If there’s one thing I’d hoped people had learned going into the next four years of Donald Trump as president, it’s that spending lots of time online posting about what people in power are saying and doing is not going to accomplish anything. If anything, it’s exactly what they want.
Many of my journalist colleagues have attempted to beat back the tide under banners like “fighting disinformation” and “accountability.” While these efforts are admirable, the past few years have changed my own internal calculus. Thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre and Hannah Arendt warned us that the point of this deluge is not to persuade, but to overwhelm and paralyze our capacity to act. More recently, researchers have found that the viral outrage disseminated on social media in response to these ridiculous claims actually reduces the effectiveness of collective action. The result is a media environment that keeps us in a state of debilitating fear and anger, endlessly reacting to our oppressors instead of organizing against them.
Cross’ book contains a meticulous catalog of social media sins which many people who follow and care about current events are probably guilty of—myself very much included. She documents how tech platforms encourage us, through their design affordances, to post and seethe and doomscroll into the void, always reacting and never acting.
But perhaps the greatest of these sins is convincing ourselves that posting is a form of political activism, when it is at best a coping mechanism—an individualist solution to problems that can only be solved by collective action. This, says Cross, is the primary way tech platforms atomize and alienate us, creating “a solipsism that says you are the main protagonist in a sea of NPCs.”
In the days since the inauguration, I’ve watched people on Bluesky and Instagram fall into these same old traps. My timeline is full of reactive hot takes and gotchas by people who still seem to think they can quote-dunk their way out of fascism—or who know they can’t, but simply can’t resist taking the bait. The media is more than willing to work up their appetites. Legacy news outlets cynically chase clicks (and ad dollars) by disseminating whatever sensational nonsense those in power are spewing.
This in turn fuels yet another round of online outrage, edgy takes, and screenshots exposing the “hypocrisy” of people who never cared about being seen as hypocrites, because that’s not the point. Even violent fantasies about putting billionaires to the guillotine are rendered inept in these online spaces—just another pressure release valve to harmlessly dissipate our rage instead of compelling ourselves to organize and act.
This is the opposite of what media, social or otherwise, is supposed to do. Of course it’s important to stay informed, and journalists can still provide the valuable information we need to take action. But this process has been short-circuited by tech platforms and a media environment built around seeking reaction for its own sake.
“For most people, social media gives you this sense that unless you care about everything, you care about nothing. You must try to swallow the world while it’s on fire,” said Cross. “But we didn’t evolve to be able to absorb this much info. It makes you devalue the work you can do in your community.”
It’s not that social media is fundamentally evil or bereft of any good qualities. Some of my best post-Twitter moments have been spent goofing around with mutuals on Bluesky, or waxing romantic about the joys of human creativity and art-making in an increasingly AI-infested world. But when it comes to addressing the problems we face, no amount of posting or passive info consumption is going to substitute the hard, unsexy work of organizing.
I wouldn’t use any of those other features. I just browse by top all 1/6/12 hr (which piefed lacks) and the theme isn’t great either.
How does it offer either of those things? I see an ‘attitude %’ on hover, and it says it has ‘strong moderation tools’. But I mean 100% community run. Subscribers have to vote on bans or something. And proof of personhood verification tests.
There are multiple themes to choose from. People that already know how to use Lemmy will be able to do more with Lemmy, for sure - PieFed is atm more of a concept of what is coming up, hence exciting! Especially for onboarding new users who don’t already know how to use Lemmy, i.e. from Reddit. I use PieFed as my daily driver, but I frequently have to fall back to Lemmy to accomplish certain types of tasks. So it’s not yet ready for the masses who don’t have an early adopter mindset. But it does offer tools to help with specifically those two things that you mentioned!:-)
Afaik, any proof of humanity depends on instance admin practices - same as Lemmy (and Mbin) too - but what PieFed offers uniquely along those lines is “reputation”. This can either be used directly by a mod (or admin) - e.g. for the first 2 weeks after signing up I was not allowed to DM anyone - or even by the individual end-user, as I’ll mention below with icons.
One really cool thing I see from PieFed already now is democratization of moderation: mods on Lemmy (and Reddit) have a binary choice to make between removal of content vs. allowing it, while PieFed significantly expands upon those options. One way is to auto-collapse, or even auto-hide, comments and posts below a certain vote threshold (different values provided for each of those, the first retaining the ability to always see the content just one single click away, the latter removing it from view altogether), thereby allowing people who want to avoid “controversial” content to do so more readily (related: there’s also a NSFL option, on top of a NSFW one, attempting to maximize such features available to people), in a manner that is independent of a community moderator, and with the ability to change the setting at any time.
PieFed similarly allows people to block all users from a specific instance, without having to defederate that requires admin support as Lemmy does (Lemmy has a feature that it calls instance blocking, but it is horribly misnamed bc it does not in fact block instances as all, and despite being promoted by people as an instance block is really just a community mute, leaving users free to spam your notifications for WEEKS and WEEKS after you no longer want to receive them - which is a real thing that has happened to me, TWICE, and basically caused me to leave Lemmy altogether as a result, although fortunately I found PieFed so didn’t have to go all the way back to Reddit to avoid such).
Another cool thing that PieFed offers is user icons: either placed by the user (whatever custom one you want, to help you recall whatever you feel that you need to - like “be careful, this guy is wordy!”), or automated ones placed by the system. Examples include new user (who may not know how things work, so be gentle), account which posts >20x more often than comments (hence may be an unregistered bot account), someone who receives >50x downvotes than upvotes (highly contentious person, very insensitive to whatever community they are in) - and to be clear these are overall, not specific to a community or post/comment, hence still works to brand-new content offered by each user. Whereas previously I spoke to removal or posts/comments based on such features, note here that this feature merely places a LABEL onto these categories of users - ultimately leaving it up to the end user, rather than a mod, to decide what to do about it. You can ignore these icons entirely, seek them out specifically, or whatever. But those varieties of “reputation” scores are made available to you in a numerical capacity.
Another cool aspect of labeling, this one requires an instance admin, is to place a commentary below every post from certain instances, like for Beehaw it says:
Note that link is to the exact statement from the instance admins themselves describing their policies in their own words. So this is far from “unfriendly”, and rather more welcoming to describe for instances where the “normal” expectations differ, what their particular desires are. Can you imagine if for Lemmy.ml it would say “any post criticizing Russia or China or North Korea is subject to removal” or some such!?
Speaking of, note how the community “side-bar” text appears below EVERY post - while some apps hide that away, PieFed places it front and center every single time, so that users have access to the info that they may need.
Also, PieFed is written in Python, rather than Rust, so its future development should proceed forward more quickly than Lemmy, allowing it to reach feature parity soon and even exceed Lemmy, as it already does in so many ways (though crucially: not all yet, so again I’m mostly describing the future here rather than the present, even though all of the above already exists).