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.
I'm mostly here to argue about politics with people who aren't conservatives or libertarians - just like you, I think engaging with different opinions is healthy, and I've had a hard time finding leftists to argue with elsewhere.
Now that is a genuinely interesting comment! I assume you have a thicker-than-average skin. But how do you go about not getting banned? My literally centrist views got me insulted and mocked to oblivion, and banned in two communities. It was so tiring.
Insulted and mocked is par for the course in political discussions. Banning too, although it's annoying when that's overused. Perhaps you should set up a centrist instance specifically for political discussion, and not ban anyone unless they spam?
But why should we accept that insults and mockery are par for the course? That's my problem. Federated social media is no better (or hardly any better) than other social media on this point. Starting your own community of people you already agree with - to me that seems to totally defeat the point of political discussion. In democracy we should be able to talk civilly to people we don't agree with. Done properly, it's also more interesting.
Lemmy is ostensibly leftist, so purity beatings will continue ~~until morale improves~~ always, it just goes with the territory. The Left always eats its own (the Right too, though they typically wait until they are in power first, instead of right out of the gate).
Also, YSK that tankies aren't actually "leftist" - just bc they call themselves that does not make it true.
If you don't think left-wingers can be authoritarian, isn't that just a no true Scotsman fallacy? You don't like the idea that people could genuinely be in favour of socialism, against the wealthy, etc, and also happy to murder people in the street and put kids in camps to make it happen.
Which, by the way, it is definitely okay to be against that. I'm just saying that "authoritarian left-wing" is a real thing.
I mean, if it looks/sounds/smells/walks like fascism, then at some point we should start to wonder if it is fascism? Even/especially when people who notoriously do not tell the truth and are extremely well-known for hiding their true intentions say otherwise.
I am less interested in political theorizing, and more whether I will be grabbed off the street and sent to a concentration camp (personally).
After all, you know what the Bible says: fuck the poors, let them eat ~~cake~~ easily-prevented diseases and die, no need for justice or mercy, just lower taxation on the wealthy and it's all good bro, just trust me.
Or perhaps we could be skeptical and not simply do things because people attach a label next to them that we like. Anyway I am not stopping you from moving to North Korea if you like, where everything is wonderful, in theory.
Fascism and authoritarian communism are different things. Fascism is built on and relies on expansion through war, whereas authoritarian communism can survive without that.
Fascism is built on the idea of purity and strength, and the pollution of the blood of the pure race by dirty foreign influence. Fascist rhetoric holds the Leader as the ultimate ideal, the perfect man to emulate and sacrifice yourself for, whereas authoritarian communism upholds the ideal of the Party or the Revolution.
This is not nitpicking, this is important, because of that expansionism and reliance on an enemy I talked about. Fascist nations must be at war, it is part of their support structure, they cannot survive without a war to fight. Their society is built to support the military. You cannot make peace with a fascist nation. They will always attack you. Also, their obsession with purity means they purge their ranks of anyone not considered racially pure, or male, which is a big disadvantage compared to communism.
Authoritarian communism can survive by focussing on conversion of their society into the communal ideal of a Marxist system, and their security structures are all built around that. Thinking correctly, not believing in capitalism, being educated in socialist modes of work, etc. Education is emphasised, with a strong bias towards one correct way of thinking, to make you a perfect worker, no matter who you are or where you came from.
When authoritarian communists purge, it's usually not for race, or sex, it's for your beliefs and ideals or your class loyalty.
Learning how to recognise different kinds of danger is important, because it lets you make the right choices to survive.
Hehe, I'm pretty sure I'm banned in at least one community as well, not sure how to check. I rarely visit communities and in stead just react off posts in my feed.
But you must be subscribed to some? I'm guessing nobody much visits them one by one, it's single feed all the way. I just checked and, yep, a ban is also an unsubscription, so you won't be informed but the posts will just stop coming.
I see you've posted to !europe@feddit.org. I'm still pretty pissed about what happened there. On one hand I tell myself they're not worth my time if they're going to treat any tiny ideological micro-dissent with such ferocity (again: I'm a frigging centrist). On the other, they're clearly still the best Europe community on Lemmy, unfortunately for me. That community was literally the reason I signed up in the first place.
I'm not saying this is the case in your case at all, but depending on the issue this isn't always an ironclad defense. We certainly have historical examples of political centrists aligning with very extreme ideologies in an attempt to cling to power.
And just logically, some issues don't have a valid centrist position. There's no valid centrist position between a flat earther and one who believes the earth is a planet in space. For example, in a science community, I would expect people pushing flat earth to possibly get banned and could see the logic in someone trying to find a middle between those two positions getting the same treatment. Just because there are two sides to an issue doesn't make a moderate position between them reasonable or defensible. Sometimes one side is just wrong.
I think the merits of the situation are more important than affiliation.
Do you not think this is what a flat-earther (or climate denier) would say? Before they shower you with factoids ("the merits of the situation") that "prove" their point? On the contrary, I think that affiliation can be very important in such cases, because science works on the basis of consensus. If you disagree with the herd, then you should expect to have an uphill struggle.
In any case, here we're talking pure politics, i.e. questions where the responses are conditioned by people's personal values, and which (theoretically) are open to debate.
But just because they say it doesn't make it a valid argument in their case.
My point here was just categorically being a centrist doesn't necessarily make the position reasonable enough that it should be tolerated. If you're a centrist between a reasonable position and an unreasonable one, you might still be being unreasonable. It really depends on the specific issue. That's really all my point was.
Sure, I understood your point. My point was that you are inadvertently making the same claim as the flat-earthers: "Don't worry about that boring scientific consensus, this specific issue is different". In science, there's absolutely a value in tribalism, i.e. respecting consensus (being a woolly "centrist") when one does not have expertise.
But again, my positions were not scientific but political. Here everyone can have their opinion about what's "reasonable" or not.
This isn't analogous, though; consensus is a category reached through reason and proof. Expert consensus is by definition a reasonable position (can still be wrong, of course, but it's a reasoned consensus).
Centrism just means a relative position between two others. It is not definitionally reasonable, so your analogy of what I'm doing doesn't hold any water.
You can always just use an alt. Fortunately I haven't been banned from any communities I really enjoy, but I've always had several alts on standby in case that were to happen.
To me that feels like too much of a concession to the abusive mod. If they don't want me in their community, fine, I will respect that. In the case of !europe@feddit.org, I can see the quality of the contributions. I know that mine would have raised the level. It's their loss. And Lemmy's, unfortunately.