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.
I think it would help to know in more detail what went down here. If we’re talking about justifying, perhaps even unintentionally, genocide in either the sense of mass killing or mass removal by other means… I think it’s pretty understandable that civility starts to go out the window a bit. Arguably the position itself is uncivil, whatever words are used to support it. When your start to talk about the right to exist or not, to not be killed or forcibly removed by a state… that’s a life or death question and people will react that way. There are some issues there’s no room for reasonable disagreement on.
That said, on wider issues, as someone firmly on the left, I do completely agree that the left can get kind of ridiculously emotionally invested and toxic over even minor disagreements from other leftists that absolutely don’t meet the above threshold, even on questions as banal as pure strategy vs actual ideological disagreement. But it’s hard to say if what you experienced was the latter and not you possibly being oblivious to your part in the former without more detail.
There’s always room for reasonable disagreement when the issue in question is a word whose definition contains an element of intent and is therefore unfalsifiable.
This sounds to me that you would rather discuss semantics, than spend five minutes trying to actually falsify the term “genocide” when applied to Palestine [0] [1] [2]
These links alone are enough to prove intent from the defence ministry.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/may/28/israels-defence-minister-says-large-scale-palestinian-migration-from-gaza-will-go-ahead
[1] https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/israel-politics/2026-03-26/ty-article/.premium/no-innocent-children-israeli-lawmaker-defends-killing-of-palestinian-family/0000019d-2976-d8a3-abff-39764b2e0000
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/17/israeli-general-aharon-haliva-palestinians-7-october-gaza
When the pattern of behaviour gives very clear indication of intent, the denial of this indicates that either you’re in favour of it, or don’t think it’s a bad thing.
When what folk see makes them feel sick to their stomach, such as a child being shot in the head, or families being shot in line for food due to a scarcity created by those making the people line up like animals, it’s going to elicit a visceral response. I personally could not fathom how a human being with functioning empathy could be fine with that.
You’ve already stated you like discussing with people of privilege. That I’m alright, Jack attitude when it comes to life and death is pretty disturbing. What makes us feel is what makes us human.
I’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.
This is whatabouttery. I care about Darfur, Myanmar, Tigray, etc. That doesn’t take away from what is happening in Palestine.
You have yet to describe why any of those situations are worse than flattening schools, hospitals, collapse of healthcare, full blockade of food, medical supplies, water, people living in camps where disease is rampant.
How is Iran killing a number of civilians worse than killing civilians, starvation, disease, shooting babies in the head?
All your post is doing, is showing bias, and a lack of care about what is happening there. The problems is you cannot persuade someone to care about human suffering, and if you don’t, why should I engage with you in a logical debate?
Your problem is, you don’t care, and you want people to be fine with you being fine with children being shot in the head. You’re on a left-leaning platform where people give a shit about their fellow man. People who give their time to work on open source generally have empathy as a core view.
Post your pro-Israel views on Xitter, or reddit and you’ll get the validation you prefer. Its an echo chamber close to yoir political persuasion. You enter a place that think differently and prepare to be challenged. Ultimately, if you want to be an empathetic human being, prepare to be wrong. Can you handle that? Your bio suggests you won’t engage if downvoted. I’ve not down voted you, but I’ll tell you you’re wrong. I say you’re wrong because I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt and I’m assuming you’re not evil.
This discussion isn’t about empathy, it’s about genocide. Changing the topic to a different, irrelevant subject as an attempt to deflect, distract, or disengage with a thought is something known as whataboutism.
As an example, let’s say the answer to all of your questions is “yes.” Does that change the fact that a genocide is happening in Palestine? No, it does not.
Now let’s pretend the answer to all of your questions is “no.” Does that change the fact that a genocide is happening in Palestine? No, it does not.
If you think the left is not politically educated enough, the solution to that problem is reading books and sharing knowledge and educating your peers, not engaging in the very same purity tests that you find so problematic.
I can’t respond to such a circumspect answer.
I can only answer generally that there still sometimes not room for reasonable disagreement where intent is involved. Courts absolutely do prove intent for some crimes beyond a reasonable doubt… someone could still disagree, but by definition it isn’t necessarily a reasonable disagreement.
Murder (vs manslaughter) in most jurisdictions is a question of intent. We prove it to the point of no reasonable disagreement all the time. That’s the very standard we use.
Sure, I get that. On this particular question, it seems clear to me that no such “beyond reasonable doubt” exists.
Categorically, as you claimed before? Why not? If we can prove intent of an individual action beyond reasonable doubt, why not an action by an organization of people?
Or are you now acknowledging intent can be proven beyond reasonable doubt but that it hasn’t been in the case you were banned for arguing it?
The second. Anything that is technically unfalsifiable can be “proven” beyond reasonable doubt in a court of law, I understand that. Anyway, I find this subject stultifyingly boring, I don’t have anything else to say on it.
Just continuing a conversation you started. It does at this point sound to me like your behavior might have played more of a role in your ban than you might be crediting.