I especially appreciate the time you spent typing out this response!

I am a little confused about one part.

The balance is finding ways to engage in your local community. Work or volunteer at the library or a non-profit performing arts center, get involved in the bills that are being proposed for your city and fight for them if they’re worth it and fight against them if they’re not. Change starts locally. We may be inspired to hear about the people of Hong Kong, but if we don’t actually do anything about our local problems then why are we cheering them on? Oh good, at least someone somewhere is doing something? Do your schools have funding for arts? Mine do not, so if kinds want to learn music or theater they have to do it as an extracurricular. These places are normally non-profit, heavily volunteer sponsored and are chronically understaffed. If you don’t like kids, senior facilities, hell the entire caregiving field if you don’t like old people either!

I feel the bolded part was leading into something, maybe another thought. As it stands, it’s placed right after a way to help that involves children, far away from the sentences near the start of the paragraph that are ways to help that are less connected to children and the elderly (get involved with local politics, volunteer at/support the library and nonprofit performing arts). So I’m confused about what you’re trying to say with that bolded sentence. Would you mind elaborating?

This entire thread is already full of ways other people have managed the balance. I have not found a way yet but others here clearly have, and reading their experiences could probably help you find a balance yourself.

As an asexual who’s only visited a porn site once to see what all the fuss was about before I knew I was asexual…

Porn sites have NEWS!?

I never understood the point behind “get them help” harassment. Not sure how getting links to suicide hotlines that I do not need and the like is supposed to hurt me. The only hurtful part is knowing that the other person did it with the intention of bothering you. Glad to know that people take this route though, instead of actually upsetting things like gorespam.

Just realized. Did the owls on r/SuperbOwl get lots of comments? If not, many upvotes with little discussion should probably just be expected for that kind of post.

I followed cute animal subs on Reddit but it totally slipped my mind about how often people would comment. I just looked, upvoted (after all, cute animals are on topic in a cute animal sub), and moved on.

I remember SuperbOwl! Unfortunately I don’t have owl pictures to contribute or anything intelligent to say about owls.

I’m using a different account to grow the community. Because I’m one of a few posters there and I’d rather not make life easier for potential doxxers, I’d rather not give out the community name. Don’t want to link two different accounts together as owned by the same person.

I’m using a different account to grow the community. Because I’m one of a few posters there and I’d rather not make life easier for potential doxxers, I’d rather not give out the community name. Don’t want to link two different accounts together as owned by the same person.

The interesting thing is this is that sometimes replying with a mind towards the audience instead of the person you’re replying is a beneficial thing to do! Most of the time, internet debates won’t convince the person you’re arguing with but they do have the potential to convince onlookers and change their minds. I’ve definitely had my mind changed by reading some debates. So you’d maybe address your opponent’s arguments with a mind more towards convincing onlookers than towards convincing your opponent, or towards your frustration with your opponent.

Of course, the part where this happens with little empathy to the person they’re replying to is bad. And the part where it’s happening as a ~epic clapback~ smackdown for upvotes, not as an attempt to present onlookers with your point of view.

As a person who only used downvotes for incorrect information, spam, or rudeness, I mostly agree because apparently most people would use the downvote button as a disagree button.

But I do miss having the “fucking [insert slur here]” “kill yourself” “only a basement-dwelling loser would have this opinion” comments auto-hid because the average passing user disapproved of it and decided to express their disapproval via downvote, instead of coming across it myself semi-frequently and reporting it. Also meant that I could contribute to hiding the bad stuff, without fear of getting lashed out on. Sometimes I don’t reply to comments that have good points but seem unnecessarily mean because in my experience, there seems to be a 50/50 chance between getting decent discussion and getting some rude snarky reply with a lot of unflattering personal assumptions made about me no matter how civil I was and how I deliberately avoided addressing the mean tone to avoid getting called out for tone policing (I know that tone policing is a problem I personally have. I don’t want to cause problems and I don’t want to face backlash for tone policing). And there is something to be said for if people only used downvotes on incorrect information, spam, or rudeness, the Beehaw admins would probably find themselves less overloaded with work.

