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We are in such a connected age though. I do want to exit and start my own shit, but I don't want to walk away from all my friends and family who aren't into pio

We are in such a connected age though. I do want to exit and start my own shit, but I don't want to walk away from all my friends and family who aren't into pioneering a new digital existence. Sure I can keep running my xmpp server & begging people to contact me over xmpp. But I'm going to miss all the life updates & chatter my friends are doing on Facebook or Instagram or Discord. The points in this article seem super spot on. The anti-cirumvention laws obstruct any kind of fair rise of an interesting alternative. We can walk away, but only if we are ok severing ties. Competitive compatibility is the relief we need to allow meaningful choices. The world of physical products allowed consumers a lot of property rights to the stuff they purchased, but in the cloud age these lords of the cloud have everything tightly sealed up in data-keeps and you likely stand 'in felony contempt of business model' (and are likely liable for these fines that start at half a million dollars for first infraction for just making the tool), if you do anything that isn't explicitly built into the app already. This shift from the world having some property rights to being ruled over from afar by contract law was pointed out by Mark Lemley, decades ago, and highlighted in the lovely Web scraping for me but not for thee, which points out that big companies all got their start off the exact sort of violations & scraping & mercenary-done competitive compatibility that would get you or I blasted out of the waters in a heartbeat. https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2023/08/web-scraping-for-me-but-not-for-thee-guest-blog-post.htm https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2023/08/web-scraping-f... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37264970 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37264970 Exit is only interesting if it doesn't mean going off to live in a digital barrel. I absolutely fully agree, we need to own the means of connection. We fully need to bootstrap real alternatives. But if the alternative has to create a walk-away movement to succeed, that's a horrible thing. And, people everywhere should have some informational property rights. That there are digital system & cloud stuff involved shouldn't so fundamentally strip people of rights & freedom as it does.

ryandrake 3y ago
Walking away from Social Media does not necessarily mean walking away from friends and family. Family/social connections existed before S.M. and they will exist after it’s gone. If your friends are not even willing to keep in touch unless it is over a specific BigTech-mediated advertising platform, well, that probably says more about them and about the reality of your relationship.
- jauntywundrkind 3y ago
  I detest this with a passion. It's a common refrain, and one that rejects any empathy or sympathy; strikes me as relentless, heartless, and small. Sure I can keep in touch with friends and family. Even if I walkaway from the active broadcast channels they use, I don't necessarily lose total contact with them. At least some of them. But they are chatting & sharing in conversations that I will no longer see or be a part of. My walking away has a huge loss to me, is me walking away from gathering spots and places where others habutate. Trying to disregard that loss feels like a gambit I hear a lot from people who are regressive, who want us in a pre-social-media age & think we ought to all walk away. I do not think it's anywhere near that simple, and I think there's huge value that we have entered a connected era, that we do keep in some contact with people from such a wide range of our lives. The serendipity of interacting with someone we otherwise wouldn't, across sometimes such great time and space: that's so neat. I don't want to walk away from that. I want to improve it.
  - ryandrake 3y ago
    I did not mean it as a personal dig against you. Quitting social media was eye opening for me, and really crystalized who in my life actually gave a shit and who didn't. It helped me to understand how meaningless this surface-level "contact" is where someone just reads an update, hits the like button and moves on. I think a lot of people are confusing "social media contact" with "healthy personal relationships." Reasonable people can disagree of course, but I don't think I really lost anything valuable leaving all that behind.
- ysofunny 3y ago
  you offhandedly diminish the power of convenicence
surge 3y ago
I'd use matrix before xmpp. I at least use Signal now, that's not bad.

ryandrake 3y ago

Walking away from Social Media does not necessarily mean walking away from friends and family. Family/social connections existed before S.M. and they will exist after it’s gone. If your friends are not even willing to keep in touch unless it is over a specific BigTech-mediated advertising platform, well, that probably says more about them and about the reality of your relationship.

jauntywundrkind 3y ago
I detest this with a passion. It's a common refrain, and one that rejects any empathy or sympathy; strikes me as relentless, heartless, and small. Sure I can keep in touch with friends and family. Even if I walkaway from the active broadcast channels they use, I don't necessarily lose total contact with them. At least some of them. But they are chatting & sharing in conversations that I will no longer see or be a part of. My walking away has a huge loss to me, is me walking away from gathering spots and places where others habutate. Trying to disregard that loss feels like a gambit I hear a lot from people who are regressive, who want us in a pre-social-media age & think we ought to all walk away. I do not think it's anywhere near that simple, and I think there's huge value that we have entered a connected era, that we do keep in some contact with people from such a wide range of our lives. The serendipity of interacting with someone we otherwise wouldn't, across sometimes such great time and space: that's so neat. I don't want to walk away from that. I want to improve it.
- ryandrake 3y ago
  I did not mean it as a personal dig against you. Quitting social media was eye opening for me, and really crystalized who in my life actually gave a shit and who didn't. It helped me to understand how meaningless this surface-level "contact" is where someone just reads an update, hits the like button and moves on. I think a lot of people are confusing "social media contact" with "healthy personal relationships." Reasonable people can disagree of course, but I don't think I really lost anything valuable leaving all that behind.
ysofunny 3y ago
you offhandedly diminish the power of convenicence

surge 3y ago

I'd use matrix before xmpp. I at least use Signal now, that's not bad.