The Fediverse has a Mental Health Problem

The Cuuuuube@beehaw.org to Free and Open Source Software@beehaw.org – 192 points –
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This is a very interesting article about the long-term sustainability of the Fediverse for moderators, administrators, and developers. We've already had two of our lovely Beehaw admins take breaks to take care of themselves as they experience the burnout associated with maintaining a community, and I think for a lot of use we already know how exhausting it can be to take a center stage position in an online community.

Unfortunately, I don't have any great starting points for what to do, but at least talking about it is a start.

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I don't think the Fediverse has a mental health problem. I think people online tend to be terrible, regardless of the platform...

The whole planet has a mental health problem. Was discussing this earlier in another community with a German user.

We live in a system that isolates people and makes them fill their lives with long hours of dull work for fear of becoming penniless and homeless, while they watch this crazy consumption led by sociopathic billionaires destroying everything they love about the planet day by day. And then when people are miserable because of these problems, they receive pills and conversation (if they're lucky enough to be able to afford them) while the material problems continue. It's no wonder we're all a bit messed up.

Capitalism is shit. We're brainwashed to believe that there's only so much and we have to get as much as can and before everyone else, damn the cost, even if it's our mental health. I don't understand how we can't look at it from the other angle and say, if there's only so much, let's protect it. Let's share what we have so everyone can have fun. Let's care about everyone and lift everyone up.

I don’t think people really realize just badly the pandemic affected peoples mental health and how that impact hasn’t really decreased much at all

I think even before that, there were major issues. The pandemic just made it so we couldn't ignore them any longer. Which is ridiculous given how much people were acting out. But now everyone is aware of how important it is, because so many were trapped with their own thoughts and/or monotony. Even so, our governments paid lip service and then failed to make meaningful changes. My government cares more about getting people back into the office than making sure mental health care is accessible to everyone.

I agree. I became an adult during the pandemic, and the way mental health is approached towards children and teenagers is really really bad and has only gotten worse these past few years.

The thing is, there's so many people that want to help and can change things. But they just don't have the access. For my grandparents, University was free and then when those people graduated, they slapped a charge on it. So we have less people able to afford to study it, let alone do the job where their open salary is now less than McDonalds. It's so stupid.

The pandemic just exposed the lie that in the worst case, the government, or your job, or someone in power, would help you.

There's not really much "going back" from that realization, especially when we can literally find news articles every day about how another politician is campaigning against us for one thing or another.

Today, for instance, I discovered that Arkansas had passed a law to make it possible to criminally charge librarians if they lend out the "wrong" books to people!

I don't think that's anything new, just a new flavour.

I still think it changes the calculus for how it feels moderating an online space when you're volunteering vs when you're getting paid for it. The latter can let you emotionally datach yourself from it. The former? It's an act of love for which you receive hate

Very few moderators on reddit are getting paid anything to moderate subreddits, the key difference is that lemmy is still in the early stages of moderation tools.

If those "moderation tools" means something like the automated blanket moderation with no recourse that's going on Reddit... we already have that, it's Reddit and pretty much every other for-profit platform where "some false positives" are acceptable as long as they don't damage the income sources by offsetting the influx of new users.

At least a few third-party apps are being adapted to Lemmy, those were where most of the richest moderation tools were. Reddit has a pretty substantial, matured API to handle a lot of those moderation tasks. That’s where Lemmy needs to catch up more than anything else when talking about moderation. I think that moderation in Lemmy will be important, there’s a lot more at stake for these communities if proper moderation is not in place.

Yeah, you're absolutely right. Some people just can't handle the "anonymity" the internet proves and take every chance to be a dick

I disagree. When you are paid for it you become reliant on it to make ends meet in your life, so you're more willing to put up with absolute garbage that you shouldn't have to. This forces people to try to detach from it as a coping mechanism while they fall further down the hole. Paying them won't change a thing about the mental health issues and will probably make it worse.

I'm not saying we shouldn't pay them, but we shouldn't look at it as the fix for this either.