Here are some reflections on my personal experience of federated social media.

A bit of background. In the 90-9-1 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: !birding@lemmy.world. Lots of original content and genuine expertise, zero vitriol or toxicity. Perfect. In a similar vein, !pigeon@mander.xyz, where you can literally post pics of pigeons to an adoring audience.

I've also got some value out of !linux@lemmy.world and !privacy@programming.dev 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 somewhat arbitrarily to !bicycle_touring@lemmy.world , !bicycling@lemmy.world, and !solarpunktravel@slrpnk.net. 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 from !europe@feddit.org 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 !europe@lemmy.dbzer0.com 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 !degrowth@slrpnk.net 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 !china@sopuli.xyz, 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.

And very likely not just. Taken this week in Valencia, Spain.

Finding a feral cat among dense subalpine scrub and treacherous cliffs is like a morbidly satisfying treasure hunt.

Another episode in the (sometimes darkly amusing) soap opera of New Zealand's battle to eradicate the feral invasive species that are preventing its native birds from thriving.

This is a consistently excellent blog. Consider subscribing.

PPS: Please at least TRY to read the following (if possible, not just the title) with an open mind and in a spirit of tolerance. It was written in good faith by a Linux user who will be staying on Linux.

PPPS: Among all the mean-spirited downvoting and insults and calumny (hey, this is social media) I actually learned a few useful things from this discussion. Perhaps the highlight was the tip about an obscure crowdfunded project which really fits the bill. Too late this time but I'm hopeful such projects, including Pine and Framework, might be become more available and more affordable in future.

PPPPS: I do not reply to downvoters (after all, you're declaring you don't care what I have to say). Or to people who obviously have not read beyond the title. Sorry. My post is very clear and I cannot express what I wrote better. In summary: There is a worsening problem with Linux compatibility on low-end hardware, due to the decline of desktop computing and in particular to the insurgency of ARM and Mediatek. It may hurt to hear it but it's true and we should care about it. Thanks to those who offered constructive feedback.

I'm frustrated. Once again, I have had to buy a computer I didn't want in order to stay on Linux.

Some background. Compared to most people in this forum, I am a somewhat normal computer user. That is, I have not touched a mouse in decades, I use a small lightweight low-end laptop (which is not slow on Linux), and I do not take anything to pieces. To be clear, I'm a programmer and a massive FOSS idealist. But I've never been interested in hardware, and in this respect I'm a complete normie. Let's not forget that for most ordinary people, a "computer" these days is the tethered corporate toy in their pocket.

For me this slide away from free personal computing is now getting impossible to ignore.

• 20 years ago I could buy a laptop (a Fujitsu) from a major European electronics retailer which came with a Linux CD - a Linux CD! (Kanotix, a Debian variant).
• In the late 2010s, I had a nice choice of cheap Taiwanese Wintel netbooks. So there was a Windows tax to pay but at least the hardware worked fine.
• 4 years ago, the options were getting thin on the ground. For 400€ I could find only one Linux-compatible X86 laptop, made by Acer. And since I didn't have a Linux live USB, I had to (fake-) register the thing with Microsoft in order to get access to the damn web.
• Today, there's almost nothing left. Intel laptops have all but disappeared from the budget aisle, replaced by ARM-powered Chromebooks and, increasingly, big Android tablets with keyboards. Putting non-spyware Linux on these things is often possible, sort of, but it's a nightmare. You're back to the 2010 era of ROM-flashing on Android, using repos from random developers and wading through impenetrable forum discussions. It's a massive PITA. This is not the way computing should be done, and normal users will never do it even if they were capable. It's hardly secure either.

The geeky suggestion which I can hear coming, "buy a secondhand Thinkpad", is not a proper solution. It's a band-aid fix with a timeout (PS: meaning it's on the way to EOL). Hardware from the likes of Tuxedo and Framework is nice but too heavy (PS: correction, Framework is not heavy) and way too expensive for me. The Pinebook Pro is always out of stock.

And anyway, for years I have wanted to move from a laptop to a convertible tablet (like the Surface or Lenovo's Yoga and Duet lines) (PS: meaning the form factor pioneered by those models, the cheap options these days are invariably on ARM). It makes so much sense ergonomically and even in terms of maintenance. (Keyboards have moving parts. I have to change my Acer because it has a faulty keyboard which cannot be fixed except professionally at prohibitive cost. Crazy.) But none of these computers are easily compatible with Linux. It's possible, yes, but hardly simple.

I considered, for a fleeting moment, throwing in the towel. After 20 years.

And then bought yet another laptop, basically the same model as last time except a Chromebook. I know I'll get an OS I control onto it without too much stress. That's a relief. But I'm more worried than ever about how this story is going to end.

PS: I should have predicted the bitterness and negativity and cynicism I would provoke simply by sharing my thoughts and feelings in good faith. Social media is absolutely incorrigible. In the meantime I will of course be staying on Linux, as I thought I described.

Seen yesterday in Teruel, Spain.

This is my second sighting of such a creature. The first time (different city so not the same bird) I didn't get a good look, and suspected the poor pigeon had somehow been, um, artistically vandalized. But this one was clearly natural (PS: or not, see comments), with symmetric coloration merging perfectly into the iridescent breast.

Some cursory research did not turn up clues. Did its domestic ancestor mate with its budgie cagemate? Nah, that can't be right.

Anyway, it seems that polychromatic feral pigeons are a thing.

PS. More angles:

PPS: I was fooled by a pigeon, or rather by a pigeon artist! Well done to the sleuthers here.

Taken yesterday.

The backstory: I have now done over 3000 km of touring on this fat-tire Engwe e-bike since buying it last year.

Engwe's target market for this bike seems to be food-delivery riders and city-tour guides. People constantly tell me that it looks like a motorbike. In fact it's the EU-regs-respecting model (so: power-capped pedelec with no throttle). I have done lots of touring on regular bikes and I can say that riding this thing is more comfortable, but not radically. The suspension and tires help with bumps and the motor takes the edge off hills, basically.

The airport is in fact an airplane-storage park near Teruel, Spain. During international crises it fills up with furloughed jets, so it's currently quite full.

A predictably outstanding selection of very recent birdie pics.

The Atlantic has a metered paywall with one free article.

Seen this weekend in Vallecas, on the southern outskirts of Madrid.

It is hard to find detailed information but this seems to be one of the more important ongoing urban developments in Spain and perhaps Europe too.

The future street layout is already drafted on OpenStreetMap.

Seen in Vallecas, a suburb of Madrid.

A touching portrait of a dirt-poor young female construction worker from Sichuan who became an unintentional celebrity on social media.

Source (Sixth Tone) is a Chinese state-funded soft-power outlet. That should not be relevant to this report, which is simply decent journalism.

If we want to keep our personal computing private (i.e. data, communications, social life, everything), we need to fix this problem.

The web is what makes privacy possible on the desktop, but the desktop platform is slowly becoming irrelevant. IMO our last hope is to make web apps usable and popular on mobile. In theory it's feasible.

Source is free to access (and highly recommended).

This is downer news. But remember that you are not helpless if you live in (for example) the West. We still have lots of political power and individual freedom compared to most other people in the world. If we want to keep it, it's up to us to get involved in politics. At the very least by voting. Cynicism and hopelessness will not solve this.