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. You disagreed with one twitter egg, and five more were like "debate me bro" and they had all these stats about race-science, and rhetoric to misconstrue the nature of equality and the value of liberalism. I don't think it was grassroots. I think it was Steve Bannon's troll army or some other coordinated institution. Here on Lemmy I keep seeing violent leftist rhetoric, and I also wonder if it's 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 coordinated. Feels like 2016 honestly.
is there anything we can do about it?
Downvote, report, block. Don't engage (trying to remember that myself). But I bet they're still driving people away.
But sometimes because of the context, as in this case, where we want info vouched for by actual humans who did research and who can be held accountable, instead of more slop.
violence as a means to an end, pragmatically, has enormous costs,
The people I'm talking about (the worst ones) don't even have an "end." No plan at all. The violence is the end. It's pure stupidity. I see it as the lust for violence, coming up with some politics to justify itself.
I honestly think self-righteousness pushes people away. It's why I can barely stand bluesky. During the big exodus from reddit, all these so-called far-lefties (who I think were just reddit goons doing infiltration) were all screaming for everybody to defederate. Even now, I keep arguing against idiots posting "kill a cop" or "kill fascists" memes, like this is literally an "advocate violence" platform. I don't expect to pull big numbers with that kind of shit.
Social media is kinda washed up. A lot of people are on substack, too. The internet as a place is just less popular, I think. We're all getting sick of it.
I see they have a SFW requirement. And while my site is currently SFW, I won't guarantee that it will remain so.
Still, it's at least making me consider cutting out all the zurb-foundation stuff, since that's the only JS I have, and the site is simple enough that it doesn't really need it.
That's ominous.