Fedi be like...

BeAware :fediverse:

Fedi be like...

https://beaware-mastodon.s3.us-east-005.backblazeb2.com/beaware-mastodon/media_attachments/files/112/508/693/333/761/488/original/b8b0ac006ebd987c.png

smallcircles (Humanity Now 🕊)

@BeAware spot on.

smallcircles (Humanity Now 🕊)

@BeAware

It is kinda interesting. Consider.. what is social networking?

BeAware :fediverse:

@smallcircles personally it's the latter. Interesting discussion to be had though.

smallcircles (Humanity Now 🕊)

@BeAware yes, for me certainly as well. I find it very weird how tech focus and an imho kind of dogmatic bias limits this perspective of social networking to sending tweets, toots, bongs, or bangs to each other.

BeAware :fediverse:

@smallcircles side note: If someone randomly sent me a bong in the spirit of "social networking". I will be forever grateful for their peace offering. :kek:

smallcircles (Humanity Now 🕊)

@BeAware

smallcircles (Humanity Now 🕊)

@BeAware

Take Github as example. Some people get mad about stars and following and say "remove the social networking cruft".

But even if you do, unless you develop software completely alone without taking input from others, Github is a social networking platform. Someone files an issue in your tracker --> social networking exchange. PR? Ditto.

Just one example. Social networking is EVERYWHERE.

So agree very much with your meme. Huge potential, we can do much more than we *currently* imagine.

BeAware :fediverse:

@smallcircles facts. Even on these platforms, we're doing a pretty terrible job in certain areas. There's a non-zero amount of folks that just talk AT people on here. Accounts with thousands of followers and the ratio is basically non-existent. Following a hundred or so with over 1-2k followers is ridiculous and anyone that follows such accounts and share them are ridiculous.

smallcircles (Humanity Now 🕊)

@BeAware I agree. My own account has a number of followers that is also quite large. Though most are 'lurkers' that may filter out some interesting bits I say now and then

When it comes to practical social networking as we are used to offline, for instance, so many followers is weird. Every msg I send is indeed like shouting it on a public square. And then have back and forth with random strangers shouting back.

Creating analogies to offline situations I find helpful to see useful patterns.

BeAware :fediverse:

@smallcircles Well, the thing that I take out of this, is that you shout back when someone shouts at you. Some don't do that and people still follow and share their posts. It's very strange. I am ALWAYS looking for people to talk to and try to reply to everyone, even if they're toxic to a point.

smallcircles (Humanity Now 🕊)

@BeAware oh, it is not that you can't get valuable human communication out of interacting this way. But you also pick up a lot of side-effects along the way (like dealing with said toxic persons).

There are cases where this type of comms is useful. I advocated fedi AS/AP for years (and now still do that, albeit with a different approach). So a larger audience helps there.

My account is less useful for different, more intimate kinds of interactions. Microblogging isn't that universal hammer

BeAware :fediverse:

@smallcircles Oh yeah. For someone wanting a more personal, intimate experience, these platforms are not what you should be looking for. I would even say Discord is WAY better for that kind of thing, and obviously it's not even the best due to privacy concerns. Ideally, there'd be an E2EE version of Discord. Which I know Matrix is pretty much that, but it's pretty hard to get people onto Matrix that aren't already there.

Jan

@smallcircles For me the first option (Stuff done by FB, Insta, X, fedi) is “social media”. Social networks are just abstraction of interaction between beings (not even exclusive to humans).

smallcircles (Humanity Now 🕊)

@jnv yess! I use it that way too. Whereby I refer to "corporate social media" where the big platforms are concerned.