13 ms·

How we lost communication to entertainment

701 points by 8organicbits 10mo ago

bryanrasmussen 10mo ago
>A few days ago, I did a controversial blog post and >When I originally wrote this post, nearly one year ago, I am confused.
- 8organicbits 10mo ago
  Bloggers don't always publish immediately after writing a post, the start of the prior post explains the time line and the delay: https://ploum.net/2025-12-04-pixelfed-against-fediverse.html https://ploum.net/2025-12-04-pixelfed-against-fediverse.html
  - bryanrasmussen 10mo ago
    hmm ok, I thought it might be that, but then I would have expected "I did" to have been "I published"
bryanrasmussen 10mo ago
>Communication networks are not profitable. Ma Bell tells me they may not have considered all possible angles on this matter.
- pyvpx 10mo ago
  Ma Bell was never profitable without government cheese. And her offspring can’t do much but complain about how every one else is making huge margins over “their” infrastructure. Telecom is very very broken.
- xpe 10mo ago
  > Communication networks are not profitable. This is strong and non-obvious claim; it warrants explanation, evidence, debate.
scotty79 10mo ago
We lost communication to advertising.
- PaulHoule 10mo ago
  It's kinda weird. Facebook started as a way to connect with family and friends and it is still really good at that. When I got back into Facebook to post my photos (e.g. in a "publish everywhere" strategy) I reconnected with distant family I hadn't been in contact with for a long time and I'm thankful for that. On the other hand that's not enough for a business so Facebook mashes that up with brands/businesses and community groups and "creators" and cleverly took the free publicity away from brands and started selling it back. I think the thing is friends and family don't generate enough content to be cover traffic for the ads and my feelings are kinda ambivalent for those people because there are people I care for who post vast amounts of content that I see as "cringe" (e.g. COVID-19 hyperchondria while I am seeing Gen X get their education and future friends, family and socialization stolen by school lockdowns) and thank God Facebook knows I don't click on that shit and shows me ads and stuff from "creators" instead!
  - basisword 10mo ago
    >> On the other hand that's not enough for a business It could be. Once Facebook had everyone on board they could have pivoted to a model where people pay directly. It's easy to forget how incredibly useful it was in the early years. It's not enough for a business that needs to endlessly grow but businesses don't NEED to do that - especially tech companies where costs can be incredibly low once the initial website is built.
    - PaulHoule 10mo ago
      20 years ago I'd say that "free-to-play" would have been necessary because of the N² value that social sites create, just getting the idea mainstream was difficult enough and you can very much see the phases we went through, how Facebook inspired Twitter and back, etc. Like, of my family and friends who are on Facebook I think very few of them would become subscribers. Today people believe in the value of social media and selling a subscription would be easier but the barriers I see are - from the viewpoint of incumbents, the people who would pay to have an ad-free experience are the people you most want to show ads to! Or to the converse, the person who won't spend $10 to block ads is cheap and won't spend money on anything else - incumbents will get in the way of any kind of "aggregator" service which adds value In a Fediversal system there would be a possible markets for a product that helps a consumer have a better consuming experience or a publisher have a better publishing experience (e.g. I post links and photos to 9 services) and would some pay, yes. But incumbents are threatened by openness and price API access at punitive, not profit-maximizing levels. Even in a more open world I'd have a lot of fear that the revenue and the costs won't line up and the profits in some part of the systems will be at the expense of unsustainable losses elsewhere and the mechanism design to make that work is tough. (e.g. I did some biz dev with a guy who had a track record in influencing freakin' telecoms to do better with mechanism design who thought "freedom isn't free" is the problem with the internet who struggled to get calls with anyone)
contrast 10mo ago
This is one of those articles that is too obsessed with amusing itself with its own pretentiousness to communicate anything interesting - which is ironic given the author seems thinks they prefer communications to entertainment.
majormajor 10mo ago
Text and chat (and the voice forms) are alive and well for communication. Broadcast forms, on the other hand, are ripe for co-option by profit-seeking through advertising. That's not communication being lost, it's media.
- mschuster91 10mo ago
  > Broadcast forms, on the other hand, are ripe for co-option by profit-seeking through advertising. The problem is, running broadcast networks is insanely expensive. You need either a lot of antennas (or other distribution points such as coax and fiber) around the country, or you need insanely large and power-hungry antennas (i.e. AM radio), or you need powerful data centers and legal teams. Someone has to pay the bill, and so it's either some sort of encrypted pay-tv which most people don't want to pay (see: the widespread piracy), or it's advertising, or (like with social media) venture capital being set alight.
  - majormajor 10mo ago
    Social media doesn't have to be that expensive to run. Countless forums out there for decades. But especially if you allow audio/video then your moderation costs can get very high if you're aiming for more "broadcast" and less "community."
    - mschuster91 10mo ago
      > Social media doesn't have to be that expensive to run. Countless forums out there for decades. Said forums existed because of volunteers paying in the form of time. Moderation is expensive, so are legal liabilities and associated cost that have only increased over the last decades - DMCA, anti-CSAM legislation, anti-terrorism legislation come to my mind primarily - and especially, there is a huge workload to deal with abusive behavior from unrelated third parties: skiddies, ddos extorters, dedicated hackers hired by "competition", spammers, you get the idea. Someone always pays the bill. There is a reason so many forums and mailing lists collapsed once Reddit took off. It just isn't worth it any more.
TheServitor 10mo ago
I think the desire to not centralize identity has more to do with it than anything. We present different facets to different communities. The pseudo-indelible nature of internet commentary means saying something to anyone potentially means saying it to everyone, in any context. That's why people have multiple fediverse accounts, to limit context or purpose of communication channels. Not because they don't value genuine communication within those channels.
- deleted 10mo ago
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- PaulHoule 10mo ago
  I used to get into arguments with people in the Fedi who couldn't seem to make up their minds whether they wanted to be visible or invisible. To me it seemed like it made no sense, like if you really want to be invisible just don't post it because you can't really take things back. At some point I realized those people were just like that. I worked at a startup circa 2012 or so which was unusually unclear in its mission but the paychecks and the parties were good and the idea seemed to be helping people partition out different parts of the identities in terms of interests so you could get Paul-the-mild-mannered-applications-developer, Paul-as-a-marketer/huckster, and Paul-as-a-fox, and Paul-with-an-embarassing-interest, etc. We had the hardest time explaining to the press (TechCrunch would say they didn't get it!) and everyone else, I could probably pitch it as well as anybody and I didn't do very well.
  - kruffalon 10mo ago
    Docker for humans!
    - shermantanktop 10mo ago
      Right, like the pods in the Matrix! Cool.
- plagiarist 10mo ago
  I think I somewhat agree with the author but I find the idea of a single account completely unappealing. My view on the benefits of federation is that you don't have a single entity gating your access. Having multiple accounts is a benefit.
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bentcorner 10mo ago
I love this paragrpah and I think it provides an interesting insight: > They are entertainment platforms that delegate media creation to the users themselves the same way Uber replaced taxis by having people drive others in their own car. Taking this analogy further, is today's end goal of social media to provide AI generated content that users can endlessly consume? I think Facebook is heading this direction.
- nicoburns 10mo ago
  > is today's end goal of social media to provide AI generated content that users can endlessly consume? I think Facebook is heading this direction. Platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts have already gone a long way down that path. I don't think users like this content much though.
  - hamdingers 10mo ago
    They don't have to like it they just need to engage with it.
    - BoingBoomTschak 10mo ago
      As KMFDM once said: We want to stop reading magazines, stop watching TV, stop caring about Hollywood but we're addicted to the things we hate
      - amatecha 10mo ago
        In high school English class we had to present a "poem" of our choice, of any sort - which included music pieces (or whatever other format). The song you quoted (KMFDM - Dogma) was my choice. The assignment included handing out the poem and reading (or playing it) to the class... Uhh, needless to say this got a pretty interesting reaction, but to the credit of the teacher, she didn't stop the music (or confiscate the printed out lyrics I handed out to everyone) despite the various swear words and pretty interesting messages in the lyrics. FWIW the lyrics are written by (and spoken word performed by) guest artist Nicole Blackman (according to https://www.discogs.com/release/73597-KMFDM-Xtort https://www.discogs.com/release/73597-KMFDM-Xtort )
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mojuba 10mo ago
> I apply a strong inbox 0 methodology Tangential to the main topic, but this is the only sensible way of running an email inbox, always has been to me, and it boggle my mind, why would anyone let clutter and a piling number of unreads in their one and only inbox, one of the most important things in our digital lives? Each email is an action item. If it's not or if it's been addressed, it's gone, period. Archive vs. Delete is another question but not as important. Over time I've found that I'm probably deleting too much (e.g. where did I buy that <nice thing> 5 years ago? want it again, can't find the order). Then business emails are all archived with the exception of business spam of course. So why would you have more emails in your inbox than items you’re supposed to act on?
- c22 10mo ago
  You have only one inbox?
- hrunt 10mo ago
  > Archive vs. Delete is another question but not as important. Over time I've found that I'm probably deleting too much (e.g. where did I buy that <nice thing> 5 years ago? want it again, can't find the order). Then business email are all archived with the exception of business spam of course. An executive co-worker of mine used his Deleted Items folder as his Archive. Problem solved.
