What ways do you know to attract users?
Perhaps there are those here who have been with Lemmy since its inception. It’s interesting to hear your experience in promoting your community or instance.
What ways do you know to attract users?
Perhaps there are those here who have been with Lemmy since its inception. It’s interesting to hear your experience in promoting your community or instance.
I agree with you that the best approach would be to let them have some “containment cages” here and there. They tend to attract legal trouble and get deplatformed anyway.
I remember seeing a bit of this in Krautchan. Sometimes it sounded like plain humour, but sometimes as punching down (like claiming that Austrians on the internet were actually German shitposters, since there was no internet in Austria), or some local hate boner against “Serwus”.
Do you happen to have better examples?
Remember the conflation between country and language? Their logic goes like this: Hunsrik is just a fake name for German language (implicitly Standard German), and this gets “proved” by the fact that there’s a Germany in the map but no “Hunsrikland”. The same reasoning is the one used against Talian (the name doesn’t help).
The “Nazi” association that people do is mostly to make the person look like the bad guy for speaking a minority language. It’s the same thing with “batateiro” (roughly “potato guy”), to imply redneckness.
Perhaps not surprisingly it’s the same sort of person who makes a big deal out of Portuguese as spoken in Brazil vs. in Portugal, Angola, etc., by pretending that “Brazilian Portuguese” is 1) internally homogeneous (nope) and 2) has some defining, linguistic feature (nope too). As if crafting a language out of nowhere, to fill the “gap”.
I’ve thought about moderation for this, as I was creating a local comm. Back then, I’ve concluded that it isn’t a big issue. Troublemakers beeline for the majority language (for visibility), and by the time that casual rule-breaking in a minority language becomes an issue, you’re probably able to ask for help from speakers of that language. Context also helps a lot.
That’s a great sign - for your community, the sense of belonging is still there, strong. That shold be the normal.
In Germany perhaps a better example would be the Sorbian speakers, I don’t know. But for Europe as a whole, Vergonha (“The Shaming”) is sadly a textbook example of it.
You can. And I’ve seen Swiss German speakers doing it informally. Since the distinction between dialect and language is mostly political in nature, there’s nothing that you can do with a “language” that you wouldn’t be able to, with a “dialect”.
Also, thank you for this conversation! (Sorry for not using German with you; I’m not too proficient in the language yet, and keeping it in English benefits other posters here.)
I think that worked well for the covid misinformation. And arguably quite some toxic (American) people left Twitter for gab.com and truthsocial.com
But… It has its downsides. I just had a conversation about right-wing populism in Germany. We - like many nations - currently suffer from that. I think filter bubbles are a big part of that dynamic. We discuss here, openly. While some other people radicalize themselves and each other on some Telegram channels. The far-right is on the rise everywhere and it starts to make me uncomfortable.
Regardless, we shouldn’t give them a voice here. They’re going to do it anyways, reasoning with them and giving good arguments does nothing and opposing them makes them even stronger. (I’m generally a very liberal person, but I count those populists to the toxic people and they should -in my eyes- all feel un-welcome where I am. Even in small quantities, they poison nice places and yell the loudest.)
Yeah, I see you’re well versed in internet culture, not many people know about Krautchan. It’s really not a good example for anything because it mainly contained trolls and shitposting. They were a group of people mainly commemorating their inside jokes. They really worked hard flashig out details to stupid small jokes like the one with the Austrians. I’ve seen this specific joke on other internet forums, albeit not often and not anything close to that degree.
We have German inside-jokes here on Lemmy, you can check out the community !ich_iel@feddit.de they do stupid jokes and innuendo, often about politics. But it’s not related to the old imageboards.
I don’t have any better examples. Well, jokes about stereotypes used to be a thing during the early parts of my life. Regarding regions: jokes about the inhabitants of East Frisia and people from East Germany. It was a play on stereotypes and on mainly on the same level with jokes about blonde women (stupid) and gay people. I think every culture has them. (“A texan walks into a bar in Ireland…” / “How do Mexicans sneeze? Quetzalquotle” …) I’ve wondered lately if those kinds of jokes are still around. I think they grew out of fashion. But that’s more playing with stereotypes than anything connected to language.
