this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2025
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Corporate social media was a mistake. Genuinely, I lay a lot of why the state of the western world is the way it is at the feet of Zuckerberg and his peers.
Same. I'm not sure Lemmy is any better tho. I know, I'm a hypocrite.
It's not owned by a corporation and doesn't sell your data or use it to feed an algorithm. So yeah I'd say it's a lot better.
What exactly is your critique? Do you think news aggregator style social media is an issue in general or is there something that lemmy just doesn't do good enough?
If I had to find something to critique, it is that bad-faith agenda-pushing is still rampant here, from "both sides" - rather all conceivable sides.
Not like I have a solution for it. Maybe forums shouldn't be this big, and we shouldn't primarily be talking to strangers.
Bad faith agenda pushing was a problem in the days of forums and BBS too, although admittedly to a lesser extent because those platforms were smaller and less commercial. As long as people are able to talk to each other over the internet, that will be a problem. I think the best way to tackle that is being able to spot it and call it out when it happens.
Social media is polarising. Lemmy, for example, and to a lesser extent Reddit, are politically left leaning. Xitter and Truth Social both very right leaning. Across all platforms voices to which do not conform to the status quo are either attacked or silenced. It's anonymous mob mentality. The human animal was not meant to communicate this way, it's not healthy, it just creates echo chambers on both sides, spreads misinformation, and is addictive.
Right now it is ok. But I worry that AI will enshittify even the Feddiverse.
It's inevitable, in part because of how easy AI will make bot farms and censorship. Really all the problems reddit has, we will see here and probably faster than the 10-15 years it took reddit. It wasn't just policy that ruined reddit, it was capital interests and special interests. Groups dedicated to swaying opinion, taking over subs, banning and shadow banning users.
In it's way, Lemmy will be easier to break because we're all already slightly fragmented. Imagine your favorite instances getting taken over like r/undelete and then defederating all the other opposition servers. Or...becoming hostile like reddit.
Then we have the greater slide to fascism. SOME of what Reddit is doing is in line with simply trying to survive that. We have no idea what kind of controlling laws might come out that will shut down or police instances hosted in places like the US. Misinformation laws. All and all it's a scary time.
I like lemmy because it feels like I've gone back 12 years or so to a better reddit. Back to old reddit. But really it's just a matter of time.
I really think we've seen a pretty complete cycle of social media over the last 25 years. If you look at how we used it and how it is used in China, Russia, or NK. It's been weaponized as much as monetized. Maybe more.
It’s better in many ways, but one that I feel is quite important is that there’s no profit motive to keep users on the platform and engaging with advertisers for as long as possible, and therefore no need to develop the kind of exploitative algorithms that drive screen addiction and engagement through rage.