Simple Living

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Live better, with less

Ideas and inspiration for living more simply. A place to share tips on living with less stuff, work, speed, or stress in return for gaining more freedom, time, self-reliance, and joy.

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Does the fediverse suffer from the same issues as centralized social media when it comes to mental health and the attention economy? (fedia.io)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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?

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 2 months ago

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.