So, I don’t know why I am doing this, but I was reading “Log Off” by Katherine Cross more carefully, after a short discussion here, and here. It seemed to me a good idea to have a post dedicated to this, and possibly in the future if this works out, about other books. The book is dense, and highly relevant to Lemmy and broadly Fediverse culture, and it spells out nicely some things I had thought before, but in much more packed and well thought-out way. I found myself highlighting something on virtually every page. So I guess I would like to post my thoughts on these highlights and see what other folks think about those as well. So here goes. I am posting the quotes as separate comments to this post, to facilitate them being discussed more thoroughly.
One thing I firmly believe is that arguing on the internet is 100% pointless and never accomplishes anything. We are too alienated and isolated and atomized on the internet to ever truly reach someone else across the gap of ideology and prejudice, everything bounces off because we’re all just strings of text on a screen. Every debate is another random encounter in the posting RPG. Rather than a public square, it’s a mob farm for exp.
I think online spaces can still be useful, but conflict is entirely useless. It’s just for fun.
I don’t even know if it is about conflict per se, or the very notion that it is virtuous to engage with these media politically. Even these alternative platforms, because they are modeled after Twitter, Reddit, and the like, possess the same qualities, by making us react and respond to similar ways. I guess digital infrastructure for activist groups should be more similar to private infrastructures of orgs rather than corporate social media. And they should be community first, with a sophisticated take on the channels available to communicate to and from the organization and the rest of the community.
Until some time ago, I was still on the fence about Lemmy though. On the technical level it has some desirable attributes in the community structure and federation, that could possibly help. But the user culture, me included, is so fucked up that only with insane levels of moderation it could ever fulfill such a purpose. For this another medium should be considered in Lemmy’s place (I don’t think Mastodon is the one either), that would constrain antisocial and non-social user behavior on the technical level. So, this is a loose argument that Lemmy and Mastodon are not tools for social change, and should be abandoned as such.
I think the format promotes conflict. Lemmy ultimately is made to be Reddit-like, so we shouldn’t be surprised when it produces Reddit user culture. Ultimately we need an entirely new format that promotes cooperation over conflict.
As for moderators, I also think the volunteer model is bad. They do important work and should be compensated for their labor.
I disagree. I joined Lemmy as an anarchist and I’ve been convinced over time that Marxism is actually the correct idealogy.
And I will never be able to convince you otherwise! I could say that I think there are other factors which made you change your mind, give examples from my own evolution from anarchism to Marxism, we can trade replies back and forth for hours or days, ect etc
It would all accomplish nothing.