A lot of people feel drawn to simple living or digital minimalism because they feel a constant need to be connected and stay up to date, and feel less and less in control because of the attention economy and how algorithms are developed to maximize your attention. While the fediverse might not work in the same exploitative way as centralised services does, there’s still a feedback loop that keeps you coming back.
To what extent does the problems of the attention economy on the human mind plague the fediverse? Is replacing centralised services with Lemmy/Mbin/Piefed and Mastodon just opting for a “lesser evil” in a sense? What are your thoughts?
Even if social media like lemmy/mastodon takes over places like reddit/xitter, the difference is that the big corps have an incentive to keep you refreshing their services so that you keep seeing more ads and add more engagement. Therefore they focus on ragebait and dark patterns to keep their audience hooked and coming back constantly, regardless of their mental health.
The fediverse doesn’t have these incentives as its run by users for users. I don’t care how often you visit lemmy.dbzer0.com , in fact, the less people refresh the page the less I pay, and since I am covering my costs with donations, I don’t have any perverse incentives towards the people and communities we host.
Lemmy moves slowly. I can come here and comment on things from two days ago cause it’s still pretty high up on the list. I think that would reduce the need to be up to date.
On mostly anonymous social medias, what’s the pressure to be connected? Back on reddit I wouldn’t log in for weeks at a time
I have ADHD really really bad, and the algorithms on main social media suck. On fedi though there is no algorithm and it doesn’t feed me new things, here it’s just new to old.
The instance I’m on is definitely smaller in scale and thus calls for a different approach to social media. It definitely feels like the old school forum days where you end up recognising usenames, I wouldn’t be surprised if a year down the line we end up setting up an irl meeting between active members.
On the other hand, it’s definitely hard to break bad habits, and having been on reddit for years, I still find myself having to fight some learned behaviour (doom scrolling, opening the app when I just closed it seconds ago, wanting to post a snarky comment to someone who’s clearly wrong instead of trying to be nice and explanatory…)
I wouldn’t say that leaving centralised platforms for the fediverse is a “lesser evil”, because the fediverse is what you make of it, you still have some control if you’re techy enough. But I do think it take extra voluntary self change to have a better approach to social media, and the fediverse isn’t a solution to that in itself.
Yeah, I love name recognition! That’s definitely one of the things I’ve missed from old-school forums. I’ve never felt content aggregators (or well, reddit) really replacing forums , but I definitely feel it more with MBin and Lemmy. Good input otherwise.
As someone who only uses social media in spurts, Lemmy/Mastodon are way better than centralized social media, exactly because they don’t rope you in as much. The centralized services can have me binge for hours of useless stuff because it’s slightly engaging. The feedback loop here is much more simple: if I don’t see anything interesting, I just leave.
On top of that, the posts you see here are usually higher quality (because of the gatekeeping of thr platform). I would easily take decentralized socal media over anything else.
Yes, it does. It will keep suffering from the same issues as long as it encourages microblogging, and there are public upvotes and likes, and you can post links on Lemmy with a single-sentence summary that people can react to without reading the link. The Fediverse social media is built on the exact same premises as for-profit social media.
What has been done on the Fediverse is taking these systems and making them less addictive. Basically, they have all the problems of for-profit social media, but for-profit social media snowballs these problems and puts them at the core of their business model. The issue without the several layers of « making it worse because money » is not nearly as bad. But I do believe it’s a « lesser evil » thing, at least for our brains and ability to interact with people.
Great insights.
