PS: The discussion on this post turned mainly into a (one-sided) debate about whether the content of my contributions passes the Lemmy ideological purity test. So dull, yet so predictable. To be clear: I stand by everything I’ve written on Lemmy. Efforts at shaming will fall flat, as will pompous denunciations and attempts at dunking based on virtual sleuthing. I’m far too secure in my convictions to be bothered by a brigade of insufferably self-righteous progressives trying to one-up each other in their efforts to root out dissidence. To the (quite numerous) others who offered interesting feedback and kind words, thanks.
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.
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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.
It wasn’t me, but looking at your moderation log and the messages in question, I would have called it “islamophobia and downplaying neo-nazi crimes” and banned you just the same. Others are welcome to have a look at those messages and judge for themselves 🤷
So, you’re a debate bro who argues Syrian refugees increase crime and terrorism, trans women in sports and children accessing trans healthcare are legitimate issues, and support Israel and claim there isn’t a genocide.
You say shit like “So many hypersensitive thin-skinned vacuum-cleaner owners! Perhaps they’re projecting their insecurities because deep down they know I’m right.” and argue intolerance that people don’t support your terrible viewpoints?
You’re peak fucking reddit mate.
To me the good of the Fediverse is that it highlights dishonest people like yourself.
On the contrary, I think the impulse to check a user’s post history and judge them is a bad habit on Lemmy.
Take me. Scroll through my history, and you’ll probably peg me as a AI Tech Bro and a… closet neolib, maybe? I dunno. But if it’s along those lines, you could not be more wrong, on either count.
With the exception of extreme trolls (or moderators doing their thing), I think Lemmy’s culture of “purity checks” is poison to the platform. It turns communities insular, toxic, and angry like it does on Reddit, governed by takes that have nothing to do with the particular thread. It kills the focus of communities. It rewards conformance.
And this thread is a good example. I thought OP was raising some good general points, but digging previous comments up threw all that out the window. I’ve seen this happen in other threads, where a technical or fandom discussion devolves into unrelated, raging arguments on something I did not come there to read.
Counterargument: I don’t want to engage in good faith with a bigot.
It hardly needs to be said, but the problem is many people here define “bigot” as “someone who doesn’t agree with me”.
Said dude who wrote this shit:
And it is at least partly because of a radical overreach in policy demands over the last decade by the “T” in LGBT. It has generated an inevitable backlash that is now hurting the other letters in the soup, of which I am one.
Maybe it’s you who are the problem, at least sometimes?
Good someone went to the trouble of digging that up. A link would have been useful. I stand by everything I have ever written, otherwise I would have deleted it.
Okay but dont you see how it’s a pretty big window into your intolerant thinking? This imaginative conglomerate, which to you is a single body, the “T” in LGBT, you are saying that all their demands have been radical and damaging. What even are you talking about? That they want to exist and get their gender affirming procedures? That they’d like society to recognize their gender, when Trans people have been around more than thousands of years in human culture and are even in other biological animals? What other fuckin policies would you be talking about? It just feels like your little dog whistle…
Sometimes rights can be zero-sum. For one person to gain them, somebody else has to lose them. That’s the issue in female sports. As for youth gender medicine, it is clearly an ethical minefield where nothing is automatically right or wrong. To paint these things as black and white is a form of religious thinking. Only the US progressive left is sticking to the absolutist line you’re selling. It’s been abandoned everywhere else. Presumably this is a consequence of America’s extreme political polarization.
Anyway, I find this subject incredibly boring so that’s all I have to say on the matter.
It does have a bit of a echochamber (defederation and moderation) problem, i agree. We should look out for that.
echochambers are what people want.
i’m not sure how you fix that ‘problem’. you can’t force folks to interact with those who are different than them without them becoming resentful and angry that differences exist, and inevitable demonizing people for those differences.
It would be great to have opt-in choices to either enter or not be forced into entering such spaces. Like I do not wish that e.g. ChapoTrapHouse did not exist, I only wish that proper labels would be more readily visible so that people would not stumble into them unawares. Likewise, Lemmy.ml’s disallowance of criticism of Russia, China, or North Korea is not exactly easily read from the instance sidebar, nor is that sidebar readily visible from most 3rd-party apps that I have seen - especially when browsing by All, which how else would someone even browse, especially when new and haven’t subscribed to much yet?
So agreed that labeling would solve most of the issues. But if e.g. Lemmy.ml refuses to allow any criticism of Russia, China, or North Korea, then at least someone would be aware that it has chosen to be an echo chamber in that manner (while others choose to be echo chambers in different ways - e.g. PieFed chooses to restrict votes to a daily quota rather than topic-based, which is just a different style of filtering).
Haha. I used Lemmy.ml for a little while, and I noticed that it had a lot of pro-China posts and tankies, to the point that I found it likely to be state-sponsored propaganda. It’s reassuring to hear that someone else noticed the bias.
Oh this is an extremely well-known and documented effect, although as you can see you will receive a significant number of downvotes whenever you state it publicly. See e.g. https://lemmy.world/post/29072279 and the community that it is posted in for FAR more details than you ever wanted to know about that instance. TLDR: as you saw with your own eyes, they are actively rooting for the downfall of all Western civilizations, and if that comes at the cost of millions of the lives of people currently living in them, so much the better - they “deserve it”, bc they did not stop capitalism single-handedly, or something. Crucially, Russia, China, and North Korea does not ever do anything wrong though, certainly not genocide or like “invading” other countries or anything like that (hey, in fact, don’t you know that UkRaInE iNvAdEd RuSsIa, not the other way around?!?).
This btw is why many people are refusing to donate to fund Lemmy.ml, and by extension further development of the Lemmy codebase, since the main developer Dessalines refuses to separate donated funds to only go to the latter without also being used to moderate and maintain the highly problematic Lemmy.ml instance.
And the pace of development of Lemmy is already glacially slow… PieFed’s is significantly faster, but like the Lemmy devs, its main dev is likewise quite opinionated and bakes that into the codebase in a number of ways. So they both have their advantages and disadvantages, but either way Lemmy.ml itself looks to me like pure disadvantage.
Oh no, the bigoted sack of shite is upset!
Write another book about it if you want, but no, you can’t play with the leftists. Also getting banned from feddit for being too liberal is HILARIOUS.
Banned for a day. Next time is a perma.
Get ratioed AND go fuck yourself.
So I decided to ditch all politics and stick to photos and niche subjects
Best plan! There’s a huge mob here that loves to fight and argue. I remember one comment to my other username said something to the tune of “…and I won’t back down until my revenge thirst is quenched!” or something dramatic like that. Some just enjoy the fight.
Once I deleted my old account, then started this one, and banned all the trolls and politics, smooth sailing.
But I’d never recommend Lemmy to my real life friends. Way too many keyboard warriors here calling or cheering violence, thinking the US is gonna have a violent revolution. lol
If you ignore the politics, it’s cool being on an platform where you can instance-hop if you don’t like how your current one is being run.
