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?
Federated software, for most people, is still entangled in a competition with mainstream social media, so the biological, psychological and social implications of the attention economy are still there. First and foremost, because they have to attract users away, and if they are boring, only people motivated by duty or politics will move and that’s a microscopic percentage. You cannot offer a pbj to a heroin addict and hope they will quit. If anything, the federated social media do not offer enough interesting content.
What you’re questioning though is somehow intrinsic to the nature of social media, especially when contrasted with social networks. Is the consumption of “content” (derogatory) in itself a problem? I would say yes, but then the solution is to ditch social media entirely. That’s a shortcoming of federated software’s (lack of) political grounding: they expect that by liberating data, they will liberate people. Such a thing never happened: software doesn’t alter social or productive relations, it just grows within the boundaries allowed by existing social structures.