  - baxtr 10mo ago
    But what about the joy of deleting 112 messages from the trash folder every day?
- shermantanktop 10mo ago
  Because my attention should be directed at what I want to do, when I want to, not a nagging number that sits there being more than zero. And when I do pay attention to it, I don't want to spend 20 minutes going through the 180 emails that I've been cc'd on. It's literally not worth my time or dilution of my attention. When I have attempted to get on top of this by doing all the curation and rule-authoring that productivity mavens shout about, it works for a little while but entropy sets in. I'm just not into scripting my own life and maximizing my productivity, and my job does not pivot on prompt email responses. So my email is a garbage dump with tire fires in it, and I know that, and I get on with the things I know are actually important. I'm not recommending this! It's just the compromise that I have settled in to. But if you wonder "why would anyone," this is it.
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ofalkaed 10mo ago
Communication was mostly lost before the rise of social media—assuming we ever had anything more than isolated pockets of actual communication, which I am not convinced we have. Literature has been exploring this for a good many decades, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is a good example and even shows how our relation to it has changed in the 80 odd years since its release; these days when it comes up the interpretation/discussion about it is more often than not, about social causes, which is depressingly ironic, it is using the novel in the same way the characters of the novel use Singer.
Esophagus4 10mo ago
> But what was created as "ride-sharing" was in fact a way to 1) destroy competition and 2) make a shittier service while people producing the work were paid less and lost labour rights. It was never about the social! Framed this way, sure. But for the most part, I like Uber. The competition it "killed" was monopolistic and stagnant, and the "shitty service" was the legacy taxi industry that Uber forced to modernize. Yellow taxis got phone apps and credit card processing devices because Uber forced them to keep up. I remember trying to order a taxi to the airport 15 years ago in one of the most populated cities in the world. I had to look up taxi companies on Google, call their dispatch, and ask for a ride. 40 minutes and several calls later, none arrived, so I had to call a different company's dispatcher as I scrambled to catch my flight. Now, I've called countless taxis with the push of a button in several countries. I get an estimate of pricing and arrival times up front. For me, Uber/Lyft is an incredible service. I'll leave the labor rights discussion for a different thread. (inb4 a HN contrarian jumps down my throat about this.) But that was a long winded way of saying: to me, the author's analogy seriously weakens his point. I could argue that highly personalized entertainment is way better than 800 cable channels of bleh. We still have plenty of non-enshittified communication (I text and call and Whatsapp and Telegram my friends).
oblique 10mo ago
> We dreamed of decentralised social networks as "email 2.0." They truly are "television 2.0." > They are entertainment platforms that delegate media creation to the users themselves the same way Uber replaced taxis by having people drive others in their own car. Either this is written poorly or way off. Social networks are already television 2.0. Decentralized social networks circumvents having the algorithm controlled by some central authority. Media creation has already been delegated to users over a decade ago, think content creators. Personally I'm a fediverse evangelist. Having decentralized entertainment platforms makes corporate/state influence much more difficult. The methods of influence in modern centralized social networks are much more sinister than television ever was.
- rileymat2 10mo ago
  I don't think the article disagrees here? The issue is not control or decentralization, but consumption v. back and forth (communication).
- hshdhdhj4444 10mo ago
  You seem to be agreeing with the article?
- Barrin92 10mo ago
  >Having decentralized entertainment platforms How? I don't even think decentralized is the appropriate term. They're distributed entertainment platforms in that they're protocol based, but regarding the distribution of content there's nothing in it that decentralizes reach. The social graph of Twitter and Mastodon could in principle be identical. Malicious actors don't need to control algorithms. States running influence campaigns on say, Youtube or Facebook don't actually control any algorithm, they adapt their content to what does well on the platform. And they could equally do this, one could argue even more effectively, on the fediverse. Saying the Fediverse solves top down influence is like thinking that Bitcoin solves wealth inequality. The distribution of the network is completely agnostic to the centralization of the content.
  - oblique 10mo ago
NedF 10mo ago
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buildsjets 10mo ago
Social media is yet another strange game where the only winning move is not to play.
- littlecranky67 10mo ago
  We must stop calling them social media and call them what they have become: media. The percentage of actually social stuff is negligible. Now you can classify having a conversation with a random stranger that you never going to meet in your life over twitter as "being social". I'd say you are just passing time or entertaining yourself. Or worse, compensating lack of real world social interactions.
terminalbraid 10mo ago
> They believe those platforms are "public spaces" while they truly are "private spaces trying to destroy all other public spaces in order to get a monopoly." There's nothing I can add to this.
- ghickPit 10mo ago
  You can: you can mention Slack and Discord. :( :( :( signed, another dinosaur (with a flawless "inbox 0" track record at both work and home, for decades now)
- nicbou 10mo ago
  LLMs are a new phase of this. This time, I think it will truly kill the open web and reroute all traffic to two or three websites.
  - BiteCode_dev 10mo ago
    And kill many apps, maybe even OSes. When most of what a user can do can be done from one single UI, the low friction will win. And since all the data must be sent to the service, and that a super intelligent AI analysis all this data, the spying that is already considered outrageous today will reach unprecedented level. Now, associate that with the fact the last year people in charge of said systems kissed the ring of the power that be in the most disgusting way. Add what we learned about surveillance from 3 letters agency. You get your dystopia. It's not an if now. It's a when. We need to solve that problem now. Once we hit it, we will lose the ability to solve it. And I'm not sure where you could go on earth to escape it.
  - joquarky 10mo ago
    I don't see how this will kill the web. If anything, it might make it easier to find more of the older nerdier web that wasn't made for profit. Also, there are so many people that are already so rabidly anti-AI that I'm certain they will form their own communities outside the mainstream.
- webdoodle 10mo ago
  Nor should you, digitally. Each ideation we have of how it can be further used to break our civil rights, is being used as a playbook to do exactly that. Warn your friends in person, but don't give the basilisk a free lunch.
mrkeen 10mo ago
This is so dramatic it's hard to recover the original complaint. Dansup has built a photo-sharing app on top of ActivityPub, and we humans are a lost cause because the app doesn't also do text-only messages? Is that the gist of it?
- hshdhdhj4444 10mo ago
  Not really. The gist of it is if Google decides to build GMail but Gmail silently deleted emails that it did not find entertaining enough so you didn’t even know they were ever sent to you. The article is saying some people see ActivityPub as a communication protocol like Gmail where you expect all messages to be delivered, while others see it as an entertainment protocol where the goal is to entertain the user.
  - mrkeen 10mo ago
    What is the image sharing platform's criteria for "entertaining enough"? Is it whether or not the message is an image?
  - stavros 10mo ago
    Yes but the author lumps all decentralized and/or social networks together when all he really means to talk about is ActivityPub specifically.
  - amiga386 10mo ago
    It's more like Usenet users complaining that NZB downloaders don't let their users read text posts. Nobody using an NZB downloader gives a fuck about text posts. They're not there to chat with their fellow humans, they're there to download files. Both the text posts and binary files are transmitted by the same substrate, NNTP, but the protocol clearly has multiple groups of people using it for very different purposes. Comparing it to email is inappropriate, because email is addressed to you, and you get upset if email servers/clients drop emails. But newsfeeds are not addressed to you. Neither is RSS/Atom. ActivityPub, generally speaking, isn't either. How you choose to experience messages coming your way is up to you. This whole article is making the assumption that if you want something more different, e.g. Pixelfed, PeerTube, Lemmy (Fediverse Instagram/YouTube/Reddit), it basically must also be Mastodon/Pleroma (Fediverse Twitter). Why must it?
vanschelven 10mo ago
I wonder if the author is aware of Neil Postman's work, especially "Amusing ourselves to death". It seems very relevant to this article.
- crims0n 10mo ago
  My thoughts definitely drifted there. I read it last year and IMO it’s still as relevant as ever.
lysace 10mo ago
This only makes sense if you only read the headline.
beej71 10mo ago
Resonates for me. I consume a bunch of content daily, but it's RSS mostly. Gemini, too. None of it is Facebook et al. I am in groups with friends and family on Signal and on Discord, and in email. It feels more boring, for sure, but it is vastly more satisfyingly "human", if I can describe it that way. Yes, I'm over 50.
- stevenhuang 10mo ago
  What Gemini are you and the author referring to? I presume not the LLM Gemini by Google? Ah the Gemini protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)
  - cons0le 10mo ago
    My head was preparing to spin if he had said he gets all of his news from google Gemini. It's a depressing thought, but I bet we will see younger people in our lifetime that just get news exclusively from LLMs
    - beej71 10mo ago
      I'm going to have to be more explicit with "Gemini (the protocol)". :) Fing Google... :)
  - Kye 10mo ago
    The protocol is older than productized transformers. It's like that scene from Office Space. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjZKVKxZcAo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjZKVKxZcAo
- xorvoid 10mo ago
