Social media imploding
Nov. 10th, 2022 04:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livI've spent most of 20 years being excited about the new soc med thing and ending up disappointed. For all its faults I'm staying here on DW until the lights actually go out, and actually I don't think there's much risk of that, DW is nothing if not stable.
Historically: I will fully admit I was excited about FB in the early days because it was really good at facilitating weak ties. Like, it's actually nice to have some degree of automation in remembering to wish your distant relatives happy birthday, to get the news when someone from a past phase of your life has a baby or gets an exciting new job. It felt like a cross between an online version of a local newspaper, and an automatic, self-updating address book. But its secret sauce was giving people the illusion of being semi-private. Partly due to its origins as a series of college-focused networks, and partly because of some clever advertising and extremely dark UI which capitalized on that to make people think they were talking to acquaintances and people like them, when actually they were talking to advertisers and the whole world. Obviously a self-updating address book is impossible, because exposing personal information on the internet is dangerous.
Facebook very quickly descended into a cesspit, as we all know. But it's a very sticky cesspit because those weak ties are still there. If I left FB I would lose touch with people I care about who aren't geeky, who are never ever going to follow me to an ethically sound open source site. And some people do manage to have decent conversations there, despite how extremely awful it is as an online environment. And because roughly everybody is there, it becomes the default for both individuals and organizations to let people know about events.
So FB is here to stay, I hate that I have to go to such a horrible place to socialize with the people I care about, but boycotting it would just be pointless moral posturing and cost me more than it would cost the evil machine that is Meta. Just about everybody I know who "boycotts" FB, for entirely valid reasons, in fact outsources their FB presence to someone else. Specifically lots of men are very ideologically pure about it, but rely on their wives or girlfriends or non-male partners to distill the actually relevant information from the sewage.
I was optimistic about Google Plus, thinking that if anyone could make a FB killer it was Google. But they really screwed up with their "real names" policy and failed to hit that sweet spot of making people think they were in a cosy space with friends of friends while actually bringing eyeballs to advertisers. Clearly Meta is no more committed to privacy than Google, but they're ruthless enough to lie about it, whereas Google openly trumpet their policy of, who needs privacy when you could have convenience?
I never got into Tumblr. But before the Yahoo! buyout it had a certain something, mostly in the form of being too small an attack surface for either trolls or adtech to bother with. It's sort of hard to believe that there was a site with essentially no policing of either sexually explicit material, or massive copyright violations even of big, litigious media outfits all the way up to Disney. Also Tumblr introduced two expectations which have really changed the way the internet works: the idea that image posting should be frictionless, and the concept of reblogging. These innovations have their downsides, of course, particularly the context breaking, but nowadays most people won't put up with a site that doesn't have them.
There were a couple of less-evil alternatives to mainstream social media that I really wanted to like but were never viable. Disapora, which was open source and all that good stuff, but it was mostly one guy who explicitly only cared about the technical side and thought of UI/UX as pointless frivolity. I think the founder died, but even if that tragedy hadn't occurred you can't actually put your social media eggs in one guy's highly principled hobby site. Imzy I was fairly sure would never fly, as they were well-meaning but clueless. I haven't jumped to Pillowfort yet, it's lasted longer than I expected as I originally filed it in the same category, basically sympathetic people but without the social or technical experience to actually run a viable site. Is anyone still there and would you say it's worth having a presence there?
I think Cohost is going to fall into a similar trap. I want to love it, it has the potential to be the LJ of the 2020s. Subscription model with decent features for free accounts, which is absolutely my preferred business model. Venture capital and ads are inherently evil, there's no way you're ever going to get an ethical or pleasant site with those funding models. Subscription only doesn't work because you don't get enough network density. Their community guidelines contain all the principles I want to see. Obviously it's only going to work if enforced, but there's a remote possibility they might get away with setting a congenial culture before highly motivated griefers get in. And it works in a similar way to LJ/DW, person focused pages with the ability to easily connect into short- and medium-range networks. But running on modern technology rather than clunky stuff from the early 2000s, and at least for now it's actively being developed. There's a balance between a site that's slightly flaky but improving, and somewhere like DW which will never change things around under you, but will also never ever have any new features or solve any of the niggles or have any developers ever do anything other than swoop in to handle emergencies.
