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I disagree with your premise.
It should be "The best thing that you can do for humanity is to be kind".
Seriously. We're living in a time when fascism is in an upswing and at least one religious leader has publicly called empathy a sin. Kindness and empathy are rebellious acts.
I can get behind the Kindness Rebellion.
You know what, I can respect that take. I was trying to tailor things to my audience, you're not wrong though :)
I like your take as well. My "disagreement" is mainly contrarian silliness as I felt it was rather implicit in your post :)
Yeah, let's show them! ... how to be decent human beings by example.
When I see small, I see potential. More people know each other which fosters genuine relationships and understanding, ingredients missing from the toxic environments of the big social networks.
My ex used to call me a very small dude with a big city attitude. She didn't mean it as a compliment, but I took it as one.
The fediverse is just a beautiful place to be you. It feels calm, relaxed, intellectual and full of supportive people. It's a refreshiong alternative to the sprawling and sometimes impersonal nature of vast social networks.
One thing we should all agree on, we all have a role to play in shaping the culture of this space.
I'll add: "be supportive and helpful if you can, and just shut up if you can't".
Fediverse is sometimes suffering from the same kind of people that Linux has - "oh you have a problem? Well, here's the GitHub repo and a project Wiki, figure it out".
RTFM is always a good strategy, the manual/wiki/source code will almost always have more info than a comment can reasonably contain.
Yeah, if I don't have the answer I usually just stop in to say I hope someone more knowledgeable can chime in and wish them luck.
That way the post at least gets a little engagement for visibility. But the "rtfm" attitude, while understandable, can be really miserable to be met with when you're out of your depth doing your best to learn about something new and need some help from another actual human.
We all begrudge the automated phone systems that try to reduce the need for human beings by helping people with simple problems, and that approach to helping people exists for good reason but it does feel like sometimes we're too eager to leave people to figure things out by themselves just because it's a lot of work to actually help them, human to human. None of us enjoy being treated that way when we need help.
This place is becoming very Reddit, if you post anything that deviates from someone’s beliefs they call you names and insult your intelligence. So many people can’t have a debate or discussion without jumping to personal attacks and hate. It’s really disheartening. I love political debate but there’s no such thing anymore, only name calling
You sound exactly like the kind of person I want in my community: !actual_discussion@lemmy.ca
Check the sidebar to see if it suits you too!
Report it - people jumping straight to insults are trying to shut discussion down which really isn't acceptable.
Its definitely rough, I can understand why. I live in the US and as a queer person whose loved ones are almost all minorities the outlook is feeling pretty bleak, but its definitely frustrating that it feels like even slightly different left wing ideas, or thoughts on what we do about our problems can spawn flamewars.
Literally with people you're in the exact same camp with :/ I'm also big on political debate, I think democracy can't function unless people can discuss with eachother what problems we have and what we think we should do about them. (And yes, I know we increasingly may not have much of democracy here in the US. I still think my statement is true of how democracy functions in general)
I think it's really valuable to learn how people arive at worldviews other than mine.
Yeah. So much of our social media is structured to reinforce being combative. Even the upvote/downvote feature of Reddit/Lemmy etc has this effect of rewarding performativity over substance. People start competing for points and start to interpret high point totals as the equivalent of winning an argument or saying something of substance.
Since it’s a lot easier to get upvotes if you’re pithy or snarky or unserious the whole mechanism that underpins this tech tilts people toward simplistic and aggressive rhetoric.
I don’t want to get too “the medium is the message” here and complexity in political discussions (or any discussions really) have been decreasing generation over generation - so it’s not just a social media problem. But social media seems to have broken so many of the traditional guardrails we’ve had against demagoguery. It’s going to take a lot to unwind it.
Spez had his gestapo admins ban a bunch of people after Elon had a fit so you're getting a lot of the terminally online types coming here. My suggestion is just don't give them any attention and they'll eventually give up. I was semi active in a few lefty subs and holy shit you could smell some of the people there just from their comments.
At least we don't have karma here, that would make it so much worse
The thing that I appreciated most about Lemmy and my transition from Reddit is how cordial everyone has been. Even if a comment is taken out of context, people tend not to jump down each others throat and assume the worst, or make bad faith arguments full of fallacies. I've had legitimate back and forths with people, something that basically never happens on Reddit.
Everyone's been really nice as long as I don't touch anything political - then it becomes a fart sniffing smug fest.
You sound exactly like the kind of person I want in my community: !actual_discussion@lemmy.ca
Check the sidebar to see if it suits you too!
Unless I know the other person has the same intent to respectfully listen and try to understand rather than argue I won’t engage in any sort of political discussion. Polarizing opinions have been completely normalized online and it’s literally ruining society.
I arrived at LEMMY after what I think we very optimistically called the Reddit Collapse. We wish. And I had toe in LEMMY and a few others at Reddit.
Recently with their abusively patronizing redesigning and gamification and just ugly bullshit, I can’t stomach Reddit at all. So LEMMY grows increasingly important, not just to me but to folks who haven’t yet even heard of it.
So, I’ll just say thanks for your post here. I have, I confess, engaged with a couple bullies on LEMMY and I always try to say… I don’t like to do this on LEMMY— and I say that precisely for the reasons you mention.
And as you encourage: I will try to be kinder, even in when feeling… hmm… less than kind.
Same. I've engaged in some stupid ragebait here too a little bit. To my chagrin. ._. We just have to remember to breathe and take a step back if we feel angry. And stay hydrated.
ngl this is such a toxic community. The Nazi thing is definitely part of the problem -- we live in an age of "soft fascism" so of course we have our fists up and we see nazis everywhere. Honestly I think most of the nazis are on twitter or truth social though, they don't come to lemmy so much. Hmm, don't assume that someone espousing an (1) conservative-looking belief is a nazi maybe?