Improving fediverse culture and social behavior

Fediversity Fediverse Futures
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Let me offer a different perspective:

  1. People are coming to fediverse, bringing with them a set of behaviour patterns, deeply ingrained through their socialisation in:
    – toxic capitalist society
    – even more toxic (artificially intensified) “social” corpomedia.

  2. There is no “rite of passage”, reorientation course nor 12 steps towards being decent(ralised) human being, they could use to acquire different social skills or habits.

  3. Proposed measures…

  • Proper moderation procedures and more powerful moderation tools (see also here and here )
    […]
  • Technology improvement / extensions / evolution

…replicate and perpetuate those from their previous environment; thus they are unlike to change the problematic behaviour. They rather mitigate effects, as @aschrijver mentioned, in a palliative way.
Granted, we need short-term solutions. But, as we create a future here, I strongly believe it is our responsibility to go beyond them.

  1. To build healthy culture and social behaviour patterns we can use two more tools that can become a long-term way to help people transform their attitude towards a more integral, responsible and cooperative one.

4.1. On an individual level, there are several proven methods usually used by people leaving various kinds of addiction (and I do not have in mind psychoactive substances, rather abusive, dysfunctional and toxic social relationships). I can imagine some kind of counselling, offered by a community to newcomers, if changing their behaviour appears to be hard for them. I am a great admirer of nordic larp tradition as a tool to re-train or instil social skills, but certainly, there is a much wider palette available.

4.2. On the network level, I think we should invite already existing communities, known as either healthy and supportive or at least successfully struggling with mainstream toxicity, to become co-creators of fediverse. Offering them technical support in building their fediverse presence could create examples for other communities and perhaps some kind of best practice codification, from those who can prove their proficiency in creating communities we believe we need.
Again, my experience is limited, but at least three examples I can recommend:

  • Transition Network communities, where the whole dynamics is concentrated on making community better for everyone (they are probably the only revolutionary group using tea and cookies as their tools of subversion).
  • Regenerative Culture, Earth-based Spirituality, and Permaculture movement, Starhawk being one of the prominent organisers there.
  • Various entities within cooperative and resilience movement, such as
    • Mutual Aid Disaster Relief, a grassroots disaster relief network based on the principles of solidarity, mutual aid, and autonomous direct action.
    • Platform cooperatives, businesses that use a website, mobile app, or protocol to sell goods or services. They rely on democratic decision-making and shared ownership of the platform by workers and users.
    • Resilience.org project of Post Carbon Institute.
      …and many others.

I imagine fediverse as a multidimensional project, helping people transform their individual and social lives towards more cooperative, healthy and mature dynamics. We need partners to achieve this, and I hope my perspective may help find them in less obvious places.

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