You misunderstand the key design principles though. They are designed so that people struggle to have the strength of will to put the apps down, because every third thing they click through is generating ad revenue.

Lemmy isn’t perfect, but I, like many others, have no issue putting it down when I’m done with it. I personally check it for about 10 minutes when I wake up and before I sign off for the night.

Its worth noting that Lemmy doesn’t have an algorithm, it just shows you posts in chronological order (technically not true, as there are community ratios and such, but it’s true enough for a general statement).

My disdain for these apps is born from watching family and friends waste days (sometimes 8+ hours at a time) on them, and then often being totally incapable of recalling anything they’ve watched or learned. It’s actively harmful to their health.

Would you care to explain why and how is Lemmy feeding me? I’m not saying Lemmy is exempt of the bad kind of content and behaviour or even me getting addicted to social media(federated or otherwise), but it is surely not motivated to do so because it gains nothing from doing so. Last time I checked federated platform do not use algorithms to filter and sort content, do not show advertisements and so on.

Final question, what would one that has those corcerns have to do so that they would not be a hypocrite? Asking geniunely… Are you concerned about those things? And if so what have you done about it?

PS: I do not hate TikTok just because, I hate any predatory social media platform, video game publisher or stream service. I have switched to every possible FOSS alternative and taken the recommended privacy practices.