[deleted]
It’s more civil than reddit and every other forum I know.
[deleted]
Submitted 11 hours ago by Yingwu@lemmy.dbzer0.com to fediverse@lemmy.world
Comments
6nk06@sh.itjust.works 11 hours ago
OpenStars@piefed.social 9 hours ago
Probably it depends which corners you look at.
A tiny niche subreddit I would presume would be more civil than a politics community here.
It's also a lot easier to dox people IRL here. e.g. self-host something, get someone to click, and there you go.
sentient_loom@sh.itjust.works 10 hours ago
Do you think the fediverse has a civility problem?
Short answer: yes.
Long answer: social media (and humans) have a civility problem. And I wonder how much of it is astroturfed. When Trump was first running for the 2016 election, social media was flooded with racism. I don’t thinknit was grassroots. I think it was Steve Bannon’s troll army or some other coordinated institute. I also wonder if the violent leftist rhetoric is feds, or reddit’s goons undermining the competition. They’ll post “murder all pigs” or “shoot fascists” and get like a thousand upvotes, and their arguments are belligerent and idiotic, and they pile on you for disagreeing. Feels coordinates. Feels like 2016 honestly.
is there anything we can do about it?
Downvote, report, block. Don’t engage (trying to learn that myself). But I bet they’re still driving people away.
G@piefed.world 10 hours ago
Maybe I’m toxic, but the Fediverse has been incredibly kind. I find a lot of people on here are a lot more sincere than on other platforms, which is refreshing.
I’ll see a lot of cringy memes or someone sharing a bit too much, which is something that I’d downvote or hide on other platforms. On here, I tend to approach things a bit kinder, maybe because the community is smaller or I think the person posting is being genuine.
SorteKanin@feddit.dk 9 hours ago
It’s weird to talk about the fediverse as a whole having a civility problem. The fediverse is a large and diverse place.
It’s like asking “do bars have a civility problem?”. And like yea, some bars do. Other bars don’t. Depends on the clientele right?
For example, on Feddit.dk we have quite a high standard of behavior and moderation is based on that. Feddit.dk is not a large instance, which probably makes it easier to manage. I would not say that Feddit.dk has a civility problem. Maybe other instances do. But then that’s a problem for those instances to solve.
So I wouldn’t say the fediverse itself has a civility problem. To me, it seems perfectly possible to moderate an instance well and preserve civil behavior. If there is a civility problem, it lies with the specific instance that has that problem and their failure to moderate that behavior.
DreamAccountant@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
“A civility problem” is stupid gatekeeping bullshit. It’s not specific in any way.
You know what is an actual problem? Modern Nazis. Corporate bot accounts.
What if you’re uncivil to a Modern Nazi? Is that not OK? What if you’re uncivil to a Corporate Account spamming advertisements? Well, OP would have you castrated, then banned for it. Really? Why?
They’re power hungry, and want to control everything. The level of civility is such that they think if they took over, everything would be back to normal. It’s pretty standard narcissistic behavior. Same as “If people just listened to jebus, like I listen to jebus, the world would be a better place”. No, it won’t. It will be worse off.
All atheists are uncivil to religious people simply by existing. That’s what religious people lie about, anyway. Who’s going to protect the atheists from false accusations? Nobody.
OP’s “I would make everything better with my vague bullshit” - is just vague asshole bullshit. Is that uncivil? I don’t give a fuck. Seems like OP could use some more uncivility in response to their controlling nonsense.
Xulai@mander.xyz 9 hours ago
Agree.
Complaining about civility is the first step toward letting morons rule.
If one is making foolish or false statements, one should expect to be humiliated. Come back when you are better educated.
If one is being an asshole for no good reason or making false accusations against another due to losing an argument, they should understand that they are now a legitimate target for everyone to dump on with impunity.
Being confidently wrong, or an asshole without cause deserves equal or greater consequences to the harm caused. Public shaming via humiliation - aka incivility - is more effective than actual punishment or moderation.
dontbelievethis@sh.itjust.works 9 hours ago
This is the perfect joke answer to this question.
anarchiddy@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 hours ago
I’m so tired of this civility meta.
Lemmy is half as uncivilized as any other social media space I’ve ever been in, including reddit or Twitter. I think people are just confused by a lack of centralized authority to settle disputes on what is or isn’t ‘civil’ behavior - but it certainly isn’t the case that it’s any less civil than just about any alternative.
