[streamofdigits]

Platform designers have a lot of control over features that influence (nudge is the official word I suppose) user behavior. But lets not kid ourselves, in large part the social media activity reflects also the attitude of people who participate.

Open source and federated platforms like lemmy will not magically fix the problem( * ). But they come with two killer advantages: 1) They are open, transparent and evolvable, hence diverse people can work on solutions and 2) Don't have private data monetization as their defining business model which frees up potential to explore less antisocial possibilities.

These "big picture" aspects will take some time to play out in full. But if you have the time there is nothing preventing you from setting up an instance that would strike the right balance (pun) and create history :-)

( * ) What would a "fix" look like? well thats not a easy question to get consensus on, but a workable definition is that at least people do not behave worse than in real life (as in person-to-person contact if you remember what that is :-)