PS: The discussion on this post turned mainly into a (one-sided) debate about whether the content of my contributions passes the Lemmy ideological purity test. So dull, yet so predictable. To be clear: I stand by everything I've written on Lemmy. Efforts at shaming will fall flat, as will pompous denunciations and attempts at dunking based on virtual sleuthing. I'm far too secure in my convictions to be bothered by a brigade of insufferably self-righteous progressives trying to one-up each other in their efforts to root out dissidence. To the (quite numerous) others who offered interesting feedback and kind words, thanks.

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.

So a good time apart from the usual cestpools of life: political and news communities.

We here all want the Threadiverse to succeed. That doesn't mean that it is going to though - it turns out that it takes a helluva lot of effort, which few to none are willing to put forth (all the way up and down the scale from contributing actual code, funding, moderation efforts, posting more content especially OC, or even just reigning in our most toxic impulses as we reply to one another in comments, smashing a downvote or failing to upvote).

I do think that eventually, as the technology itself gets better, the Fediverse is the only thing likely to be able to hold the tide against the onslaught of for-profit enshittificated alternatives. Even though we make our own kinds of Algorithms here that allow what can be said or done in the various spaces, almost none of which are properly labeled as such, leaving people to always guess incorrectly and then have to find out the hard way what are the unwritten rules.

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.

Yeah. Federated social media is even more prone to this effect than centralized. This is the single reason why I believe Lemmy can't possibly become anything meaningful on a global scale. It is a purgatory built in the image of long dead websites where we all wait for the rotting corpses of old media to wither away.

I'm eagerly looking forward to more silly, niche communities. Communities like /c/pigeon@mander.xyz & /c/stick@sh.itjust.works are wonderful examples of people providing genuinely human and silly fun content. It shows there's an actual community, not just nerds advocating for Linux.

I do find a few things annoying about the federation system, like opening links directly to lemmy.world on my desktop an having to surgically recreate the link on my instance if I want to interact with it at all. I figure it's part of the growing pains and we will find interesting ways to solve it.

Still, I feel so much better using this platform. I feel like contributing isn't just padding the Reddit admin's pockets and being used to fuel AI models. Y'all are a much more chill group anyway. I'll keep posting my food here.

Unfortunately there's loads of reddit style interactions on here. But at a structural level, it's successfully set up differently from Reddit.

Will be good to see it flesh out more, and I hope it keeps growing.

Communities like /c/pigeon@mander.xyz & /c/stick@sh.itjust.works

The !communityname@instancename format works better, it's more universal to other platforms/apps. !pigeon@mander.xyz and !stick@sh.itjust.works

I do find a few things annoying about the federation system, like opening links directly to lemmy.world on my desktop an having to surgically recreate the link on my instance if I want to interact with it at all.

You can copy paste the URL into you instance's search box.

But I do think we also need this feature https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/2318

Thanks for the community recommendations!

As it grows I think it will be much easier to justify a new person or instance in cutting off entire toxic areas and that will only cause it to grow faster.

Right now we all have to weigh the balance between activity and toxicity but eventually we shouldn't need to make that calculation, we can have "high moderation" and "low moderation" versions of every topic.

I'm jealous you're part of the nine percent I'm more of one of the ninety percent of lurkers myself.

So, you're a debate bro who argues Syrian refugees increase crime and terrorism, trans women in sports and children accessing trans healthcare are legitimate issues, and support Israel and claim there isn't a genocide.

You say shit like "So many hypersensitive thin-skinned vacuum-cleaner owners! Perhaps they're projecting their insecurities because deep down they know I'm right." and argue intolerance that people don't support your terrible viewpoints?

You're peak fucking reddit mate.

To me the good of the Fediverse is that it highlights dishonest people like yourself.

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.

It wasn't me, but looking at your moderation log and the messages in question, I would have called it "islamophobia and downplaying neo-nazi crimes" and banned you just the same. Others are welcome to have a look at those messages and judge for themselves 🤷

Thank you for contributing and for this introspective analysis, but thank you most of all for writing it yourself and not using a random word generator to do it for you. It’s a rare treat to read human prose these days.

