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.
Free expression does not mean no push back. You shouldn’t complain about someone calling you out because they don’t agree.
However, I don’t like it when people get banned from communities for disagreement. Unless you spam, or do not engage in a good faith argument (both of which are noise, not signal) you should be allowed to post.
I have literally never complained when someone disagreed with me politely. I love debate. I don’t like rudeness, insults, mockery, brigading, and all the rest of the litany of social-media toxicity.
Agreed on brigading, with a caveat.
Sometimes what feels like brigading is just a lot of people being genuinely pissed off at you enough to stop lurking. I have experienced this myself, from saying something dumb, or being confidently ignorant, etc, and thereby attracting the anger of the mob.
Usually there’s someone in there willing to correct me, so I learn something from the experience. Which I would never have done if I just got annoyed at the pile of hostility and assumed I was right.
Another problem is that rudeness and insults and mockery are not objective. There is no set definition.
For some people, it’s rude to say a trans man is a man, because the idea seems unscientific, or against their religion, or just unfamiliar and therefore possibly dangerous. They have a visceral reaction of disgust or fear, or uncertainty, or all three, because they don’t know what this means for the world.
For the majority of people, it’s either fine to say, or not important. Someone wants to be a guy, what do I care? There are real problems to worry about.
But for a trans man, if someone says that trans men aren’t real men, it’s not just rude, it feels like a kick in the balls. For them, the stakes are very high.
The person saying it might feel like they’re taking crazy pills when they get such a strong pushback, because to them, it’s simple. Dick = boy, pussy = girl. They learned it before they could remember learning anything, and never even dreamed it could be more complicated than that.
So they genuinely aren’t being intentionally rude, but the other person feels very insulted. See? It’s like when I used to be an obnoxious atheist, and mocked the idea of religious belief because it just seemed so pointless and silly to pretend there’s a big old man in the sky who made everything.
Before I knew it was more complicated. I did not consider that a) You cannot actually disprove God, so arguing about it is very silly indeed, and b) if someone builds their psyche around an idea, one that holds great meaning to them, and helps them see meaning in this life, and gives them joy… Why would I fight that?
(As long as they aren’t being control freaks and trying to impose their own beliefs on other people, of course.)
Anyway, the point there is that young me would not think he was insulting someone’s entire pysche by mocking the idea of God, but he was. And therefore, the people I may have come to terms with back then, and learned from, dismissed me as an atheist, and I dismissed them as too stupid to see the obvious.
So it’s not as simple as “Everyone just stop being rude! Jeez! Stop calling me a genocide denier!” and expecting a pleasant, unthreatening debate.
Sometimes the truth can feel like a threat because of how wrong you are.
This whole argument (neatly summarized in the final line) is based on the premise that whenever someone gets pushback it’s because they’re wrong. I beg to differ. Anyway: sterile debate, I hear your points. Let’s call this a day.
Get a thicker skin. The world is not designed to cater to your specific sensibilities. Taking a shitty opinion and gussying it up in pretty language isn’t some magic spell that makes you immune to push back, and the fact that some people are less than polite doesn’t invalidate their response.
You want to be able to push buttons with your edgy “it’s just a debate bro” opinions while being spared impassioned responses. Too fucking bad, bro. Either man up and get thick enough skin to wade in the water or stay the fuck off the beach.
This comment makes my point. I’m arguing that federated social media would be a more pleasant place, with more interesting contributions, and definitely a wider demographic profile, if less of the comments were aggressive and profanity-laden like this one.
I’m not sure the majority of us want to make this a more pleasant place for people who express the ideas you do. You’re free to express them, but you’re not free from criticism.
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.
Then go to Facebook where your “mainstream moderate” opinions won’t be called out for the shit they are. In this marketplace of ideas everyone thinks your ideas are shit.
Mainstream and moderate ideas are what has led to the current crisis. Why should we respect them?
Even mainstream and moderate opinions are not immune from criticism.
See slavery, rights for gay people, immigration, and how Irish, and Italians were discriminated against when coming to America.
But yeah we should always only go by the most centrist or mainstream ideals
And you’re fucking wrong. We don’t need the sterility of traditional social media because that only existed in the first place to be advertiser-friendly.
You aren’t better, more correct, or more valid because you play the respectability politics game, you’re just bitter that the game isn’t as effective here without the incentive of advertiser-friendliness to wield as a cudgel.
Either grow up and learn to meet people where they are instead of expecting people to play by and cater to your personal preferences, or fuck right off.