New Users: Minds is not Facebook, My experience

Since coming to Minds.com, I’ve realized a lot of things about the place. It’s hard to sum it all up. But if I did, the word that would come to mind is:

Community

Minds is a community where most other social media is not.

Vibrant

Here, we have a collection of political dissidents, Google plus refugees, and journalists who speak a truth a bit too hard hitting for the vanilla blandness of the politically correct landscape. We have artists, photographers, writers, and musicians who value freedom of expression.

We have crypto enthusiasts, anarchists, socialists, national socialists, centrists, western chauvinists, liberals, conservatives and every shade of wrong-thinker. We have occultists, new agers, conspiracy theorists, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, atheists, and mystics. We have the social media curious and more. We have free thinking. A diversity of thought.

In short, there’s a lot of very differently thinking people here. It’s a melting pot of color next to the bland sleepy tones of censored social media.

 But despite all that difference, we band together over the freedom this place offers, and it’s potential.

A Virtual Community

Let me tell you a story about that.

I had an unfortunate experience with a user here, who I gave crypto under a promise they did not fill. I was a new user, naive to crypto, and also how tokens worked.

I told the staff, and they were supportive and looked into it. This shows their good intent. But what the community did was eye-opening. 

Not only did many voices speak up, to elaborate on how things work, what the rules were, and what kind of recourse I had. On that topics, Realmindschan wrote an excellent piece on how tokens and crypto work that I think is a must read, and I’ll link at the end.

But they also banded together. They asked hard questions of this, now deactivated user. And they asked for further proof from me. They wanted the matter resolved, and they were impartial. And significantly, they banded together and helped compensate my loss with many very generous donations of tokens.

They helped make the wrong, right.

Thriving and Supportive

As an artist, I’ve also received plentiful support for my creative works, networking with other users here. In my blog writing, I’ve encountered enthusiastic engagement on topics you’d never see elsewhere, from people with technical to economic to those with philosophical or spiritual backgrounds.

This place is like a little like a small town in how we actually related to each other. A crazy tent city of different thinkers, yes, and often we disagree. And because we have free speech, often we do so with some zeal. People used to sanitized social media might be surprised by that! Be warned. 

But something new users need to understand is this is an online community.

It’s not a bland anonymous city, but a place where if you have a problem and speak out, others will likely help. We also share in a passion for what this place represents, in its potential. And we talk about that vigorously. 

As other social media becomes increasingly censored and dystopian, this place is our oasis. 

If you need a rundown on how tokens and crypto work look here. Indeed almost anything on here has an excellent community made a tutorial so have a look in the blog section if you are confused!