A lot of people feel drawn to simple living or digital minimalism because they feel a constant need to be connected and stay up to date, and feel less and less in control because of the attention economy and how algorithms are developed to maximize your attention. While the fediverse might not work in the same exploitative way as centralised services does, there’s still a feedback loop that keeps you coming back.
To what extent does the problems of the attention economy on the human mind plague the fediverse? Is replacing centralised services with Lemmy/Mbin/Piefed and Mastodon just opting for a “lesser evil” in a sense? What are your thoughts?
Even if social media like lemmy/mastodon takes over places like reddit/xitter, the difference is that the big corps have an incentive to keep you refreshing their services so that you keep seeing more ads and add more engagement. Therefore they focus on ragebait and dark patterns to keep their audience hooked and coming back constantly, regardless of their mental health.
The fediverse doesn’t have these incentives as its run by users for users. I don’t care how often you visit lemmy.dbzer0.com , in fact, the less people refresh the page the less I pay, and since I am covering my costs with donations, I don’t have any perverse incentives towards the people and communities we host.
Lemmy moves slowly. I can come here and comment on things from two days ago cause it’s still pretty high up on the list. I think that would reduce the need to be up to date.
On mostly anonymous social medias, what’s the pressure to be connected? Back on reddit I wouldn’t log in for weeks at a time
It’s true that there is a difference between e.g., FB and anonymous social media, but they can still be heavily addictive. You can still want to be “in the know” for example, or just sit around mindlessly browsing instead of dedicating yourself to more worthwhile tasks that you’d like to do, or just sit around and refresh the notification page.
Lemmy is relatively slow with breaking news and misses a lot of the fluff that other sites would have in between truly noteworthy things. For addiction prevention, this is pretty great— if I missed a couple days on Reddit, the entire conversation was different. Here on Lemmy, I can show up a couple days later and still see the big things from the previous days. I can respond to notifications days later without feeling bad. I never really feel out of the know unlike Reddit, and if I was incentivized to log in because of that, I’d definitely say Lemmy is less addictive.
Absolutely, but it’s different. For-profit media needs to maximize, well profits. So their platforms will be designed around this. If they profit from advertisements that means they need you to be using the app as much as possible and it will be designed to manipulate you into using the app, engaging with content, making content, etc.
Without those incentives, people can browse differently. Though we are products of our environment, so if we have been trained to use social media in a certain way, we are still likely to use say Lemmy that same way.
The instance I’m on is definitely smaller in scale and thus calls for a different approach to social media. It definitely feels like the old school forum days where you end up recognising usenames, I wouldn’t be surprised if a year down the line we end up setting up an irl meeting between active members.
On the other hand, it’s definitely hard to break bad habits, and having been on reddit for years, I still find myself having to fight some learned behaviour (doom scrolling, opening the app when I just closed it seconds ago, wanting to post a snarky comment to someone who’s clearly wrong instead of trying to be nice and explanatory…)
I wouldn’t say that leaving centralised platforms for the fediverse is a “lesser evil”, because the fediverse is what you make of it, you still have some control if you’re techy enough. But I do think it take extra voluntary self change to have a better approach to social media, and the fediverse isn’t a solution to that in itself.
Yeah, I love name recognition! That’s definitely one of the things I’ve missed from old-school forums. I’ve never felt content aggregators (or well, reddit) really replacing forums , but I definitely feel it more with MBin and Lemmy. Good input otherwise.
Federated software, for most people, is still entangled in a competition with mainstream social media, so the biological, psychological and social implications of the attention economy are still there. First and foremost, because they have to attract users away, and if they are boring, only people motivated by duty or politics will move and that’s a microscopic percentage. You cannot offer a pbj to a heroin addict and hope they will quit. If anything, the federated social media do not offer enough interesting content.
What you’re questioning though is somehow intrinsic to the nature of social media, especially when contrasted with social networks. Is the consumption of “content” (derogatory) in itself a problem? I would say yes, but then the solution is to ditch social media entirely. That’s a shortcoming of federated software’s (lack of) political grounding: they expect that by liberating data, they will liberate people. Such a thing never happened: software doesn’t alter social or productive relations, it just grows within the boundaries allowed by existing social structures.
As folks here have said, the Fediverse at this time goes a long way by not carrying over dark pattern nonsense and other deliberate psychological tricks to keep you engaged. But that’s only one half of the equation - why do those tricks work?
Honestly, something I found useful for me (whose main consumption medium is my smartphone) is dedicating specific timeframes for recreational web activity/email checks, and turning off wifi and mobile outside of those times. It can be hard to maintain (particularly when family members suddenly move to web-based messaging platforms rather than SMS), but when I was keeping it up I felt a lot calmer/engaged with IRL stuff.
Worth an experiment - turn off social media notifications, download anything you think you really need for offline use, develop the habit of switching connectivity on and off only as absolutely needed outside of internet rec time (maps, etc.), and keep it up for a few months. See what kind of changes come of it re: your headspace.
most likely although less so as we dont have teams of expert psychologists working around the clock. i find Lemmy in particular is as scrollable as Reddit and thus addictive, where thing change are on the Instagram clones based around decentralization, they aren’t very popular to begin with and mostly find photography that is very much detached from the fake photos on Instagram that set beauty standards high and cause many people all sorts of adverse effects.
The fediverse doesn’t actively optimize for attention like commercial platforms. No notification spam and random pings on your phone, no sorting and throwing suggestions in your face by some algorithm that’s trying to keep you glued to the screen. It’s like night-and-day, IMO.
Sorting and such is just to try and bubble up interesting stuff.
One major problem it still has is encouraging filter bubbles, which have the secondary effect of sucking people in.
So far it seems like people develop around the ideas laid down by social media giants. Rather than replicating, it would be good to see incorporation of healthier options (e.g. time monitoring displayed in app, stopping endless scrolling and keeping to page by page scrolling, avoiding prioritising low effort content (by showing older posts in people’s feeds as well and displaying more that prompts comments rather than just upvotes, etc). Don’t know how they would design to minimise the hivemind…there’s still plenty of that.
Yes, it does. It will keep suffering from the same issues as long as it encourages microblogging, and there are public upvotes and likes, and you can post links on Lemmy with a single-sentence summary that people can react to without reading the link. The Fediverse social media is built on the exact same premises as for-profit social media.
What has been done on the Fediverse is taking these systems and making them less addictive. Basically, they have all the problems of for-profit social media, but for-profit social media snowballs these problems and puts them at the core of their business model. The issue without the several layers of « making it worse because money » is not nearly as bad. But I do believe it’s a « lesser evil » thing, at least for our brains and ability to interact with people.
Great insights.
I have ADHD really really bad, and the algorithms on main social media suck. On fedi though there is no algorithm and it doesn’t feed me new things, here it’s just new to old.