Too bad people try to use downvotes for ”I disagree with your civil, well-thought out opinion” instead of “spam and cruelty not welcome, misinformation not useful and sometimes actively harmful, hide this.”

The main thing I appreciate is the federation, which helps make us resistant to getting bought out by a corporate entity and subsequently enshittified. Theoretically, even if you buy a few instances you still don’t get the entire Fediverse.

In practice, people congregated on a few big servers. I exist on some smaller Lemmy and Kbin servers as well, because I want to help with the decentralization. Spread out the server demands and all that. I’m not the only one who’s on some smaller servers, but a huge chunk of us are on a couple of big servers that, if bought, take a lot of the Fediverse with them.

But even having to buy a few servers > buy one, all set.

For more my immediate concerns though? Less big-picture “what if” future thoughts? Editing titles. It’s really nice.

I’m having a similar problem. Trying to grow a niche community. The subreddit for it has rules about promoting other communities that condemns my post to a weekly self-promotion thread nobody looks at even though I have no authority in that community, so that method of growth is essentially locked off. Already advertised it in some “look at this new community!” communities. I am one of a few posters there, and it feels bad. I’m lucky enough to have a small close-knit Discord group surrounding the same interest, but if I wasn’t I would probably have to go crawling back to Reddit to discuss the topic. For what it’s worth I do try to post comments on any post where I have something to add. Sometimes it’s even a fairly useless “thanks, this was really interesting” comment just to help boost Fediverse engagement.

I’m using a different account to grow the community. Because I’m one of a few posters there and I’d rather not make life easier for potential doxxers, I’d rather not give out the community name. Don’t want to link two different accounts together as owned by the same person.

Is this a reference to something? I’m not sure I understand your reply. If it’s meant to be taken at face value, I do honestly appreciate that we can edit post titles. No more noticing a mistake in the title, copy/pasting the text of my post, deleting the post, and reposting with a fixed title. Instead, I can just change the title. This is especially beneficial if I don’t notice a mistake in the title until I have several replies on it already.

I am the kind of pedant who values correct spelling and the absence of small mistakes. I am also accident-prone and sometimes overlook things. So I am being entirely genuine in my appreciation of this feature.

A nice thing we do that’s different from Reddit is being able to edit post titles.

People have tried to copy at least some of the outrage communities over to Lemmy and Kbin and I hope they don’t take off.

I do see a point to r/mildlyinfuriating, for venting about something bad that happened that day. “Why not just vent to your friends and family?” Perhaps they all have a lot going on and you feel you’d be adding “listen to my small problems when you have huge ones” to their plate, so you go to the internet instead. I feel a lot of other outrage communities can serve that purpose too. And r/AmITheAsshole does, on the surface, legitimately seem like a spot to find out if you were the bad guy in a situation (or will be if you proceed with your intended course of action), why, and what you can do to fix what you did wrong. Unfortunately they seem to do more of making people angry and making them scroll more than letting people vent and make kinder life decisions.

I did get an unintended benefit from some of the outrage subs. When I was younger, I was unaware that some actions were unacceptable or unaware of why. In between “I can’t believe they did that, what an asshole” replies, there would also be “yeah, don’t they realize that by doing [unacceptable action] they’re [explanation of how and why it’s hurtful to others]” replies. This went a long way towards helping my young autistic self learn some social rules I was previously unaware of and that they’re not arbitrary but in place for a reason.

There are probably positive sides to the outrage subs but I agree that they’re overall a negative. I’m glad there’s no algorithm trying to recommend them to me despite hitting Not Interested repeatedly. I ignored it by never touching anything but Home and turning off home feed recommendations in settings, but before I did that it was annoying. And for people who might want home feed recommendations, it would be really bad to keep getting your “don’t show me this sub please” requests consistently ignored and to be consistently served outrage you don’t want.