Maybe this places extra stress on instance admins for constantly addressing complaints of users on and off their server, but that has less to do with the kind of user civility people are talking about and more with a culture of mob justice evidenced by communities like MoG and PTB.
People seem uncomfortable with multipolar systems, and maybe it’s because of my political bent but I think distributed systems are way better.
DieserTypMatthias@lemmy.ml 9 hours ago
No, it doesn’t. It’s up to server mods to moderate the server.
Nemo@slrpnk.net 9 hours ago
If it does, the mods and admin under whose aegis I abide are doing an above-average job removing it quickly.
Or maybe it’s just that I avoid political discussion communities these days.
In the end, I find the lemmy / piefed / *bin network much more civil, thoughtful, and compassionate than reddit was.
OpenStars@piefed.social 9 hours ago
I don't think the Lemmy software can do anything about it, as it places too much emphasis on manual labor on behalf of the moderators to keep up.
PieFed has some really neat ideas though, on democratization of moderation where users can set software preferences, thereby taking a substantial burden off the shoulders of the mods.
e.g. instead of relying on mods to remove posts, keyword filtering allows individual users to reduce exposure to topics such as "Musk" or "Trump" or "USA". Or user icons are really cool - e.g. new user account with age <2 weeks, or highly contentious user with >10x more downvotes than upvotes, or potential unregistered bot account that posts >10x more often than they reply in comments. None of those cause "removal" of content except in the recipient's personal feed.
Undearius@lemmy.ca 8 hours ago
I do like the idea of leaving the curation of content in the hands of the user.
I think the mentality should be more common, and the tools should make it easy, to filter out content the same way it’s easy and common to follow a community/topic that adds to your feed.
Almost all social platforms have a method at the forefront to “see more content like this” but a lot don’t have “see less of this”, and if they do, it’s a buried setting.
It’d be really interesting for mods and admins to get a list of users’ exclude list, either of post keywords or user blocks, to see trends and stats on the content that people don’t want to see.
spankmonkey@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
Yes, requiring people to be civil when discussing topics that negatively impact them directly stifles the ability to convey how much they are suffering. Being forced to be polite to oppressors is absolutely awful.
markovs_gun@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
This is a feature not a bug. We saw what happened when the Internet was sanitized and welcoming, instead of being a transparent black mirror showing the true nature of humanity - society adopted it en masse without thinking about it or realizing its danger because that filth has a nice façade over it, and society is crumbling as a result. The Internet should not be a clean, universally friendly place because that is not reality and just hiding that behind civility doesn’t do much. In 2008, online Nazis were posting shittily drawn swastikas and talking about how much they love Hitler on fringe websites. In 2025 they’re posting videos on Facebook and Twitter in suits with massive audiences with the same hateful rhetoric hiding just beneath the surface hidden by a false veneer of respectability. This is what sanitizing the Internet has wrought.
JASN_DE@feddit.org 11 hours ago
This has little to do with the Fediverse itself and mostly with the people involved. It would be the same on any other platform, so simply switching the software stack or whatever would do exactly zilch.
A fraction of people are going to be assholes. Sad bit inevitable.
You can ban the dickheads, but that’ll only get you so far.
Emsquared@piefed.social 11 hours ago
100% agree. It's a people thing rather than a site specific thing. Politics, for example in the social media arena attracts a certain combative behaviour from some who clearly feel passionately but who also feel that shouting down others is now the accepted norm rather than reasoned discussion though that's mostly where we are everywhere now.
ekky@sopuli.xyz 10 hours ago
Then you make a “no politics” rule, after which the very respectable debaters show up to tell everyone that everything ultimately is political, and therefore their ragebaiting, trolling, cancel culture, and general toxicity is totally acceptable! Unless you want an entry in the powerhungrybastards community, ofc.
Anyway, I’ve generally had a positive experience on the fediverse (compared to Reddit, etc.). That said, I’ve blocked and avoid most, if not all, right wing extremists, though I’m having a harder time with the left extremists since we seem to have a lot of interests in common. ^,^’
OpenStars@piefed.social 9 hours ago
I disagree, bc "exactly zilch" is fairly extreme. It can do something, perhaps it would not be enough but it could have a measurable impact.