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: [email protected]. Lots of original content and genuine expertise, zero vitriol or toxicity. Perfect. In a similar vein, [email protected], where you can literally post pics of pigeons to an adoring audience.
I’ve also got some value out of [email protected] and [email protected] 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 [email protected] , [email protected], and [email protected]. 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 [email protected] 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 [email protected] 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 [email protected] 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 [email protected], 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.
They can also look at the whole post I wrote to clarify what happened, which is linked.
Everyone is the hero in their own story, and sadly Islamophobia is widely spread with people that call themselves “liberals”.
Pot, meet kettle.
Except that it wasn’t me who banned them. I am just looking at the modlog and their own explanation of what happened.
I know you didn’t ban them. But you’re also considering yourself the hero in your own story when you go around Lemmy criticizing people of an extremely similar political viewpoint as yourself for not being left-wing enough and intimating that they are Islamophobic if they make any criticism of Muslims whatsoever. Seems like a self-defeating MO to me but what do I know.
Ironically, it’s fairly similar to people who claim that any criticism of Israel is equivalent to anti-semitism. It’s possible to criticize behaviors, groups, and/or cultures without being hateful towards them. Quite frankly, if you read Islamophobia from the two removed comments in the modlog, it says a lot more about you than OP.
This is a complete misrepresentation of what happened. Did you even read the messages they were banned for?
The full story is that the mod admitted banning me not for what I wrote but for what they thought I meant. That’s just outrageous.
What I actually wrote was (1) a factual correction to some comment downplaying the scale of the jihadi terrorist problem a decade ago, and (2) the anodyne observation that we cannot just dismiss as illegitimate the concerns that voters have about the effects of immigration.
I don’t know why you’re so keen on sullying me, to the point of alleging that you’ve looked into this when you obvious haven’t. I’ll keep things civil and leave it there.
I am not trying to sully anyone. I am just telling people to look it up themselves and make their own judgement 🤷 It’s all based on what you wrote yourself, and apparently you have zero self-reflection on why people might ban you for what you wrote.
https://sh.itjust.works/modlog?userId=203917
The two comments at the bottom.
Edit: Okay, I see it was a whole thread and those were the only two comments that got removed for whatever reason. I still don’t think I’m misrepresenting anything but I don’t really care to argue about it.
Apparently you have yourself internalized islamophobia to such an extend that sweeping claims like that about a diverse group of people and their religion does not raise any red flags for you 🤦
Where does he make sweeping claims?
And also just because a claim is broad does not make it invalid. I could make the claim that human beings generally have two arms. And your type would vitriolically attack me for saying so, because how could I erase the existence of amputees and other exceptions to the rule.
But I would still continue to make that claim and argue that its a valid claim, partially because the broadness of the claim inherently signifies that it may be subject to exceptions. The purpose of making such claims is to develop an ability to understand the universe, which is a near infinitely complex system, in terms that we as human beings can understand. By developing the ability to understand what is going on in the universe, although our understanding may be slightly less than 100% accurate due to our tiny human brains, we unlock the ability to manipulate the universe to our advantage. This is how critical thinking and science brought us from hunter gatherer societies to where we are now. Because people have continued making claims, which have always been slightly less than 100% true, but close enough approximations to the truth that they are useful in making better decisions. Isaac Newton made claims about physics that have since been proven to be incorrect. Was he wrong to make those claims?
In this case, OP was making a claim that there are clear indications that certain traits and tendencies commonly exhibited by Islamic cultures are perhaps problematic or destructive in the context of Islamic migration to Europe. And your response is #NotAllMuslims. Which is of course willfully ignorant of the overarching point that is relevant in the context of the discussion. It doesn’t need to apply to all Muslims in order to be a problem, and nobody aside from yourself and your ilk ever implied that it did.
Does people blowing themselves up and murdering hundreds of other random people in the name of religion not raise any red flags for you? And yet what OP said does? How can that be possible?