy.ca/post/58955248 - though as evidenced by that same post, the admins tend to be pretty on top of shutting them down.
Below that though, at the level of communities, Lemmy has a moderation problem. Reports from one instance to anther do not federate (well, on PieFed they do, but on Lemmy they don’t) - although like everything else this is promised to be fixed “soon” (same as last year iirc, and to a lesser degree the year before that too, though probably more in the sense of just having put it onto the roadmap), which allows toxicity to thrive. Ironically it also encourages having toxic mods as well, seeing as they are the only ones willing to put up with the majority of the negative flood pushed at them.
And don’t even get me started on the lack of notification to someone that their content was removed by a mod - people tend to find out days/weeks/years later/if at all, meaning that they continue unabated, not even aware at all (or at least, at first) that they have been so censured.
Lemmy also is lacking is so many other ways, e.g. content discovery is often primarily achieved by browsing All, rather than lets say by browsing Topic areas (I am not discouraging the existence of the All Feed, just bemoaning the lack of many alternatives to it). So communities get “stumbled upon” much more readily by people not actively searching for something anywhere close to that content type, who might tend to emotionally vomit upon people rather than be genuinely interested in constructive dialog.
Reddit is a multimillion dollar company and even though the vast majority of the features rolled out over the last decade either ignored or actively went against what the userbase wanted, it nonetheless was a fully feature-complete product. e.g. it triggered notifications upon removal of your content, it had a modmail allowing you to communicate with the team to ask why, and posts removed from a community remained active to anyone possessing the URL, allowing people to continue discussions already begun, which personally as a mod of a small gaming community I used to explain to the OP why I felt their post had to be removed, and we could talk about it back and forth. None of that can be done here (although PieFed now retains deleted posts, rendering them inactive/locked but preserving their content to be read, so that e.g. a Q&A would preserve the A part even if the OP deleted their Q).
The Threadiverse is great for FOSS, not so much great as in overall terms. We make sacrifices to be here, and the benefits tend to be more abstract and harder to explain in few words (at least without needing all kinds of MAJOR caveats about what does not work). Even Linux took decades to arrive at where it is at today, and until then it was primarily a CLI tool for all that time (gfx options often did not work as well or even properly at all, earlier in its development).