  Strong agree. I switched back to RSS after trying social media. Much more boring. And that has been a very good thing. It's also been much more substantive. It's like eating your veggies vs eating sugar candy. Why should we believe that "being entertained" is a valuable thing? I suppose it serves an evolutionary purpose as "steering focus", e.g. noticing the unusual/novel/scary/etc. But, it's not the end goal. And overloaded attention mechanisms sounds like an obvious misfeature.
NiloCK 10mo ago
Being born in 83, I experienced the shift from "serious local nightly news program" into the 24 hr cable news platforms as a loss of focused, serious journalism. Only much later did I read Understanding Media, Amusing Ourselves to Death, etc, and understand that the prior shift from print to the "serious local nightly new program" was itself a loss of focused, serious journalism. For today's youth, Tik Tok is "the air we breath" - the de-facto standard against which the future will be judged. It's horrifying to imagine what will be worse.
- startupsfail 10mo ago
  I'm curious, is there some meaningful way for geriatric millennials to use Tik Tok? Without being sucked in into doomscrolling and content consumption? Produce content? I'd guess it should be possible to play with the thing somehow...
  - wussboy 10mo ago
    Why? Just leave it be, and your life will be just as rich if not richer.
    - aGHz 10mo ago
      I think one good reason is connecting with the youth. My kids are too young for Tik Tok but old enough to come home with 6-7 (btw, best antidote to that is the 7-8-9 joke ;) ) and "chicken banana", and I'm told this comes from Tik Tok. I grew up in a house where every BSOD was caused by the fact that we installed video games, and I'd rather not be that kind of parent to my own kids. I'm also like GP though, I'd rather not go full scrollhead, so it's a bit of a dilemma.
      - peruvian 10mo ago
        You can search TikTok memes on YouTube. People upload them. You using TikTok earnestly would result in a feed vastly different from your kids anyway.
      - 10mo ago
jlengrand 10mo ago
Ploum is one of the people getting me into blogging 12 or so years ago. I'm so glad to see it popup again here, it's like a big piece of nostalgia. And the piece is current. Thanks Ploum!
1121redblackgo 10mo ago
This article makes me think of how defiant Discord has been against all of this, and how slowly I'm starting to succumb to many of the same forces, although much slowly than other platforms. It's a minor miracle they never got bought up/sold themselves. Also reminds me of the Dark Forrest Yancy Strickler stuff.
jim201 10mo ago
The book Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman seems really relevant here. The thesis is that different modes of information are best suited to different tasks. Postman argues that television is best suited for entertainment. So the programs that do well on TV will naturally tend to be entertainment. That book was written in 1985, but the core observations are also applicable to modern cellphones (which have become, for the majority of users, entertainment devices). Postman then talks about how our communication systems have degraded as a result of entertainment being the strength of our current modes. Fantastic read.
hollow-moe 10mo ago
Soooo, when my email client is text-only and doesn't show me the attachments from the multi-part, it's "actively destroying the Fediverse" ? Ploum doesn't make any sense here. A "platform" such as Mastodon, Pixelfed, Peertube etc. (Do not mistake with "client", there's multiple Peertube "clients" or "frontends" for instance) using ActivityPub shouldn't have to implement and provide the user with the whole spec, otherwise just make the "ActivityPub" platform, implement everything there why even bother making other platforms?
- tecoholic 10mo ago
  The email client might not show attachments, but will still let you know there is a message. Pixelfed is not letting the user know there is even a message. Also you seem to be responding to the original post or just the first paragraph of this post. He understands the differences and the way he sees the differences is the whole post.
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ofalkaed 10mo ago
Reading through this thread, I can't help but think that Stanley Elkin got everything right when he wrote George Mills. The blurbs and reviews of George Mills often reduce it to being about the failures of the 99%, but I think it is more about why the 1% succeeds and the answer is fairly simple, because the 99% wants the 1% to succeed, it absolves them of all culpability. This is modern (contemporary) life, absolution. George Mills seems to only increase in relevance as far as I can see, but it only recedes in relevance in the eyes of the public because it offers no scapegoats. This time it is different, right? The first George Mills was correct in believing that, but we don't live in his times.
kaonwarb 10mo ago
The author’s ideological bent against Big Tech shows through most clearly in the passage on Uber: > Uber replaced taxis by having people drive others in their own car. But what was created as "ride-sharing" was in fact a way to 1) destroy competition and 2) make a shittier service while people producing the work were paid less and lost labour rights There are valid complaints about Uber, but most people consider it a materially better service than taxis most of the time. They vote that way with their wallets, long after VC subsidies ended, and often even when it costs _more_ than a taxi.
_cenw 10mo ago
I don't get the hangup on having multiple accounts. The point of AP is that you can read any kind post, not create any kind of post. There is a truth to consumption over communication, but that is in the destruction of third spaces and the increasing difficulty in making friends. The fediverse is a force against that in my view, even if it has some of the creature comforts of regular social media.
BrenBarn 10mo ago
I found this a bit odd as I don't recall ever thinking of social media as about "sending messages", and only loosely would I say they're for "communication". They're mostly for one-way communication, which is essentially what entertainment is too, so it's not surprising that social media would feel like entertainment. When you make a post on Facebook you're not really "sending a message" to anyone in particular, you're just broadcasting it out to the network. But this got me thinking about what I think a "message" really is. Maybe there's a Dunbar's number kind of thing here because I feel like there's some sort of limit on how many people I can send textual content to before it stops being a "message" and becomes more like an "announcement". Like I get emails, and some of those are messages because they come from individuals and are sent to me and perhaps a small set of other individuals. But some emails are more like announcements (or even "content"), and such quasi-messages have existed since before email went mainsteam (like holiday newsletters that people sent out with xmas cards). It's true that many social media platforms have a messaging system that exists in parallel ("direct messages"), but that always seemed kind of separate from the core essence of the platform. The closest you get to real "messages" in social networks is comments, but in my experience the degree to which those constitute "messages" or "communication" varies a lot from platform to platform and also from user to user. These days a large proportion of comments are just slightly more specific "reactions" like "That's so great!" or "Wow" or "Thanks for posting this". I don't often see genuine discussion happening in comments (although HN, if you consider it a social media site, is an exception to this). There has been an evolution in this regard, but even back in the day I think it wasn't what I'd call "messaging". The earliest platform I can remember using that (in retrospect) I could call a social network was LiveJournal. But LJ was a blogging platform. You didn't post "messages" to other people, you posted, well, posts, and maybe people would comment on them or maybe they wouldn't. I would never have said that I dreamed of LJ becoming "email 2.0". And I'd say modern microblogging-type platforms (like Twitter) seem even more removed from email or "messaging". I also don't see decentralization as really connected to this. To me the main advantage of decentralization is to eliminate single points of failure and guard against various sorts of rugpulls (like what eventually happened to LJ). But whether a platform fosters communication, messages, interaction, or whatever you want to call it, is pretty much independent of whether it's decentralized. This isn't to say that I disagree that something's been lost in internet communication over the years. But to me that missing thing seems mostly to be a combination of attention and authenticity. We've lost attention in the sense that now that people do everything with their phones, they consume and create content more diffusely, as opposed to having a division between "I'm sitting at my computer reading or writing" and "I'm doing something else". The small screens and balky input mechanisms of phones make this problem even worse for writing than it is for reading. And we've lost authenticity in the sense that so many platforms have become contaminated with stuff that is in no sense communication from any human, not even one-way communication. Instead it's junk generated by corporations to sell products (perhaps with some intermediate steps of harvesting data, etc.). This has become much, much worse in the last few years with the rise of AI slop. It's harder and harder to find stuff on the web that actually represents the work of a human being expressing themselves in a personal way. So yeah, we've lost something, but I wouldn't say we lost communication to entertainment. It's more like we lost the boundaries of the units of our communication so that we find ourselves in a constant blur of content, rather than a sequence of discrete units each of which we process and ponder independently.
nephihaha 10mo ago
"All our communication channels are morphed into content distribution networks. We are more and more entertained but less and less connected." This isn't true. You can still meet in person or make a phone call. As for news media... They tend to be at the beck and call of whoever owns them. Most of them use the same press agencies but promote political binaries to the exclusion of other viewpoints.
markus_zhang 10mo ago
IMHO communication is entertainment sometimes. Most of the “communication” we do day to day, like small talks to colleagues, or tweeting some posts, in my opinion, is just a way to relax and have fun, like patting each other electronically.
- cons0le 10mo ago
  Sure, but there's nothing worse than when you want to have a serious conversation with someone, and all they can make are jokes. There are a lot of serious conversations we need to have as a society right now. And collectively, all we can do is make jokes.
  - markus_zhang 10mo ago
    Social media is probably not the best place to make such communications anyway. It is good for propaganda but not good for serious discussion. Serious, scientific discussion asks for a lot more than just communication itself.
  - oersted 10mo ago
