8 ms·

How to leave dying social media platforms

88 points by Kye 4y ago

izzydata 4y ago
Silently into the night.
MichaelCollins 4y ago
Just turn 360 degrees and walk away.
- mejutoco 4y ago
  Hard to tell if sarcasm but I love it.
  - hairofadog 4y ago
    They say the only way out is through.
- asplake 4y ago
  When your back is against the wall, there is only one thing to do, and that is turn around and fight (John Major)
- akira2501 4y ago
  This isn't so much a hostage situation as an undiagnosed case of Stockholm syndrome. The irony to me is that these same people often decry the "filter bubble," but by their writing, it seems to me that they really do _enjoy_ living in one.
  - ferrocarraiges 4y ago
    Filter bubbles are easy: We are good, They are bad. Real life is hard: We are imperfect people, They are imperfect people. How are you supposed to feed the anger center of your brain if you occasionally have to see the objects of your hatred acting all kind and neighborly around your community? It's much easier to avoid Them and only interact with those who have the internet points to prove that they are ideologically pure.
  - pixl97 4y ago
    Life is a filter bubble, this is what our brains do best, it is what our bodies do, filter out information. If you could not filter out signal from noise then you as a human would die pretty quickly. When it comes to our digital lives it really is no different. If we couldn't filter out salespeople and propagandists would fill every moment of our existence with their slurm making this medium useless.
- ggm 4y ago
  180
  - MichaelCollins 4y ago
    https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1265714-turn-360-degrees-and-walk-away https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1265714-turn-360-degrees-and...
stale2002 4y ago
As a person who supports decentralization, and a user having the ability to control what content they see, or block (without a centralized party being able to stop it), I support the gist of this article. But I think the author fundamentally misunderstands why people don't like the claimed upcoming Twitter changes. The pro moderation people don't like the changes, because they want the supposedly benevolent dictator to control the centralized platform, to moderate it. They want the Twitter team to be engaging in centralized moderation, and control who or who does not have access to the "digital square". Therefore, given that this is what people want, suggesting that users leave to a decentralized platform, where the user controls everything, and can choose to read "misinformation" or choose to discuss things with others saying supposedly horrible statements, is counter to those pro-moderation goals. The pro moderation goals only work where there are a couple centralized actors, all marching in lock steps, with few users on all the irrelevant alternatives. And giving users back the power, undermined this goal.
- PuppyTailWags 4y ago
  I don't think it's reasonable to describe literally everybody who is leaving Twitter as some they that want only one kind of moderation and control over digital square. I think that some people want what they understand to be misinformation off the platform because the misinformation is used in a hurtful way. E.g. gay people are pedophiles, so fill the feeds of gay people on Twitter with vitriol. I think that some people want misinformation off the platform because of the natural knee-jerk "someone is WRONG on the internet!". I don't think there's some nebulous they who consciously considers the narrative of social media as something to control. I think it's just very hard to remove bad actors in a non-centralized-tyrannical way. And I think leaving to a decentralized platform isn't a hurdle because of some weird nebulous they who want power over everything. I think it's just less intuitive. I'm a mastodon user and I think "twitter but with decentralized spaces" can be super confusing to someone who is familiar with the centralized space. Many friends who have tried to move to mastodon to enter a community I'm in have accidentally signed up on other servers by accident.
  - stale2002 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jsemrau 4y ago
Interestingly written on Medium which is also dying. Fun fact: I have about 1,300 "followers" on Medium. My articles have generated 90 views over the last 30 days [1] But there is hope [2] [1] https://imgur.com/elke2GY https://imgur.com/elke2GY [2] https://app.finclout.io/u/J%20Daniel%20Semrau https://app.finclout.io/u/J%20Daniel%20Semrau
such12 4y ago
This is a piece that argues in favor of government regulation of internet communications platforms. I think he’s got a lot of good points about how bad current social media is as controlled by billionaires. I think he’s completely misguided about how great government control would be. I think he’s equally misguided about the staying power of something like Facebook. It’s decaying and we don’t need to do anything about it. He’s also just plain wrong about not being able to maintain connections with people who are left behind. Younger people don’t bother to sign up, and pretty much everyone I know is steadily moving to signal or telegram for communications. People have multiple apps. I still have Facebook messenger installed for ‘legacy’ contacts, but I barely use it anymore. I frankly think he’s out of date in his thinking. He’s spent years on this political action, but technology is just moving faster than that.
- MichaelCollins 4y ago
  > I think he’s completely misguided about how great government control would be. It's not as though the premise is without precedent. It's easy to port your phone number to a new telephone company and all your friends can still call you. That's thanks to government "control" (aka regulation.) Maybe it's even too easy from a security perspective, but it's not as though you have to navigate a byzantine and capricious government bureaucracy to get it done. For the common person it generally works very well, seamless and painless.
  - dimitrios1 4y ago
    I think most people are in favor of government when it comes to utilities, phones and landlines being a classic example (although in the age of wireless, one could argue government regulation actually makes things worse). But social media is not a utility, in the traditional sense.
    - MichaelCollins 4y ago
      What is the intrinsic sense in which telephony is a utility but social media isn't? The wires? Phone companies all share the wires now (thanks again to government regulation), and with VoIP it's becoming less relevant by the day.. but phone number porting still works fine. The physical infrastructure natural monopoly stuff isn't a necessary component of what makes government regulation of phone systems work out well. The government regulation of the phone system works well because the government regulations are well designed, not because there's a limit to how many wires you can hang from a pole.
