JubilantJaguar

European. Linux enthusiast. History graduate. **I never downvote reasoned opinions** and I do not engage with people who downvote mine (which may be why you got no reply). Low-effort comments with vulgarity or snark will also be ignored.

Last Notes

2026-07-30 19:30:18 GMT

Here are some reflections on my personal experience of federated social media.
A bit of background. In the [90-9-1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule) 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: [[email protected]](https://lemmy.world/c/birding). Lots of **original content** and genuine expertise, zero vitriol or toxicity. Perfect. In a similar vein, [[email protected]](https://mander.xyz/c/pigeon), where you can literally [post](https://lemmy.world/post/34854109) pics of pigeons to an adoring audience.
I've also got some value out of [[email protected]](https://lemmy.world/c/linux) and [[email protected]](https://programming.dev/c/privacy) 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](https://lemmy.world/post/36489459) somewhat arbitrarily to [[email protected]](https://lemmy.world/c/bicycle_touring) , [[email protected]](https://lemmy.world/c/bicycling), and [[email protected]](https://slrpnk.net/c/solarpunktravel). 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](https://lemmy.world/post/32670109) from [[email protected]](https://feddit.org/c/europe) 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 [[email protected]](https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/c/europe) 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 [[email protected]](https://slrpnk.net/c/degrowth) 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 [[email protected]](https://sopuli.xyz/c/china), 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.

2026-03-05 20:01:50 GMT

Seen in Vallecas, a suburb of Madrid.
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/f2eb57a6-c0d4-4dcd-975e-7d2298f231b5.jpeg

2025-11-01 20:26:28 GMT

- reply

Since when did I claim to be "passionate" about anything? My proposal concerns *new users*, it's in the title. I'm not a new user any more and I have a bunch of post and comments to my virtual name (not that it's important, sure). But I now see that it would have been better if I had been pushed to another server when I signed up. Hence the proposal.

2025-11-01 20:08:36 GMT

- reply

You're just saying I should practice what I preach and get off LW, is that it? Can't be bothered, but fair enough. My proposal here concerns new users.

2025-11-01 19:48:39 GMT

- reply

Since when am I proposing a utopia? I'm proposing that people *talk to people in their physical communities*. Nothing more ambitious than that.

2025-11-01 19:38:27 GMT

- reply

>People not wanting to see hate speech or propaganda does not mean they are in echo chambers.
You know that bad guys are now calling *your* ideas "hate speech" and "propaganda", right? And they believe it as much as you do. How do you propose to get out of this mess if not by talking?

2025-11-01 19:28:58 GMT

- reply

Well, if the true nature of the fediverse is to *encourage* people to silo themselves into echo chambers where they never have to deal with others who don't already share all their values and opinions - if that's truly the point of this thing - then yes, apparently I'm wasting my time here. I still hope there's a better way.

2025-11-01 18:10:58 GMT

- reply

>There’s only one mexican instance
Join it and make it better.
>it uses a whitelist and it fucking federates with grad
Change that fact, or accept it, or use blocking features (which are not lacking).
Sure, these won't be popular suggestions, but IMO social media should not be just another form of shopping, where we pick exactly what agrees with us best, and annoys us least, and then lock the door to keep everything else out.

2025-11-01 13:02:05 GMT

There is perennial discussion about what fediverse servers (Lemmy or otherwise) to recommend to new users. I have a proposal, perhaps not very original but I haven't seen it made often.
**Let's just recommend that newbies pick an instance that is located close to them geographically. That's to say: their country, their region, or (ideally) their town.**
Some context. Personally, I am not totally sold on social media, federated or otherwise. The evidence is now pretty clear that it causes major social harms. One way it does this is by fuelling polarization around hot-button national and international debates, at the expense of local issues. **Reviving democracy is going to mean boosting communities at a local level.** This could be a small way to do that.

2025-02-28 11:17:31 GMT

- reply

But who's making these "updates"? Who's doing the actual work of keeping the software secure? Mozilla is.
If everybody moves to a free-riding fork, Mozilla goes to 0% and there will be no browser let alone updates.

2025-01-21 13:48:29 GMT

- reply

Legtimacy? The guy won the popular vote. Like it or not, legitimacy there is.

2025-01-15 12:50:05 GMT

- reply

> I think often people find it easier to write their own code than to make changes to other people’s projects
A rarely mentioned weakness of open source, and it can only be getting worse given the narcissism of younger generations.
I regularly see cases of multiple projects with *exactly* the same goals. All that duplication of effort just to serve the vanity of the respective project leaders. The wasted potential for good software has to be huge.