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?
We are living in a world full of conflicts and political tension that we never seen since the end of world war 2. You can’t expect people to post less negstive contents. If you talk about balance between negative and positive content I can agree
lemmy and doomerism are synonymous at this point
What I said is factual
It’s really tough anymore to post positive content here. It feels like spitting on a fire to put it out.
I’m from the US, but I’ve always tried to include everyone in my posts, at the price of looking ignorant every now and then when I get things wrong, but it’s nice when I’ve had people from across the world remark how they’re pleasantly surprised to see something local to them being covered by a non-local. I’ve learned so much in return from just having brief interactions with users from other countries, just by showing some genuine interest in them, their languages, and their home countries. But outside of my own posts, it’s hard to find a place on Lemmy where there doesn’t seem to be things looking to drive a wedge between us.
I used to be able to jump into random posts, even if it was something I wasn’t very familiar with, to try to get conversations going, but so many news/political posts just feel rigged to get people riled up, and I’ll scroll through and not find anything to interact with a lot now.
Plenty of people tell me that I’m doing something important by doing positive stuff here. I really like the small community we’ve got of people that regularly interact. It’s hard to feel like I’m making any kind of difference though. I’m going to show up as long as people are talking to me, but there’s plenty of times I ask myself why I don’t just devote this time back into music or my volunteer work. I’ve dropped all my news and politics podcasts at this point because I’m sick of hearing it all. I censor myself on discussing animal rights issues because I don’t want to add to the pile of negative stuff to worry about. I’ll keep at it the best I can, but a lot of people here are sure making it an exhausting effort some days.
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).
rage drives engagement.
it’s just how the internet works. angry people post and reply a lot more than non-angry people.
and angry posts tend to be shorter, easier to comprehend, and induce more angry responses.
thoughtful and non-rage takes don’t drive engagement from people. it mostly bores them.
people come to be entertained, more than anything else.
I definitely want to see more non-news content, but I don’t think the threadiverse needs less of anything. If you wanna post news and politics, have at it! The rest of us just need to get on their level with all our other hobbies and interests.
Also, it’s discouraging to post in a niche community and always harvest downvotes from people that don’t like that you’re posting at all. I get it, there aren’t other NWSL/MLS fans out here, but could you please stop doing drive-bys and downvoting all my articles?
I would love to not be bombarded with US news in communities where it has no business showing up.
I think there’s a lot of communities where the mods have gone inactive and no-one’s noticed yet, so when you get stuff in the wrong community there’s no-one to clean it up. Iirc, there’s a process for getting added as a mod for those communities — maybe it’s something we could help with?
Maybe. On the other hand, I can see a mod being reticent about nuking a post that has a high upvote ratio and a healthy discussion going.
Lemmy’s mod tools allow for much more nuanced responses than just nuking a post. For instance, I think locking the post and adding a comment pointing folks to the same post in a more relevant community is something most people would react positively to. And, it’s definitely okay to have some communities be for very small groups of people with a very restrictive mod policy — there’s always a bigger, more permissive community available for people that want to discuss whatever.
it’s definitely okay to have some communities be for very small groups of people with a very restrictive mod policy
I’d say that’s not only ok but desirable. I forgot about locking posts, that would indeed be effective.
Yes, there is the economy community that only post politics on it
To be fair, politics shape a lot of the economy. But it pops up everywhere, TV show communities, hobbies, everything.
I only say there needs to be less because that’s all that seems to get pushed to the top. Ever since I saw the few posts asking how to get new users here, I’ve been trying to put myself in their shoes and look at things raw and unfiltered like a brand new user would see. Sadly, now that I’ve looked, I can’t un-see.
The rest of us just need to get on their level with all our other hobbies and interests.
100% agree :) But those don’t seem to get the rage clicks like all the bad news stuff and get buried even on scaled sort.
there aren’t other NWSL/MLS fans out here, but could you please stop doing drive-bys and downvoting all my articles?
I don’t know what either of those are, but I just went and threw some upvotes to some of your stuff because it was non-political / non-news. And one of them was highly downvoted for reasons I cannot possibly fathom.
I’ve been mulling this stuff over.
I think going fedi (and open source) is like hitting rock bottom/finding jesus/starting therapy. All we can do is try and remove the stigma.
Yeah, all the doomerism is pulling me down, too. My best solution so far is to not interact. Not even a downvote. Contrarianism and acute cynisism need feedback to thrive, and the bastards ain’t getting any more of my blood!
More mods and admins on Fedi need to step up and take bolder action, imo. Whether intentional or not, a mods inaction will often set the tone for a given community more than their actions.
Imagine the community you mod meets in person and someone is being obnoxious and disruptive. A new attendee is not going to speak up, they’re going to look to you for guidance. If you allow unwelcoming behavior to persist, then attendees learn that being loud is how to get noticed, and if they don’t want to be loud (as many of us don’t) they’ll just stop going.
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Item #10: Don’t be this person.☝️
Like, wow. None of what I said has anything to do with that. This is the kind of jumping to insane conclusions, putting words in peoples’ mouths shit that turns people away.
