This is a very interesting article about the long-term sustainability of the Fediverse for moderators, administrators, and developers. We’ve already had two of our lovely Beehaw admins take breaks to take care of themselves as they experience the burnout associated with maintaining a community, and I think for a lot of use we already know how exhausting it can be to take a center stage position in an online community.
Unfortunately, I don’t have any great starting points for what to do, but at least talking about it is a start.
I don’t think the Fediverse has a mental health problem. I think people online tend to be terrible, regardless of the platform…
The whole planet has a mental health problem. Was discussing this earlier in another community with a German user.
We live in a system that isolates people and makes them fill their lives with long hours of dull work for fear of becoming penniless and homeless, while they watch this crazy consumption led by sociopathic billionaires destroying everything they love about the planet day by day. And then when people are miserable because of these problems, they receive pills and conversation (if they’re lucky enough to be able to afford them) while the material problems continue. It’s no wonder we’re all a bit messed up.
Capitalism is shit. We’re brainwashed to believe that there’s only so much and we have to get as much as can and before everyone else, damn the cost, even if it’s our mental health. I don’t understand how we can’t look at it from the other angle and say, if there’s only so much, let’s protect it. Let’s share what we have so everyone can have fun. Let’s care about everyone and lift everyone up.
I don’t think people really realize just badly the pandemic affected peoples mental health and how that impact hasn’t really decreased much at all
I think even before that, there were major issues. The pandemic just made it so we couldn’t ignore them any longer. Which is ridiculous given how much people were acting out. But now everyone is aware of how important it is, because so many were trapped with their own thoughts and/or monotony. Even so, our governments paid lip service and then failed to make meaningful changes. My government cares more about getting people back into the office than making sure mental health care is accessible to everyone.
The pandemic just exposed the lie that in the worst case, the government, or your job, or someone in power, would help you.
There’s not really much “going back” from that realization, especially when we can literally find news articles every day about how another politician is campaigning against us for one thing or another.
Today, for instance, I discovered that Arkansas had passed a law to make it possible to criminally charge librarians if they lend out the “wrong” books to people!
I still think it changes the calculus for how it feels moderating an online space when you’re volunteering vs when you’re getting paid for it. The latter can let you emotionally datach yourself from it. The former? It’s an act of love for which you receive hate
Very few moderators on reddit are getting paid anything to moderate subreddits, the key difference is that lemmy is still in the early stages of moderation tools.
If those “moderation tools” means something like the automated blanket moderation with no recourse that’s going on Reddit… we already have that, it’s Reddit and pretty much every other for-profit platform where “some false positives” are acceptable as long as they don’t damage the income sources by offsetting the influx of new users.
Yeah, you’re absolutely right. Some people just can’t handle the “anonymity” the internet proves and take every chance to be a dick
I disagree. When you are paid for it you become reliant on it to make ends meet in your life, so you’re more willing to put up with absolute garbage that you shouldn’t have to. This forces people to try to detach from it as a coping mechanism while they fall further down the hole. Paying them won’t change a thing about the mental health issues and will probably make it worse.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t pay them, but we shouldn’t look at it as the fix for this either.
Does the Fediverse have more of a mental health problem than other social media sites? Or is it just more visible and more likely to be hidden away?
Yeah, exactly. Commercial social media sites pay workers in low-wage countries to moderate content. Plenty of stories out there about the toll it takes on them, but it’s easy enough for the commercial sites to just keep finding more cheap labor. Fedi is mostly volunteers so it’s quite different, and much more visible.
From the article:
If you want a certain feature, or are waiting for the release of a new version of the software you use, or have a bug: I urge you to please be patient with the developers. There’s an enormous amount of work to do, and every project is understaffed and strained for finances at the moment.
Please please please be nice to people that are taking their own time and mental energy from their own lives without material compensation to give you something cool to enjoy.
I get things can be frustrating when something needs fixing, but people that contribute here are mostly overworked and underfunded.
And those that are helping out but feeling overworked, do take breaks regularly before you get permanently burnt out on it. That should be normalized, it goes for Beehaw admins and other Fediverse admins mods and contributors as well.
Please please please be nice to people that are taking their own time and mental energy from their own lives without material compensation to give you something cool to enjoy.
Not only that, sign up to donate to their Patreons. I give a buck a month to my mastodon instance and my two lemmy instances.
Speaking as someone who ran a set of public forums back in the early days of the internet, the number one thing I can suggest is don’t do it alone.
Alone, you’re one person arguing with hundreds of other people that your opinion is the right one. This burns out anyone but the most narcissistic assholes (I should know, being the latter). With a team, you get to deflect attacks that would be personally directed at you to the overall team while relying on their support to provide a unified front. Bullies generally target single individuals - they rarely go after groups.
This can be hard to build, and it often relies on a third party in the admin role to encourage the creation and unity of the mod team until it gets on its feet, often becoming part of the team in the early phases until it runs well on its own. A minimum of three people is usually what it takes to really make a community thrive cleanly.
Unfortunately, the fragmented nature of the Fediverse makes it difficult to build these kind of teams, as the mods have to be users on the same instance platform, and a small instance with only 20 users can end up with an enormous amount of content and commentary from users across the wider Fediverse. This, of course, ties into @hoodlem 's comment regarding bandwidth costs for instance owners - the speed at which your traffic can scale is exponential, and you need to be prepared for it from both a financial and staffing standpoint.
One solutions that could help would be to have an ActivityPub login standard that would allow logged-in users from one instance to moderate a community on another when given permissions. A cross-platform private messaging standard would help here as well. Of course, both of these functions would have to be encrypted and secured to prevent cross-site attacks, but they could be steps in unifying the Fediverse without centralizing it.
EDIT: as pointed out in the comments, you can mod across instances, but it doesn’t look like you can mod across platforms yet.
One solutions that could help would be to have an ActivityPub login standard that would allow logged-in users from one instance to moderate a community on another when given permissions.
That’s already possible on lemmy. Not sure about kbin.
Unfortunately, the fragmented nature of the Fediverse makes it difficult to build these kind of teams, as the mods have to be users on the same instance
No they don’t. As long as the instances are federated then you can moderate a community on another instance. I’ve set up communities on my home instance for other people to mod and I mod a few lemmy.world ones.
As much as Reddit has done wrong (hence me being here as a part of the migration) one thing I always liked was the mention of “remember the human”. This isn’t a network of bots, but actual individual people interacting and - in the case of this article - creating the things you are utilizing. Jerboa has a weird issue where if I hit “back” on what I think should be a sub screen to “home” as the main page of the app, I instead leave the app entirely. Does this mean I am warranted to passive aggressively - or even with well intentions - tag the developer on mastodon to request a fix? No. That’s what support requests are for.
I think people with the advent of the internet and the ease of communication over text have forgotten empathy with those alongside them on the internet. We need to refocus the way we communicate on these platforms - federated or not - to respect the opinions and thoughts of those around us. (Not necessarily agree, but respect.) I also like the proposed idea of the support line for developers of federated tech and sites, as it may provide alleviation for the stress sudden large influxes of users can cause on often one person teams acting as Atlas and holding these instances and servers up for their userbase.
TL;DR: Everybody Love Everybody.
