On big commercial social media, people think the websites they are on are a big deal: opinions you share there, people you interact with, engagement you receive. It must matter SO MUCH to them - especially to influencers who earn some money from it.
Well, commercial Web is an obvious fodder to the Fedi but what about other alternative social spaces? These small, timy websites with barely any activity on them… there’s no place for such delusions. They aren’t changing the world and they know it.
Fediverse, in comparison… oof. You see, it is the Future. If We succeed, the Evil will be defeated. The whole world depends on the few people who ended up on here. It is a quiet place now but it will inevitably become the most popular thing. The Year of Linux Fediverse is any day now!
This feel of self-importance and superiority leads to the level of drama almost on-par with the corporate socials which is highly unusual in such small online spaces, at least in my experience.
Hehe. I think we inherited a lot of that from social media. I always like to believe we could be an old-school Linux forum, or one of the places where we discussed hobbies like bicycles, knitting… whatever. For some reason, those used to be way more constructive and positive. And while we had drama, it used to be way more toned down. I don’t really know why it’s sometimes different here. We have elements of that. But maybe we lack a clear goal? Other than negative goals and growth or non-growth? Maybe it’s in part the userbase. The platform layout, psychology… Or we’re just doing way too much politics and memes here. Back in ye “good old days”(?) politics used to contained in specific corners. And since social media that’s 80% of what everything is about…
But it kinda all depends on what people expect the network to be like.
For Threadiverse specifically, I blame the laser focus on negativity on here. So often do I come across a comment that makes me think “holy shit, this guy really shouldn’t doomscroll right now”. It doesn’t need to be a political sub either, I find them everywhere. Sometimes I feel like the whole platform was tailor made for doomscrolling. It’s wild, I don’t see it anywhere else where I’ve been.
What do you mean by “I don’t see it anywhere else where I’ve been.”? The Lemmyverse in contrast to other Fediverse platforms? Or the Fediverse versus other social platforms? Commercial (with algorithms) or free? I mean I sometimes see some destructive tendencies on Mastodon as well. And there’s a lot of shenanigans going on in YouTube comments, on Reddit or underneath half the newspaper articles. But I’d also say a lot of platforms come with a unique atmosphere. Either due to the userbase or because of how they’re set up and what kind of behaviour gets reinforced due to platform design.
I follow very few groups or profiles for memes, news and politics, and I find the experience with what’s left pretty enriching overall.
Yeah, we kinda all still share this space… So I get to put up with things. But I’d agree, there’s lots of positive stuff here. It just needs a good dose of subscribing and unsubscribing from other stuff. And I sometimes wish we had more of the good stuff. Like we definitely got conversation going about mainstream stuff (and politics). I mentioned Linux as well and there’s about enough people here to talk about that, get someone’s questions answered and computer fixed… But with my more niche hobbies, there’s like 3 other people who are into that. So I regularly struggle to get a conversation going. I think we need more of that. On Reddit or Discord, there’s a lot going on, even for the most absurd hobby or interest, people post their original content… And I think we still need way more of that.
I’ve been trying to help on that for a while. Boosting, commenting, posting/crossposting… At worse, I just like/dislike since I can use that to make Ublock Origin auto-hiding posts on instances whose software doesn’t have native hiding. And I’d incentivize others to do so too, to ensure the network doesn’t whither.
But still, patiently being around for some 3 years now, my impression is that it’s growing quite nicely and quite fast too. Even more so if compared to the competition which’s been around for much longer. Iirc Reddit, Facebook, Twitter and Youtube, for example, are some 20 y.o. already. Discord I find suspicious how fast it grew, but even then it’s older than most fediverse softwares too afaik, the oldest ones to my knowledge (not counting retrofitting ActivityPub) being Mastodon and Lemmy circa 2016~2017.
Still, having learned not to take things for granted, even if I don’t find it barren, I’d again incentivize others that see potential in this network to keep helping it stay relevant.