    Throughout history, real social conversations and movements have happened around thought leaders that dedicate their lives to painstakingly understanding and expressing a certain point of view on a set of issues. Be it in written form or through oratory, it then acts as an anchor to frame and facilitate conversations between people one-on-one. Real progress requires that hard work of crafting and spreading a vision, something to point at that helps people express what they struggle to express themselves. It also then needs that protected intimacy of long conversations between individuals to digest it. The architecture of social media centered around short-form public communication is not appropriate for this. This of course applies to both constructive and destructive movements, but it’s the only way to get big real things done. I suppose that’s why we have this emergent class of powerful independent (podcast) intellectuals after a long time of the concept not being a thing. Again, for better or worse, plenty of both.
    - cons0le 10mo ago
athrowaway3z 10mo ago
> Big Monopolies have managed to convince people that they need one account on each platform. That brainwash/marketing is so deeply entrenched that most people cannot see an alternative anymore. I get what is being said, but i disagree with the framing. The "brainwashing" happened in two stages, and the first stage is perfectly logical. Most people don't want just 1 identity, and they want separate spaces for being different. If you're already OK with having two accounts on BBS, what is 1 or 2 accounts more for thefacebook.com?
- gus_massa 10mo ago
  Facebook sometimes decides to block your account when the name is not 100% identical to your official ID. Google when you make a chargeback or your youtube channel has the song of a bird The other platform also have similar weird cases. I don't want to be instabanned from ALL the internet just because one site decides I did something wrong for real or imaginary reasons.
- BrtByte 10mo ago
  Where the framing still resonates for me is in who controls the boundaries
cbsmith 10mo ago
> Communication networks are not profitable. Lost me on that one. Communication networks provide significant value and can be quite profitable. That's a whole industry.
peteforde 10mo ago
The author makes some solid points, and I don't love Uber the company, but I can't accept the notion that ridesharing is a shittier experience than taking taxis. Only someone who willfully forgets how terrible taxis are could say that.
- iancmceachern 10mo ago
  I have the exact opposite opinion. Taxis were great, for both the consumer and Taxi driver.
  - peteforde 10mo ago
    I'm floored! My experience pre-Uber was that cabs were never there when you need them, the cars were smelly and in bad shape, the rides were expensive, seatbelts were usually broken, and drivers were not particularly motivated to be civil, never mind kind. I personally don't drink bottled water on principle, but in theory it's nice to know it's there if I'm suffering. Are your local cabs just amazing? I'm open to it, but again... floored. This very well could be a regional difference. Edit: I cannot believe that I forgot to mention that the entire taxi medallion system found in most cities was not only deeply corrupt and usually intimately connected with organized crime... but the ownership structure was such that they enabled some of the worst legal wage slavery rackets in the western world. You've had these deeply shady owners with dozens of medallions and fleets of easily replaced, mostly immigrant drivers who all seemed to be prepared to drive for decades before someday hopefully being able to buy their own car and then drive it until they die. I dunno, man. Convince me I'm mistaken.
    - iancmceachern 10mo ago
      From what I've read Uber drivers aren't any better off. It's still a race to nowhere. All the negatives you described about the old structure still exist, it's just Uber skimming of the top now.
      - peteforde 10mo ago
ChrisMarshallNY 10mo ago
> They believe those platforms are "public spaces" while they truly are "private spaces trying to destroy all other public spaces in order to get a monopoly." This has been my biggest beef with Facebook. I have an FB account, but never use it, anymore. By walking away from it, there are a number of folks with whom I can no longer communicate. In some cases, that’s fine, but in a couple, I sincerely miss them. I like the idea behind the fediverse, but find it too “fiddly” to use. That’s often an issue with things designed by engineers, for engineers. There’s long been discussion of “One ID to Rule Them All,” but that brings in the inevitable (and completely valid) point of who arbitrates/controls the infrastructure for that ID (“and in the Darkness, Binds Them”). The thing is, folks really want convenience. If it’s not provided as a benevolent resource, an opening is made available to less benevolent people. It’s going to happen, and all the hand-wringing in the world can’t stop human nature. I feel that public discourse is particularly vulnerable to the medium. Who controls the medium, controls the discourse, and, as we’ve already seen, that can have serious consequences in the real world. Not a new conundrum. Social Media has simply sprinkled Miracle Gro onto the problem. I’m not sure there’s any real solution. I am thinking that today’s newer generation (“Alpha”?) is developing a “thick skin,” and maybe, is becoming resistant to people that manipulate communication. I’m fairly despondent about my generation. We seem to have fallen hook, line, and sinker for the shysters.
- cons0le 10mo ago
  I had such high hopes for blue sky. The team seems highly un-problematic. Every time I go on there it's just happy stories and people communicating. But still almost nobody uses it. And now worst of all, people are saying it doesn't "count" as real federation. It seems like we're letting perfect be the enemy of good. But what do I know
  - oytis 10mo ago
    Facebook started as people communicating too. I just don't understand why do you need to create a new incompatible protocol when ActivityPub exists - unless enshittification is in the roadmap. Even less I understand why prefer it over e.g. Mastodon from the user's perspective
BrtByte 10mo ago
What resonated for me is the framing shift: not "centralized vs decentralized," but communication vs consumption
pitched 10mo ago
Social Media fills the same role that Alcohol used to. As far as debilitating addictions go, it does seem to be a small improvement though. Driving afterwards isn’t a problem, for example.
- BrtByte 10mo ago
  That comparison feels uncomfortably accurate
- christophilus 10mo ago
  > Driving afterwards isn’t a problem, for example. Many people drive-during which appears to have a similarly dangerous outcome.
fullshark 10mo ago
Economics. Entertainment and monetizing eyeballs is much more lucrative than charging for communication services.
hypertexthero 10mo ago
It took me a long time to notice that the word in the title is “massage”, and not “message”, in Marshall McLuhan’s and Quentin Fiore’s The Medium is the Massage (An inventory of effects): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Medium_Is_the_Massage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Medium_Is_the_Massage Links to various editions: https://www.biblio.com/the-medium-is-the-massage-by-marshall-fiore-quentin-mcluhan/work/58810 https://www.biblio.com/the-medium-is-the-massage-by-marshall... Also of interest, notes about the observer being the observed in Jiddu Krishnamurti’s Think on These Things — https://www.biblio.com/9780060916091 https://www.biblio.com/9780060916091 — and The First and Last Freedom: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_First_and_Last_Freedom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_First_and_Last_Freedom
teleforce 10mo ago
>Big Monopolies have managed to convince people that they need one account on each platform. This was done, on purpose, for purely unethical reasons in order to keep users captive. >That brainwash/marketing is so deeply entrenched that most people cannot see an alternative anymore. It looks like a natural law: you need an account on a platform to communicate with someone on that platform. Easily the best post on HN so far this year 2025, thanks. Very messy situations that we're at the moment for our communications platform but sadly it's true.
blfr 10mo ago
Sure but wasn't this always the case? People told stories. joked, bantered, preached, and flirted both to communicate on different levels and to entertain themselves and each other. And so my Signal is solid 40% memes. Memes that someone carefully selected and sent me but still pure entertainment. No evil monopoly necessary to make it so.
convolvatron 10mo ago
I know it seems reductive, but in the early 90s there was a serious discussion about NAT. NAT bifurcates the internet into producers and consumers. naturally everyone looking to monetize the internet thought this was just fine, even desirable. and almost all the people who actually built the internet were aghast. ubiquitous reachability was the goal, not making a new form a television. the details wrt social media etc were unknown, but the path we were taking was quite clear.
Mikhail_Edoshin 10mo ago
William James wrote that one of characteristics of a religious state of mind is its seriousness. I'll quote: For common men “religion,” whatever more special meanings it may have, signifies always a serious state of mind. If any one phrase could gather its universal message, that phrase would be, “All is not vanity in this Universe, whatever the appearances may suggest.” I myself can compare this with the cultural state of Soviet Union. It was a very atheistic country on the surface; yet the art, the cultural scene, the newspapers, the cinema; the school education; the public forums (they existed in the form of letters to newspapers); everything was imbued with that idea that there are serious things, not everything is vanity. It wasn't dull or dark; it was very reviving, in fact, because it gave you the foundation, something firm to stand upon. There were fantastically funny comedies (I wish I could find modern comedies like that) but there was also seriousness. I still remember some journal pieces of that time that, I admit, formed me as a person. An essay about a relatively minor crime, for example: two women were bitten by guard dogs. Yet somehow it rose to your place in life; your approach to what life is; you and your responsibility for how you live. And these themes were everywhere. Until 1991.
- joquarky 10mo ago
  Alan Watts says something similar about how religions often harden into institutions that demand loyalty and "purity". When that happens, they slide into in-group/out-group thinking, defensiveness, and "spiritual one-upmanship" which makes everything more tense and brittle.
AuthAuth 10mo ago
No we didnt lose communication to entertainment. You still have communication protocols like email and xmpp. Fediverse is a communication protocol and some of that communication is entertainment. We need to seperate social media and fediverse because the philosophy is completely different. Fediverse has you make an account and you get posts from users you follow. The reason you need multiple accounts is because the sites are not complete enough to handle all of the different styles of posts. There is still a social and communication aspect to it. Big tech social media is pushing you a stream of entertainment and pushing away from social interactions.

