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The problem is that social media is not and was never designed to be a replacement to public square.. Social media started as tool to allow people to stay in t

The problem is that social media is not and was never designed to be a replacement to public square.. Social media started as tool to allow people to stay in touch after their time together came to an end and eventually evolved\merged with forums as a tool to bring people with similar interest together. The thing we have today that kind resemble a public square is a side effect of then needing to make money, that they decided to do by using ads. In order to make more money with ads they need to keep people around for longer so they started taking content and spreading around to random people. Kind like a public square but not really because you need to keep advertisers happy, so you cannot allow any speech in your platform that displeases the advertisers, or at least you need to ensure ads will not show next to speech that make advertisers unhappy or else they are going away and you now have a money problem (exactly twitter situation). Public square is a end to end relation.. You go somewhere and speak and whoever is in ear shoot listen, if they don't want to listen they get away, if a lot of people that does not want to listen get together they make you leave, but you can always come back later. The moment you add any kind of platform in the middle, specially one with an algorithm that decide what you should see, you are now bound to the platform rules and biases. And that is no longer a public square. Social media today is, in my opinion, more akin to personal ads or letters to the editor in a newspaper then to a public square. It will spread your speech further then a public square but is bound to the rules and biases of the newspaper publishing then. And I don't think any protocol can solve this. All a protocol can do is allow you to created biased silos where different types of speech live and they might or might not federate to other silos. Basically federation allow you to turn social media in glorified forums, but it will never really replace public square.

CuriousCosmic 2y ago
> Social media started as tool to allow people to stay in touch after their time together came to an end and eventually evolved\merged with forums as a tool to bring people with similar interest together. This actually isn't really true. It may be true for social media in it's current incarnation but the origin of social media, the bulletin board systems/BBS (and their progenitor the Community Memory) started as a means for hobbyists to share information and coordinate projects. It would only be as BBS grew in popularity that they became a kind of digital public square/3rd place. Then with their decline, the graphical web/http based hobbyist forums (and eventually image boards) would rise repeating the pattern. It would only be the modern incarnation of social media that would originate as an attempt to serve as a "digital rolodex for friends and family" but really out of all the incarnations of social media that would be a relatively short lived oddity before folding back into the hobbyist forums -> public square pattern.
- tmottabr 2y ago
  But what is being discussed is social media current incarnation and that is exactly what i talking about. I even kind address your point when i said that it evolved\merge into forums, that were themselves an evolution of bulletin boards that in turn were evolution of older concepts. But i don't see BBS or forums really as a digital public square anymore then current social media is. They were really silos were you would find people with similar interest, but was ultimately subjected to the will of the board owner or its moderators. I see those more as an digital version of clubs then a public square. Also the modern social media version of hobbyist forums\bulletin boards was also a short lived one and has being replaced by the addictive algorithm aimed at capturing our attention as much as possible that we have today. I do not see anything in the past that could resemble what we have today, the closet parallel would be addictive drugs. Surely some of the old community building aspects are still there in some platforms, but the biggest problem is that now we are seen a new generation of platforms being born from start aimed at the single goal of capturing our attention and get us hooked.
throwaway894345 2y ago
Semantic arguments about what is and isn't a public square aside, the salient point is that an enormous share of our national and international dialogues about culture and politics take place on a handful of social media platforms. Those platforms have sufficient power that state actors _indirectly_ use them to influence elections (and if the platforms can be _indirectly_ manipulated to influence elections, then the people with hands directly on the levers of these platforms can necessarily directly influence those elections). The goal isn't, as you suggest, to eliminate bias, it's to democratize control. Consequently "all a protocol can do is allow you to created biased silos where different types of speech live which may or may not federate" is a perfectly good outcome! The goal posts are not and never were "eliminate bias" or "force everyone to hear opinions they don't want to hear".
- tmottabr 2y ago
  Well, silos being a perfect good outcome is debatable.. I for one don't agree.. But that is already possible today, just not at the escale of most social medias.. But let's be realistic, that will never happen.. A enormous amount of dialog is taking place in just a few social media because that is the majority of the people are.. That is not a problem you solve by just throwing more tech into it.. And that is part of the problem, while people share the same space kind of equally, their ideas do not because of the biases of the platform.. And people end-up being flood with one only one side of the discussion whatever they like it or not.. Everything that bluesky aim to do already exist in some form or another but it never got traction simple because people are not there.. In my opinion a much more realistic future is countries starting to ban foreign social medias, as it is already starting to happen. Not that this would be any better then what we have today.. Truth is that is is an extremely complex problem with no simple solution..
  - throwaway894345 2y ago
    > Well, silos being a perfect good outcome is debatable.. I for one don't agree.. But that is already possible today, just not at the escale of most social medias.. The goal isn't to produce silos, it's to distribute control. A bunch of subreddits under the control of Reddit Inc isn't "distributed control" even if Reddit allows moderators a degree of autonomy. > But let's be realistic, that will never happen.. That's vapid defeatism. It absolutely _can_ happen, and we know this because plenty of other layers of the stack are decentralized (e.g., the Internet, the web, etc) and the decentralized social media world is growing year over year. While it still constitutes a small share of the overall social media landscape, these things are nonlinear, so all it takes is a single inflection point which could well be BlueSky or similar. > Everything that bluesky aim to do already exist in some form or another but it never got traction simple because people are not there.. No social media app got traction until it did. I'm not saying BlueSky will be _the_ app that gets big, but "apps like BlueSky haven't made it big yet, therefor BlueSky won't make it big" could have applied as easily to every early social media network. Moreover, the Fediverse is already pretty large and it's a fair bit more tedious and less polished than BlueSky. One could easily imagine a privacy-concerned polity like the EU, or some Nordic state standing up their own AT proto instance for their citizens, which could serve as an inflection point.

