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.
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.
No! That’s communism and we can’t have that!
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.
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
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.
Does the Fediverse have more of a mental health problem than other social media sites? Or is it just more visible and more likely to be hidden away?
Yeah, exactly. Commercial social media sites pay workers in low-wage countries to moderate content. Plenty of stories out there about the toll it takes on them, but it’s easy enough for the commercial sites to just keep finding more cheap labor. Fedi is mostly volunteers so it’s quite different, and much more visible.
From the article:
If you want a certain feature, or are waiting for the release of a new version of the software you use, or have a bug: I urge you to please be patient with the developers. There’s an enormous amount of work to do, and every project is understaffed and strained for finances at the moment.
Please please please be nice to people that are taking their own time and mental energy from their own lives without material compensation to give you something cool to enjoy.
I get things can be frustrating when something needs fixing, but people that contribute here are mostly overworked and underfunded.
And those that are helping out but feeling overworked, do take breaks regularly before you get permanently burnt out on it. That should be normalized, it goes for Beehaw admins and other Fediverse admins mods and contributors as well.
Please please please be nice to people that are taking their own time and mental energy from their own lives without material compensation to give you something cool to enjoy.
Not only that, sign up to donate to their Patreons. I give a buck a month to my mastodon instance and my two lemmy instances.
I am calling for the professionalization of the fediverse since December of last year. The donation-based and “pay-what-you-want” systems that the most popular instances are adopting are not sustainable and they are not fair.
Paying for servers is the least of the problems. Dealing with hundreds of thousands of users who are freeriding on the donations from some generous minority is. The income from an instance might grow linearly with the number of users, but the amount of issues grows exponentially because of the potential number of interactions.
Instead of these handful of servers who are concentrating the majority of users, we should be aiming at having an explosion of smaller instances who have a well defined, limited size and where every members contributes, no matter how little. When everyone contributes, then everyone feels responsible and the burden gets to be shared among all. When a handful of people give and the majority does not reciprocate, we get these cases of people feeling burn out and isolated.
I agree with your assessment that the Fediverse would be healthier encouraging small to mid-sized servers to populate with each having active groups of members contributing a fair share of money or time.
I’m just confused by the other parts of your comment. Donation-based financing appear to work for some instances like Beehaw at least for hosting and backup costs, but how do you determine what is a fair contribution and who is freeloading? Should the admins be taking a minimum wage salary from the fund as fair compensation of their work? Are the free-loaders the prolific posters or commenters, the chronic lurker who only votes, or the people that only visit the website once in a while?
A slush fund non-profit to help get small and mid-sized servers up, running and maintained as suggested in the article is a good idea.
Also I’ve long been telling the admins since 2 months ago to take breaks as needed and forgive themselves for mistakes they might make. It’s a lot of work, and burnout shouldn’t be normalized. Instead, taking breaks for the purpose of mental health before it reaches a breaking point should be normalized.
About the first part of your comment, some of the ideas around “professionalization” imo would make Beehaw lose a part of it that I love. How in my experience it’s a little rough around the edges but friendlier in a deeper way than most social media, relying on common sense and mutual understanding to keep arguments from getting too heated, and a strict but well-defined and equitable approach to moderation. I get why it might work better in many aspects, but the raw conversation I was able to have even with people I vehemently disagreed with on Beehaw has been an amazing experience.
Money won’t change the fact that moderating humans online as a job sucks either way. Plenty of people are stuck in crappy jobs that they hate and only do because not eating is worse.