701 points by 8organicbits 10mo ago

>A few days ago, I did a controversial blog post and >When I originally wrote this post, nearly one year ago, I am confused.

8organicbits 10mo ago
Bloggers don't always publish immediately after writing a post, the start of the prior post explains the time line and the delay: https://ploum.net/2025-12-04-pixelfed-against-fediverse.html https://ploum.net/2025-12-04-pixelfed-against-fediverse.html
- bryanrasmussen 10mo ago
  hmm ok, I thought it might be that, but then I would have expected "I did" to have been "I published"

bryanrasmussen 10mo ago

>Communication networks are not profitable. Ma Bell tells me they may not have considered all possible angles on this matter.

pyvpx 10mo ago
Ma Bell was never profitable without government cheese. And her offspring can’t do much but complain about how every one else is making huge margins over “their” infrastructure. Telecom is very very broken.
xpe 10mo ago
> Communication networks are not profitable. This is strong and non-obvious claim; it warrants explanation, evidence, debate.

scotty79 10mo ago

We lost communication to advertising.

PaulHoule 10mo ago
It's kinda weird. Facebook started as a way to connect with family and friends and it is still really good at that. When I got back into Facebook to post my photos (e.g. in a "publish everywhere" strategy) I reconnected with distant family I hadn't been in contact with for a long time and I'm thankful for that. On the other hand that's not enough for a business so Facebook mashes that up with brands/businesses and community groups and "creators" and cleverly took the free publicity away from brands and started selling it back. I think the thing is friends and family don't generate enough content to be cover traffic for the ads and my feelings are kinda ambivalent for those people because there are people I care for who post vast amounts of content that I see as "cringe" (e.g. COVID-19 hyperchondria while I am seeing Gen X get their education and future friends, family and socialization stolen by school lockdowns) and thank God Facebook knows I don't click on that shit and shows me ads and stuff from "creators" instead!
- basisword 10mo ago
  >> On the other hand that's not enough for a business It could be. Once Facebook had everyone on board they could have pivoted to a model where people pay directly. It's easy to forget how incredibly useful it was in the early years. It's not enough for a business that needs to endlessly grow but businesses don't NEED to do that - especially tech companies where costs can be incredibly low once the initial website is built.
  - PaulHoule 10mo ago
    20 years ago I'd say that "free-to-play" would have been necessary because of the N² value that social sites create, just getting the idea mainstream was difficult enough and you can very much see the phases we went through, how Facebook inspired Twitter and back, etc. Like, of my family and friends who are on Facebook I think very few of them would become subscribers. Today people believe in the value of social media and selling a subscription would be easier but the barriers I see are - from the viewpoint of incumbents, the people who would pay to have an ad-free experience are the people you most want to show ads to! Or to the converse, the person who won't spend $10 to block ads is cheap and won't spend money on anything else - incumbents will get in the way of any kind of "aggregator" service which adds value In a Fediversal system there would be a possible markets for a product that helps a consumer have a better consuming experience or a publisher have a better publishing experience (e.g. I post links and photos to 9 services) and would some pay, yes. But incumbents are threatened by openness and price API access at punitive, not profit-maximizing levels. Even in a more open world I'd have a lot of fear that the revenue and the costs won't line up and the profits in some part of the systems will be at the expense of unsustainable losses elsewhere and the mechanism design to make that work is tough. (e.g. I did some biz dev with a guy who had a track record in influencing freakin' telecoms to do better with mechanism design who thought "freedom isn't free" is the problem with the internet who struggled to get calls with anyone)

contrast 10mo ago

This is one of those articles that is too obsessed with amusing itself with its own pretentiousness to communicate anything interesting - which is ironic given the author seems thinks they prefer communications to entertainment.

majormajor 10mo ago

Text and chat (and the voice forms) are alive and well for communication. Broadcast forms, on the other hand, are ripe for co-option by profit-seeking through advertising. That's not communication being lost, it's media.

mschuster91 10mo ago
> Broadcast forms, on the other hand, are ripe for co-option by profit-seeking through advertising. The problem is, running broadcast networks is insanely expensive. You need either a lot of antennas (or other distribution points such as coax and fiber) around the country, or you need insanely large and power-hungry antennas (i.e. AM radio), or you need powerful data centers and legal teams. Someone has to pay the bill, and so it's either some sort of encrypted pay-tv which most people don't want to pay (see: the widespread piracy), or it's advertising, or (like with social media) venture capital being set alight.
- majormajor 10mo ago
  Social media doesn't have to be that expensive to run. Countless forums out there for decades. But especially if you allow audio/video then your moderation costs can get very high if you're aiming for more "broadcast" and less "community."
  - mschuster91 10mo ago
    > Social media doesn't have to be that expensive to run. Countless forums out there for decades. Said forums existed because of volunteers paying in the form of time. Moderation is expensive, so are legal liabilities and associated cost that have only increased over the last decades - DMCA, anti-CSAM legislation, anti-terrorism legislation come to my mind primarily - and especially, there is a huge workload to deal with abusive behavior from unrelated third parties: skiddies, ddos extorters, dedicated hackers hired by "competition", spammers, you get the idea. Someone always pays the bill. There is a reason so many forums and mailing lists collapsed once Reddit took off. It just isn't worth it any more.

TheServitor 10mo ago

I think the desire to not centralize identity has more to do with it than anything. We present different facets to different communities. The pseudo-indelible nature of internet commentary means saying something to anyone potentially means saying it to everyone, in any context. That's why people have multiple fediverse accounts, to limit context or purpose of communication channels. Not because they don't value genuine communication within those channels.

deleted 10mo ago
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PaulHoule 10mo ago
I used to get into arguments with people in the Fedi who couldn't seem to make up their minds whether they wanted to be visible or invisible. To me it seemed like it made no sense, like if you really want to be invisible just don't post it because you can't really take things back. At some point I realized those people were just like that. I worked at a startup circa 2012 or so which was unusually unclear in its mission but the paychecks and the parties were good and the idea seemed to be helping people partition out different parts of the identities in terms of interests so you could get Paul-the-mild-mannered-applications-developer, Paul-as-a-marketer/huckster, and Paul-as-a-fox, and Paul-with-an-embarassing-interest, etc. We had the hardest time explaining to the press (TechCrunch would say they didn't get it!) and everyone else, I could probably pitch it as well as anybody and I didn't do very well.
- kruffalon 10mo ago
  Docker for humans!
  - shermantanktop 10mo ago
    Right, like the pods in the Matrix! Cool.
plagiarist 10mo ago
I think I somewhat agree with the author but I find the idea of a single account completely unappealing. My view on the benefits of federation is that you don't have a single entity gating your access. Having multiple accounts is a benefit.

deleted 10mo ago

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bentcorner 10mo ago

I love this paragrpah and I think it provides an interesting insight: > They are entertainment platforms that delegate media creation to the users themselves the same way Uber replaced taxis by having people drive others in their own car. Taking this analogy further, is today's end goal of social media to provide AI generated content that users can endlessly consume? I think Facebook is heading this direction.

nicoburns 10mo ago
> is today's end goal of social media to provide AI generated content that users can endlessly consume? I think Facebook is heading this direction. Platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts have already gone a long way down that path. I don't think users like this content much though.
- hamdingers 10mo ago
  They don't have to like it they just need to engage with it.
  - BoingBoomTschak 10mo ago
    As KMFDM once said: We want to stop reading magazines, stop watching TV, stop caring about Hollywood but we're addicted to the things we hate
    - amatecha 10mo ago
      In high school English class we had to present a "poem" of our choice, of any sort - which included music pieces (or whatever other format). The song you quoted (KMFDM - Dogma) was my choice. The assignment included handing out the poem and reading (or playing it) to the class... Uhh, needless to say this got a pretty interesting reaction, but to the credit of the teacher, she didn't stop the music (or confiscate the printed out lyrics I handed out to everyone) despite the various swear words and pretty interesting messages in the lyrics. FWIW the lyrics are written by (and spoken word performed by) guest artist Nicole Blackman (according to https://www.discogs.com/release/73597-KMFDM-Xtort https://www.discogs.com/release/73597-KMFDM-Xtort )

deleted 10mo ago

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mojuba 10mo ago

> I apply a strong inbox 0 methodology Tangential to the main topic, but this is the only sensible way of running an email inbox, always has been to me, and it boggle my mind, why would anyone let clutter and a piling number of unreads in their one and only inbox, one of the most important things in our digital lives? Each email is an action item. If it's not or if it's been addressed, it's gone, period. Archive vs. Delete is another question but not as important. Over time I've found that I'm probably deleting too much (e.g. where did I buy that <nice thing> 5 years ago? want it again, can't find the order). Then business emails are all archived with the exception of business spam of course. So why would you have more emails in your inbox than items you’re supposed to act on?

