253
Returning to the fediverse is hard. (piefed.world)
submitted 3 weeks ago* by to c/fediverse@lemmy.world
177 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

With Reddit just announcing ai mods for sub reddits I think it’s finally time I fully give it up. I’ve been slowly trying to transition back into the fediverse but damn is it hard sometimes. Listen I have left leaning politics but does every other post have to be about some political shit on the all tab, I feel like I’m forced into this box that is my subscribed feed or I have to actively search out new communities because all is just a political circle jerk that I don’t care about. Not to mention the moment I came back I saw a fucking flow chart on the instances drama of the week. If I wasn’t so dedicated to dropping Reddit I think the average Joe would have left by now seeing all of this. And YES I have been trying to be the change I want to see if you check my profile I regularly post in meme subs non political just funny memes to be like “lmao” and people can move about their day. I’m not saying there ISNT other type of content on lemmy or piefed it just feels like the stuff that floats to the top is political

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 17 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

There's also no curated algorithm to cause that dopamine rush, that causes the addiction, so you want to scroll and hit those juicy dopamine posts, but without the manipulation designed to keep you engaged and stuck, not going to happen. So it's also a great place to detox from your brain being in the habit of seeking dopamine that way, it's like a slow lowering to the ground, instead of cold turkey.

I was really feeling the loss of those dopamine hits, when I first transitioned over here, but now I don't look for those hits here at all, and I can just enjoy a small scroll, without getting stuck in here, and put my phone down, which is nice.

What reddit and Facebook do, is hugely manipulative and created and curated to trap you there. I don't know if that needs to be the same here, as much. And maybe curating your home page, really is the way to go.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • hideshow 4 child comments
    •
  • [–] 3 points 3 weeks ago (1 child)

    I don't like how people talk about The Algorithm™ as though any feed algorithm is inherently a problem and exists to keep people trapped in the app.

    I'd love to have an algorithm automatically curated my feed so I don't have to manually curate it, since the curation tools are so coarse.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 1 point 3 weeks ago (1 child)

    PieFed categories of communities do this, with user-customizable and shareable Feeds. Perhaps check out PieFed.ca - it has the same set of admins that you have now, and even without an account you can view these and then subscribe to those communities in your Lemmy one, see full list at https://piefed.ca/topics.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 child)

    I mean curation by community is too coarse. Often communities have a mixture of posts I'm interested in and posts that I'm not.

    The idea of communities makes sense from a moderation perspective, but I don't like it from a feed/search perspective.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 1 point 2 weeks ago (1 child)

    What would be more ideal? The tighter focus that e.g. subreddits provided? More niche communities here keep dying off, so that we cannot have e.g. a community based on a single game, so much as a community like just "gaming".

    PieFed has a bunch of features that may help - post flairs (e.g. see posts about the Threadiverse but not Mastodon-style Fediverse posts), user flairs (e.g. see posts by senior "enthusiasts" in a community while excluding all those "hey all I am new and I love the Threadiverse so far"), or do direct keyword filtering. There are also user icons that you can place next to people's account names to help you visually spot posts from people that you might want to either specifically read or perhaps avoid, but whom you did not want to simply block. You can also "follow" users too, receiving notifications whenever they post.

    Also, since you can always find content in those categories of communities / Topic Feeds, you can fine-tune your actual subscriptions more so that you make it tighter in the general sense. i.e. I'm saying that you can both have your cake and eat it too! e.g. I unsubscribed from the most popular politics communities, which keeps it out of my Subscribed feed and allows other posts - even low-interaction stuff (with <10 upvotes) like poetry - to come through, but then whenever I want more I can always view those posts from a politics Feed, so nothing is "lost" that way.

    PieFed offers a significantly more robust set of tools than Lemmy. Though in general the entire Threadiverse is niche, and cannot replace what Reddit had - like better post organization (across communities) is great and all, but when the actual content creators choose to submit to Reddit but not here, then there is only so much that can be done about that.

    The Threadiverse isn't like "dying" or anything, but it's definitely not thriving either, when we used to have 65k active users while now we have 35k - people are leaving us in droves and not coming back.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 child)

    Automatic personalized feed curation, imo, would make it better, based on tags added by the author, by the reader, and by automatic classification, which is then weighted against your previous interaction with posts with those tags and explicit user preferences regarding those tags.
    In other words, an option for an automatic personalized feed algorithm. But people here (and the devs) are against it because it's a boogeyman.

    That said piefed at least lets multiple tags be added to a post where Lemmy doesn't, so that's the minimum bar for something like what I'm describing.

