Something I see a lot in the Fediverse and left wing spheres is people rejecting, or making enemies of imperfect allies. The video I shared paints a great picture of what it’s like.
Here is some examples I’ve seen, and what reactions they’ve been met with.
“I ditched Gmail for Proton” is met with “That’s terrible the CEO is a Trump boot licker”
“Posts on r/BuyCanadian” is met with “Why are you still using Reddit, it’s American?”
“I’m pro trans but, there are some things I’m not 100% onboard with” is met with “Harsh criticism & Ban”
“I sold my diesel SUV for an electric KIA” is met with “You shouldn’t support China or drive a SUV, buy European instead”
“I switched to Brave instead of Chrome” is met with “Brave sucks its American and still part of chromium”
etc.
I so often see people harshly criticize and alienate people that are mostly on their side, and might in the near future be fully on their side.
Instead I’d like to see responses like
“Hey fantastic that you switched to Proton away from Gmail, consider moving to Migadu as they’re an even better solution”
“Awesome that you’re buying Canadian, while you’re at it consider checking out Lemmy or PieFed”
“Great job switching to Electric, next time consider buying a smaller European car there are many great reasons why they are better”
“Great that you’re pro-trance, what’s stopping your from being onboard with XYZ? Maybe I can change your mind?”
“Nice Brave is already a lot better than Chrome, even better would be LibreWolf, also make sure to try out Kagi or Qwant instead of google”
You don’t change someone’s mind by criticizing them, you need to have a discussion and bring them over, tone matters. How do we stop these criticisms and alienating imperfect allies?
I thought about what to comment there instead of just saying how cute this ‘remember the person’ post looks in the hostile modern internet, and then I recalled a couple of interactions where digital people in my app took their time and energy to explain me something. That’s not reddit/twitter-rare, but it would be nice if it would happen even more often. And, taken out from this one moment’s emotional state, I feel kinda bad later for a couple of interactions I had on this platform when I jumped onto assumptions or was in a combatative mood for nothing.