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.
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.
Well, I checked it now, and found a thread about immigration with some fairly centrist takes ( https://b.piefed.social/inbox/posts/https%3A%2F%2Fjlai.lu%2Fpost%2F41340213 ) so maybe your position isn't the issue?
As I remember it, the community I was banned from was one that claimed to be for a united left, but where they kept posting memes about how voting is stupid. Eventually, I had enough and posted that it's as if they're working for the Republicans, which I'll admit was not very constructive, and that got me banned. Not something I agree with, and I doubt they'd be as strict with someone who posted in disagreement with me, but that's hard to know :l
Indeed. !europe@feddit.org seems relatively uncaptured by ideology, but still, I basically got banned for wrongthink rather than for breaking any actual rules. Last time I checked, the particular mod seemed to have gone away, but I can't be bothered begging to let back in.
That's very diplomatic and generous.
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.
You could make your own Europe community with blackjack and hookers 🤷