I think the key here is reminding ourselves why we are on lemmy, as opposed to other social media sites. I’ll speak for myself, having recently discovered lemmy on reddit while looking for alternatives to that site:

• Lack of corporation/state control (i.e. tencent buying a stake in reddit),

• Lack of censorship (while bearing in mind that individual communities can and should retain the right to enforce rules)

• Privacy (lightweight interface which doesn’t sell your data to advertisers)

• A new start (ideally learning from mistakes of previous forum/social media endeauvours)

In my opinion structurally incentivising long form debate as opposed to hot takes in political/worldnews instances is one way of improving the discourse. I enjoy the r/geopolitics approach (though I am aware that many here will disagree with the political slant of that subreddit), in that submissions are heavily regulated and require an input from the OP as to why they are posting a given source.

One thing I would also say from my perspective, is that I am a novice in regards to the technical elements of lemmy as far as federalised platforms and struggle to participate in technology based privacy discussions.

Perhaps outreach from the more tech savvy elements of the lemmy community towards “tech novices” (among whom I count myself) in regards to internet privacy and the privacy benifits of lemmy and other such endeauvours would be helpful here in retaining users. It should be easy to find a simple explanation on the advantages of lemmy vis a vis other (hopefully soon to be) obsolete (heh) platforms.

Some of these points don’t directly attatch to the discussion of the OP, but I feel this thread has engendered much discussion in the wider community.

tl;dr: privacy, lack of massed external interference good, outreach to less tech savvy, but privacy interested users good, dispensing with a datascraping monetisation model very good, repeating mistakes of established platforms bad bad bad

Edit: Cleanup

I agree that maybe there’s something that could be done.

Fact checking is tricky

As to fact-checking, I’m not really sure what to do. On one hand I worry the ‘reputation’ system would be too restrictive. On the other hand, in general (by which I mean that I haven’t seen this crop up in Lemmy but I wouldn’t like to see) I’d hate to see anti-vax, flat-earth, or otherwise blatant fake science showing up.

Nudging cognition and affect is as well, but seems more viable

But there is something that could be done regarding the way in which the Lemmy interface nudges our thoughts and feelings. The paradigmatic example in the Fediverse is Eunomia. I wonder (and don’t doubt we could find) literature on these nudges to improve interactions.

The goal could be to avoid finger-pointing as well as aggression, and to incentivize thought/understanding, kindness, and, in general, positive emotions so that we’re able to be both flexible and critical. Note that the positive emotions part is not me being hippy-dippy; by now it’s well established that positive emotions enhance cognition and permit a much broader set of automatic thinking habits than negative emotions. In particular, negative emotions have no desirable characteristics that positive emotions can’t deliver (make sure you read p.110 ¶2 sentences 4 and 5).

It would be great if we can find a way of changing interfaces in such a way as to nudge us towards positive emotions and critical thinking.

But until the heavy lifting for that is done (something that, once I feel comfortable with my CS training, I could attempt), I wonder if the minimal Democratic manifesto could be done with tricky situations like these in mind. In other words, make an explicit, clear, and widespread expectation that we’re here to share, understand critically, and interact kindly.