4 ms·

There's a pretty stark difference between organic internet communities as they were and what is emerging from federated platforms on an already connected planet

There's a pretty stark difference between organic internet communities as they were and what is emerging from federated platforms on an already connected planet. I was on an emulation forum for several years in the early 2000s that had people from every walk of life, every stripe of politics, on essentially every continent of the planet, yet the number of regular users was still within Dunbar's number, for years. That's not going to happen nowadays. If you can reasonably attract ten users, you can and probably will attract several hundred, or more, in much smaller timelines. This is borne out by looking at Mastodon instances right now--there are ~200 out of ~3000 that fall within reasonable estimates of Dunbar's number and there's no guarantee that any of them will be stable even in the short term. It's a Great Filter for comprehensible human communities. Secondly, the notion that by federating or centralizing, you can avoid or generate discursal control is pretty unfounded. The 2016 US Presidential election and Brexit are more than enough evidence of that. People can and will use any capacity within their reach to influence discourse, regardless of who owns or doesn't own the infrastructure. I'd argue that federating generally allows for more pernicious discursal control by monied and corporate interests, solely through the lack of singular points of control. If you can automate contact and distribution, which is already trivial, you can spread whatever you want as far as you please as much as you like, knowing that if 90% of administrators remove it, you still have 90% possible impressions and 10% of instances that haven't removed it. If the content is even remotely infectious, it'll immediately spread back to the 90% by the 10% of users, anyway. Chain-letters are great examples of this in action (and in their more modern forms "upvote this if," "retweet this if," and "like this if").

mgummelt 8y ago
> Secondly, the notion that by federating or centralizing, you can avoid or generate discursal control is pretty unfounded. The 2016 US Presidential election and Brexit are more than enough evidence of that. Control isn't binary. Facebook can exert much control over discourse while still being vulnerable to powerful actors.
- froasty 8y ago
  If your narrative can be derailed by pseudo-anonymous actors, you don't control the narrative. The idea that I'm primarily disagreeing with is that Facebook, Twitter, et al. can be hegemonic in a user-populated space. I don't think they can. They can certainly exert large amounts of influence and constrain it, but it's not monolithic and they don't control it. Federation only makes that influence more invisible. It certainly doesn't remove it.
  - mgummelt 8y ago
    You're still replying as if control is binary. No, FB doesn't fully control the content on their platform. Nor does China fully control their media. But they still exert much more control than do distributed systems.
  - 18pfsmt 8y ago
    For the sake of argument, let’s say federated social platforms will not solve "digital privacy, digital harassment, and digital overpopulation,” what is your proposal to solve these “problems?” Are you suggesting everybody stay on FB/TWTR/IG/SNAP? Are you saying nobody should use the internet to socialize? I seriously do not comprehend the point(s) you are trying to make. Just because not all problems can be solved with Mastodon, and the like, does not mean they are not worth pursuing.
    - froasty 8y ago
      Instead of asking why these problems are endemic to every platform, people just say "let's try silver bullet #24 so that we can keep doing the same pernicious stuff with a veneer of progress" and now you have several more problems on top of the ones that already existed. Are humans in large numbers capable of interfacing with individual human beings without engaging in pernicious behavior? The answer, as anyone online in the last twenty-five years is a resounding no. Are humans in large numbers capable of behaving immaculately when it comes to preserving their own or their customer's privacy? Once again the answer, as anyone online in the last twenty-five years (and several decades longer if you include proto-business networks) is a resounding no. If you add progressively more humans to anything, does the output improve? If the metric is human satisfaction, the answer is no. If the metric is the rate of return in a Ponzi scheme, then yes, okay, you've got me there. The cause of almost all problems is solutions. As far as social media goes, it's literally designed to use people to promulgate human-motivated pseudo-information for as long as humanly possible. It's not for "socializing" or "meeting people" in the same way that TV shows and movies aren't there for entertainment. It's to sell the viewer's attention to people that have anything but their interest in mind. Moving to federated enclaves is just further deregulating an already throughly pernicious industry.

mgummelt 8y ago

> Secondly, the notion that by federating or centralizing, you can avoid or generate discursal control is pretty unfounded. The 2016 US Presidential election and Brexit are more than enough evidence of that. Control isn't binary. Facebook can exert much control over discourse while still being vulnerable to powerful actors.

froasty 8y ago
If your narrative can be derailed by pseudo-anonymous actors, you don't control the narrative. The idea that I'm primarily disagreeing with is that Facebook, Twitter, et al. can be hegemonic in a user-populated space. I don't think they can. They can certainly exert large amounts of influence and constrain it, but it's not monolithic and they don't control it. Federation only makes that influence more invisible. It certainly doesn't remove it.
- mgummelt 8y ago
  You're still replying as if control is binary. No, FB doesn't fully control the content on their platform. Nor does China fully control their media. But they still exert much more control than do distributed systems.
- 18pfsmt 8y ago
  For the sake of argument, let’s say federated social platforms will not solve "digital privacy, digital harassment, and digital overpopulation,” what is your proposal to solve these “problems?” Are you suggesting everybody stay on FB/TWTR/IG/SNAP? Are you saying nobody should use the internet to socialize? I seriously do not comprehend the point(s) you are trying to make. Just because not all problems can be solved with Mastodon, and the like, does not mean they are not worth pursuing.
  - froasty 8y ago
    Instead of asking why these problems are endemic to every platform, people just say "let's try silver bullet #24 so that we can keep doing the same pernicious stuff with a veneer of progress" and now you have several more problems on top of the ones that already existed. Are humans in large numbers capable of interfacing with individual human beings without engaging in pernicious behavior? The answer, as anyone online in the last twenty-five years is a resounding no. Are humans in large numbers capable of behaving immaculately when it comes to preserving their own or their customer's privacy? Once again the answer, as anyone online in the last twenty-five years (and several decades longer if you include proto-business networks) is a resounding no. If you add progressively more humans to anything, does the output improve? If the metric is human satisfaction, the answer is no. If the metric is the rate of return in a Ponzi scheme, then yes, okay, you've got me there. The cause of almost all problems is solutions. As far as social media goes, it's literally designed to use people to promulgate human-motivated pseudo-information for as long as humanly possible. It's not for "socializing" or "meeting people" in the same way that TV shows and movies aren't there for entertainment. It's to sell the viewer's attention to people that have anything but their interest in mind. Moving to federated enclaves is just further deregulating an already throughly pernicious industry.