Simon_O_Rourke 4y ago
A lot of the advice in this piece is all well and good for tech savvy folks, but what about trying to get Grandma onto some federated social media network. This is all pie in the sky, Facebook has captured the over 35s, Twitter has got the next generation down and TikTok is cleaning up with the under 25s. Friends and friends networks are too sticky to abruptly just leave.
- fortysixdegrees 4y ago
  Addressing your point was literally the point of the article
  - woojoo666 4y ago
    Though to be fair it was a bit buried. Another commenter surfaced a relevant quote: > There’s no technical reason that Big Tech can’t directly connect to the Fediverse. The ACCESS Act, a proposed US law, would do just that. The EU has passed the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which promises to impose interoperability on giant social media platforms…eventually.
- such12 4y ago
  I just text or FaceTime my relatives who are on Facebook. It works just fine. My mother, who doesn’t even have a cellphone, I call via skype to her landline phone. No problem.
- Kye 4y ago
  I think you might have your age ranges a bit off.
yosito 4y ago
TL;DR Mandate interoperability with federated networks. I'm skeptical about the feasibility of the idea, mostly due to the fact that it will be impossible to get tech giants to agree to stick to a standardized content format, especially when they have conflict interests. But I would definitely like an app where I could follow all of my friends on whatever networks they choose, and see an ad-free list of their posts so I could choose which ones to view on the respective networks, and make sure that I don't miss important posts.
- akira2501 4y ago
  It's not feasible because there's no fee model for the users. It's a free service. With traditional "federated" networks, like telephones, the customers pay for the service and you can mandate interoperability that includes allowed peerage fees to incentivize quality and compatibility of these connections. The proposed act requires one social network to carry messages for another with zero incentives between them. Even if you do get it implemented, I suspect it will never work with any reliability or will have so many limitations applied as to be essentially useless for the stated purpose.
- dmix 4y ago
  Plus by the time it gets through congress and into written law the big tech lawyers will have riddled it with ways to suppress their competition and have it so complex/involved that only a large company could follow it (see: the bills following 'too-big-too fail' that merely reduced the number of big banks to 5 and hundreds of midsized ones could no longer deal with the new capital requirements). I'm just trying to imagine how awful the standard will be, or how selective the enforcement will be, how some new technological development happens but adoption gets crippled by a policy written for the Facebook era, etc, etc. There's always tons of downsides that outweigh these heavy handed interventions.
h0l0cube 4y ago
> There’s no technical reason that Big Tech can’t directly connect to the Fediverse. The ACCESS Act, a proposed US law, would do just that. The EU has passed the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which promises to impose interoperability on giant social media platforms…eventually. This couldn’t happen soon enough.
- Originami 4y ago
  And all will come with convenient back-doors for warrantless tapping by Government agencies.
coffeefirst 4y ago
The underlying assumption is that social platforms are the ideal way to communicate. Is that really true? I keep in touch with most people by texting. It does the job. Ditching almost every "social" app had no noticeable affect on my social life. I think I missed one housewarming party in 2019 because the host didn't realize I'd left Facebook. None of us really picked the "post all your life updates to one feed with everyone you know and then scroll it"—the platforms designed that and we just sort of ran with it. I'm not suggesting we should go strictly back to keeping in touch by phone calls and handwriting long letters (for starters, I forget how stamps work), but I'd rather have a slightly more personal model than replace one big feed with another.
- em-bee 4y ago
  I keep in touch with most people by texting SMS is very bad at groups, and the most effective way to stay in touch with friends for me is groups where we talk about shared interests. not everyone needs to engage but everyone can read and is thus kept in the loop. there is no problem for the more silent types to engage only once in a while whereas in one on one they would almost never stay in touch. i use one on one almost exclusively for transactional messages, where we have to exchange information of some form, but rarely for just personally staying in touch. so at least for me it's not social networks that are the ideal, but groups.
- zimpenfish 4y ago
  > I keep in touch with most people by texting. It does the job. That requires giving your phone number to someone. I can imagine there's many situations where you'd be happy to have a casual social relationship with someone but not want them to have your phone number (and that's not even considering the potential for stalking, etc.)
Animats 4y ago
This is a proposal, not something you can actually do. Now, on LinkedIn, you can sort of do this. My LinkedIn profile says only, see my GitHub profile. But Facebook, not so much. None of the federated systems have any traction. From PeerTube to Mastodon to Open Simulator, they're all orders of magnitude smaller than the commercial competitors. PeerTube has an interesting model. It's useful as an ad-free video streaming service for when you don't need or want "discovery". As, for example, when you want to post a video and link it from elsewhere. It's partial peer to peer. There's one master copy. hosted on a server, but if there are enough watchers of that video, the watchers' browsers also become temporary caching servers to distribute the load. The source site thus avoids overload. This is a useful way to do federation. The watchers don't have to be members, they don't have to store content long term, and they're not trusted. What else could be done that way?
water8 4y ago
c-fe 4y ago
https://archive.ph/SSSUz https://archive.ph/SSSUz
mgarfias 4y ago
He didn’t actually tell us how. I want a refund

