Does the fediverse suffer from the same issues as centralized social media when it comes to mental health and the attention economy? (fedia.io)

submitted 3 months ago by Treedrake@fedia.io to c/simpleliving@lemmy.ml

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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?

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[-] rando895@lemmygrad.ml 2 points 3 months ago

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.

this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2024

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