Simple Living

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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] 13 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

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.