Comment on Recommend that new users join geographically local instances
JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world 1 day agoWas not aware of the latency issue. But that’s something that can surely be overcome.
By “reviving democracy” I mean just that. Democracy is in a bad way and it’s partly because of the changed information environment. The crisis of professional journalism has decimated local news. People don’t know their neighbors or what’s going on in their communities. This is not an original observation.
MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 1 day ago
I haven’t checked. I may have been already.
As a support structure providing more open communication, the fediverse might help with that. It in itself is not, and is not supposed to be, democratic. It’s its own wierd mix of dictatorship with the option for the community at large to wrest control away from current leaders, should they want to.
As of now, preferring “going local” would hinder more than help with irl democracy. There just aren’t enough users. If you divided them you’d end up with a ton of tiny incentive communities, rather thana big pretty lively one.
Smaller communities is also something that happens naturally, and is already happening naturally. The reddit exodus was the spark for a ton of new niches on lemmy hitting critical mass.
There is also plenty of non-english, more local activity already. You just might not be seeing it due to your language settings.
Blaze@piefed.zip 1 day ago
The latency issue has been solved 7 months ago: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/42049808
JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world 1 day ago
This was not my point. My point is that social media will always encourage “niches” (as you hint) and that it would be better for our politics if these overlapped with real-world communities than with, say, obscure hobbies (neutral politically) or political affiliation (the original sin of this new medium).
MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 1 day ago
I don’t agree.
You present two things as if they are mutually exclusive, when they are not.
The very starting point of your argument seems to be that current niche communities can only exist at the expense of local geographic communities.
As such, you seem to suggest sacrificing existing communities in favor of hypothetical “better” communities based on physical proximity.
Such communities are useful in terms of political mobilization, but they aren’t very fun. People don’t bond over tax rates, they bond over tabletop rpgs, cats, music, movies, etc. And you can’t engage in those bonding activities in local communities until they themselves are big enough to contain such niches within them.
And all of these things can exist simultaneously. In fact I completely reject your view that niche online communities do more harm than good.
Boiled down, your view seems to equate to seeing a bunch of people having fun, and telling them ro go do something useful, while completely dismissing that it doesn’t matter whether I learn empathy from my neighbour, or someone on the other side of the world.
What youre asking for, IMO, is for the fediverse to work more like facebook and twitter, which HEAVILY bias their feeds towards local matters. The US would not have been so easy to turn into a xenophobic ball of angry people if their social media were MORE international.
TikTok is even worse about it. The one time I gave it a chance, it was 90% content local to me. But it was mindless trash. At worst, it was xenophobic rhethoric. Local, doesn’t mean meaningful or good.
You saw it on reddit all the time, how people from the US often didn’t even realize they were talking to people across the world. Because it’s a foreign concept to them. Say what you will but it is the one corporate platform that dosn’t care where you are from, and everyone discussing something gets pooled into the same communities and threads, regardles of age, sex, or even timezone.
That is a good thing. We need more of that, not less. Because online and real-world communities DO overlap. But you seem to be asking them to match. That would isolate them, not empower them.
Online communities today are the one way that authentically bridges communities of people across the world. If online communities matched offline communities, why would I ever develop a desire to understand not just my neighbour, but also people across the world?
How would I ever go and find out for myself, how people across the world think and feel? Whether my government speaks true about the threats around us, or if there is more to it?
If you overlap a bunch of circles, they all become connected. If you match them, you get bubbles.
Echo chambers.
JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Seems to be a misunderstanding. My proposal concerns servers, not communities. It would do no more than responsibilize users (“your virtual home here has people who may be your neighbors”) and encourage them to join local communities where they might discuss local issues (rather than, say, US politics).
Corporate social media is only biased towards local if you count the whole USA as “local”. Again, seems to be a misunderstanding. In the US case “local” would mean state or town.