88 points by Kye 4y ago

izzydata 4y ago

Silently into the night.

MichaelCollins 4y ago

Just turn 360 degrees and walk away.

mejutoco 4y ago
Hard to tell if sarcasm but I love it.
- hairofadog 4y ago
  They say the only way out is through.
asplake 4y ago
When your back is against the wall, there is only one thing to do, and that is turn around and fight (John Major)
akira2501 4y ago
This isn't so much a hostage situation as an undiagnosed case of Stockholm syndrome. The irony to me is that these same people often decry the "filter bubble," but by their writing, it seems to me that they really do _enjoy_ living in one.
- ferrocarraiges 4y ago
  Filter bubbles are easy: We are good, They are bad. Real life is hard: We are imperfect people, They are imperfect people. How are you supposed to feed the anger center of your brain if you occasionally have to see the objects of your hatred acting all kind and neighborly around your community? It's much easier to avoid Them and only interact with those who have the internet points to prove that they are ideologically pure.
- pixl97 4y ago
  Life is a filter bubble, this is what our brains do best, it is what our bodies do, filter out information. If you could not filter out signal from noise then you as a human would die pretty quickly. When it comes to our digital lives it really is no different. If we couldn't filter out salespeople and propagandists would fill every moment of our existence with their slurm making this medium useless.
ggm 4y ago
180
- MichaelCollins 4y ago
  https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1265714-turn-360-degrees-and-walk-away https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1265714-turn-360-degrees-and...

stale2002 4y ago

As a person who supports decentralization, and a user having the ability to control what content they see, or block (without a centralized party being able to stop it), I support the gist of this article. But I think the author fundamentally misunderstands why people don't like the claimed upcoming Twitter changes. The pro moderation people don't like the changes, because they want the supposedly benevolent dictator to control the centralized platform, to moderate it. They want the Twitter team to be engaging in centralized moderation, and control who or who does not have access to the "digital square". Therefore, given that this is what people want, suggesting that users leave to a decentralized platform, where the user controls everything, and can choose to read "misinformation" or choose to discuss things with others saying supposedly horrible statements, is counter to those pro-moderation goals. The pro moderation goals only work where there are a couple centralized actors, all marching in lock steps, with few users on all the irrelevant alternatives. And giving users back the power, undermined this goal.

