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There's a lot of good that happens via internet communication, social media is inherently toxic. Despite some crazy wider definitions I ran into, social media
by g-b-r 1y ago
There's a lot of good that happens via internet communication, social media is inherently toxic.
Despite some crazy wider definitions I ran into, social media traditionally meant things similar to Facebook, so real names, over-sharing of your life, falsehood, data collection, and what that leads to.
Anything good that might happen on social networks, is a result of a large portion of the population (disgracefully) being on them.
- micromacrofoot 1y agoI don't think social media is inherently toxic — I remember early time-based social media feeds and problems felt a lot smaller (though of course audiences were smaller). Even looking back at livejournal as social media, things were sometimes dramatic, but also a lot different. Maybe it's impossible to make monolithic social media non-toxic because of all the levers also required to make it profitable via engagement. It's very hard to distinguish social media from the algorithms that certainly reward toxic behavior today. You can look at Mastodon as a possible less-toxic counter-example, but we're now in a place where the audience demographics diverge so it's hard to be certain either way.
- mncharity 1y ago> monolithic Parents have written of setting up a local minecraft server for kids, and their friends, a neighborhood, or a school. Is setting up a local social media server also a thing?
- micromacrofoot 1y agoI believe you can do this with Mastodon, you can turn off all the federation features and have an individual twitter-like social network you can invite your friends to join. More commonly people are using groupchats on WhatsApp, Discord, or Slack for this... it's easier than maintaining it yourself (but there are also plenty of self-host options for chat networks too).