Ask Lemmy

You can still make an open source cancer-causing machine. It'll just be built correctly.

What makes you think it is. Does anyone say that?

Social media is social media, regardless of the host.

All the harmful elements are still there, the only difference is that there's no one boosting them for profit but people are already great at hurting themselves that way without any help.

Thry are still niche so there is no studies to prove or deny it

Nope, there is none.

The difficulty of this little scientific endeavour would be that you would need to have enough people that only use open source social media over a sufficient period of time that you could monitor and record responses/behaviour.

But people can’t be trusted and they would inevitably look at other socials which would then dilute your results.

If you did manage to get a study completed you would then need to submit it for peer review (as with all studies) to the scientific community as a whole and they would need to perfrom their own tests to compare results.

So, you can see the difficulties.

Probably aren’t any actual studies, but the fediverse still apes mainstream social media so it likely has the same problems.

Users' testimonies i guess. Me and anyone else on lemmy will tell you that they prefer it to reddit, twitter, and instagram.

The rate at which people get banned for hate speech or bullying could also be used as an indicator, in my opinion.

Currently, no.

The research on social media in general is already spotty and uneven. Most publicly available studys exclusively look at students, often use very small population samples, use exclusively self-reported data, and introduce other methodological issues. Thats not to say that the data is useless (esspecially given the near-unanimous results in the studies that are done) but its very incomplete. We have no idea which features, models, or topics are most problematic nor do we know how they affect different demographics. Given that we lack even that data, there is no way something as niche as the Fediverse or other forms of open-source social media will be covered.

I don't think there are studies showing direct comparisons(that I know of), but it is clear that commercial social media stands to profit from you the more you use the platform and open-source platforms usually stand to lose money from hosting the service. That incentive alone is big enough to demonstrate how more harmful they are.

Replacing real social interactions with virtual ones is harmul regardless of the platform, so at least open source ones don't profit from addictions and mental health issues(like casinos). Not to mention that commercial options make it hard for you to leave the platform, and not in a "lets make a maze so the user takes longer to get out" but in a "lets stand in the door for days blocking the users exit".

Also important to note that it is possible to make a commercial social media platform without such aggresive strategies (at cost of their profit), and a open social media platform with aggresive strategies. It just happens that proprietary software can lend its hand to abuse which is not posible in open source. So in practice none of these happen.

So in general I would say that open source social media is completely free of intentional harm and commercial ones will not bother if their platform is harming people as long as it makes profits.

Being open source has no impact on how bad it is for you. It's entirely based on the algorithm.

Given that there is actual evidence that the for-profit platforms intentionally are machiavellian in order to produce more-polarized, more-ideological, more-reactionary, more-violent, more-prejudiced, more-stampeding, more-reacting/nonthinking populations which can be more easily manipulated ..

.. I'd say that the evidence is right there.

In what the fediverse-platforms are not doing.

That there are griefers, machiavellians, sociopaths, etc, is the same in both categories.

But the software's more trustworthy in the fediverse, in terms of its intent, see?

_ /\ _

There has to be some positive mental boost from getting to virtue signal how you don't use corporate stuff. I don't know if that helps long term mental health, though.

The only thing I've seen is via this video:

https://youtu.be/tdIUMkXxtHg

However, this focuses on particular features with a cognitive impact such as infinite scrolling rather than specific communities