My thought process:

1. Post wholesome content. You need to be providing what you want to see, first and foremost. Provocative content is easy engagement, but wholesome stuff is both a little harder to find and to get people to interact with.

2. Support other people doing what you like. See a post you like with no or low comments? Leave a comment to show that person other people want more. Likes are nice and all, but I personally post things I'm interested in and want to discuss. If I get likes, but nobody is talking with me, I get bored and feel like posting less.

3. Clarify when you post or comment. If you're sharing an opinion, make that clear. If you're interested in a subject but understand you aren't an expert, make sure you're not coming off as one. If you're bringing facts, support them with quotes and citations and be sure to credit others where it's due.

4. Respect constructive discussions. If people are rude, feel free to ignore them. No one wants to see 2 stubborn randos arguing in a thread though. If people give counterpoints or ask questions of your opinion, return the politeness given or steer it back to positive interior you feel it isn't.

5. Discipline is required if I can't stick to my principles that I've outlined. If I think what I'm going to post is going to rule people up or if I think I'm saying too much about something I'm not very informed on, am I better off hitting cancel than post?

1. Try not to fall into the trap of groupthink. The "reddit hive mind" was one of the worst things about our predecessor, and it seems to have followed us here.

2. Understand that humans are not, and never will be, perfect. Endless purity tests do not accomplish anything other than turning away newcomers.

3. For the love of God, pick up a hobby. My feed on any given day is 99.8% US politics and activism. I'm not saying that these things aren't important, but it gets exhausting when it's the only thing people want to discuss.

My take is that the fediverse is wholesome. Today's news isn't but that is our current reality and the topics on a social network will always cover current events.

But when you really pay attention to the people here, they are wholesome. And if what you see is a lot of terrible people in your feed, start watching the instances they are coming from. Frequently the difference between a good and bad experience here is how well you curate your feed and how well your instance is moderated.

we seem to be popular with reddit users that were banned from reddit, which on average seems to translate to less than wholesome behavior - so maybe lemmy's whole reddit-alternative branding works against us that way.

maybe developing a distinct UI so it's not just a reddit clone, and directing features in a way that is appealing more to particular communities or people we wish to attract would be a good idea, rather than trying to directly replace reddit as a whole?

for example, attracting academics by supporting built-in LaTeX syntax rather than requiring a browser extension

Stop posting world news (unless it’s specifically wholesome news).

From a reader perspective, filter out everything news related (or subscribe to everything you want to see and only browse by subscribed).

When you create a piefed account it asks if you want to filter the "Trump & Musk" keywords by default, that’s pretty cool.

Liberal use of the block button.

There's two subreddits I really miss: AskScience and AskHistorians. I was a regular and flaired contributor to AskScience, but its super helpful to generate a response when there's a good question. It would feel weird opining on a random science topic that I come up with. And I loved the well sourced AskHistorians posts. When I do see a c/AskHistorian post on Lemmy the responses are very low effort

I'll go for the technical side: having a distributed accounts manager so you only need one account to use every aspect of the Fediverse.

Try to be insightful, supportive, and ask questions that lead to discussion

My biggest issue with the fediverse and all alt social media in general is due to the current social climate and censorship on mainstream SM platforms, every alt platform is inundated with politics. Politics is very hot button, it breeds negative interactions and very often is worded in such a way that its very ragebait-y in order to increase engagement. I have this issue with Bluesky as well, even after blocking bad actors and bad communities, and muting keywords I still find myself overwhelmed with political content and I find it difficult to not engage even if I support the causes.

When I consume media that is not politically related, I find people are very positive and easy to connect with, the problem is that type of content is few and far between.

Let's talk about politics a whole hell of a lot less. Yes, things are awful and insane, but there is good stuff to discuss.

Please don't, disneyfication is as bad as enshitifcation.

Hmm, maybe some more diversity? Right now it seems to be mostly hypernerds who use fediverse services. When was "Ask Lemmy" about web development questions.. you know

When you've been shown facts that contradict your argument, concede politely. People will respect you for it. In fact they'll probably respect you more than if you go down endless chains of trying to save face.

Remember, this should go both ways. There will be times when people concede to you, and other times when you need to concede.

I don't think it needs to take very many people doing this to create a snowball effect where it becomes the common way to debate.

It would be cool if people stopped thinking the only ideologies are their ideology and fascism

There are ideologies that are bad that arent far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist

Generously start using CWs (Content warnings) as folks used to do in the early days of Fediverse.

Welcome folks, be friendly, get to know people. I've started a podcast, because I had this exact question. I talk to folks from around the fedi and just have a fireside chat. We need more projects like this that show who and what we are and it has to be shown outside of Fedi as well.

If you're interested the show is at video.firesidefedi.live/@show . Also on YT, but delayed by months and with new videos I'm pulling some out as a teaser to go to Peertube.

WITH FIRE!!!!!!

Ok, this doesn't answer your question, but is that an ICQ icon?? God I haven't seen that thing in a bazillion years.

Sharing nice posts and personal experiences. We can discuss news pieces all day long under anonymous accounts with no need to really communicate with each other, just competing for a best take in the comment section, and it's something else entirely to discuss some OC with a person who shared it. Fedi is small and tight, so acting like we are a small community and not the Frontpage of the Internets may be beneficial to our existence there, leading to less toxic behavior and more quality interactions.

Ask youself, where have you seen the best comments and interactions? I've seen them when either post is OC, or if a person under a random post gives their expertise in something. While we can't predict the latter (if there's a Boing malfunction and there's a guy who worked with them who can go into details), we can encourage OC posters to do their thing and find if we ourselves can join them.

Can we all just post something instead of redirecting , every subreddit has this shit . I wanted to ask something about passkeys and i made a big post for that but all the technology sub just deleted it and I got the answer for it on reddit within 2 hr also there are no fun sub as well all the memes look shit and boring . No wonder nobody uses fediverse

Quit artificially upvoting US politics?

Mandatory fursona creation required upon account activation.

we require men to read a single feminism book, just one /j

Implement a way for users to subscribe to an updating community/user blocklist. That way new users can get rid of all the crazies and block all the ml instances.

Change the sorting algorithms?

I’m not sure of the details, but the default “Hot” algorithm for Lemmy surfaces ragebait from popular subs first, while Scaled or New Comments are way more wholesome.

This should be an ongoing experiment, but I think “Hot” or whatever is default should boost quiet communities more.

Maybe dispense with the power-tripping moderators and also give me lots of money

Change the world to be less hostile toward ordinary people. Improve general conditions and decrease inequality. I know it's a tall order, but it's a pretty big step toward people being less angry, aggrieved, and sullen.

More attainable, and not applicable to everyone (but works on me), more pics of kittens and puppies and other cute critters. Sorry that I don't have a more actionable philosophical suggestion.