I agree about universal links, but I'd also highly recommend Lemmy Universal Link Switcher plugin. There is also a similar one for Mastodon.

Holy cow that comment history. Geez. Yeah. If this is who is complaining about the Fediverse as an echo chamber then we must be doing something right.

I was waiting for this comment. Since others won't bother checking, here's the fact-check.

who argues Syrian refugees increase crime and terrorism

Incorrect.

trans women in sports and children accessing trans healthcare are legitimate issues,

Correct.

and support Israel

Correct. I support every sovereign country's right to exist.

and claim there isn’t a genocide.

Incorrect. Literally no opinion because it's unfalsifiable.

On the vacuum cleaner, I was totally right and stand by my based take.

You can copy paste the URL into you instance's search box.

But I do think we also need this feature https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/2318

Since I use my phone for Lemmy 100% of the time I sometimes forget what a massive issue this is. A feature like that strikes me as critical.

you should comment on my Github feature request to bump it lol

They can also look at the whole post I wrote to clarify what happened, which is linked.

Thanks, I appreciate that.

Great post. I'm frequently reminded that 40k people is so much more than it seems as I consistently encounter users who have been here and quite active for 3 years and yet I don't recognize them.

That ban from c/Europe is a badge of honor in my book. One of the nice things about the modlog is that anyone can quickly verify whether bans or comment removals are justified according to their own perspective. It shouldn't always be as necessary as it currently is, but with people on Lemmy constantly throwing around accusations of bigotry, nazism, genocide denial, etc, its quite useful to be able to quickly view a user's moderation history. Honestly that might be the most useful feature that Lemmy has, aside from the ability to federate.

However, I do have one minor quibble with your post.

for me this was quite a shocking confirmation of the intolerance of a certain section of the (mainly US) left.

To ascribe your banning from a European community on a European server because of an opinion on a European situation to the US left is quite unreasonable. Also, the mod who banned you appears to be German. This is one of my pet peeves about Lemmy, that Americans always seem to take collateral damage in the most random threads lol. The Lemmy user base is significantly more international than the reddit user base in my experience, and thus the anti-American attitudes that seem quite common outside of the US are frequently exhibited here.

I don't know that there's anything that can be done about it, but I do know that it's unproductive to blame Americans from the outside looking in. I mean it's unproductive to blame average people for the actions of their government anyway, but it's especially annoying coming from people who don't even live here and often lack a lot of context and empathy with their angry rants. None of this applies to you personally btw, but I'm just saying it for the record.

Everyone is the hero in their own story, and sadly Islamophobia is widely spread with people that call themselves "liberals".

Everyone is the hero in their own story

Pot, meet kettle.

Except that it wasn't me who banned them. I am just looking at the modlog and their own explanation of what happened.

Pushback accepted. You're absolutely right, in the main case I mentioned the community was (technically) German and the mod was German.

Alas, there were a bunch of other incidents on other communities that left a really bad taste in my mouth and in the end convinced me to avoid literally anything even slightly politics-adjacent on Lemmy. To be clear: I have totally mainstream political views, I don't regret anything I wrote anywhere (I would have deleted it otherwise). Anyone is free to look it up and argue back if they (or I) can be bothered, but we all know that this is unlikely to be productive (to put it politely). The de-facto impossibility of genuine debate on anything even slightly controversial does feel like a serious failing of social media. Discovering all this up close has unfortunately been a part of my experience here.

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.

I know you didn't ban them. But you're also considering yourself the hero in your own story when you go around Lemmy criticizing people of an extremely similar political viewpoint as yourself for not being left-wing enough and intimating that they are Islamophobic if they make any criticism of Muslims whatsoever. Seems like a self-defeating MO to me but what do I know.

