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.
Also, to add:
Information hygiene here is bad.
Every day, nearly every time I scroll the feed, some spicy headline goes past. When I go to look it up, it’s often completely made-up misinformation, or a warped ragebait headline, or a literally bot-written Tweet, yet it’s voted right to the front page.
…I thought Reddit refugees would be sick of this, and more careful/skeptical, but apparently not. I’ve even talked to some users who don’t understand the distinction between opinion columns and news.
And I had an argument with a mod, who had no problem with an LLM engagement farm Tweet as long as its “the right message.”
I think this is the thing that bothers me the most about Lemmy. I thought we all came here to get away from this intentionally misleading bullshit, but I guess not.
The political subreddits, especially the "politics" ones, are the absolute worst about this. Like, there is so, so, SO much real shit to get mad at about the current US administration, so why is most of what I see completely cherry-picked rage-bait bullshit??
Edit: Also, same as imaqtpie, I'm totally stealing "information hygeine" for calling out posts like that.
"I thought the behavior that they engaged in on the other site wouldn't happen here on the new site!"
shocked pikachu face
The people who left reddit to join Lemmy aren't representative of the average reddit user. They consisted of a fraction of a percent of the userbase and generally were the type to be calling out bad information hygiene. It might surprise you, but everyone who ever used reddit doesn't behave in the exact same way or value the same exact things. Tbh, I think the information hygiene was much better here shortly after the API exodus, and it has slowly degraded again over the past few years.
Btw I never heard information hygiene before but I'm going to keep using that, it's a great term.
Yeah while Lemmy has been great for refugees from reddit. Lemmy's decentralized approach makes it very difficult to deal with bad faith actors.
More than a few extremely bad trolls/people that were banned from Reddit for very good reasons have infected Lemmy over the past few years.
I remember when I first got here, there's ALWAYS the innitial shock of "what IS this place???"
Once I figured out what this place was, I asked what I thought was an obvious queation.
"If people can interact with the same communities from different instances, wouldn't it be easy to just make a new account on a new instance? The name might be the same, but the instance is different, so it's a different account. And since anyone can host an instance, what's not to prevent someone from hosting hundreds or thousands of instances with the explicit intent on being malicious?"
When I asked that two years ago, I was told by several members that would never be an issue, since instance owners can defederate with instances.
Which I don't think solves the problem. It seems to me in a cat and mouse game here it's not the admins who hold the advantage. Seems like the troublemakers hold the advantage.
Because everything the admins have is reactionary. They can only ban after the troublemakers cause trouble. But then they're back in 10 seconds.
The admins aren't paid. The mods aren't paid. It seems to me if troublemakers wanted to shut everything down they would do it with a coordinated attack. Having thoussnds if not millions of bots all at once overrun the human mods.
Eventually the mods and admins would have no choice but to shut down. Too little resources to keep up with the work of running a popular instance.
And thats kind of what happened with lemm.ee. Not trolls per se, but a lack of resources. They ran out of money and resources to host an instance, and that's without the traffic of overwhelming trolls.
Yet when I said this, I was told I was wrong. Yet here we are. Now you have 1 troll who manually makes account and is banned. Makes account, gets banned. Makes account, banned again.
Thats ONE troll, who honestly seems like he's doing it for his own amusement rather than malicious intent.
What happens when there's a much larger concentrated troll attack?