this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2024
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Let me rephrase that:
There are studies that show that if you eat highly sweetened, salted or otherwise intensely seasoned food, it becomes harder and harder to return to normal food because A, your brain builds pathways for the things you do that make it easier and B, your receptors become weaker and weaker so that normal food will taste bland.
This is true for everything. You get used to all kinds of things. It is the reason a lot of people are addicted to social media. The constant dopamine rush of corpo social media is what keeps them going and many (me included) advicate to make these techniques illegal.
So, opening your instance to meta is like putting tons of seasoning in your food or mixing heroin to your saline infusion. Its not impossible to get off of it but if you ever read an addicts journal or watch a documentary about it (I have), you will see that it makes everything else a barren wasteland (that hasnt been previously).
And in case you want to take the next low hanging fruit of an argument: no, your users are not able to judge this for themselves. That is wrong. We tend to think of ourselves as less biased as we actually are. A strudy if you want to read about it https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1999-95006-117.
Sure, if this were their first exposure to centralised social media and if they weren't members of a highly targeted minority that are ongoingly harassed on those platforms.
But this isn't their first time. They're here specifically because they chose to get away from the experience that mega instances offer gender diverse folk.
And ultimately if Meta removes the hate, we will then refederate because the hate is gone and if that means some members of our community head back to a mega instance that takes hate seriously, that's an acceptable outcome to me.
And if they don't remove the hate (which they won't), we stay defederated and it's all hypothetical.
It is hypothetical indeed. I‘m part of a targeted minority as well and ran away from general social media for multiple reasons, hate not being the biggest. So I won’t speak to your reasons because I‘m not in the same position.
My issue was power imbalance. The single entity could do whatever they wished. If I ever went to a place that federated with them, the power imbalance is back and I‘m back where I wanted to get away from.
To me, the difference is that the power isn't in their hands now, even with federation. If they don't act on something that should be acted on, we can still act on it, even if only for our own instance.
I agree. You can act then. But your place will be fundamentally different from what it was.