Ironically, it's fairly similar to people who claim that any criticism of Israel is equivalent to anti-semitism. It's possible to criticize behaviors, groups, and/or cultures without being hateful towards them. Quite frankly, if you read Islamophobia from the two removed comments in the modlog, it says a lot more about you than OP.

Yes, and it's not like the US far left isn't extremely intolerant, that's absolutely a true statement. But I feel similarly in terms of how I try to use Lemmy. It's hard to gauge how much of the toxicity around political topics is exclusive to the Lemmy userbase, and how much is just an unavoidable failure of social media in general. Our specific flavor of extreme left wing toxicity is pretty shocking when you first encounter it, but it's really no different than the more mainstream types of political toxicity you would encounter on reddit. Instead of worshiping Trump they worship Xi and Putin, but the unwarranted aggressiveness and complete detachment from reality is similar.

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.

This reflects my experience, approximately.

Yeah… Lemmy/Piefed is a mixed experience for niche interests. I fear a set of “insulated hyper-political echo chambers,” to put it somewhat crudely, is not going to attract the masses from corporate social media.

It’s kinda my fault, though. I’m not putting enough effort in seeking out those niches, much less posting in them; it’s too easy to doomscroll.

I keep telling myself to dedicate more attention to “specialized” forums like HN or SpaceBattles or DPReview, but alas, my brain keeps failing me there too.

!birding@lemmy.world mention! Easily my favorite community here too.

My experience is much the same as yours. The Linux community is usually a bit agressive everywhere. I have been banned for questioning things as well. Still, I'd never go back to mainstream social media platforms.

This is a complete misrepresentation of what happened. Did you even read the messages they were banned for?

Sadly, a conclusion I'm leaning towards as well. In theory this system should allow an even greater mixing of ideas than Reddit and its ilk, there's no central authority determining which subjects are forbidden. But it seems we just do that to ourselves anyway, and since each instance and each community are so much smaller than Reddit it's much more effective. The same "single giant impersonal central authority" thing that's a downside of Reddit also means that it's easier to seamlessly encounter everything that is allowed under it.

I don't really know how to fix this since it seems like most people literally want it to be this way. We don't like having our views challenged, it's comforting to look around and see that everyone agree with you.

On the contrary, I think the impulse to check a user’s post history and judge them is a bad habit on Lemmy.

Take me. Scroll through my history, and you’ll probably peg me as a AI Tech Bro and a… closet neolib, maybe? I dunno. But if it’s along those lines, you could not be more wrong, on either count.

With the exception of extreme trolls (or moderators doing their thing), I think Lemmy’s culture of “purity checks” is poison to the platform. It turns communities insular, toxic, and angry like it does on Reddit, governed by takes that have nothing to do with the particular thread. It kills the focus of communities. It rewards conformance.

And this thread is a good example. I thought OP was raising some good general points, but digging previous comments up threw all that out the window. I’ve seen this happen in other threads, where a technical or fandom discussion devolves into unrelated, raging arguments on something I did not come there to read.

https://sh.itjust.works/modlog?userId=203917

The two comments at the bottom.

Edit:
Okay, I see it was a whole thread and those were the only two comments that got removed for whatever reason. I still don't think I'm misrepresenting anything but I don't really care to argue about it.

Apparently you have yourself internalized islamophobia to such an extend that sweeping claims like that about a diverse group of people and their religion does not raise any red flags for you 🤦

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.

Its a sovereign country that is the colonization of an existing people's home 😅

Its a settler colonialist nation trying to build an ethnostate in someone else's homeland, and currently doing so by overt ethnic cleansing 😅

If any state is a legitimate one then all you have to do to legitimize any settler colonial state is set up a government and all of a sudden you're allowed to be there and murder or displace all the other inhabitants, and any attack on you by those colonized people facing the wholesale destruction of their society can be claimed as self defense 😅

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.”

Thank you for expressing perfectly the points I didn't have the energy to make myself. It's a comfort to know that there are other people here who still believe in free expression and enjoy hearing opinions they don't necessarily share.

