You can see it if you check https://fedidb.org/. Monthly active users have gone from just a hair under one million to somewhere around 1.4 million and still growing. How do we think this will go? How do we feel about this influx of new users? Has PixelFed done something different that Mastodon hasn’t?
I feel like I didn’t really recognize having different “platforms” like Mastodon, PixelFed, etc would give multiple opportunities for the fediverse to make a “first” impression with people.
So far so good! Some very unscientific observations from spending an absurd amount of time scrolling local on pixelfed.social:
The people coming from Instagram and TikTok seem way less grumpy than the microbloggers. People are having a lot of fun and not complaining about much. It’s kind of a trip seeing happy, joyful people on the Fediverse to be honest. Everything in the world suuuuuuuucks right now, so it’s felt like a bit of a refuge. Sometimes I’ll accidentally bounce over to the global feed and oh man is the change in tone jarring.
People don’t seem to have a problem with servers like the Twitter migrants did. Folks are still talking about it a lot on Mastodon though. I’ve literally not seen a single post about Pixelfed being “too complicated” to succeed, whereas it was (and is) pretty common to see “this place is great and all, but…” posts in the microblogging neighbourhood. Not sure why this is but it might be because the people coming to Pixelfed are generally younger than Mastodon users. This is just a guess, but I’d estimate the average age of Mastodon users is maybe mid-40s. Most of the people pouring into Pixelfed appear to be in their mid-to-late-20s. Perhaps those folks are just more accustomed to servers through Discord and gaming? Though people are generally captioning photos and not writing out lists of things they’re unhappy about and they could also just be unaware of servers altogether…
Pixelfed is easily the most diverse “corner” of the Fediverse now. Fedi is very white but a large number coming over now aren’t. Pixelfed.social has probably gone from being 75% men to 75% women in the last few weeks. Diversity is the best possible thing for the social web.
I’ve seen a bunch of people on Instagram promoting Feb 1st as “Global Switch Day” so hopefully it’ll keep blowing up.
This was a huge part of why I now spend more time over on pixelfed as opposed to here – I have a few accounts I’ve used here, and every single time I’m in a thread about a woman who’s been sexually assaulted, or about a woman’s shelter, etc, the ‘not all guys’/‘men suffer too’ bros come flooding in. I’ve logged out of accounts for weeks, switched to another one, just to let them scream into the void of my inbox for awhile, and it happens every time. I befriended a woman here when I responded to one of the most sad-to-read replies in one of those threads, that read like: “Women are often abused by men–not all men, just some, and I want to reiterate that this is about those specific men…” and it just went on and on trying to placate the inevitable furious white men in the comments section. As someone who lived as a white man for over forty years, I know just how whiny, sad, and ridiculous they look, and they they still get their way.
Over on pixelfed I haven’t once had an interaction even close to that. It’s extremely pleasant, people helping each other learn the platform, people asking for help in bad home situations, and it’s a community. People have messaged me when I made mistakes linking things in extremely pleasant ways, and two people debated alt-text (is it helpful to those who use audio captions, or is it training AI?) without once insulting each other. Lemmy was very briefly that, yet there’s a lot of tribalism that is not only unnecessary, and frankly, childish. I’m quite often embarrassed of my fellow men here.
(Well, non-binary now, yet I still feel the experiences of 40+ years of being a man are helpful.)
So anyway, I agree pixelfed is a lot more inviting, and a lot more diverse.
I think that’s, usually, not necessary. The “going on at length” part, that is. People want to know you’re not literally Andrea Dworkin, trying to actively reinforce the toxic AF “women are always victims, men are always perpetrators” narrative etc, but it takes like five words to make that clear.
Complications might arise when you’re trying to simultaneously assuage hurt men and misandrists. I fear it’s either “‘kill all men’ is toxic” or “‘kill all men’ is a valid expression of your anger, let it all out”, there’s no real space for compromise, there.
That all said your post and this reply probably wouldn’t have happened on pixelfed so your point stands. Disengagement is perfectly valid.
…
/face in hands
Okay I took a minute and I have to go through this with you.
So just so I’m clear, all women have to make clear they don’t think what Andrea Dworkin does (sigh), because all men aren’t responsible for men as a group being, statistically, the perpetrators of rape, partner violence, etc?
If you start a sentence with “all men” then you should take a step back and say “fucked-up men” or suchlike, is all I’m saying. That was even three words, not five. You can also say something like “men should speak up more often”, that’s a general call to action, and not a blanket verdict on individuals who might be reading it. The “yes all men” of this song (total banger btw).
This is a general norm I apply to everyone regarding every topic: Don’t paint groups with broad, antagonistic, brushes. It never does any good, no matter who does it to whom or whatever the excuses are one might be able to come up with to justify it. The means are vile, the ends at best neutral, there’s no benefit to be had.
Also side note at least according to the statistics over here in Germany partner violence, if psychological violence is taken into account, is almost exactly even among hetero couples and, in the overwhelming number of cases, mutual: Assholes hook up with assholes they just, statistically, express it differently. Things might very well look differently where you’re from, another reason to not generalise.
No. Also in no example was that how anything started. I said women can talk about being victims of violence and men always do what you’re doing right now.
1/3 of German women had experienced physical and/or sexual violence. ONE THIRD.
Stop trying to make this something that’s even between men and women. It isn’t. You’re giving these guys in my inbox furious about exactly the reason for my original fucking comment a green light to do this shit by hand-waving the reality women face.
If this is how Lemmy is going to be, I’m so thankful pixelfed is exploding in size because women deserve the goddamn break.
When men talk about being victims of psychological violence, what happens then? That they have been driven into depression, even into being violent, by an intimate parter, parent, or such?
How do people react? How did you react?
They are reminded that if they wanted to talk about that, they were more than welcome, but a thread about a woman who was talking about her sexual assault isn’t the place to ‘what about us.’
Also cool dodge of having your entire argument torn apart only to abandon it and switch to a different one.
I was a young man who was sexually assaulted, and by a woman, and I still know that doesn’t mean that it’s equal. It’s people like you who de-legitimize what I went through by making it seem like a game of Brinkmanship with women, when in reality it was the women I spoke to who got me through it, and the men who asked if it was possible for me, as a man, to be raped, and then mocked me for it.
And what I’m talking about doesn’t invalidate that for even a second.
I can’t relate to it because male culture doesn’t work like that over here but, sure, it sucks. Still doesn’t make sense to ignore psychological violence in the overall picture, though. I’d call the stuff the men display there narrative violence: They internalised that they can never be victims, and then accosted you with their self-perception.
This isn’t one of those threads. Yet what did you do? We had a thing going on, there, there was banger music. Seriously if you haven’t yet listen to it. Use the UK subtitles.
The only place I know on lemmy on which it’s possible to have a whole thread about this is !mensliberation@lemmy.ca. Press doesn’t like to talk about it, presumably because of a predictable “what about the women” pushback, so it never comes up in the news communities. Plenty of sociological research exists, though.
I didn’t want to go into the weeds of how BKA statistics are police statistics and in no way, shape, or form, suitable for anything without taking both the actual criminal statistics (cases brought to trial as well as convictions) and other surrounding factors such as under/overreporting, current force focus, etc, into consideration. According to police statistics, if you report your phone stolen and then retract that because you found it again, that’s a theft.