On big commercial social media, people think the websites they are on are a big deal: opinions you share there, people you interact with, engagement you receive. It must matter SO MUCH to them - especially to influencers who earn some money from it.
Well, commercial Web is an obvious fodder to the Fedi but what about other alternative social spaces? These small, timy websites with barely any activity on them… there’s no place for such delusions. They aren’t changing the world and they know it.
Fediverse, in comparison… oof. You see, it is the Future. If We succeed, the Evil will be defeated. The whole world depends on the few people who ended up on here. It is a quiet place now but it will inevitably become the most popular thing. The Year of Linux Fediverse is any day now!
This feel of self-importance and superiority leads to the level of drama almost on-par with the corporate socials which is highly unusual in such small online spaces, at least in my experience.
I never thought about Lemmy’s communities as one of the reasons for the combative attitude that’s so common here. Although, I disagree that Mastodon and Reddit are less affected by it: Reddit definitely had serious fights between subreddits and they stopped being so prominent primarily because of Reddit’s heavy-handed moderation. Mastodon, on the other hand, is defined by defederations (which are worse than on Lemmy) and since visibility depends almost entirely on the amount of followers (tags are rather unpopular on Masto), groups form naturally around popular users whose boosts are the main way to be seen.
I can totally confirm that Lemmy users are susceptible to tribalism - just for the amount of times I heard that someone being called a fascist/tankie/lib because they are from a certain Lemmy instance. And I know I think this way too sometimes.
You’re probably right. I don’t spend a lot of time on Mastodon. I likely missed drama and defederation. Other than the occasional shitstorms. But I think that’s just “a thing” on microblogging platforms. And the German privacy nerds I follow on Mastodon do way less of it anyway.
And regarding language… That seems to be a factor as well. The German speaking community here on Lemmy established a different atmosphere. From my perspective, there’s way less yelling at each other amongst the Germans than in the broad English speaking Threadiverse. There’s trolls and a lot of memelords, but seems to me some people still remember the “Netiquette”. And those ideology- or identity wars aren’t as loud. I heard from other people, it’s similar (also a noticeably different atmosphere) in the French speaking corner.