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.
Thank you for clarifying, no I actually meant non-technical folks who don’t spend as much time in introspection, as opposed to e.g. creating things. An example could be a comics artist, or a craftsperson, let’s say working with wood, who gets confused by all the technical hurdles needing to be overcome in order to join the Threadiverse. We (who use Linux btw) thought virtually nothing of any of that, even finding it fascinating how and why the entire Fediverse is able to function as it does, but they tend to feel daunted at such and turn away rather than engage.
I felt the need to clarify since you chose my comment about needing more diversity of people with a quip about not wanting mainstream, normal folks.
It was the rampant sexism that initially turned me away from the fediverse. I think I tried two or three times before I found my groove and the communities that speak to me.
It’s not that confusing to use the Threadiverse and I think it’s a little snobbish of you to think crafts people shouldn’t be welcome if they get confused by some of the tech stuff here. I have never used Linux and can function fine on this site. You’re underestimating people.
It’s not a quip - we’ve had quite in-depth discussions about this topic before and people have outright stated that they do not want normal folks to come here (example). Something about barriers to entry keeping this place a safer haven against undesirable segments of the population. I disagree with that viewpoint, but that is my background context.
It would indeed be nice if this place was more welcoming to people, imho. And being a technical person myself, who is here, I was only going by what people said about this place when they left it or refused to join. Early on, during the Rexodus (when Huffman spurned 3rd-party app developers and thereby many of us left in protest, foreseeing what Reddit was about to become - “when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time”), the most common refrain was that it was too empty and too complicated to figure out. Later, the most common mantra (in e.g. r/Redditalternatives) it shifted to still being too empty but also far too toxic (example), even people sticking around on Lemmy for several years but eventually leaving as a result (example that is not Reddit - I’ve also seen similar on Bluesky as well but it’s much harder to search for those).
Like here is a great example of a recent discussion of people on Reddit deciding whether to come here: https://www.reddit.com/r/fossdroid/comments/1uiywal/should_we_switch_to_lemmy/. The poll said yes to move but with major pushback. Some selected comments:
This one is misspelled but reflective of many longer comment replies saying similar - honestly I think a lot of people got confused by not understanding the difference between the “Local” vs. “All” sorting. Obviously a lot of that will depend on people’s method of access, e.g. a 3rd-party app vs. web browser UI, and also PieFed has basically solved the onboarding issues, though PieFed has its own… problems to contend with (leading to an exodus of some of the highest contributors to it, I mean to say PugJesus but also I’ve seen others say the same things since they no longer feel welcomed, which in turn is only going to exasperate the lack of content issue still further).
Sorry if I somehow implied that gender discrimination was not an issue, I just wanted to add that it is not the only one - it is merely one among many that turn people away. Including you, until you found your groove, but many won’t stick around long enough to do so.