The Hostile Environment
Lemmy is the absolute worst social media platform I use. It’s a place where I often feel like I’m invisible. My experience on other platforms highlights just how off-putting Lemmy can be. The core issue? People on Lemmy are not nice to me, and it’s painfully clear that I’m not the center of attention.
Lemmy feels like a battleground where users thrive on tearing me down. I don’t need to be coddled, but a little civility and treating me like royalty wouldn’t hurt. On other platforms, my contributions are met with encouragement and respect. There, I feel valued and engaged.
Poor Moderation and Fragmentation
Moderation on Lemmy is either virtually nonexistent or too extreme. The platform blatantly allows allowing negativity toward me to flourish unchecked. It’s like being in a crowded room where no one is listening, even when I’m trying to be very loud.
In contrast, on other platforms, the moderation is so seamlessly perfect that I never see anything problematic, and nothing I say gets removed. I’m encouraged to express my opinions. This creates an environment where I feel like the star—something that is sorely lacking on Lemmy.
The Struggle for Attention
On Lemmy, it feels like a constant struggle for attention in a sea of people who aren’t me. I don’t seek to be the center of attention all day but, when I do want that and I sometimes can’t have it, it’s disheartening. My thoughts deserve to be heard.
In healthier online communities, there’s an understanding that I have something valuable to contribute. This mutual respect allows me to be appreciated. On Lemmy, my opinion is only appreciated when it’s a “good” opinion.
Conclusion: A Call for Kindness
Ultimately, my experiences with Lemmy serve as a stark reminder of the importance of kindness in online interactions with me. While diversity of thought is crucial across different platforms, people must treat me with respect and civility. You folks could learn a lot from the kind users over at Aspect and SocialAI
If Lemmy had weekly awards, you would win one for this post. The bland, LLM-inspired structure creates a feeling of rising dread until the very end when one is left with the horror of realizing this human (if they can still be called human?) has spent way too long talking only to AIs.
What’s more, the text is not a story or essay submitted as a post; the text only really works AS a post, with its references to Lemmy, Aspect, and SocialAI and contextualized among a stream of posts. The fact that it’s in [email protected] provides ironic distance, but not so much to prevent it from being read unironically for at least the first couple paragraphs. I don’t know what Aspect and SocialAI are like, but the differences between them and Lemmy that are pointed out in the text creates a picture of a platform that problematizes modern identity and the individual’s role in a society mediated by social media (ha) and AI bots. I bet someone could write a half-decent critical theory research paper expounding on your post. Well done.
Thank you very much! I feel seen- how cool to have my post broken down and reflected upon like I’m a published author lol.
I actually don’t know anything about Aspect or SocialAI beyond what I’ve read in headlines, and I didn’t bother to ask GPT-4 or look into it myself, so I just went with what I assume to be how those apps work.
I was inspired by a recent post on Fedigrow about people’s various complaints about Lemmy
I debated for a while on how veiled I wanted the satire to be; part of me wanted it to just be something for myself to laugh about when people think it’s real, but I decided I would make it a bit more obvious and post it here
Sometimes I wonder if it’s a complete waste of time to think through a post that I’m writing, if only a couple people are going to read it. But then I figure: a) doing so is its own reward: practice putting sentences together, keeping the mind sharp; b) some texts/ideas can be seminal, just as a music band may have very few fans but each of those fans goes on to create their own band; c) contemporary scholars study texts and articles (including ephemera such as handbills) from past decades, so it’s likely that future scholars will trawl and study social media posts from our era, using techniques we can barely imagine. Plus, it’s fun!