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.
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.
Not what I want, I want people to debate ideas with who argue back.
If I wanted non stop validation I'd chat with an LLM.
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).
problematic communities like that are never going to label themselves as problematic.
they also don't see themselves that way. They think they are bastions of truth and free speech and open-mindedness, it's just that everyone else is wrong and close minded.
every echo chamber, and hate community, and cult-like group thinks like this. abusive sex cults don't go 'hey we are an abusive sex cult who will destroy your identity and steal all your money, come join us!'
And that mismatch between the claim and reality is what will - if anything does - doom the entire Threadiverse to irrelevance. It's understandable that inside the echo chamber they refuse to see what is plain, but what is far less fine is when everyone else simply goes along with it, with zero pushback.
Lemmy is a ~~Nazi~~ tankie bar (for anyone who does not know, see Paradox of Intolerance). The lack of moderation is why whenever Lemmy gets brought to in outside mentions, it is as the butt of a joke and laughed at (I've seen it treated such in Reddit, X, Bluesky, Tildes, etc.).
Here is a perfect example: https://www.reddit.com/r/fossdroid/comments/1uiywal/should_we_switch_to_lemmy/. An entire community was deciding whether to move here or no, and the majority of the top comments are basically just "lolz no fucking way". A few examples:
To be fair, some of these issues are older now - like PieFed has basically solved the onboarding issue, and db0 solved the CP spam one from years back, though such events tend to stick around in people's memories... and I cannot honestly state that the lack of moderation has gotten any better. MAYBE will the upcoming release of Lemmy v1.0??? Though I exceedingly doubt that, especially after seeing what happened to Lemm.ee.
Also tbf, people did recommend Beehaw and mander.xyz as sensible choices. The former was more or less soundly rejected by bringing up its defederation status from lemmy.world, cutting it off from the majority of the Threadiverse communities (although the ones locally on it i think are quite nice - I've never had a negative interaction with any of them), and the point that a single cadre of super-mods controls the entirety of what is allowed to be said on it, which is what they would be wanting to get away from by leaving Reddit. Browsing locally on mander.xyz though... that just might work!? But only if you are exclusively interested in STEM and basically nothing else.
Being a tankie bar is our choice, but others refuse to enter into that journey alongside us. So long as we entertain the most toxic among us, refusing to distinguish them in any way from anyone else, mainstream normies are going to refuse to put in the enormous amount of effort required to do that work for themselves, and so will simply stay on Reddit or move to corporate solutions (like Bluesky) that do not shirk from doing so, rather than enjoy the Fediverse where they would be free but that also requires the high amount of effort that comes with that.
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.
The solution is quite simple, really. Mods (or anyone else for that matter) should not be able to ban people. The concept of global banning shouldn't exist. If an account posts/comments stuff you like, then just block it on a personal level. Global banning (especially when the decision can only be done by the mods / a select few people) will always lead to echo chambers.
Ironically, PieFed has allowed such things for something like a year already - e.g. with keyword filters someone who does not want to view content involving "Trump" or "Musk" can avoid it on a personal level, without requiring a mod to make that decision for everyone.
Likewise, for all the flak it has received, the "reputation" visual indicators put additional power into the hands of end-users to decide how they best would like to interact with others on the platform.
Another one, back to actual filters again, is an automated collapsing or even filtering of comments below a certain score threshold. I always turned those off, but for those who want them they are neat to have - not every moment of every day does every person need to be ready to read such content, sometimes people just want a break from anything controversial and to enjoy a pleasant read?
Lemmy is glacially slow to add new features so I wouldn't hold my breath for these anytime soon, but FYI, they do already exist elsewhere.
Then a few accounts could spam every community with nazi shit or child porn (hidden from users who blocked them), so any newly registered users would leave the second they joined.
Would this really happen, tho? Also you could give a prompt to new users on this issue and tell them how they can subsequently block those accounts. Sure, there are always pros and cons to doing things, but in my experience the current approach where you give a select few people total control always results in total echochambers. Which I believe on the broader scale just reinforces the political divide of a society.
I mean, having to deal with the torrent of that type of content was a big reason why the admin of lemm.ee quit altogether, so I would wager it happens quite a bit.
Edit: This content is also quite explicitly illegal in many jurisdictions, and hosting it on your instance can get you landed in jail.
yes, it does frequently. you're naive if you think there are highly abusive actors in every online space like this.
determined folks with negative agendas also have a lot more resources and energy to put into harassment and spamming, than any ordinary person does. they are also often well-financed and emotionally driven.
This never works
ughhh why do libertarians think they are the first babies to use their brain in the most basic way possible?