It turns out, if people in an online community really don't like what you're doing, they can turn to harassment, threats, or worse to try to shut you down.
  • VolcanoWonderpants@lemmy.todayEnglish
    31·
    9 months ago

    I can get people being cautious about for-profits trying to monetize user data, but trying to ruin this guy’s life over it, regardless of whether or not he was actually trying to make money from their data, is just sick. Anyone who thinks this is an acceptable method of protest is fucked up in the head.

  • haui@lemmy.giftedmc.com
    23·
    9 months ago

    Very interesting article! Very much fits with my own experience. The following things I decided to take as lessons learned from the fedi so far:

    • stating novel concepts will get you ignored at best ans bullied at worst
    • lemmy lacks (at least afaik) a way to share blocklists for destructive people (not instances)
    • if you keep your posts on the constructive side, you will get a lot of positive replies but some will come at you no matter what

    Especially when in a bad mood I need to get off lemmy if I cant emotionally distance myself from the bad actors.

    Mastodon is a different kind of animal. They have centralized blocklists (like oliphant.social) to keep whole instances of trolls out. I havent had really bad situations since I implemented those but I have to report people nearly on a daily basis.

    The reasons I have to assume are very varied and as such probably the solutions should be varied as well. Reasons I concludes from many discussions:

    • lack of social skills on both sides
    • no explicit behavioral code on instances or communities
    • lack of active moderation and guidance
    • the fediverse kind of includes those unable to keep an account unbanned on corpo media
    • lack of (social) education, like biases and phallacies

    All these are solvable imo. Not all by the same thing and none of them immediately. Obviously people will disagree with me and I‘m fine with that. My personal thoughts on solutions are as follows:

    • Moderators get fixed shares of donations (x% over all moderators)
    • Sidebars and rules get more fleshed out with links to social resources and education, explanations for those not immediately understanding it
    • Explicit rules against ad hominem attacks and getting personal to win an argument

    Imo, these will be beneficial for lemmy. Mastodon might benefit from other ideas. Feel free to share those and discuss with me.

    Disclaimer: Ridicule and Ad hominem attacks will not be replied to but immediately blocked.

  • Kierunkowy74@piefed.social
    21·
    9 months ago

    “Congratulations” for the trolls, who crashed Content Nation and for anyone condoning it. Now you have become the same bad actor you swore to destroy.

  • nocturne@sopuli.xyz
    19·
    9 months ago

    In general I think we can just say micro blogging platforms are toxic. You hear this of Twitter, Bluesky, and mastodon.

    • spaduf@slrpnk.net
      5·
      9 months ago

      I don’t think it’s fair to write off the entire medium like that. They all share a common ancestor in Twitter and I think it’s fair to say the toxicity is inherited from there.

  • Zoop@beehaw.org
    8·
    9 months ago

    Damn. Poor guy! He didn’t deserve any of that. I hope this whole shit show results in positive changes and better documentation, but I don’t have high hopes, unfortunately. I hope Sascha is doing okay. Thank you for sharing this great article here!

  • froggers@lemmy.world
    5·
    9 months ago

    Ahh Mastodon strikes again. I’m actually grateful that BlueSky opened up, it’s a much better experience imo.

    EDIT: You can downvote me all you want, but it won’t change the fact that I like BlueSky more than Mastodon. lol

    • Flaky@iusearchlinux.fyiEnglish
      3·
      9 months ago

      Take my upvote. There’s nothing about Mastodon that Bluesky doesn’t do for the average user and for me it’s got an actual laid-back vibe where Mastodon feels like people trying to indoctrinate me into a nerd cult.

      Sidenote, it’d be nice if Pleroma or one of its forks had the stronghold on the fediverse instead. It’s got a lot more features than Mastodon and Bluesky.

    • Safipok@lemmy.mlEnglish
      2·
      9 months ago

      Disagreeing doesn’t mean you should get downvoted. I disagree with your sentiment but upvote.

  • Flaky@iusearchlinux.fyiEnglish
    4·
    9 months ago

    I think the main issue with Content Nation, personally, was that it looked like an SEO spam site that was using the fediverse as its source for content scraping.

    That being said, that still doesn’t justify the toxicity from the paranoid nerds that targeted this guy. I was quite surprised when the Bridgy Fed stuff happened, but now, I’m not surprised in the slightest.