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One of the interesting benefits of Twitter splintering into multiple shards is that this problem becomes more clear. As Twitter alternatives have grown more rel
by jtbayly 2y ago
One of the interesting benefits of Twitter splintering into multiple shards is that this problem becomes more clear. As Twitter alternatives have grown more relevant, there is no obvious single place to do this anymore as, say, a police department. Should we move to Bluesky? Threads? Mastodon? Stay on Twitter? Somehow publish to all of the above?
I’m hoping it will lead to something more like RSS, but that may be wishful thinking.
- palata 2y ago> I’m hoping it will lead to something more like RSS, but that may be wishful thinking. Why not exactly RSS? Is it missing something?
- _aavaa_ 2y agoInteractivity from the part of the reader
- jjulius 2y agoThis is probably more rhetorical than anything, but why does it need to be interactive?
- nullren 2y agoif it’s not interactive and not littered with “likes”, how will i know to care about it or not?
- dymk 2y agoYou are presently commenting on a platform that has upvotes and replies. Even you apparently want to use a platform that has interactivity.
- jjulius 2y agoI sure am! Just because I'm commenting on this platform doesn't mean that I actually care about upvotes and such (spoiler alert: I don't give a shit what my score is). I interact, but I never feel the need to and I don't find the interactions to be the important aspect of the site, rather the kinds of articles I find submitted here are what I appreciate the most. The commentary is secondary, "extra" if you will - take it away and I wouldn't care. Hell, I have an RSS-based news reader that I utilize on a daily basis that provides no interactivity and I find it a more pleasant experience than on this site, and you know why that is? Because there isn't a comments section filled with people tossing nuance aside, taking a very shallow, disingenuous interpretation of someone's comment and then going at them in a sort of "gotcha" moment, rather than asking clarifying questions to better understand someone's thoughts first. ;)
- renewiltord 2y agoNo, it only appears as a gotcha. It's actually providing an insight. There are read-only sites and there are sites that people use, and for the most part that splits the universe of sites. For better or for worse, even read-only users primarily go to sites that others interact with.
- fluoridation 2y agoWhy does a police department need a feed to be interactive? Actually, doesn't it being interactive invite improper interactions from citizens that should have used official channels?
- TylerE 2y agoIt is an official channel.
- fluoridation 2y agoBy "official" channel I was thinking of making a police report, or writing something in a complaints book. Tweeting at a PD's account is comparatively as official as scribbling something on the wall of the station bathroom.
- TylerE 2y agoNo, it's more like dropping a note card in a "Tips" drop box in the station lobby. It's literally an officially monitored communication channel that is explicitly authorized. If anything, the transparency of a social media post is much better than, say, private emails that can be buried and ignored.
- fluoridation 2y agoI don't find it particularly interesting to argue about which analogy is more appropriate. My point is that it doesn't have the same degree of officialness as a report or some other public record, and it existing just invites to confusion on that matter.
- TylerE 2y agoI challenge you again - wht is this any less official than any other officially controlled, officially monitored communication channel. You have offered absolutely no argument to that, yet you continue to say it.
- gs17 2y agoThis is a platform for discussion, but if it was the example of a police department, why do they necessarily want to turn a feed of updates into a space they have to moderate (or if they can't moderate it, having to put up with most responses being along the lines of "ACAB"?). Communities can have value, but sometimes you wouldn't lose much by having your feed be read only.
- bobthepanda 2y agoThe problem is that departments want to put the news in front of people, and people want interactivity. Right now RSS is, for the vast majority of the public, a tree falling in a forest with nobody there to hear it.
- pseudalopex 2y ago> The problem is that departments want to put the news in front of people, and people want interactivity. Views exceed interactions by orders of magnitude.
- bobthepanda 2y agoBut people don't bother looking on non-interactive platforms. This is a problem for outreach that aims to hit 100% of the public, ideally.
- derektank 2y agoInteractions draw views. If someone asked the same question you had, and had it answered by the original poster, that's more valuable to you than a simple feed.
- palata 2y agoMy experience with comments on announcements from public entities (like a police department) is that they are more toxic than informative.
- heresie-dabord 2y agoWhat information gain is there in most of the "interactivity" that is afforded by social media?
- multjoy 2y agoPeople seem to like it?
- frio 2y agoFor things like a missing person alert, it provides an instant feedback mechanism and the ability to share things with people you might know in the affected area. Otherwise, there’s absolutely utility to interacting over social media. We’re doing it right now!
- flir 2y agoWhy is information gain the correct metric? We're talking about marketing here. Shouldn't it be conversions or awareness or something?
- ianburrell 2y agoOne important one is reposting that shows post to your followers who might not see the original. It is important way to see other content. Also, liking it signal that other people were interested in the post. I don't global likes are useful for likes from people you follow are important. Finally, replies mean can see interaction from people you follow. If you follow interesting people, you see interesting discussion. With social media, it isn't possible to read everything, I know I used to try to read my whole Twitter feed. There needs to be some way to filter than just time when you looked. I think the current algorithmic feed is bad because it tries to show other stuff instead of ordering things that want to see.
- palata 2y agoBut all those features allow for optimization and create competition. If you want likes, or views, or reposts, then you will have to "engineer" your post in such a way that it gets more attention. Not sure if that's always beneficial.
- krferriter 2y agoLikes could just be part of the RSS feed
- johnnyanmac 2y agoI know RSS is basically old tech by now, but I'm a bit surprised how many seem to misunderstand how this works. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It's goal is not to be "the" hub. It is a middleman that takes you to other websites that implement it. Be it twitter (on shakey ground), Your own website, or a game server (in theory). Anything that implements it and sends out messages can be caught by any number of clients made on top of RSS. Asking for interactivity from an RSS Feed is like asking for interactivity from an email. The goal is to point you towards other content that may or may not be interactable. The RSS is simply there to consolidate all your feeds into one view.