PuppyTailWags 4y ago
I don't think it's reasonable to describe literally everybody who is leaving Twitter as some they that want only one kind of moderation and control over digital square. I think that some people want what they understand to be misinformation off the platform because the misinformation is used in a hurtful way. E.g. gay people are pedophiles, so fill the feeds of gay people on Twitter with vitriol. I think that some people want misinformation off the platform because of the natural knee-jerk "someone is WRONG on the internet!". I don't think there's some nebulous they who consciously considers the narrative of social media as something to control. I think it's just very hard to remove bad actors in a non-centralized-tyrannical way. And I think leaving to a decentralized platform isn't a hurdle because of some weird nebulous they who want power over everything. I think it's just less intuitive. I'm a mastodon user and I think "twitter but with decentralized spaces" can be super confusing to someone who is familiar with the centralized space. Many friends who have tried to move to mastodon to enter a community I'm in have accidentally signed up on other servers by accident.
- stale2002 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

jsemrau 4y ago

Interestingly written on Medium which is also dying. Fun fact: I have about 1,300 "followers" on Medium. My articles have generated 90 views over the last 30 days [1] But there is hope [2] [1] https://imgur.com/elke2GY https://imgur.com/elke2GY [2] https://app.finclout.io/u/J%20Daniel%20Semrau https://app.finclout.io/u/J%20Daniel%20Semrau

such12 4y ago

This is a piece that argues in favor of government regulation of internet communications platforms. I think he’s got a lot of good points about how bad current social media is as controlled by billionaires. I think he’s completely misguided about how great government control would be. I think he’s equally misguided about the staying power of something like Facebook. It’s decaying and we don’t need to do anything about it. He’s also just plain wrong about not being able to maintain connections with people who are left behind. Younger people don’t bother to sign up, and pretty much everyone I know is steadily moving to signal or telegram for communications. People have multiple apps. I still have Facebook messenger installed for ‘legacy’ contacts, but I barely use it anymore. I frankly think he’s out of date in his thinking. He’s spent years on this political action, but technology is just moving faster than that.

MichaelCollins 4y ago
> I think he’s completely misguided about how great government control would be. It's not as though the premise is without precedent. It's easy to port your phone number to a new telephone company and all your friends can still call you. That's thanks to government "control" (aka regulation.) Maybe it's even too easy from a security perspective, but it's not as though you have to navigate a byzantine and capricious government bureaucracy to get it done. For the common person it generally works very well, seamless and painless.
- dimitrios1 4y ago
  I think most people are in favor of government when it comes to utilities, phones and landlines being a classic example (although in the age of wireless, one could argue government regulation actually makes things worse). But social media is not a utility, in the traditional sense.
  - MichaelCollins 4y ago
    What is the intrinsic sense in which telephony is a utility but social media isn't? The wires? Phone companies all share the wires now (thanks again to government regulation), and with VoIP it's becoming less relevant by the day.. but phone number porting still works fine. The physical infrastructure natural monopoly stuff isn't a necessary component of what makes government regulation of phone systems work out well. The government regulation of the phone system works well because the government regulations are well designed, not because there's a limit to how many wires you can hang from a pole.

Simon_O_Rourke 4y ago

A lot of the advice in this piece is all well and good for tech savvy folks, but what about trying to get Grandma onto some federated social media network. This is all pie in the sky, Facebook has captured the over 35s, Twitter has got the next generation down and TikTok is cleaning up with the under 25s. Friends and friends networks are too sticky to abruptly just leave.

fortysixdegrees 4y ago
Addressing your point was literally the point of the article
- woojoo666 4y ago
  Though to be fair it was a bit buried. Another commenter surfaced a relevant quote: > There’s no technical reason that Big Tech can’t directly connect to the Fediverse. The ACCESS Act, a proposed US law, would do just that. The EU has passed the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which promises to impose interoperability on giant social media platforms…eventually.
such12 4y ago
I just text or FaceTime my relatives who are on Facebook. It works just fine. My mother, who doesn’t even have a cellphone, I call via skype to her landline phone. No problem.
Kye 4y ago
I think you might have your age ranges a bit off.

