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?
The fediverse doesn’t actively optimize for attention like commercial platforms. No notification spam and random pings on your phone, no sorting and throwing suggestions in your face by some algorithm that’s trying to keep you glued to the screen. It’s like night-and-day, IMO.
Sorting and such is just to try and bubble up interesting stuff.
One major problem it still has is encouraging filter bubbles, which have the secondary effect of sucking people in.