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You know what, you've convinced me. I've been rooting for some kind of society-at-large network to succeed at federation (I was so optimistic I tried bitclout,

You know what, you've convinced me. I've been rooting for some kind of society-at-large network to succeed at federation (I was so optimistic I tried bitclout, and more recently bluesky. Both want to be a single global database to send money or to index hashtags and blocklists globally) I really believed that discoverability is king, and I should just be able to search a global graph of user profiles and read everything that everyone has ever said, but you're right, there's a lot of conversations that don't happen in public, and not everyone wants to be "discoverable". So I think there's a case to embrace the balkanization of social media, and go back to having separate identities to be a part of each phpbb we signed up to. Going to different domains to talk to different groups of people makes sense, and we can have the modicum of privacy offered by a semi-private chat server like discord, so that your messages don't get indexed by google and archived forever. (Obviously discord retains all the message logs, DMs included, but at least its not publically searchable) And global social media is always going to suffer eternal september. Smaller, unfederated chat communities is a probably a much healthier approach to social media than whatever it is we've been doing the last decade of meta-gramming

cmrdporcupine 3y ago
Spend a few days in some large Facebook groups or on any active Twitter thread and one comes to this conclusion very quickly: online semi-anonymous interaction does not scale. Cannot scale. Putting aside the concerns about the dark patterns brought by the companies seeking revenue from it, I just don't think human beings are capable of working in these kinds of mediums in a way that doesn't degrade to a lowest common denominator of shitty behaviour. There's just no way to get enough moderation in place and get people to behave respectfully, and then it just gets ugly. I remember BBSes back in the 80s degrading to uncomfortable useless places simply because of a few bad trolls or assholes getting in the mix. Now it's just ridiculous. Small, comfortable social networks and a feed that I can fully control, that's what I want. Facebook and Twitter began their misdeeds the moment they rolled out algorithmic suggested content that I did not explicitly subscribe to. I've mostly just retreated into a few discord channels for family and friends at this point, with forays into Mastodon here and there. Oh, and way too much time on this orange site.

cmrdporcupine 3y ago

Spend a few days in some large Facebook groups or on any active Twitter thread and one comes to this conclusion very quickly: online semi-anonymous interaction does not scale. Cannot scale. Putting aside the concerns about the dark patterns brought by the companies seeking revenue from it, I just don't think human beings are capable of working in these kinds of mediums in a way that doesn't degrade to a lowest common denominator of shitty behaviour. There's just no way to get enough moderation in place and get people to behave respectfully, and then it just gets ugly. I remember BBSes back in the 80s degrading to uncomfortable useless places simply because of a few bad trolls or assholes getting in the mix. Now it's just ridiculous. Small, comfortable social networks and a feed that I can fully control, that's what I want. Facebook and Twitter began their misdeeds the moment they rolled out algorithmic suggested content that I did not explicitly subscribe to. I've mostly just retreated into a few discord channels for family and friends at this point, with forays into Mastodon here and there. Oh, and way too much time on this orange site.