Their actual T&C are badly drafted.![[staff profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user_staff.png)
denise (![[twitter.com profile]](https://p2.dreamwidth.org/e0caa790ec10/-/twitter.com/favicon.ico)
rahaeli) thinks this is fatal, and she's usually right about social media start-ups, but I find courtneymilan's counter-argument compelling. Basically the T&C are sloppy, not evil, and either the site will succeed and they'll get a better lawyer to go through their text so that there's no interpretation where it bans linking to another user's post or any such nonsense. Or the site will flop for other reasons than launching with crappy T&Cs.
The problem I have with Cohost is that I don't understand their privacy model. They seem to sort of want people to tie accounts to offline identity, but they're (correctly, IMO) not trying to enforce this by banning pseuds, or any such nonsense about "real" names. You can have private pages, but it's really hard to work out what sort of protection you get from that, I think they're just private from spiders and search engines, and the actual status is visible to any logged in account, which is really no use. But it might not be that, and there might be better fine-grained options coming soon. They also seem to want one account per human, but possibly may offer different identities under the same account? Not sure how separate their "pages" are; if I can't create separate casual friends accounts from professional, world-facing accounts, that might be a deal-breaker for me.
Then we come to Twitter v Mastodon. I initial thought the Musk buyout wouldn't matter, because Musk is very politically similar tojack, they are both out-of-touch billionaires who will happily watch the planet burn if it makes them a quick buck, and both hang out with some unsavoury far-right types. The only difference, I thought, was that Jack is a recluse but Elon is a massive attention seeker. But in fact it does seem like Musk has done more than make a public fool of himself, he's fired huge swathes of Twitter staff and already gone a significant way to actually breaking the site.
The problem is that Mastodon is not actually a Twitter alternative. It has a superficially similar look-and-feel, but it's not Twitter, and people who want it to be an ethical, open-source version of Twitter are already crashing out in disappointment. My best analogy for Mastodon is that it's basically slow IRC. It's federated, which in many ways is great. But if what you want is two-way if limitedly parasocial interactions with the whole world, you can't get that from a federated system. Personally, I find Mastodon a good alternative to early-days Twitter, when it was a way to send group texts to people you actually know. But we don't really need that functionality because nowadays you can send group texts more conveniently in just about any phone-first app, across the whole range from big-and-evil like WhatsApp to obscure and geeky like Signal. But it's not a good alternative to 2022 Twitter, because there's no sensible way to curate a list of interesting voices, it's not a way that people are going to advertise their own long-form writing or share articles from others. It's not a way to learn about the world.
Also, federated is a problem as well as an advantage, and I don't think this is fixable, I think this is fundamental to a federated system. Either you have the time and competence to run your own server, which 99% of people just don't, or you rely on a friend to be your personal sysadmin. Or you rely on some volunteer who seems like a basically nice person but is almost always doing way more than any one person can sustainably manage, and even if they are in fact as nice as they seem they're just not going to be able to protect you against actual malice (whether that's personal or organized trolling / griefing). OG IRC had/has exactly the same problem. For that matter, email and traditional blogs have exactly the same problem; in theory you can run your own server, but in practice you're pretty much stuck with Google selling you to advertisers, because nobody else has the resources to be scalable, or to deal with spam or protect you from other harms.
So where I'm circling back to is that what's missing from my internet life is a thing I resisted for a long time: not social media, but social bookmarking. I have resolved a few times now to do more about posting links to interesting stuff I've come across here. But I'm increasingly convinced it's vital. It's a good way to keep the site lively, without having to cross the intimidation barrier of, do I have something sufficiently interesting to say / do I have the time to write it? And links posted by my circle (previously on Twitter but I don't hold out much hope for that, but to some extent here too) are so much more valuable than what I can find by just browsing.
Recognizing that our platforms don't last, because we're in the hands of either evil businesses or overstretched volunteers, lots of people are collecting together lists of 'where to find me if my current site dies'. I'm not quite able to do that because I haven't set up exactly the right relationship between wallet-name internet presence and pseudonymous places like here. But my main places I'm happy to link to are:
individeweal on Twitter (though it's rapidly becoming unusable)
Not really present on any photo or video-based sites, nor on review sites like Goodreads etc.