- _aavaa_ 2y agoI'm not misunderstanding anything. The original discussion was about why wouldn't RSS itself be a good backbone for replacing current types of social media. And my answer is because it's not interactive. Regular users don't care if the service is decentralized or distributed. And they don't want the experience of dozens of personal blogs they navigate through by RSS, and needing an account on each one.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago>And my answer is because it's not interactive. And I explained why that response is a bit nonsensical. Rss doesn't take interactivity away from you. It delegates it to Wherre ever you choose to visit. >they don't want the experience of dozens of personal blogs they navigate through by RSS, and needing an account on each one. 1. Thars overly presumptuous. Social media didn't give them a real choice. 2. You don't need an account for every blog. Not even for interacting. I guess people forgot that anonymous commenting is indeed a thing. If you really want to like stuff sure. But that's not anything different from today. >Regular users don't care if the service is decentralized or distributed. Sure, Bluesky shows they don't have to but the service can still be successful. As the article discussed, part of the ATS stack used Rss. How's thst different from using something like Feedly? It's juet a different app view.
- _aavaa_ 2y ago
- krisoft 2y ago> Why not exactly RSS? Is it missing something? The users. You can put your news on RSS and approximately nobody will read them. Or you can put them on twitter and it will reach people. This is true even now when the management of the bird app is seemingly hellbent on destroying the site. It was even more true when the decision was made. I guess we can hope (or work) on an RSS based future, but the key thing to achieve is users, and then the rest will follow.
- johnnyanmac 2y agoTo be fair, RSS isn't an either/or. Quite the oppoiste. You make an RSS feed and bring users into twitter to reach them. Ideally being able to move people to your own hosted service and they then interface with the base news in the same way, on their chosen RSS. Even if the link may take them to a blog instead of a centralized service. Issue is that the bird app doesn't want this middleman between them. They want all the users' attention.
- eduction 2y agoUnfortunately you are way more likely to get a blank stare when you say "add our RSS feed" than when you say "add us on Facebook" or similar, especially if you are an organization like a police department. Ordinary people do not tend to set up RSS readers or know how to handle feeds. Picking a reader means making one or more choices (for your phone, laptop, tablet whatever), adding a feed is several steps, and it is easy to get overloaded with too many boring items (and too few interesting ones) because curation is left to the end user. Centralized social networks require no choosing of readers, let you add an info source in one click, and ensure you have neither too few nor too many interesting items -- for some value of "interesting" -- regardless of how many entities you follow. I love RSS and decentralization but creating a smooth, user friendly experience with such tools is a major unsolved challenge.
- palata 2y agoI'm not sure. People click on links all the time. Sometimes it opens a browser, sometimes it opens a social media app. Why wouldn't it work with an RSS feed?
- johnnyanmac 2y agoI mean, there's plenty of clients for an RSS feed. It's kind of like saying "subscibe to our email list" but you never heard of gmail/yahoo/MSN. The user needs to put up some legwork to understand what's what. But after that, it is at worst pasting a link into your client, or clicking a button if the site gives proper attention to it. Not that much more friction than following someone on any centralized platform.
- ks2048 2y agoRSS feeds simply return the last N posts, correct? How can RSS be used to serve a user's whole history? Already, we talking about some other service that accumulates the history and provides search, history, etc. That and many other things (likes, replies, quotes, etc) are all things users expect (rightfully, IMHO). While orgs/people simply issuing announcements should ideally provide an RSS feed, that type of content is a tiny part of "social media".
- palata 2y agoWell I was answering to a comment talking about announcements from a police department.
- Terr_ 2y ago> there is no obvious single place to do this anymore as, say, a police department. Their website! Now get off my lawn! :p
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- hiatus 2y agoBut then you need to go to each website for updates. The benefit of these platforms was aggregation.
- XorNot 2y agoThey're a government department. This is literally something which should be coordinated by the government. I.e. police.gov should just dashboard this for you using location services.
- hiatus 2y agoPolicing in the US is fragmented. Unlike many European countries, the local police are not nationalized—each department has its own concerns, budget, etc.
- homebrewer 2y agoThis was solved 20 years ago with RSS, I guess it's about time for someone to rediscover the idea and reimplement something like it, push it like a great new invention, and make a couple of billions in the process.
- johnnyanmac 2y agoIt was solved 20 years ago. But companies unsolved it by deciding to de-prioritize or even remove such RSS API's. Getting around that requires some heavy and expensive scraping (compared to a lightweight API to hook into), and as we're seeing right now companies are at each other's necks in real time over scraping.
- ianburrell 2y agoActivityPub is something like RSS. It is based on OStatus which used Atom and other standards. But it also does multidirectional syncing. If Bluesky did ActivityPub, that will federate Mastodon, Threads, and Bluesky. There are tools for posting to old social media, we will probably see tools for the new ones. Should be easier since protocols are more open.
- protocolture 2y agoRealistically I think all social media should have been operating on an open standard years ago.
- johnnyanmac 2y agoideally, yes. Realistically, companies were never going to willingly give up their centralization once they started chasing ad revenue and then later selling data to 3rd parties.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago> Somehow publish to all of the above? I would have assumed this one. What's the downside?
- jtbayly 2y agoIt’s a lot of work to do, in part because you have an increasing number, and even more because you now have many more ways that people might respond. You need to monitor those accounts.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y agoOh, good point. I sorta forgot that you want to reply to people and it's not pure write-only broadcast.
- plaguuuuuu 2y agoInternet publishing? we could create a generic document format that could be published on the net. you'd need some standard markup to define presentation. then a hypertext protocol of some kind could transmit.
- tomrod 2y agoBluesky. It's fantastic.