c22 10mo ago
You have only one inbox?
hrunt 10mo ago
> Archive vs. Delete is another question but not as important. Over time I've found that I'm probably deleting too much (e.g. where did I buy that <nice thing> 5 years ago? want it again, can't find the order). Then business email are all archived with the exception of business spam of course. An executive co-worker of mine used his Deleted Items folder as his Archive. Problem solved.
- baxtr 10mo ago
  But what about the joy of deleting 112 messages from the trash folder every day?
shermantanktop 10mo ago
Because my attention should be directed at what I want to do, when I want to, not a nagging number that sits there being more than zero. And when I do pay attention to it, I don't want to spend 20 minutes going through the 180 emails that I've been cc'd on. It's literally not worth my time or dilution of my attention. When I have attempted to get on top of this by doing all the curation and rule-authoring that productivity mavens shout about, it works for a little while but entropy sets in. I'm just not into scripting my own life and maximizing my productivity, and my job does not pivot on prompt email responses. So my email is a garbage dump with tire fires in it, and I know that, and I get on with the things I know are actually important. I'm not recommending this! It's just the compromise that I have settled in to. But if you wonder "why would anyone," this is it.

deleted 10mo ago

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ofalkaed 10mo ago

Communication was mostly lost before the rise of social media—assuming we ever had anything more than isolated pockets of actual communication, which I am not convinced we have. Literature has been exploring this for a good many decades, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is a good example and even shows how our relation to it has changed in the 80 odd years since its release; these days when it comes up the interpretation/discussion about it is more often than not, about social causes, which is depressingly ironic, it is using the novel in the same way the characters of the novel use Singer.

Esophagus4 10mo ago

> But what was created as "ride-sharing" was in fact a way to 1) destroy competition and 2) make a shittier service while people producing the work were paid less and lost labour rights. It was never about the social! Framed this way, sure. But for the most part, I like Uber. The competition it "killed" was monopolistic and stagnant, and the "shitty service" was the legacy taxi industry that Uber forced to modernize. Yellow taxis got phone apps and credit card processing devices because Uber forced them to keep up. I remember trying to order a taxi to the airport 15 years ago in one of the most populated cities in the world. I had to look up taxi companies on Google, call their dispatch, and ask for a ride. 40 minutes and several calls later, none arrived, so I had to call a different company's dispatcher as I scrambled to catch my flight. Now, I've called countless taxis with the push of a button in several countries. I get an estimate of pricing and arrival times up front. For me, Uber/Lyft is an incredible service. I'll leave the labor rights discussion for a different thread. (inb4 a HN contrarian jumps down my throat about this.) But that was a long winded way of saying: to me, the author's analogy seriously weakens his point. I could argue that highly personalized entertainment is way better than 800 cable channels of bleh. We still have plenty of non-enshittified communication (I text and call and Whatsapp and Telegram my friends).

oblique 10mo ago

> We dreamed of decentralised social networks as "email 2.0." They truly are "television 2.0." > They are entertainment platforms that delegate media creation to the users themselves the same way Uber replaced taxis by having people drive others in their own car. Either this is written poorly or way off. Social networks are already television 2.0. Decentralized social networks circumvents having the algorithm controlled by some central authority. Media creation has already been delegated to users over a decade ago, think content creators. Personally I'm a fediverse evangelist. Having decentralized entertainment platforms makes corporate/state influence much more difficult. The methods of influence in modern centralized social networks are much more sinister than television ever was.

rileymat2 10mo ago
I don't think the article disagrees here? The issue is not control or decentralization, but consumption v. back and forth (communication).
hshdhdhj4444 10mo ago
You seem to be agreeing with the article?
Barrin92 10mo ago
>Having decentralized entertainment platforms How? I don't even think decentralized is the appropriate term. They're distributed entertainment platforms in that they're protocol based, but regarding the distribution of content there's nothing in it that decentralizes reach. The social graph of Twitter and Mastodon could in principle be identical. Malicious actors don't need to control algorithms. States running influence campaigns on say, Youtube or Facebook don't actually control any algorithm, they adapt their content to what does well on the platform. And they could equally do this, one could argue even more effectively, on the fediverse. Saying the Fediverse solves top down influence is like thinking that Bitcoin solves wealth inequality. The distribution of the network is completely agnostic to the centralization of the content.
- oblique 10mo ago

NedF 10mo ago

[dead]

buildsjets 10mo ago

Social media is yet another strange game where the only winning move is not to play.

littlecranky67 10mo ago
We must stop calling them social media and call them what they have become: media. The percentage of actually social stuff is negligible. Now you can classify having a conversation with a random stranger that you never going to meet in your life over twitter as "being social". I'd say you are just passing time or entertaining yourself. Or worse, compensating lack of real world social interactions.

terminalbraid 10mo ago

> They believe those platforms are "public spaces" while they truly are "private spaces trying to destroy all other public spaces in order to get a monopoly." There's nothing I can add to this.

ghickPit 10mo ago
You can: you can mention Slack and Discord. :( :( :( signed, another dinosaur (with a flawless "inbox 0" track record at both work and home, for decades now)
nicbou 10mo ago
LLMs are a new phase of this. This time, I think it will truly kill the open web and reroute all traffic to two or three websites.
- BiteCode_dev 10mo ago
  And kill many apps, maybe even OSes. When most of what a user can do can be done from one single UI, the low friction will win. And since all the data must be sent to the service, and that a super intelligent AI analysis all this data, the spying that is already considered outrageous today will reach unprecedented level. Now, associate that with the fact the last year people in charge of said systems kissed the ring of the power that be in the most disgusting way. Add what we learned about surveillance from 3 letters agency. You get your dystopia. It's not an if now. It's a when. We need to solve that problem now. Once we hit it, we will lose the ability to solve it. And I'm not sure where you could go on earth to escape it.
- joquarky 10mo ago
  I don't see how this will kill the web. If anything, it might make it easier to find more of the older nerdier web that wasn't made for profit. Also, there are so many people that are already so rabidly anti-AI that I'm certain they will form their own communities outside the mainstream.
webdoodle 10mo ago
Nor should you, digitally. Each ideation we have of how it can be further used to break our civil rights, is being used as a playbook to do exactly that. Warn your friends in person, but don't give the basilisk a free lunch.

mrkeen 10mo ago

This is so dramatic it's hard to recover the original complaint. Dansup has built a photo-sharing app on top of ActivityPub, and we humans are a lost cause because the app doesn't also do text-only messages? Is that the gist of it?

hshdhdhj4444 10mo ago
Not really. The gist of it is if Google decides to build GMail but Gmail silently deleted emails that it did not find entertaining enough so you didn’t even know they were ever sent to you. The article is saying some people see ActivityPub as a communication protocol like Gmail where you expect all messages to be delivered, while others see it as an entertainment protocol where the goal is to entertain the user.
- mrkeen 10mo ago
  What is the image sharing platform's criteria for "entertaining enough"? Is it whether or not the message is an image?
- stavros 10mo ago
  Yes but the author lumps all decentralized and/or social networks together when all he really means to talk about is ActivityPub specifically.
- amiga386 10mo ago
  It's more like Usenet users complaining that NZB downloaders don't let their users read text posts. Nobody using an NZB downloader gives a fuck about text posts. They're not there to chat with their fellow humans, they're there to download files. Both the text posts and binary files are transmitted by the same substrate, NNTP, but the protocol clearly has multiple groups of people using it for very different purposes. Comparing it to email is inappropriate, because email is addressed to you, and you get upset if email servers/clients drop emails. But newsfeeds are not addressed to you. Neither is RSS/Atom. ActivityPub, generally speaking, isn't either. How you choose to experience messages coming your way is up to you. This whole article is making the assumption that if you want something more different, e.g. Pixelfed, PeerTube, Lemmy (Fediverse Instagram/YouTube/Reddit), it basically must also be Mastodon/Pleroma (Fediverse Twitter). Why must it?

vanschelven 10mo ago

I wonder if the author is aware of Neil Postman's work, especially "Amusing ourselves to death". It seems very relevant to this article.

crims0n 10mo ago
My thoughts definitely drifted there. I read it last year and IMO it’s still as relevant as ever.

lysace 10mo ago

This only makes sense if you only read the headline.

beej71 10mo ago

Resonates for me. I consume a bunch of content daily, but it's RSS mostly. Gemini, too. None of it is Facebook et al. I am in groups with friends and family on Signal and on Discord, and in email. It feels more boring, for sure, but it is vastly more satisfyingly "human", if I can describe it that way. Yes, I'm over 50.

stevenhuang 10mo ago
What Gemini are you and the author referring to? I presume not the LLM Gemini by Google? Ah the Gemini protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)
- cons0le 10mo ago
  My head was preparing to spin if he had said he gets all of his news from google Gemini. It's a depressing thought, but I bet we will see younger people in our lifetime that just get news exclusively from LLMs
  - beej71 10mo ago
    I'm going to have to be more explicit with "Gemini (the protocol)". :) Fing Google... :)
- Kye 10mo ago
  The protocol is older than productized transformers. It's like that scene from Office Space. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjZKVKxZcAo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjZKVKxZcAo
xorvoid 10mo ago
Strong agree. I switched back to RSS after trying social media. Much more boring. And that has been a very good thing. It's also been much more substantive. It's like eating your veggies vs eating sugar candy. Why should we believe that "being entertained" is a valuable thing? I suppose it serves an evolutionary purpose as "steering focus", e.g. noticing the unusual/novel/scary/etc. But, it's not the end goal. And overloaded attention mechanisms sounds like an obvious misfeature.