My Spotify is tied to my FB and therefore my wallet name. The other places I can be found are under my wallet name and / or mobile number: LINE for preference, Viber, Signal, WhatsApp all basically fine. DM me if you'd like to connect via those systems.
I think I probably also want to be on Discord, more as a substitute for IM than true social media, but I'm struggling a bit with the relationship between accounts, channels and identities. Does anyone have a recommendation for a Discord server where I might be welcome?
Historically: I will fully admit I was excited about FB in the early days because it was really good at facilitating weak ties. Like, it's actually nice to have some degree of automation in remembering to wish your distant relatives happy birthday, to get the news when someone from a past phase of your life has a baby or gets an exciting new job. It felt like a cross between an online version of a local newspaper, and an automatic, self-updating address book. But its secret sauce was giving people the illusion of being semi-private. Partly due to its origins as a series of college-focused networks, and partly because of some clever advertising and extremely dark UI which capitalized on that to make people think they were talking to acquaintances and people like them, when actually they were talking to advertisers and the whole world. Obviously a self-updating address book is impossible, because exposing personal information on the internet is dangerous.
Facebook very quickly descended into a cesspit, as we all know. But it's a very sticky cesspit because those weak ties are still there. If I left FB I would lose touch with people I care about who aren't geeky, who are never ever going to follow me to an ethically sound open source site. And some people do manage to have decent conversations there, despite how extremely awful it is as an online environment. And because roughly everybody is there, it becomes the default for both individuals and organizations to let people know about events.
So FB is here to stay, I hate that I have to go to such a horrible place to socialize with the people I care about, but boycotting it would just be pointless moral posturing and cost me more than it would cost the evil machine that is Meta. Just about everybody I know who "boycotts" FB, for entirely valid reasons, in fact outsources their FB presence to someone else. Specifically lots of men are very ideologically pure about it, but rely on their wives or girlfriends or non-male partners to distill the actually relevant information from the sewage.
I was optimistic about Google Plus, thinking that if anyone could make a FB killer it was Google. But they really screwed up with their "real names" policy and failed to hit that sweet spot of making people think they were in a cosy space with friends of friends while actually bringing eyeballs to advertisers. Clearly Meta is no more committed to privacy than Google, but they're ruthless enough to lie about it, whereas Google openly trumpet their policy of, who needs privacy when you could have convenience?
I never got into Tumblr. But before the Yahoo! buyout it had a certain something, mostly in the form of being too small an attack surface for either trolls or adtech to bother with. It's sort of hard to believe that there was a site with essentially no policing of either sexually explicit material, or massive copyright violations even of big, litigious media outfits all the way up to Disney. Also Tumblr introduced two expectations which have really changed the way the internet works: the idea that image posting should be frictionless, and the concept of reblogging. These innovations have their downsides, of course, particularly the context breaking, but nowadays most people won't put up with a site that doesn't have them.
There were a couple of less-evil alternatives to mainstream social media that I really wanted to like but were never viable. Disapora, which was open source and all that good stuff, but it was mostly one guy who explicitly only cared about the technical side and thought of UI/UX as pointless frivolity. I think the founder died, but even if that tragedy hadn't occurred you can't actually put your social media eggs in one guy's highly principled hobby site. Imzy I was fairly sure would never fly, as they were well-meaning but clueless. I haven't jumped to Pillowfort yet, it's lasted longer than I expected as I originally filed it in the same category, basically sympathetic people but without the social or technical experience to actually run a viable site. Is anyone still there and would you say it's worth having a presence there?
I think Cohost is going to fall into a similar trap. I want to love it, it has the potential to be the LJ of the 2020s. Subscription model with decent features for free accounts, which is absolutely my preferred business model. Venture capital and ads are inherently evil, there's no way you're ever going to get an ethical or pleasant site with those funding models. Subscription only doesn't work because you don't get enough network density. Their community guidelines contain all the principles I want to see. Obviously it's only going to work if enforced, but there's a remote possibility they might get away with setting a congenial culture before highly motivated griefers get in. And it works in a similar way to LJ/DW, person focused pages with the ability to easily connect into short- and medium-range networks. But running on modern technology rather than clunky stuff from the early 2000s, and at least for now it's actively being developed. There's a balance between a site that's slightly flaky but improving, and somewhere like DW which will never change things around under you, but will also never ever have any new features or solve any of the niggles or have any developers ever do anything other than swoop in to handle emergencies.