I agree. We should try it and see what happens, instead of coming up with hypothetical scenarios that are probably never going to play out this way. I know some people would disagree with that. For example here on Lemmy, the people from beehaw.org want to build something like a safe space. They have rigurously used defederation on other instances that have different approaches to moderation and signup. Sometimes even before anything happened. They won’t like taking chances. But I think we have to be bold and try things. Lemmy still has a few technical shortcomings. But the general (federated) design allows us to do both simultaneously.
That’s perfectly alright. English is the Lingua franca (common language) here. I’m very thankful I have it and it grants me the opportunity to efforlessly talk to people like you. I think recent developments in AI and machine translation like the local translation feature of Firefox 117 will soon enough bridge the gap more and more.
I suppose it’s difficult for minority languages. They are somewhat bound to become extinct. And people have to work hard to keep them alive. The world is very globalized. People commute to the next bigger city and work there. And generally move more often than they did a hundred years ago. Even in the small mountain villige in Tyrol in the Alps, the young people go study at an university in the city and a large percentage doesn’t come back after. They used to have a distinct dialect in every valley, back when they weren’t yet as interconnected as they are today.
I don’t know what OP was trying to achieve with this post. They didn’t engage in the conversation. I think internet communities have the abilitiy to connect non-english speakers. And even linguistic minorities. Lemmy would be a good platform for something like that. But I don’t think a top-down approach works here. We can (and should) advertise the service. But I don’t think doing missionary work will cut it. If you don’t have any insight on the culture, it’s really difficult to get to the people and make it a lasting and healthy thing. I wouldn’t know how to attract a dozen of the few thousand Sorbian speakers to get something going. And I don’t feel entitled to do so, either.
I’ve been imagining a federated platform that connects people who live nearby. As far as I know there isn’t anything like that around, yet. And there are some privacy issues to tackle if you want people to share their location. My use-case for something like that was to use it for classified ads. Or recommendations about concerts and cultural events. Maybe we should program something like that and also have language and dialect be part of the design.
Thanks for all the references you gave. I really can’t reply with anything of substance, here. I skimmed a few of the articles but I still have to read most of them properly. And I think I have to brush up on my knowledge about things like the Vergonha. For me, language discrimination hasn’t really been part of my perspective, yet. I grew up and live in a city. Things are more connected and more diverse here, and it happens to be a region thats close to speaking standard German anyways.
It’s really a fascinating topic. And encompassing lots of different dynamics. We can’t go back to live all our lives in a few kilometres of our birthplace in order to nurture local things. We need a more modern approach. But it’d be nice to keep those things alive and even actively doing something for it.
Yeah it’s awful how people subscribe to willful ignorance and right wing misinformation that can ultimately hurt them - like not getting vaccinated, and the right wingers are still the biggest group dying from COVID every day. We do suffer from right-wing populism which is the direct result of ignorance and lack of education in our country. The more stupid America gets, the more right wing it will become, until it completely falls apart as a country and never recovers.
I don’t know what to reply. I live far away but still on the same world. Shady politicians here follow what kind of stuff works in the US and copy the arguments from people like Ron DeSantis. I’ve even seen his face on the news when he visited Bavaria a few months ago. Imho German politicians should know better than take a picture with someone who has proper neo-nazi followers.
The USA is way ahead in being backwards. It makes me sad, too, and my solidarity to you.
I can’t imagine how it feels to have that many biggots and idiots around. And I suppose it depends on where exactly you live. But I think we’re headed the wrong direction. I have nice neighbors, though. I don’t think the situation here would look desperate to me if I wasn’t reading the news. So I’m still optimistic. But I have no solution for the short or medium term in the USA. There seem to be nice people around and also sometimes good things happen. Hope it turns out okay in the end, even if it looks desperate now.
Most of our US politicians are also shady and very crooked. Very much in it for the money they can get from special interest groups. Ron Desantis is an example - he doesn’t care about anyone, and he constantly tries to pass laws to hurt LGBTQ people just because it pleases his followers. He’s really a scumbag.
America had the potential to be a great country, certainly it had the right idea - but as usual, people are crooked and untrustworthy and have ruined it completely.
I read the news also, and it’s a sure way to get totally depressed about the world and what is going on. I think man’s natural inclinication is to make unhappiness for each other. There are some good people, but they are very far between. Hope it all goes well for you there in spite of all this.