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?
It’s true that there is a difference between e.g., FB and anonymous social media, but they can still be heavily addictive. You can still want to be “in the know” for example, or just sit around mindlessly browsing instead of dedicating yourself to more worthwhile tasks that you’d like to do, or just sit around and refresh the notification page.
Lemmy is relatively slow with breaking news and misses a lot of the fluff that other sites would have in between truly noteworthy things. For addiction prevention, this is pretty great— if I missed a couple days on Reddit, the entire conversation was different. Here on Lemmy, I can show up a couple days later and still see the big things from the previous days. I can respond to notifications days later without feeling bad. I never really feel out of the know unlike Reddit, and if I was incentivized to log in because of that, I’d definitely say Lemmy is less addictive.
Absolutely, but it’s different. For-profit media needs to maximize, well profits. So their platforms will be designed around this. If they profit from advertisements that means they need you to be using the app as much as possible and it will be designed to manipulate you into using the app, engaging with content, making content, etc.
Without those incentives, people can browse differently. Though we are products of our environment, so if we have been trained to use social media in a certain way, we are still likely to use say Lemmy that same way.