PS: But judging by the upvote tallies, we're outnumbered about 3 or 4 to one. I have no idea how democracy will continue to exist if this is representative of the offline world.

Where does he make sweeping claims?

And also just because a claim is broad does not make it invalid. I could make the claim that human beings generally have two arms. And your type would vitriolically attack me for saying so, because how could I erase the existence of amputees and other exceptions to the rule.

But I would still continue to make that claim and argue that its a valid claim, partially because the broadness of the claim inherently signifies that it may be subject to exceptions. The purpose of making such claims is to develop an ability to understand the universe, which is a near infinitely complex system, in terms that we as human beings can understand. By developing the ability to understand what is going on in the universe, although our understanding may be slightly less than 100% accurate due to our tiny human brains, we unlock the ability to manipulate the universe to our advantage. This is how critical thinking and science brought us from hunter gatherer societies to where we are now. Because people have continued making claims, which have always been slightly less than 100% true, but close enough approximations to the truth that they are useful in making better decisions. Isaac Newton made claims about physics that have since been proven to be incorrect. Was he wrong to make those claims?

In this case, OP was making a claim that there are clear indications that certain traits and tendencies commonly exhibited by Islamic cultures are perhaps problematic or destructive in the context of Islamic migration to Europe. And your response is #NotAllMuslims. Which is of course willfully ignorant of the overarching point that is relevant in the context of the discussion. It doesn't need to apply to all Muslims in order to be a problem, and nobody aside from yourself and your ilk ever implied that it did.

Does people blowing themselves up and murdering hundreds of other random people in the name of religion not raise any red flags for you? And yet what OP said does? How can that be possible?

Right now we all have to weigh the balance between activity and toxicity but eventually we shouldn’t need to make that calculation, we can have “high moderation” and “low moderation” versions of every topic.

Including when you secretly mass moderate people, Patrick.

For someone who apparently thinks of themselves as rational and scientific, you exhibit a real lack of curiosity to differentiate between correlation and causation as well as a naive notion to take people's self-serving justifications at face value (if they fit to your preconceived notion of them). I don't think this discussion will make much sense to continue, if that is the level you are arguing at.

The full story is that the mod admitted banning me not for what I wrote but for what they thought I meant. That's just outrageous.

What I actually wrote was (1) a factual correction to some comment downplaying the scale of the jihadi terrorist problem a decade ago, and (2) the anodyne observation that we cannot just dismiss as illegitimate the concerns that voters have about the effects of immigration.

I don't know why you're so keen on sullying me, to the point of alleging that you've looked into this when you obvious haven't. I'll keep things civil and leave it there.

This is more like asserting that humans are generally otherkin, proportionally. There are 1.5 billion Muslims.

Lol, this isn't a discussion, you're just taking potshots at people without presenting any sort of argument or justification at all. You don't even bother to address my arguments or explain why you take the positions that you take and make the judgments that you make. But I already knew that you were that type of user going in, tbf. It's exactly the behavior that OP describes quite nicely in this very post

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.

I'm mostly speaking for the benefit of others, because you're so wrapped up in your personal issues that it's impossible for me to get through to you via this platform.

…I thought Reddit refugees would be sick of this, and more careful/skeptical, but apparently not.

"I thought the behavior that they engaged in on the other site wouldn't happen here on the new site!"

shocked pikachu face

One of the nice things about the modlog is that anyone can quickly verify whether bans or comment removals are justified according to their own perspective.

Not really. Most of the time it's like "So-n-so got banned Reason: "

So you click the context to see whats happened, and the thread is deleted. So you can't even see what was said. You only see the topic title.

Or if the whole thread isn't deleted, you just see "Comment deleted by mod".

I am not trying to sully anyone. I am just telling people to look it up themselves and make their own judgement 🤷 It's all based on what you wrote yourself, and apparently you have zero self-reflection on why people might ban you for what you wrote.