Here are some reflections on my personal experience of federated social media.
A bit of background. In the 90-9-1 trichotomy, I am one of the 9%: an occasional active participant. As of 3 years ago I had been dabbling in social media since I was a teenager in the 90s, but never very deeply. Newsgroups and IRC; a bit of invisible blogging; various techie web forums; Twitter from 2008 (hardly any tweets); Facebook in the early 2010s (a post or two per week at the peak); then Reddit. As of 2023 I had been “on” Reddit for nearly a decade and not even written 100 comments. Then I decided on a whim to join Lemmy.
The good
Three years later I have written nearly 100 original posts and over 3000 comments! This is an order of magnitude more than I used social media in the previous 25 years. How to explain it?
A bunch of things. I liked the UX instantly, it’s much better than Reddit. No ads, so no nagging feeling that you’re bankrolling a corporation. A (slightly) higher level of conversation quality than Reddit.
Probably the single biggest explanation is just that it’s quieter. On Reddit I always arrived too late to the party. It’s hard to find the motivation to say something when a thread already has 800 comments. On Lemmy, I’d arrive 12 hours after the post and there were only 6 comments. If I take the time to compose my thoughts, somebody might actually see it! I get the paradox here (there are tons more eyes passively looking at Reddit), but the “quiet room” effect is real.
Highlights
Hands down the best community I’ve found here is (no surprise) a specialized one: !birding@lemmy.world. Lots of original content and genuine expertise, zero vitriol or toxicity. Perfect. In a similar vein, !pigeon@mander.xyz, where you can literally post pics of pigeons to an adoring audience.
I’ve also got some value out of !linux@lemmy.world and !privacy@programming.dev for one of those reasons: the ambient expertise. It’s not really breaking news: Linux and FOSS and privacy are really the only subjects where the fediverse can go toe-to-toe with the corporates in terms of expertise. IMO that’s already an achievement that should not be squandered!
Quite a few of my 96 posts are original content (“OG”, ugh). A whole bunch are photos from my bike-touring escapades, which I posted somewhat arbitrarily to !bicycle_touring@lemmy.world , !bicycling@lemmy.world, and !solarpunktravel@slrpnk.net. I rationalize this as an alternative to blogging: instead of hosting your own invisible vanity website, you can write what you have to say in a place where you have less control but where people may actually read it. It’s the logic of social media, basically, but minus the ads and opaque algos and shareholders. As expected, my holiday photos were not viral sensations, but they did attract some love and a few nice comments. Success!
The less good
My experience on Lemmy has taught me something that I knew in theory but (somehow) not quite in practice: Socializing via text on a screen is quite hard to pull off successfully. The lack of physical accountability, the inherent difficulty of text communication (avoiding ambiguity without the help of a face or body language), all this tends to make people into worse versions of themselves. Me included to some extent, I’m sure.
And then there’s the echo-chamber problem. It turns out that when people have an option to avoid dealing with ideas they disagree with (even slightly), very many of them choose that option. IMO this is a major (perhaps fatal) problem with social media. The fediverse is not magically immune from it.
Lowlights
The first - and definitely worst - experience I’ve had was 2 years ago when I got banned from !europe@feddit.org for “racism and gaslighting” on the basis of, well, pretty much nothing except the moderator’s paranoia. Shut out of the single community that had most drawn me to Lemmy, I tried !europe@lemmy.dbzer0.com and in short order had a similar experience. I am a European liberal who votes green, and a moderate on social questions, although admittedly I do enjoy debate. To be shut down so brutally for daring to question progressive doxas in the politest terms - for me this was quite a shocking confirmation of the intolerance of a certain section of the (mainly US) left.
On !degrowth@slrpnk.net I got a virtual slap on the wrist for posting an article offering constructive criticism of degrowth. I’m basically a degrowther myself but I believe it’s important to stress-test one’s ideas (cf. J S Mill). The moderators politely disagreed. Fair enough. I deleted my post and unsubscribed.
The problem on !china@sopuli.xyz, meanwhile was (is) slightly different. It’s that the community is swamped by a single hyperactive member who posts relentlessly on exactly the same themes with the same POV, and - the echo chamber, again - responds badly to any pushback. I contacted the moderator in private and received a virtual shrug.
So I decided to ditch all politics and stick to photos and niche subjects. But even here it has not been plain sailing. A (slightly whiny) post I wrote a few months ago about the difficulty of installing Linux on cheap hardware (a pretty niche subject!) received an avalanche of mockery and insults that really took me aback. And then I really stirred up a hornets’ nest quite recently in this very community when I proposed a feature which would hugely improve my experience of Lemmy without affecting anyone else. Can’t link to that because it got (very belatedly) deleted, ostensibly because offtopic but in reality because the proposal was unpopular. In fact this was my last post on Lemmy to date. Probably not a coincidence.