    But it's a chicken and egg problem because the tags aren't helpful for manual or automatic curation until more people actually use them accurately. So tldr I don't have a solution.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 1 point 2 weeks ago (1 child)

    It sounds like you might enjoy TikTok. Those Algorithms exist for a reason - they give people what they want. Sometimes they can be overzealous, like you watch just ONE video in YouTube and it starts showing you more like it... but overall people use those platforms because they enjoy what they offer to them.

    And as you say, PieFed takes giant leaps towards offering a user power to find what they want, e.g. in providing hashtags, which of course so few people use since even if they submit a post to a community on PieFed that would support them, if you do that from a Lemmy account, or via a 3rd-party app that does not provide (easy) support for hashtags, then the post will have none.

    The entire Threadiverse is an experiment. To see what people will build, and to see what the community overall will use. It's sad to see it struggling so much but... writing code it turns out is so much easier than engendering consensus among people.

    In the meantime, I now suggest to people that they not rely upon the Threadiverse and especially Lemmy as their sole source of social media. The tools are still being built, and even then something like 99% of what is already available is simply not being used, and the primary thing is Content - or you might argue rather interactions with people - both of which are fairly lacking here. e.g. so many major events happening irl that I don't even hear about the tiniest bit about here, and many times I have even searched the Threadiverse for keywords after I've learned about the topic elsewhere in case it was here but I simply missed it, only to find that as far as the Threadiverse is concerned the topic simply does not exist. Our low number of content creators is simply insufficient to fully replace Reddit or other sources, unless one's goal is simply masturbatory dopamine hits from exclusively looking at memes, or arguing about which facts exist or not (were there any fatalities in the Tiannamen Square Massacre or not?).

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 child)

    I do enjoy tiktok, although the longer it exists (and the longer it's under American control) the more I feel the negative effects of "the algorithm" in that it's not just building an echo chamber by accident but it's intentionally showing me or not showing me things for their own gain.

    I want an algorithm, but I don't want an Algorithm ™

    I hope piefed takes off because I like it. But still maybe it's for the best that I use it as an excuse to disconnect completely from social media

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 1 point 2 weeks ago

    It's dangerous for sure - both collectively (e.g. it has been demonstrated how they can map out military bases and movements following the patterns of when either the or even the surrounding people login, or perhaps do not log in during certain periods of time), and in a sense perhaps individually for people (this is probably most people) who are susceptible to additive behaviors. Although ofc forewarned forearmed and all of that, so just like any source of positive reinforcement (alcohol, drugs, gaming, even unquestionably "healthy" activities such as exercise and working), it needs to be used appropriately i.e. kept in check. "The unexamined life is not worth living", and all that.

    I should note that it was not America that made TikTok that way - at least not directly. That company has always done those activities. Capitalism always sells not what people want but what the company desires to sell them. If we want different - e.g. Loops or like PeetTube and Pixelfed and such - then we have to build it. The code is not simply going to spill out of a random generator and then email itself to us:-) - it requires a staggeringly enormous amount of effort.

    And that is the problem. I, like you and most of us here, want an algorithm that isn't Their Algorithm, but what we end up with instead still ends up being a form of Algorithm, just fueled by upvotes (vulnerable to disinformation) rather than monetary gain.

    And we should all disconnect - I would argue not entirely, but stepping back a bit may do us all a world of good. Spend most time with people irl, spend only a little learning here, and don't neglect other sources that are significantly better as primary or secondary or even tertiary means of getting information. Other than Reddit though, which is where the content creators are, I am not sure more specifically what that may look like but now I know the task ahead of me: to find that.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 0 points 3 weeks ago (1 child)

    What juicy dopamine posts are you talking about?

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 0 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 child)

    there are a handful of users who just post shitty low quality rage bait from shitty websites constantly across various communities all day long. many of these users were not on fedi a year ago.

    like, websites you have never heard of, that are highly editorialized and frame things as dramatic and hyperbolic as possible.

    and these posts dominate many of the news and politics communities, because juicy dopamine headlines mean people upvote.

    and the comment sections are dumpster fires of similar minded folks, and anyone who is skeptical/critical gets dog piled and/or the OP comes out swinging calling them a fascist for daring to challenge the 'trump does thing world is collapsing' narrative they are all addicted to.

    it's all engagement/rage bait quality stuff. it's not like, respectable moderate journalism that reports facts, that shit doesn't get upvotes because the headlines are not juicy enough.

    FWIW I have been on fedi for 3 years and this stuff is exploded the past 6-9 months, I used to like the news/politics subs a year ago because they were not dominated by this low quality content and typically had more respectable news-sources. but you can't compete with low-brow rage bait trolls who are just here to collect as many upvotes and flood the zone with dramatic bullshit to drive engagement, and that's what these posters are doing. if you confront them they just say you are a bad person who clearly supports Trump etc.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •