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.
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.
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.
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.