I feel like I’ve seen a ton of comments about how the Fediverse is so nice, but I feel it’s the same as what was my Reddit experience. Just less likely to get enshittified because it’s not corporate, and not optimized for maximum engagement and thus max outrage, so still an upgrade.

Seeing bigots (not on Beehaw, but on other servers), although they’re downvoted to hell and contradicted? Check. (Yes, they were downvoted to hell and contradicted on Reddit too.)

Seeing contrarianism just for the sake of being contrary? Check. Happened twice on my own post. I asked people to please reply with advice to my post and not just “me too” or “I didn’t find a solution lol” and got two “I didn’t find a solution lol” so it’s contrarianism, not just me freaking out over a differing opinion. At best they didn’t fully read my post, didn’t get to the part where I make the request, but somehow I don’t think so and I’m usually the type to try to assume the best of people. Those two replies were thankfully removed by an admin, so unfortunately I don’t have any proof to show you that this happened anymore.

Seeing people being condescending? Check. Lots of “Imagine telling people with real problems [insert the original poster’s complaint about a non-world-ending issue]” type replies. Lots of “touch grass” or “and those who think [other opinion] are dorks who need to go outside more” added when a user disagrees with the person they reply to. Lots of all these other snide things that let you know a user thinks very little of not just your opinion but you as well, merely because they disagree with your opinion. And it’s used against people acting in good faith talking about stuff like video games, not against people spouting bigotry on a server that explicitly has rules against it.

The kicker is I don’t even go on the communities that you’d think would be more likely to get heated, like Politics. I have that blocked.

Maybe it was wrong of me to say this was like my Reddit experience. It was like my Reddit experience when I wandered into bigger subs. When I stayed in my niche topic subreddits I rarely saw this kind of behavior.

I still post here out of habit and to try to contribute to the Fediverse’s activity. But I see something like this in at least 75% of my Beehaw sessions. (Yes, I report the meanness when I see it.) I’m probably going to slow my activity and fall off, back to a Kbin server and a different Lemmy server where all I sub to is tiny hobby communities that don’t have any of this behavior. And where they didn’t promote themselves as a nice space, so I’ll be less shocked if I do run into bad behavior. I understand bad actors are everywhere but most of the people seem like abrasive actors and less like intentional disruptors—perhaps it’s people not being too aware of the norms of the instance they’re on because they come from a different server. But I’ve also seen this kind of behavior from people who are on Beehaw accounts. Would think group norms would filter the meanness out, but I encounter it more often here than I do in other places. Honestly not sure how to fix it, otherwise I’d be posting my suggestions because I really do want people to have a nice experience on the be(e) nice server, including myself.

I’m glad everyone else seems to be having a good experience.

I’m so pleased about this feature and would be discouraged if Lemmy and Kbin implement an algorithm for everyone in a way you can’t turn off.

What RSS feeds are you using?

As a cisgender, asexual Asian woman I don’t experience most of the oppression I’m “supposed” to and functionally share the experience of a cishet white guy. This is what everyone is supposed to have, a privileged experience, and yet I’ve managed to feel bad about not having more problems which is incredibly fucked up.

I’m not sure what the activists are doing that focuses on guilt-tripping you instead of actually helping the underserved and oppressed. The point is for those in a position to help to help others, not to tell the people in a position to help to feel bad about themselves for being well-off/unoppressed enough to be able to help. My sympathies that that happened to you. I always thought that was more online behavior that would disappear in real life, but I suppose I forgot that as much as people would like to think otherwise, nasty people online sometimes get off the keyboard and do things in the real world—they “touch grass” just as much as normal people.

I do appreciate this, but my anxiety problem is only caused by news. I hope others find the anxiety tips helpful, but luckily it’s not a problem I have in general so I’m going to ignore the health advice as you predicted. I think solving my news problem and consuming at a good balance would take less effort to do than following all of the health advice. Especially since I hate meditation, no matter how many times people cite health benefits for it for so many different things. Thank you for all the effort in writing those tips and I hope someone who needs to see it will see it :)