Conclusions
For me personally, the jury’s still out. I’m pretty ambivalent about social media in general. Since The Atlantic introduced a discussion space a few months ago, I admit that I’ve transferred some of my energy there. And yes, it’s been a better experience. But the reason is no indictment of Lemmy: It’s that The Atlantic has a paywall, which essentially means I’m talking only to privileged people like myself there. I enjoy Hacker News even more, but that’s because it’s super specialized (politics is mostly banned), and professionally moderated, and also (attention: wild POV!) because it’s full of engineers and other spectrumy types who take a Spock-like approach to communication. The problems I’ve had on Lemmy are problems of all generalist social media, not specifically of the fediverse.
In my case what remains are the figures. Despite everything, I have contributed more, and more personally, on Lemmy than I ever did on the R-site or anywhere else. That has to count for something. Corporate social media is a manipulative money-driven spyware-fueled nightmare. The federated decentralized type is obviously, plainly, better. That’s why it has to succeed.
Since The Atlantic introduced a discussion space a few months ago, I admit that I’ve transferred some of my energy there. And yes, it’s been a better experience.
It’s so good, that’s a level of loser stink that will never scrub off even with steel wool and uncured lye soap (which I wholeheartedly recommend for this… Person.)
I love hexbear for insulating me from these types, OP is literally a Zionist. Baffles me how most of the lemmyverse is open to Zios
Tbf this guy’s I getting taken apart even on .world. Not by .worlders but still.
Yeah but that’s the point, “we accept debate with fascists” is exactly what I want to be insulated from
I’m certainly glad that they aren’t here
The reason I moved my main to hexbear was because of that. A bunch of genocidal zionists kept telling me not to visit hexbear.
When genocidal zionists tell me not to check something out, I start checking it out.
How fucking bigoted do you have to be to get banned from the Europe community???
Also using the fucking Atlantic discussion page is nuts. Genuine turblib imperialist
Edit: anyone got the deets on that “improvement” post?
Edit: anyone got the deets on that “improvement” post?
Looking at their modlog at dot world:
Lmao, and they said echo chambers are bad? What a ball of contradiction
Holy shit lol. Imagine anytime anyone down votes you, you auto block them. Anyone who wants that feature would have blocked everyone in the fediverse within a week
Except hexbear users because we don’t have downvote.
Hexbear stays winning
The idea of a Lemmy lib implementing this and then wondering why they’re only ever seeing PPBs in their replies is funny to me
I would like an option to auto-PPB moderators.
They’re currently saying they aren’t genocide just that they don’t know if one is happening as they’re a true centrist.
The systematic destruction of an entire region is just too nuanced and complex for us smol beans to understand 😔
you don’t understand this is just the moderate and centrist take so it’s the only acceptable one
https://lemmy.world/post/50102615/25054408
What a low point we’ve sunk to. As I’ve said elsewhere, my opinions are totally mainstream and moderate - not by your standards, I’m sure, but by the standards of society. I’m not at all rightwing. I have voted mostly green for 20 years. You appear to be living in a bubble where you never cross paths with anyone who doesn’t share all your opinions right down the line. This is a totally unhealthy state of affairs.
Or
why don’t you worry about what all the non Israel countries are doing
https://lemmy.world/post/50102615/25052600
d argue that this empathy is selective. Were you as exercised by the horrors that were inflicted by the other side in this particular conflict? What about the handful of conflicts in the world, for example Darfur, where the scale of suffering and atrocity is unarguably worse than anything happening in the Middle East? People seem to know inside-out the situation in Gaza and who’s responsible and how terrible they are. Much less interest in, say, Myanmar, or even Iran, where the government seems to have inflicted years worth of Gaza’s suffering in the space of just a few days six months ago. It’s revealing.
deeply insuffurable human being. honestly incredible work
The amount of accounts both showing exactly that AND happy to show that is waaaay too high in that post
And then there’s the echo-chamber problem. It turns out that when people have an option to avoid dealing with ideas they disagree with (even slightly), very many of them choose that option.
So I decided to ditch all politics and stick to photos and niche subjects.
It’s actually not very interesting to have a good faith discussion with someone in denial of reality. Sometimes it’s good to do so you know you still got the fundamentals on hand but there is no learning something new about a subject when talking with someone who is wrong about everything and proud to be a contrarian.
Like godamn clockwork. You couldn’t write a more on the nose caricature if you tried.
How are these types of posts always huge walls of texts with LLM characteristics?.
Either way, not reading all that. Free Palestine.
A ton of LLM training data is reddit posts, so the slop machines tend to sound like annoying redditors
Some of the people in this thread are totally brain dead.
“You shouldn’t be allowed to judge me based on the views I espoused last week waaaaaah.”
Debate perverts expect everyone to drop what they’re doing and waste time arguing nonsensical hypotheticals with someone using it purely as a mental masturbation exercise. They get so fucking mad when you decide “No, actually, I am not going to waste 5 minutes of my life arguing with a white supremacist.”