CuriousCosmic 2y ago

> Social media started as tool to allow people to stay in touch after their time together came to an end and eventually evolved\merged with forums as a tool to bring people with similar interest together. This actually isn't really true. It may be true for social media in it's current incarnation but the origin of social media, the bulletin board systems/BBS (and their progenitor the Community Memory) started as a means for hobbyists to share information and coordinate projects. It would only be as BBS grew in popularity that they became a kind of digital public square/3rd place. Then with their decline, the graphical web/http based hobbyist forums (and eventually image boards) would rise repeating the pattern. It would only be the modern incarnation of social media that would originate as an attempt to serve as a "digital rolodex for friends and family" but really out of all the incarnations of social media that would be a relatively short lived oddity before folding back into the hobbyist forums -> public square pattern.

tmottabr 2y ago
But what is being discussed is social media current incarnation and that is exactly what i talking about. I even kind address your point when i said that it evolved\merge into forums, that were themselves an evolution of bulletin boards that in turn were evolution of older concepts. But i don't see BBS or forums really as a digital public square anymore then current social media is. They were really silos were you would find people with similar interest, but was ultimately subjected to the will of the board owner or its moderators. I see those more as an digital version of clubs then a public square. Also the modern social media version of hobbyist forums\bulletin boards was also a short lived one and has being replaced by the addictive algorithm aimed at capturing our attention as much as possible that we have today. I do not see anything in the past that could resemble what we have today, the closet parallel would be addictive drugs. Surely some of the old community building aspects are still there in some platforms, but the biggest problem is that now we are seen a new generation of platforms being born from start aimed at the single goal of capturing our attention and get us hooked.

throwaway894345 2y ago

Semantic arguments about what is and isn't a public square aside, the salient point is that an enormous share of our national and international dialogues about culture and politics take place on a handful of social media platforms. Those platforms have sufficient power that state actors _indirectly_ use them to influence elections (and if the platforms can be _indirectly_ manipulated to influence elections, then the people with hands directly on the levers of these platforms can necessarily directly influence those elections). The goal isn't, as you suggest, to eliminate bias, it's to democratize control. Consequently "all a protocol can do is allow you to created biased silos where different types of speech live which may or may not federate" is a perfectly good outcome! The goal posts are not and never were "eliminate bias" or "force everyone to hear opinions they don't want to hear".

tmottabr 2y ago
Well, silos being a perfect good outcome is debatable.. I for one don't agree.. But that is already possible today, just not at the escale of most social medias.. But let's be realistic, that will never happen.. A enormous amount of dialog is taking place in just a few social media because that is the majority of the people are.. That is not a problem you solve by just throwing more tech into it.. And that is part of the problem, while people share the same space kind of equally, their ideas do not because of the biases of the platform.. And people end-up being flood with one only one side of the discussion whatever they like it or not.. Everything that bluesky aim to do already exist in some form or another but it never got traction simple because people are not there.. In my opinion a much more realistic future is countries starting to ban foreign social medias, as it is already starting to happen. Not that this would be any better then what we have today.. Truth is that is is an extremely complex problem with no simple solution..
- throwaway894345 2y ago
  > Well, silos being a perfect good outcome is debatable.. I for one don't agree.. But that is already possible today, just not at the escale of most social medias.. The goal isn't to produce silos, it's to distribute control. A bunch of subreddits under the control of Reddit Inc isn't "distributed control" even if Reddit allows moderators a degree of autonomy. > But let's be realistic, that will never happen.. That's vapid defeatism. It absolutely _can_ happen, and we know this because plenty of other layers of the stack are decentralized (e.g., the Internet, the web, etc) and the decentralized social media world is growing year over year. While it still constitutes a small share of the overall social media landscape, these things are nonlinear, so all it takes is a single inflection point which could well be BlueSky or similar. > Everything that bluesky aim to do already exist in some form or another but it never got traction simple because people are not there.. No social media app got traction until it did. I'm not saying BlueSky will be _the_ app that gets big, but "apps like BlueSky haven't made it big yet, therefor BlueSky won't make it big" could have applied as easily to every early social media network. Moreover, the Fediverse is already pretty large and it's a fair bit more tedious and less polished than BlueSky. One could easily imagine a privacy-concerned polity like the EU, or some Nordic state standing up their own AT proto instance for their citizens, which could serve as an inflection point.