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?
As someone who only uses social media in spurts, Lemmy/Mastodon are way better than centralized social media, exactly because they don’t rope you in as much. The centralized services can have me binge for hours of useless stuff because it’s slightly engaging. The feedback loop here is much more simple: if I don’t see anything interesting, I just leave.
On top of that, the posts you see here are usually higher quality (because of the gatekeeping of thr platform). I would easily take decentralized socal media over anything else.