Their actual T&C are badly drafted.
denise (The problem I have with Cohost is that I don't understand their privacy model. They seem to sort of want people to tie accounts to offline identity, but they're (correctly, IMO) not trying to enforce this by banning pseuds, or any such nonsense about "real" names. You can have private pages, but it's really hard to work out what sort of protection you get from that, I think they're just private from spiders and search engines, and the actual status is visible to any logged in account, which is really no use. But it might not be that, and there might be better fine-grained options coming soon. They also seem to want one account per human, but possibly may offer different identities under the same account? Not sure how separate their "pages" are; if I can't create separate casual friends accounts from professional, world-facing accounts, that might be a deal-breaker for me.
Then we come to Twitter v Mastodon. I initial thought the Musk buyout wouldn't matter, because Musk is very politically similar to
The problem is that Mastodon is not actually a Twitter alternative. It has a superficially similar look-and-feel, but it's not Twitter, and people who want it to be an ethical, open-source version of Twitter are already crashing out in disappointment. My best analogy for Mastodon is that it's basically slow IRC. It's federated, which in many ways is great. But if what you want is two-way if limitedly parasocial interactions with the whole world, you can't get that from a federated system. Personally, I find Mastodon a good alternative to early-days Twitter, when it was a way to send group texts to people you actually know. But we don't really need that functionality because nowadays you can send group texts more conveniently in just about any phone-first app, across the whole range from big-and-evil like WhatsApp to obscure and geeky like Signal. But it's not a good alternative to 2022 Twitter, because there's no sensible way to curate a list of interesting voices, it's not a way that people are going to advertise their own long-form writing or share articles from others. It's not a way to learn about the world.
Also, federated is a problem as well as an advantage, and I don't think this is fixable, I think this is fundamental to a federated system. Either you have the time and competence to run your own server, which 99% of people just don't, or you rely on a friend to be your personal sysadmin. Or you rely on some volunteer who seems like a basically nice person but is almost always doing way more than any one person can sustainably manage, and even if they are in fact as nice as they seem they're just not going to be able to protect you against actual malice (whether that's personal or organized trolling / griefing). OG IRC had/has exactly the same problem. For that matter, email and traditional blogs have exactly the same problem; in theory you can run your own server, but in practice you're pretty much stuck with Google selling you to advertisers, because nobody else has the resources to be scalable, or to deal with spam or protect you from other harms.
So where I'm circling back to is that what's missing from my internet life is a thing I resisted for a long time: not social media, but social bookmarking. I have resolved a few times now to do more about posting links to interesting stuff I've come across here. But I'm increasingly convinced it's vital. It's a good way to keep the site lively, without having to cross the intimidation barrier of, do I have something sufficiently interesting to say / do I have the time to write it? And links posted by my circle (previously on Twitter but I don't hold out much hope for that, but to some extent here too) are so much more valuable than what I can find by just browsing.
Recognizing that our platforms don't last, because we're in the hands of either evil businesses or overstretched volunteers, lots of people are collecting together lists of 'where to find me if my current site dies'. I'm not quite able to do that because I haven't set up exactly the right relationship between wallet-name internet presence and pseudonymous places like here. But my main places I'm happy to link to are:
individeweal@octodon.social on Mastodonewerb on various gaming sites, notably Steam. Not really present on any photo or video-based sites, nor on review sites like Goodreads etc.
My Spotify is tied to my FB and therefore my wallet name. The other places I can be found are under my wallet name and / or mobile number: LINE for preference, Viber, Signal, WhatsApp all basically fine. DM me if you'd like to connect via those systems.
I think I probably also want to be on Discord, more as a substitute for IM than true social media, but I'm struggling a bit with the relationship between accounts, channels and identities. Does anyone have a recommendation for a Discord server where I might be welcome?