NiloCK 10mo ago

Being born in 83, I experienced the shift from "serious local nightly news program" into the 24 hr cable news platforms as a loss of focused, serious journalism. Only much later did I read Understanding Media, Amusing Ourselves to Death, etc, and understand that the prior shift from print to the "serious local nightly new program" was itself a loss of focused, serious journalism. For today's youth, Tik Tok is "the air we breath" - the de-facto standard against which the future will be judged. It's horrifying to imagine what will be worse.

startupsfail 10mo ago
I'm curious, is there some meaningful way for geriatric millennials to use Tik Tok? Without being sucked in into doomscrolling and content consumption? Produce content? I'd guess it should be possible to play with the thing somehow...
- wussboy 10mo ago
  Why? Just leave it be, and your life will be just as rich if not richer.
  - aGHz 10mo ago
    I think one good reason is connecting with the youth. My kids are too young for Tik Tok but old enough to come home with 6-7 (btw, best antidote to that is the 7-8-9 joke ;) ) and "chicken banana", and I'm told this comes from Tik Tok. I grew up in a house where every BSOD was caused by the fact that we installed video games, and I'd rather not be that kind of parent to my own kids. I'm also like GP though, I'd rather not go full scrollhead, so it's a bit of a dilemma.
    - peruvian 10mo ago
      You can search TikTok memes on YouTube. People upload them. You using TikTok earnestly would result in a feed vastly different from your kids anyway.
    - 10mo ago

jlengrand 10mo ago

Ploum is one of the people getting me into blogging 12 or so years ago. I'm so glad to see it popup again here, it's like a big piece of nostalgia. And the piece is current. Thanks Ploum!

1121redblackgo 10mo ago

This article makes me think of how defiant Discord has been against all of this, and how slowly I'm starting to succumb to many of the same forces, although much slowly than other platforms. It's a minor miracle they never got bought up/sold themselves. Also reminds me of the Dark Forrest Yancy Strickler stuff.

jim201 10mo ago

The book Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman seems really relevant here. The thesis is that different modes of information are best suited to different tasks. Postman argues that television is best suited for entertainment. So the programs that do well on TV will naturally tend to be entertainment. That book was written in 1985, but the core observations are also applicable to modern cellphones (which have become, for the majority of users, entertainment devices). Postman then talks about how our communication systems have degraded as a result of entertainment being the strength of our current modes. Fantastic read.

hollow-moe 10mo ago

Soooo, when my email client is text-only and doesn't show me the attachments from the multi-part, it's "actively destroying the Fediverse" ? Ploum doesn't make any sense here. A "platform" such as Mastodon, Pixelfed, Peertube etc. (Do not mistake with "client", there's multiple Peertube "clients" or "frontends" for instance) using ActivityPub shouldn't have to implement and provide the user with the whole spec, otherwise just make the "ActivityPub" platform, implement everything there why even bother making other platforms?

tecoholic 10mo ago
The email client might not show attachments, but will still let you know there is a message. Pixelfed is not letting the user know there is even a message. Also you seem to be responding to the original post or just the first paragraph of this post. He understands the differences and the way he sees the differences is the whole post.

deleted 10mo ago

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ofalkaed 10mo ago

Reading through this thread, I can't help but think that Stanley Elkin got everything right when he wrote George Mills. The blurbs and reviews of George Mills often reduce it to being about the failures of the 99%, but I think it is more about why the 1% succeeds and the answer is fairly simple, because the 99% wants the 1% to succeed, it absolves them of all culpability. This is modern (contemporary) life, absolution. George Mills seems to only increase in relevance as far as I can see, but it only recedes in relevance in the eyes of the public because it offers no scapegoats. This time it is different, right? The first George Mills was correct in believing that, but we don't live in his times.

kaonwarb 10mo ago

The author’s ideological bent against Big Tech shows through most clearly in the passage on Uber: > Uber replaced taxis by having people drive others in their own car. But what was created as "ride-sharing" was in fact a way to 1) destroy competition and 2) make a shittier service while people producing the work were paid less and lost labour rights There are valid complaints about Uber, but most people consider it a materially better service than taxis most of the time. They vote that way with their wallets, long after VC subsidies ended, and often even when it costs _more_ than a taxi.

_cenw 10mo ago

I don't get the hangup on having multiple accounts. The point of AP is that you can read any kind post, not create any kind of post. There is a truth to consumption over communication, but that is in the destruction of third spaces and the increasing difficulty in making friends. The fediverse is a force against that in my view, even if it has some of the creature comforts of regular social media.

BrenBarn 10mo ago

I found this a bit odd as I don't recall ever thinking of social media as about "sending messages", and only loosely would I say they're for "communication". They're mostly for one-way communication, which is essentially what entertainment is too, so it's not surprising that social media would feel like entertainment. When you make a post on Facebook you're not really "sending a message" to anyone in particular, you're just broadcasting it out to the network. But this got me thinking about what I think a "message" really is. Maybe there's a Dunbar's number kind of thing here because I feel like there's some sort of limit on how many people I can send textual content to before it stops being a "message" and becomes more like an "announcement". Like I get emails, and some of those are messages because they come from individuals and are sent to me and perhaps a small set of other individuals. But some emails are more like announcements (or even "content"), and such quasi-messages have existed since before email went mainsteam (like holiday newsletters that people sent out with xmas cards). It's true that many social media platforms have a messaging system that exists in parallel ("direct messages"), but that always seemed kind of separate from the core essence of the platform. The closest you get to real "messages" in social networks is comments, but in my experience the degree to which those constitute "messages" or "communication" varies a lot from platform to platform and also from user to user. These days a large proportion of comments are just slightly more specific "reactions" like "That's so great!" or "Wow" or "Thanks for posting this". I don't often see genuine discussion happening in comments (although HN, if you consider it a social media site, is an exception to this). There has been an evolution in this regard, but even back in the day I think it wasn't what I'd call "messaging". The earliest platform I can remember using that (in retrospect) I could call a social network was LiveJournal. But LJ was a blogging platform. You didn't post "messages" to other people, you posted, well, posts, and maybe people would comment on them or maybe they wouldn't. I would never have said that I dreamed of LJ becoming "email 2.0". And I'd say modern microblogging-type platforms (like Twitter) seem even more removed from email or "messaging". I also don't see decentralization as really connected to this. To me the main advantage of decentralization is to eliminate single points of failure and guard against various sorts of rugpulls (like what eventually happened to LJ). But whether a platform fosters communication, messages, interaction, or whatever you want to call it, is pretty much independent of whether it's decentralized. This isn't to say that I disagree that something's been lost in internet communication over the years. But to me that missing thing seems mostly to be a combination of attention and authenticity. We've lost attention in the sense that now that people do everything with their phones, they consume and create content more diffusely, as opposed to having a division between "I'm sitting at my computer reading or writing" and "I'm doing something else". The small screens and balky input mechanisms of phones make this problem even worse for writing than it is for reading. And we've lost authenticity in the sense that so many platforms have become contaminated with stuff that is in no sense communication from any human, not even one-way communication. Instead it's junk generated by corporations to sell products (perhaps with some intermediate steps of harvesting data, etc.). This has become much, much worse in the last few years with the rise of AI slop. It's harder and harder to find stuff on the web that actually represents the work of a human being expressing themselves in a personal way. So yeah, we've lost something, but I wouldn't say we lost communication to entertainment. It's more like we lost the boundaries of the units of our communication so that we find ourselves in a constant blur of content, rather than a sequence of discrete units each of which we process and ponder independently.

nephihaha 10mo ago

"All our communication channels are morphed into content distribution networks. We are more and more entertained but less and less connected." This isn't true. You can still meet in person or make a phone call. As for news media... They tend to be at the beck and call of whoever owns them. Most of them use the same press agencies but promote political binaries to the exclusion of other viewpoints.

markus_zhang 10mo ago

IMHO communication is entertainment sometimes. Most of the “communication” we do day to day, like small talks to colleagues, or tweeting some posts, in my opinion, is just a way to relax and have fun, like patting each other electronically.

