Call me crazy, but I a) think the fediverse probably doesn’t have more ‘toxic content’, harmful and violent content, and child sexual abuse material then other platforms like X, Facebook, Meta, YouTube etc, and b) actively like the fediverse because of that.
But after a few hours carefully drafting and sourcing an edit to make it clear that no, the fediverse isn’t unusual in social media circles for having a lot of toxic content, I realised that the entire ‘fediverse bad’ section was added by 1 editor in 2 days. And the editor has made an awful lot of edits on pages all themed around porn (hundreds of edits on the pages of porn stars), suicide, mass killings, mass shootings, Jews, torture techniques, conspiracy theories, child abuse, various forms of sexual and other exploitation, ‘zoosadism’, and then pages with titles like ‘bad monkey’ that seemed reasonably innocent until I actually clicked on them to see what they were and, well.
I decided to stop using the internet for a while.
I’ve learned my lesson trying to change Wikipedia edits written by people like that - they tend to have a tight social circle of people who can make the internet a very unpleasant place for anyone suggesting maybe claims like ‘an opinion poll indicated that most people in Britain would prefer to live next to a sewage plant than a Muslim’ should maybe not on Wikipedia on the thin evidence of paywalled link from a Geocities page written by, apparently, a putrid cesspit personified.
I thought I’d learned my lesson about trusting Wikipedia.
It just makes me so angry that most people’s main source of information on the fediverse contains a massive chunk written solely by a guy who spends most of his time making minor grammar edits to pages about school shootings, collections of pages about black people who were sexually assaulted and murdered, etc, and that these people control the narrative on Wikipedia by means of ensuring any polite critics’ are overcome with the urge to spend the rest of the day showering and disinfecting everything.
Man, I really disagree with your stance but you’re arguing in an annoyingly reasonable, balanced manner and doing legwork to produce evidence for your claim that invites people to re-evaluate their long held stance.
It’s annoying because I like my long held stances. They’re comfortable.
I’m a big fan of dark humour (as long as it isn’t punching down and is kept in pretty well defined areas where it’s unlikely to upset reasonable people who happen to be on the wrong side) and have read all your posts thinking ‘sorry but if people can’t joke, or express their frustration and fear by pretending they aren’t powerless, that sounds like a recipe for frustration and repression’, which is reasonable because all the examples are on my socio-political side.
And you’ve made it kinda obvious, without being aggressive, that if I only think it’s ok because I happen to agree with them… It’s maybe time to re-evaluate my threshold for when joking and letting off steam online crosses the threshold that I don’t want to be part of that community any more.
So, full marks on ‘how to convince people to change beliefs that they have an emotional connection to’, because I’ve seen the argument a few times and it’s never been remotely effective.
And I guess, the world needs less violent jokes and personal vendettas in general, even though it’s clearly one side causing the actual problems. I can’t keep criticising them without being critical of the people in my own spaces doing the same.
(Really sorry, just a few marks deducted because I do not feel overjoyed or enlightened. I’m mildly annoyed that I’ve been in the wrong and have to change, for no personal gain, and it’ll take the fun out of a lot of the internet. I suspect at some point I’ll realise I’m much happier without reading violent stuff etc, and be much more grateful. But for now it feels a little like finding out that one of my new hobbies is problematic)
Thank you for your kind words. Most people who felt that way would either just be angry, or at best uncertain so would not share, so thank you for your bravery to open up and be vulnerable.
I also am a big fan of dark humor, especially comedians that do it, then hearing the audience, pause to explain a little bit - the best ones, the absolute masters of their craft, are indeed super gentle about it.
But we are just people, trying to get by in life. I will leave the actual “judgement” as to whether it’s good or bad to you (while acknowledging my own bias in that I think it’s bad, for numerous reasons but one is the slippery slope where it pulls someone down the pathway ever further along, bc if one step is fine then why not two, and if two is fine then okay what about three, and so on), but in any case I think that either way the situation is compounded by it being “unexamined”. Whatever our beliefs are, they are best if they are TRULY ours, rather than just borrowed from others without a thought as to whether they fit our actual selves. Crowd-thinking is not any kind of thinking at all.
We have such PRIVILEGES, and we don’t like to think about that. Most of my closer friends online tend to be older gay men or trans people, who don’t like to think about how privileged they are to have experienced trauma that a traditional neurotypical person has not (mainly bc feeling suicidal, they would think along the lines of privileged=“good”, which it is not - what they experienced is not “good”, but it does make them “privileged” in terms of having traumatic experiences that allows them to understand things that others outright refuse to or perhaps worse are flat incapable of doing). Access to education is one such privilege. Ability to spend time reading is another. In contrast, a single parent of multiple kids in the USA hustling by working 2-3 jobs does not have such luxuries, and is all the more vulnerable to disinformation as a result.
And on the Fediverse, we spend a great deal of time blocking things that we do not like. We who enjoy fiddling with config files and trying out how they might change the outcome of a process - we are if not quite rare in the population then at least uncommon. Which is fine, but then we cannot delude ourselves - at least, not if we wish to remain honest with ourselves - that the stuff that we spent such enormous amounts of time blocking does not in fact exist.
People advocate for murder here constantly. Some might even mean it. If Russia or China or North Korea were not here trying to push agitation, then they are missing a great opportunity, imho - although fortunately (for them) useful believers will do that work for them, having already been converted on more popular platforms.
And then, as you said, there’s people just joking around. Which we DESPISE when we hear the right-wing people do it in our direction, yet we do it to them in turn. It’s natural though, and therefore lazy, and easy to fall into, without ever considering any other alternatives.
Whichever way you end up on this topic, kudos for taking the time to examine it and decide what you actually want here.