PS: The discussion on this post turned mainly into a (one-sided) debate about whether the content of my contributions passes the Lemmy ideological purity test. So dull, yet so predictable. To be clear: I stand by everything I’ve written on Lemmy. Efforts at shaming will fall flat, as will pompous denunciations and attempts at dunking based on virtual sleuthing. I’m far too secure in my convictions to be bothered by a brigade of insufferably self-righteous progressives trying to one-up each other in their efforts to root out dissidence. To the (quite numerous) others who offered interesting feedback and kind words, thanks.

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.

A pigeon hotel. Seen last month in a public park in Alcoy, Spain.

Most of the rooms looked to be out of service but the luxurious upper floors were visibly in use. In France such colombariums dispense healthy food laced with contraceptives for the guests. I could not find any information on this particular project.

Some thoughts about my 5 weeks of cycle tourism in France, Spain and Portugal.

First, that thing is not a motorbike! It has a certificate of EU conformity as an e-bike, which got me a hefty state rebate on the €1200 price (from a French regional authority). To qualify as an e-bike in Europe you’re limited to 250W max output and 25km/h, with no throttle. Those caps can usually be jailbroken but I’m not interested in doing that: I’m touring, not delivering pizzas. The bike is made by Engwe, a Chinese budget manufacturer. It weighs 36kg, has a low-end Shimano gearset, no torque sensor, mechanical brakes with no regenerative function, and welding that looks like it was done in a hurry. On the other hand, it’s a bike, it’s made of metal. I keep it oiled and tuned and inflated correctly, and the ride is silky smooth. After 1500km I have zero regrets about not spending more. Thank you China.

The fat tyres must be a heresy for purist cyclists, who probably see them like vegans see SUVs. I think that’s unfair. As I see it, fat tyres are to skinny tyres what hiking boots are to sneakers: both are fine, but with the former you have the freedom to take your eye off the road.

In terms of comfort, I’ve found that riding an electric bike is not a fundamental improvement on a push bike. For me anyway, it turns out that discomfort is mainly a factor of things that a motor cannot improve: basically, the fact of being perched precariously on a tiny seat on a two-wheeled object in the path of other road users. The main benefit of the motor is that it takes the edge off hills.

Roads in western Europe are generally excellent. In Spain and Portugal many of them are quite new (often built with EU development funds since the 1980s). I regularly had rural roads almost completely to myself.

The big disappointment of the trip was the cycle routes, in particular the EuroVelo ones. I planned to follow Eurovelo 1 (Atlantic route) and 3 (Pilgrim’s route). But it turns out that many sections are not even paved! Again, this seems to be a question of taste. Some cyclists love bumping over stones and gravel, for whatever reason. Personally, I love rolling along in silence and without any fear of punctures (oddly, the luxuries that motorists take for granted!). In the end I chose to ignore all cycle routes. This was particularly a shame in Spain, which has a parallel network of vias verdes (green ways), former railway branch lines which make for ideal cycling. Alas many of them are unsurfaced and even potholed. The exception was the Basque country, where they are paved, signposted and well-maintained, like the rest of the public infrastructure there. The section from Eibar to Vitoria in particular was such a pleasure that I actually slowed down so as not to get there too quickly.

Car traffic was the main bummer of this trip as any other I have ever taken on a bike. This is where an electric motor really helps, because on an e-bike you are never out of breath. In my view there are few experiences as miserable as huffing and puffing up a hill in a cloud of diesel fumes from passing trucks overtaking in first gear. But, as mentioned, smaller rural roads in western Europe are mostly pretty empty.

On the rack is a backpack, attached by bungees. I was literally bikepacking. This setup is simpler than traditional panniers and makes it easier to take trains, which I did several times. Taking bikes onto (slower) trains is becoming easier in Europe but it still needs planning. French trains have bike hooks, which are incompatible with heavy bikes (or panniers). In Spain the station staff sometimes don’t know the (ever-changing) rules. Once I was refused access to my train by security guards who believed (wrongly) that electric bikes were banned (in fact, they have a exemption). By the time I’d proved them wrong, my train had left. I made an official complaint and expect to be refunded. Not a happy experience, but mostly things went smoothly. Commuter trains in particular are becoming easy-peasy throughout western Europe (the ones in Barcelona are now packed with bikes). Spanish stations are mostly modern and accessible by lift. Less so in France, but things are improving.