Well yeah, when you spew terrible comments like that moose account and op of course you shouldn’t judge them by that!
you probably think i’m all sorts of thing i want to distract you from but you could not be more lie lie lie lie lie…
The first - and definitely worst - experience I’ve had was 2 years ago when I got banned from !europe@feddit.org for “racism and gaslighting” on the basis of, well, pretty much nothing except the moderator’s paranoia.
Racist Islamophobe.
To be shut down so brutally for daring to question progressive doxas in the politest terms - for me this was quite a shocking confirmation of the intolerance of a certain section of the (mainly US) left.
Wow, an unironic ”so much for the tolerant left” in the wild.
“Mainly US” euro left catching strays
The first - and definitely worst - experience I’ve had was 2 years ago when I got banned from !europe@feddit.org for “racism and gaslighting” on the basis of, well, pretty much nothing except the moderator’s paranoia. Shut out of the single community that had most drawn me to Lemmy, I tried !europe@lemmy.dbzer0.com and in short order had a similar experience.
Interesting, why don’t we just check the modlog on that one real quick:
lol, he posted a link that disproves his own claims of being banned for no reason, nice own goal. Transphobia in his modlog too, he seems like an asshole redditor in general.
I am … a moderate on social questions
”I think the racists and transphobes have some valid points, and we should be allowed to have an open discussion with them.”
Every single time
They can argue with the wall
reason: please shut the fuck up
Wow it is somehow worse than I thought
Was waiting for them to mention white genocide in South Africa
I got banned (…) for “racism and gaslighting” on the basis of, well, pretty much nothing except the moderator’s paranoia.
Shirt questions answered shirt
This felt like reading one of those meandering recipe intros before it got to the slop.
Authentic Chinese Chili Crisp Eggs
This is a quick, classic dish that makes for a protein rich breakfast that I learned on a commercial fishing ship.
Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.
There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs—commerce surrounds it with her surf. Right and left, the streets take you waterward. Its extreme downtown is the battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves, and cooled by breezes, which a few hours previous were out of sight of land. Look at the crowds of water-gazers there.
Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward. What do you see?—Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep. But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster—tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are the green fields gone? What do they here?
Ingredients:
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Sichuan or Guizhou chili crisp or oil
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Egg(s)
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MSG or Chicken Bouillon Powder (optional)
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Spring onion (optional)
Method:
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Heat chili crisp or chili oil on low in a pan or wok
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Crack egg into the oil, cook to your desired consistency. Flip if desired.
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Season and garnish with spring onion if desired.
I don’t have Sichuan chili oil, will Texas pete work as a substitute?
you can just use tallow, it’s healthier anyway. add ranch for flavor.
instructions unclear, tried to grind a ranch into sauce but all i have is a ton and a half of rubble and drywall and the owner is mad at me.
oh dear, we normally shell the ranch and pulp only the soft innards
now you tell me
-
I’m instantly sceptical of anyone meticulously formatting posts and comments on a site where the most popular content is a pig shitting on its own balls.
another star trek fan…
Lib Star Trek fans are weird, they all imagine themselves as being Sisko but every time they post about politics and society it’s always like you would read Dukat or Weyoun.
western chauvinism, the bad guys can’t be them so comparisons like that don’t apply. though sisko is a war criminal who goes on an anti-maquis “war on terror”
I don’t have much affection for maquis, not only they were clearly tokenized but also seemed to be the typical strong independent pioneers seeking their own destiny far from the “bureocratic” postscarcity communist society yadda yadda, aka. settlers. Just had the misfortune to settle on the land on the border of highly militarized fascist empire instead of less developed tribal indigenous people, so they got they teeth whacked and when Federation offered them they will help them move to some other planet where they could continue their wild west fantasy they refused apparently prefering to be treaded on by Cardassians.
So wild because Sisko is literally space Stalin.
Yea but they think he’s space Truman.
Well frankly it’s shameful that they still are on the platform…
Is this AI slop slop?
The smugness emanating from the text feels too real to be AI. I 100% believe yuropeen succdem green voter hands typed that post.
It has to be real because even an AI would not admit to using the Atlantic discussion board
if that’s been added very recently it may not have been scraped
I’m pretty confident they had the text edited by AI. I’ve seen the exactly same headings too many times.
The china@sopuli.xyz is a bot “Hotznplotzn@lemmy.sdf.org” is called out on davel’s profile page. There are a few bots like that with the same exact posting patterns that are all shills.
Did they prove it was a bot? Still think it’s like cm and just a very terrible person doing it with multiple alts.
I think cm coordinates with a few other shut-ins and one of them operates a RSS feed to posting bot with an approval step to make sure it keeps the party line. I have my suspicions on who it might be but it borders on paranoia to name names as if I were certain.
Oh hey open stars and ap/kirk/ptv are all agreeing with op. Including unsurprisingly the issue isnt op being a complete centrist on everything including being unable to consider a genocide is being committed by Israel but that is those damn tankies
what are we like ey? could they be crypto-fascist collaborators in disguise? hard to say but somehow we’re guilty of something.