cons0le 10mo ago
Sure, but there's nothing worse than when you want to have a serious conversation with someone, and all they can make are jokes. There are a lot of serious conversations we need to have as a society right now. And collectively, all we can do is make jokes.
- markus_zhang 10mo ago
  Social media is probably not the best place to make such communications anyway. It is good for propaganda but not good for serious discussion. Serious, scientific discussion asks for a lot more than just communication itself.
- oersted 10mo ago
  Throughout history, real social conversations and movements have happened around thought leaders that dedicate their lives to painstakingly understanding and expressing a certain point of view on a set of issues. Be it in written form or through oratory, it then acts as an anchor to frame and facilitate conversations between people one-on-one. Real progress requires that hard work of crafting and spreading a vision, something to point at that helps people express what they struggle to express themselves. It also then needs that protected intimacy of long conversations between individuals to digest it. The architecture of social media centered around short-form public communication is not appropriate for this. This of course applies to both constructive and destructive movements, but it’s the only way to get big real things done. I suppose that’s why we have this emergent class of powerful independent (podcast) intellectuals after a long time of the concept not being a thing. Again, for better or worse, plenty of both.
  - cons0le 10mo ago

athrowaway3z 10mo ago

> Big Monopolies have managed to convince people that they need one account on each platform. That brainwash/marketing is so deeply entrenched that most people cannot see an alternative anymore. I get what is being said, but i disagree with the framing. The "brainwashing" happened in two stages, and the first stage is perfectly logical. Most people don't want just 1 identity, and they want separate spaces for being different. If you're already OK with having two accounts on BBS, what is 1 or 2 accounts more for thefacebook.com?

gus_massa 10mo ago
Facebook sometimes decides to block your account when the name is not 100% identical to your official ID. Google when you make a chargeback or your youtube channel has the song of a bird The other platform also have similar weird cases. I don't want to be instabanned from ALL the internet just because one site decides I did something wrong for real or imaginary reasons.
BrtByte 10mo ago
Where the framing still resonates for me is in who controls the boundaries

cbsmith 10mo ago

> Communication networks are not profitable. Lost me on that one. Communication networks provide significant value and can be quite profitable. That's a whole industry.

peteforde 10mo ago

The author makes some solid points, and I don't love Uber the company, but I can't accept the notion that ridesharing is a shittier experience than taking taxis. Only someone who willfully forgets how terrible taxis are could say that.

iancmceachern 10mo ago
I have the exact opposite opinion. Taxis were great, for both the consumer and Taxi driver.
- peteforde 10mo ago
  I'm floored! My experience pre-Uber was that cabs were never there when you need them, the cars were smelly and in bad shape, the rides were expensive, seatbelts were usually broken, and drivers were not particularly motivated to be civil, never mind kind. I personally don't drink bottled water on principle, but in theory it's nice to know it's there if I'm suffering. Are your local cabs just amazing? I'm open to it, but again... floored. This very well could be a regional difference. Edit: I cannot believe that I forgot to mention that the entire taxi medallion system found in most cities was not only deeply corrupt and usually intimately connected with organized crime... but the ownership structure was such that they enabled some of the worst legal wage slavery rackets in the western world. You've had these deeply shady owners with dozens of medallions and fleets of easily replaced, mostly immigrant drivers who all seemed to be prepared to drive for decades before someday hopefully being able to buy their own car and then drive it until they die. I dunno, man. Convince me I'm mistaken.
  - iancmceachern 10mo ago
    From what I've read Uber drivers aren't any better off. It's still a race to nowhere. All the negatives you described about the old structure still exist, it's just Uber skimming of the top now.
    - peteforde 10mo ago

ChrisMarshallNY 10mo ago

> They believe those platforms are "public spaces" while they truly are "private spaces trying to destroy all other public spaces in order to get a monopoly." This has been my biggest beef with Facebook. I have an FB account, but never use it, anymore. By walking away from it, there are a number of folks with whom I can no longer communicate. In some cases, that’s fine, but in a couple, I sincerely miss them. I like the idea behind the fediverse, but find it too “fiddly” to use. That’s often an issue with things designed by engineers, for engineers. There’s long been discussion of “One ID to Rule Them All,” but that brings in the inevitable (and completely valid) point of who arbitrates/controls the infrastructure for that ID (“and in the Darkness, Binds Them”). The thing is, folks really want convenience. If it’s not provided as a benevolent resource, an opening is made available to less benevolent people. It’s going to happen, and all the hand-wringing in the world can’t stop human nature. I feel that public discourse is particularly vulnerable to the medium. Who controls the medium, controls the discourse, and, as we’ve already seen, that can have serious consequences in the real world. Not a new conundrum. Social Media has simply sprinkled Miracle Gro onto the problem. I’m not sure there’s any real solution. I am thinking that today’s newer generation (“Alpha”?) is developing a “thick skin,” and maybe, is becoming resistant to people that manipulate communication. I’m fairly despondent about my generation. We seem to have fallen hook, line, and sinker for the shysters.

cons0le 10mo ago
I had such high hopes for blue sky. The team seems highly un-problematic. Every time I go on there it's just happy stories and people communicating. But still almost nobody uses it. And now worst of all, people are saying it doesn't "count" as real federation. It seems like we're letting perfect be the enemy of good. But what do I know
- oytis 10mo ago
  Facebook started as people communicating too. I just don't understand why do you need to create a new incompatible protocol when ActivityPub exists - unless enshittification is in the roadmap. Even less I understand why prefer it over e.g. Mastodon from the user's perspective

BrtByte 10mo ago

What resonated for me is the framing shift: not "centralized vs decentralized," but communication vs consumption

pitched 10mo ago

Social Media fills the same role that Alcohol used to. As far as debilitating addictions go, it does seem to be a small improvement though. Driving afterwards isn’t a problem, for example.

BrtByte 10mo ago
That comparison feels uncomfortably accurate
christophilus 10mo ago
> Driving afterwards isn’t a problem, for example. Many people drive-during which appears to have a similarly dangerous outcome.

fullshark 10mo ago

Economics. Entertainment and monetizing eyeballs is much more lucrative than charging for communication services.

hypertexthero 10mo ago

It took me a long time to notice that the word in the title is “massage”, and not “message”, in Marshall McLuhan’s and Quentin Fiore’s The Medium is the Massage (An inventory of effects): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Medium_Is_the_Massage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Medium_Is_the_Massage Links to various editions: https://www.biblio.com/the-medium-is-the-massage-by-marshall-fiore-quentin-mcluhan/work/58810 https://www.biblio.com/the-medium-is-the-massage-by-marshall... Also of interest, notes about the observer being the observed in Jiddu Krishnamurti’s Think on These Things — https://www.biblio.com/9780060916091 https://www.biblio.com/9780060916091 — and The First and Last Freedom: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_First_and_Last_Freedom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_First_and_Last_Freedom

teleforce 10mo ago

>Big Monopolies have managed to convince people that they need one account on each platform. This was done, on purpose, for purely unethical reasons in order to keep users captive. >That brainwash/marketing is so deeply entrenched that most people cannot see an alternative anymore. It looks like a natural law: you need an account on a platform to communicate with someone on that platform. Easily the best post on HN so far this year 2025, thanks. Very messy situations that we're at the moment for our communications platform but sadly it's true.

blfr 10mo ago

Sure but wasn't this always the case? People told stories. joked, bantered, preached, and flirted both to communicate on different levels and to entertain themselves and each other. And so my Signal is solid 40% memes. Memes that someone carefully selected and sent me but still pure entertainment. No evil monopoly necessary to make it so.

convolvatron 10mo ago

I know it seems reductive, but in the early 90s there was a serious discussion about NAT. NAT bifurcates the internet into producers and consumers. naturally everyone looking to monetize the internet thought this was just fine, even desirable. and almost all the people who actually built the internet were aghast. ubiquitous reachability was the goal, not making a new form a television. the details wrt social media etc were unknown, but the path we were taking was quite clear.

Mikhail_Edoshin 10mo ago

William James wrote that one of characteristics of a religious state of mind is its seriousness. I'll quote: For common men “religion,” whatever more special meanings it may have, signifies always a serious state of mind. If any one phrase could gather its universal message, that phrase would be, “All is not vanity in this Universe, whatever the appearances may suggest.” I myself can compare this with the cultural state of Soviet Union. It was a very atheistic country on the surface; yet the art, the cultural scene, the newspapers, the cinema; the school education; the public forums (they existed in the form of letters to newspapers); everything was imbued with that idea that there are serious things, not everything is vanity. It wasn't dull or dark; it was very reviving, in fact, because it gave you the foundation, something firm to stand upon. There were fantastically funny comedies (I wish I could find modern comedies like that) but there was also seriousness. I still remember some journal pieces of that time that, I admit, formed me as a person. An essay about a relatively minor crime, for example: two women were bitten by guard dogs. Yet somehow it rose to your place in life; your approach to what life is; you and your responsibility for how you live. And these themes were everywhere. Until 1991.

joquarky 10mo ago
Alan Watts says something similar about how religions often harden into institutions that demand loyalty and "purity". When that happens, they slide into in-group/out-group thinking, defensiveness, and "spiritual one-upmanship" which makes everything more tense and brittle.

AuthAuth 10mo ago

No we didnt lose communication to entertainment. You still have communication protocols like email and xmpp. Fediverse is a communication protocol and some of that communication is entertainment. We need to seperate social media and fediverse because the philosophy is completely different. Fediverse has you make an account and you get posts from users you follow. The reason you need multiple accounts is because the sites are not complete enough to handle all of the different styles of posts. There is still a social and communication aspect to it. Big tech social media is pushing you a stream of entertainment and pushing away from social interactions.