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.
It’s hard for me to know whether I am dealing with people who are genuinely misunderstanding my arguments, or if they are simply trying to cast doubt on my conclusions by pretending to misunderstand how I arrived at them. Given the length of my comments and the relative brevity of yours, I am leaning towards you belonging to the latter group. If you were genuine, you would explain what you mean without being ambiguous and respond to at least a portion of the points I have already made, as a demonstration of good faith. Please make better use of your time.
In turn, I’m wondering if you’re going to have this much energy yourself after (say) another six months here! Thanks for the intelligent pushback you’re giving, I appreciate it.
I was on one yesterday for some reason. Had a lot of energy and a lot of time. I think it was because I got a bunch of sleep this week when I haven’t been getting much sleep at all over the past few months
I’ve been following @imaqtpie and your posts in this thread (haven’t looked through your history) and I think you are both making reasonable but unpopular statements. Much of the problem seems to be different goals and investments in conversation from different parties.
You guys are raising what you think are rational nuanced views on controversial topics, assuming others will respond with their own take, pushing back on your ideas in some cases and validating you in others. This is the “healthy debate” ideal, where there are no high stakes, just banter among friends or like minded individuals who enjoy fleshing out ideas and learning.
The issue is you’re not sitting in a living room with people you know, or at dinner table with a mix of acquaintances and strangers where you can read the room. You mentioned this in your original post, how the text format of social media can be more challenging than face to face. I posit it’s not only the fact that you can’t read body language or have to give your whole argument in mini essay form instead of conversational chunks, but the fact that the “dinner table” is actually composed of a flow of people with different motivations, dispositions and attention spans.
Social media is often likened to a town square for this reason. You have huge reach to get your “message” out, but the kinds of conversations you’re having are not ones that you would likely print off as manifestos and shout/distribute while atop a soapbox in real life. Yet, that’s what can happen in a place like this. You start a conversation in a small sub thinking it’s a dinner table, then all of a sudden everyone and their dog is there and has an opinion.
If you imagine yourself on a streetcorner engaging random passerbys then it starts to make sense. Sure, some regulars stop for a friendly chat each morning and engage in constructive banter over a coffee before going to work, but others are just waiting for the bus, or walking their dog, and they hear fragments of your conversation and are upset by it. They didn’t agree to your terms of debate, hell they don’t even want a debate. They just heard you say something slanderous and are pissed! They call you a name, flip you the bird, and walk on in disbelief that someone like you could be so ignorant and spew your backwards views on innocent bystanders. Why, you must be some kind of radical. You have the panflets and are saying discriminating things, what’s your motive? It can’t be good.
You on the other hand are shocked by this engagement and are crafting a rebuttal. What are they talking about? Which part of the conversation upset them? Did they misunderstand your point or miss some context? You prepare a whole speech but they’re gone. Your reply never reaches them because they weren’t in a debate to begin with, they were just walking by.
As I write this now, twice I’ve thought about stopping and deleting it. Not because I don’t stand by what I’m saying, but because I’m lying in bed typing on my phone, and what would have been a 5 minute conversation has now taken me over 20 minutes to type with my thumbs and I’m going to be late for work. I’m replying to a the bottom of a comment thread so many layers deep will anyone see it? I know you will, maybe @imaqtpie, but that’s probably it. Was it worth it? What do I get for all this effort? It’s easier to not engage and just leave you two hangning.
In your case you probably get a lot of downvotes for your effort and negative reactions, which have to be discouraging. But again, I think that’s all you can expect when you realize that the vast majority of people aren’t like you, aren’t your friends, and aren’t at the same table. If it’s possible to enjoy debating for the few people who do come by and enrich you, while sluffing off all the low effort jabs and thumbs down, then the soapbox might be for you. Otherwise yeah, it doesn’t seem worth it.
Anyway this has turned into quite the ramble. Cheers from a guy who enjoys talking on his way to work.
Your thumb-typing ordeal was not (totally) in vain because I read it!
Probably the most interesting thing that’s been written in this thread.
Actually, I tend to ignore the low-effort bird-flipping posts. The comments that bother me are the ones that take the form of angry lectures dripping in sanctimony. That’s because they suggest that their author is so deeply ensconced in their bubble that they’re unused to seeing my opinion expressed openly. Given that my views are anything but extreme by the standards of the electorate, I find this situation pretty worrying.
That’s hard for me too, but if you start out by assuming both, you’re going to offend people.
I’m trying to do you a favor by telling you. I’m no longer trying to discuss the original thing at all, because I don’t feel like you’re going to engage well with the conversation. I get the sense that you’ll continue to try and cover all your bases with one comment, starting off seemingly genuine and then ending with passive aggression.
I will make better use of my time going forward, so I won’t be engaging further, but I hope you realize that I have been genuine with you.
I don’t realize that at all. I’ve presented you with comprehensive discussion points and you’ve responded with snide passive aggressive snipes. You responded to my detailed argument with an intentional misunderstanding to imply that I was islamophobic, and then continued to passive aggressively fuck with me for kicks. Your talent for gaslighting is exceptional though, I begrudgingly commend you for that.