Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

The existence of a "thumbs down" reaction button on a platform just invites brigading and harassment, it does not contribute to constructive conversation in any way; and it is a community management error to introduce a thumbs-down button just because you also have a thumbs-up button

Composting is just feeding vegetables to other vegetables, ie. vegetable cannibalism

You know the "bystander effect"? The idea that in a crisis, when there's multiple people around, nobody will do anything because everybody is expecting someone else to do something - the claim being that "individuals don't have a sense of responsibility anymore".

It's a widely believed concept. It's also based on faulty data, never credibly proven, and increasingly being debunked through research of real-world incidents. By all appearances, the theory is complete nonsense.

(The original incident that sparked this theory ended up being much more about failure of the police to respond to calls for help: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Kitty_Genovese - but that's a different topic.)

More interesting is the question of why people believe they have experienced the bystander effect themselves, if it doesn't exist. And we're not just talking biased interpretation of events, but actual scenarios where nobody stepped in to help.

And I'd like to propose a more credible explanation: what if people just *don't know what to do*, and need guidance?

Look at this video of an incident, for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtqBU5xmv5Y (CW: video of fairground ride almost falling over, no injuries to my knowledge)

You'll notice that initially, nobody is responding, nobody is doing anything. But as soon as one person runs towards the ride to counterbalance it - everybody else joins in!

Does this really look like "nobody has a sense of responsibility"? Because to me, it looks a lot more like "people just didn't know what to do, until someone showed them", and the difference is subtle to an external observer.

I think this is a particularly important thing to consider when people raise the bystander effect as a reason why police needs to exist; it's based on the premise that you cannot trust 'regular people' to take the necessary actions to deal with incidents.

But that doesn't seem to be true - they just need to be prepared to know how! And to top it off, poor handling of an incident by police is how the entire theory came to exist in the first place.

Growing increasingly frustrated by people going "this is not how Mastodon was framed to me, it was described as a coherent Twitter alternative! I have been deceived!" while many of us have expended considerable effort to debunk that idea in the face of a tidal wave of lazy journalism spreading it further

I honestly think the indieweb circles still have a *lot* of work left to do, and a lot of introspection at their own ranks to carry out, before I can take them seriously.

As it stands, it consists of way too many people who are speaking from a privileged position, or actively inviting or cooperating with bad actors (eg. corporations).

It's all big words about independence and personal websites, but not enough words about how we can make all of that actually accessible to a diverse set of marginalized folks for whom "setting up a website" isn't something they grew up with.

And meanwhile there's plenty of corporate sponsorships, spotlights of commercial ventures, and so on. It sure doesn't feel like the "web for the people" that it tries to present itself as.

Indieweb folks should start centering marginalized folks (and that doesn't just mean "women" either!) and talking about how to solve the *difficult* problems of accessibility on an independent web.

And crucially: more marginalized folks speaking, and less white tech dudes speaking *for* them.

(This is not a criticism of any one particular incident or person; it's a long-standing 'background frustration' that seems to get reconfirmed every time I run into indieweb stuff.)