@lmorchard @rgegriff I was too afraid to click
Posts
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Holy shit, this is like the House of Leaves of blog monetization blog posts https://modem.io/blog/blog-monetization/ -
Holy shit, this is like the House of Leaves of blog monetization blog posts https://modem.io/blog/blog-monetization/Mutuals, I beg you, click on this link. My body fat melted like butter. I have Become.
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My dear fellow white people:@Curator Thank you for this.
This isn't just fedi "drama".
This is a multiple-years campaign by one person and her allies to muddy the waters around POC reporting racism on the fediverse, by harming POC and then linking their reactions to transmisogyny. It has left this whole place scarred. And that's not even to mention the unfair harm it has done to so many individual people.
I've personally witnessed It since what, 2019? It needs to fucking stop.
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Me in 2017: 🦝 oh thank goodness, social media that feels like the old internet before social media bollocksed everything up@kate @amaranth @msh @ifixcoinops I'm sure there are things that block it right now. Both in terms of basic human psychology, and also the habits we've all formed and the things we've all come to expect from online socializing. Look at the people who come over here from Twitter -- you can pick them out of the crowd because of how they're used to interacting. If they don't find that here they often leave.
I still think that paths are going to have to be managed. That's why people' ability to spin up something like their own server, easier than mastodon currently allows, has to be part of the new thing. That would allow for lots of different proposed "paths" to be offered, in how people interact. And with some means of discovery/search/common area, eventually people could find the paths they like best. I realize all this language is pretty vague. I'm not describing a protocol, but just patterns of possible behavior.
I do actually like a lot about mastodon/the popular fediverse. The ability to block and defederate, single-user servers, boosting for visibility, chronological timelines, and the way "likes" are just a little gift, not something that screws with a visibility algorithm. It gets a lot of things right.
Where it blocks agency is once again defaulting to having basically "the feed" as the only real way to interact. There are no places, except as mentioned before the really intentional locked community servers. No places means nowhere for desire paths to truly make themselves known. And the person in charge of mastodon, I mean there's kind of a fraught relationship there in terms of responsiveness to users' wishes...
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Me in 2017: 🦝 oh thank goodness, social media that feels like the old internet before social media bollocksed everything up@kate @amaranth @msh @ifixcoinops
Even in the 90 BBS age, it was more about visiting somebody else's space (the BBS itself), not necessarily having your own.
Webrings and personal sites kinda got close in the late 90s and early 00s, but search was still so new, that finding your people was sometimes difficult. And interaction felt like it took place somewhere separate, like IRC.
And the linked-blogs era came closer but "monetization" as a concept got introduced a few years later and just fucked everything up. I think this era overlapped with social media in its infancy, about 2002-2006, and it was great...until having a blog became about selling yourself for money.
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Me in 2017: 🦝 oh thank goodness, social media that feels like the old internet before social media bollocksed everything up@kate @amaranth @msh @ifixcoinops All of this reminds me of "desire paths" in landscaping and architecture. The footpath that takes a shortcut where the planned sidewalks don't go.
Corporate social media kind of doesn't allow for those desire paths to form. People are constantly herded to patterns and "upgrades" where their activity is most profitable for the company, and most addictive for the user, at a short-circuiting psychological level. I think that actually feels demotivating to most people, and the addictive patterns are most of what keeps them using a platform, outside the most basic "I guess it works" communication crumbs.
A social network that was willing to evolve with people and to where desire-paths were noted and built into the next iteration -- have we really had that yet?
Where people have their own space if they want, and/or a shared space if they'd rather have that, and the point wasn't to sell things OR to sell them and their data?
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Me in 2017: 🦝 oh thank goodness, social media that feels like the old internet before social media bollocksed everything up@msh @ifixcoinops I think it's tempting to conclude social media would be better off if it didn't exist, but I can't help but remember how it was at first. Everyone rushed on because there was something there that fulfilled a need. Facebook in 2005-06 and Twitter in 08 hadn't worked out exactly how to make everyone addicted yet. Not that they were healthy platforms, but there was something in people that made them want it. Whatever that need is, the big companies only make money if it's not truly fed. So I think the goal should be a form(s) of social media that does feed whatever those needs are. Reduce people susceptibility to getting caught in the manipulative webs, by providing more wholesome ones.
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Me in 2017: 🦝 oh thank goodness, social media that feels like the old internet before social media bollocksed everything up@msh @ifixcoinops Well, the epic refactoring was what I was hoping people could spitball about. What have we got to lose, ya know?
I think if social media ended altogether, it would have to be due to something pretty dire. Too many people (myself included) have gotten used to the feeling of instant back-and-forth with people you hadn't already met in real life. Like, we used to have things like forums/BBS, but they weren't exactly accessible to the average person.
But holy shit do I agree with you about the built-in features that create toxicity. Something needs to happen. The very fact that a crummy foreign government has the ability to (probably relatively easily) fuck with our elections using social media is proof enough that changing the way this is done is a crisis.
Do you think that there are specific anti-features that cause most of the problems? Without which social media would be at least somewhat healthier? Which would you target first if you could change anything?
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Me in 2017: 🦝 oh thank goodness, social media that feels like the old internet before social media bollocksed everything up@ifixcoinops You know I think you're on to something here. One of the reasons I believe federated social media is struggling to shed the problems of centralized social media, is the over-emphasis on mastodon itself. I know there are a ton of other services, but we're all here.
I think if mastodon were better integrated with the other types of federated platforms, and it formed more of an overall ecosystem, it would be a bit more self-regulating. Just by dint of having some of the worst abuses more diluted. Just a theory, do you think it's relevant to what you mean?
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Me in 2017: 🦝 oh thank goodness, social media that feels like the old internet before social media bollocksed everything up@ifixcoinops Really good points.
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Me in 2017: 🦝 oh thank goodness, social media that feels like the old internet before social media bollocksed everything up@ifixcoinops What do you think changed?
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Well, NaNoWriMo has made an official statement that they believe categorical condemnation of "AI" to be classist and ableist. I'm… I'm just done with them.@amin @dyani It just boggles my mind -- the whole blowup #NaNoWriMo had this past two years was in part kicked off by partnering with a scam vanity publishing sponsor in 2022, and being called out on it by wrimos.
Sorry that they're Reddit links (and long), but it's the most thorough retelling of the organization's recent scandals.
Now they've revamped the board, got a new director (who sucks), and...did it again? WTAF?
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Well, NaNoWriMo has made an official statement that they believe categorical condemnation of "AI" to be classist and ableist. I'm… I'm just done with them.@dyani @amin I read the whole thing and I'm just left with puzzlement. They didn't have to say any of this. There was no pressing need for them to weigh in. But they did anyway -- in a scolding and judgmental manner. I swear some orgs just can't help but damage themselves. Ironically you also see it with some AI businesses.