yosito 4y ago

TL;DR Mandate interoperability with federated networks. I'm skeptical about the feasibility of the idea, mostly due to the fact that it will be impossible to get tech giants to agree to stick to a standardized content format, especially when they have conflict interests. But I would definitely like an app where I could follow all of my friends on whatever networks they choose, and see an ad-free list of their posts so I could choose which ones to view on the respective networks, and make sure that I don't miss important posts.

akira2501 4y ago
It's not feasible because there's no fee model for the users. It's a free service. With traditional "federated" networks, like telephones, the customers pay for the service and you can mandate interoperability that includes allowed peerage fees to incentivize quality and compatibility of these connections. The proposed act requires one social network to carry messages for another with zero incentives between them. Even if you do get it implemented, I suspect it will never work with any reliability or will have so many limitations applied as to be essentially useless for the stated purpose.
dmix 4y ago
Plus by the time it gets through congress and into written law the big tech lawyers will have riddled it with ways to suppress their competition and have it so complex/involved that only a large company could follow it (see: the bills following 'too-big-too fail' that merely reduced the number of big banks to 5 and hundreds of midsized ones could no longer deal with the new capital requirements). I'm just trying to imagine how awful the standard will be, or how selective the enforcement will be, how some new technological development happens but adoption gets crippled by a policy written for the Facebook era, etc, etc. There's always tons of downsides that outweigh these heavy handed interventions.

h0l0cube 4y ago

> There’s no technical reason that Big Tech can’t directly connect to the Fediverse. The ACCESS Act, a proposed US law, would do just that. The EU has passed the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which promises to impose interoperability on giant social media platforms…eventually. This couldn’t happen soon enough.

Originami 4y ago
And all will come with convenient back-doors for warrantless tapping by Government agencies.

coffeefirst 4y ago

The underlying assumption is that social platforms are the ideal way to communicate. Is that really true? I keep in touch with most people by texting. It does the job. Ditching almost every "social" app had no noticeable affect on my social life. I think I missed one housewarming party in 2019 because the host didn't realize I'd left Facebook. None of us really picked the "post all your life updates to one feed with everyone you know and then scroll it"—the platforms designed that and we just sort of ran with it. I'm not suggesting we should go strictly back to keeping in touch by phone calls and handwriting long letters (for starters, I forget how stamps work), but I'd rather have a slightly more personal model than replace one big feed with another.

em-bee 4y ago
I keep in touch with most people by texting SMS is very bad at groups, and the most effective way to stay in touch with friends for me is groups where we talk about shared interests. not everyone needs to engage but everyone can read and is thus kept in the loop. there is no problem for the more silent types to engage only once in a while whereas in one on one they would almost never stay in touch. i use one on one almost exclusively for transactional messages, where we have to exchange information of some form, but rarely for just personally staying in touch. so at least for me it's not social networks that are the ideal, but groups.
zimpenfish 4y ago
> I keep in touch with most people by texting. It does the job. That requires giving your phone number to someone. I can imagine there's many situations where you'd be happy to have a casual social relationship with someone but not want them to have your phone number (and that's not even considering the potential for stalking, etc.)

Animats 4y ago

This is a proposal, not something you can actually do. Now, on LinkedIn, you can sort of do this. My LinkedIn profile says only, see my GitHub profile. But Facebook, not so much. None of the federated systems have any traction. From PeerTube to Mastodon to Open Simulator, they're all orders of magnitude smaller than the commercial competitors. PeerTube has an interesting model. It's useful as an ad-free video streaming service for when you don't need or want "discovery". As, for example, when you want to post a video and link it from elsewhere. It's partial peer to peer. There's one master copy. hosted on a server, but if there are enough watchers of that video, the watchers' browsers also become temporary caching servers to distribute the load. The source site thus avoids overload. This is a useful way to do federation. The watchers don't have to be members, they don't have to store content long term, and they're not trusted. What else could be done that way?

water8 4y ago

c-fe 4y ago

https://archive.ph/SSSUz https://archive.ph/SSSUz

mgarfias 4y ago

He didn’t actually tell us how. I want a refund