In sum, an adventure. I see a bike as a mode of transport that opens up otherwise inaccessible destinations. In this, the experience was a great success.

Photo: near Alcoy in Alicante province.

In Square René le Gall, Paris.

On the surface this story looks about as common as it gets. Maybe I’ll have a hard time convincing you there’s smoke without fire, but I’m gonna try. To assert my dignity and also because I think the case is strong.

Quick summary: Last year, I commented on a post in feddit.org/c/Europe about a stabbing spree by an immigrant in Germany. The mod @federalreverse@feddit.org showed up a week later to slap me with a temporary ban for “racism, gaslighting” (see screenshot). I complained and we had some back-and-forth in private. I defended myself and refused to “change my opinion”. The mod got irritated and shut down the conversation with a snarky “Congratulations, you’re now banned permanently”. A week ago (i.e. 10 months later) I sent an unban request to the mod team, promising meekly to stick to the rules (which AFAIC I never broke). The same @federalreverse@feddit.org replied (the others stayed quiet): “You will never be welcome in this community. Don’t ask again.”

PLEASE READ ON before you skim the screenshot.

First: I know what server this is, so I have to ask (beg?) you to make an effort and assume good faith. I am not, in any way, racist. Obviously, this is completely unfalsifiable, hence the mod’s lawyerly use of the word “latent”. I could provide tons of anecdotes to show how unracist I am, but what’s the point? Ultimately there’s no way for me to prove the purity of my innermost convictions. This is IMO what makes the “Assume good faith” rule so important - and the racism slur so powerful and open to abuse. On economics I’m solidly left-wing, on cultural questions I’m a go-slow centrist. In Europe a big cultural issue for basically generations has been non-European immigration, particularly of Muslims. Yes yes, red lights are now going on. Controversy! Here is my position on that: immigration is fine, we just need to be careful about speed and numbers or else integration will be a problem. And Islam is fine (of course it’s compatible with democracy, the far right is wrong about this as with almost everything else), BUT we just need to be honest about the potential for jihadi violence (which also hurts Muslims BTW - for instance the Muslim police officer among the Charlie Hebdo victims). That’s it. If I’ve lost you already, then things are going to go downhill from here. So: no, I am not even anti-immigration, let alone some kind of proto-fascist. FWIW I usually vote green.

Second: I want to set the record straight about the bit of my comment which seems to have precipitated all this:

It is common knowledge that during the year following the Syrian influx several hundred people were killed and over a thousand injured in a series of spectacular terrorist attacks.

Apparently this is not common knowledge. One respondent called it “huge hyperbole”, a second concluded I was “full of shit”. Then @federalreverse@feddit.org turned up to ban me for disinformation or wrongthink or whatever. But what I wrote was correct. The three main attacks (1, 2, 3) in 2015-16 in France killed 235 people and injured 877. I was in Paris at the time and I heard the ambulence sirens and saw the helicopters myself. That was just 3 incidents. There were lots of other Islamist attacks, mostly smaller but some comparable, right across Western Europe during those years. This does not diminish the awful far-right terrorism that also happened.

So my comment was not hyperbole or bullshit, and it was obviously relevant to the article. It was an uncomfortable observation, sure, but I don’t see “Causing cognitive dissonance” as a reason for deletion and banning in the Feddit Europe community rules. BTW: those rules are really serious (“We follow German law”). They would be quite good if the mods respected them.

For my troubles I have been branded a racist and I can no longer participate in one of the higher-quality communities on Lemmy (where I had mostly been posting about economics and the environment).

It feels humiliating and unjust. I’m fine with speech-policing, but thought-policing really bothers me. Who was this @federalreverse@feddit.org to pass judgement on my supposed motivations?? Just judge me on what I write, FFS. And if you don’t know the relevants facts, that should be your problem, not mine.

This experience (with one or two others, alas) has left me with the impression that Lemmy is maybe not, after all, the place for calm, reasoned, nuanced, good-faith discussion after all. I still want that not to be true. Anyway, I feel a bit better now this particular mod’s abuse is on the record.

Thanks for listening.