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?
(no subject)
Date: 2022-11-10 04:25 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2022-11-10 04:34 pm (UTC)I'm on two discord servers: one of which is for local pokemon players, and the other is essentially friends-of-the-admin - and I don't really keep up with either to be fair, but neither would I really recommend either to other people (unless they play pokemon, or are friends of this particular admin).
Mike does a bit of discord and a bit of Reddit, but doesn't do any of the big social media things, and you're right that does lead a bit to me doing some of the social admin for him! I keep up with the more obscure bits of his family more than he does, but then I'm more fond of the weak-ties as you put it, with distant cousins and old school friends and people I once knew via Livejournal or oxgoths or irc or whatever. For all its faults I too am unlikely to leave Facebook!
(no subject)
Date: 2022-11-10 04:34 pm (UTC)Like you, I'm going to stay on DW as long as it's up and running (and not just because I have a seed account).
(no subject)
Date: 2022-11-10 04:36 pm (UTC)Unfortunately the writing was pretty much on the wall for Twitter once Musk went through with the deal; he's now deeply in debt for it, so deep that Twitter can basically never earn it back. Best case scenario at this point, as far as I can tell, is he drives it all so far into the ground the bank calls in the debt and it gets sold off for cheap to somebody competent before it's completely gone. Even the most competent exec couldn't make enough from it to service that debt, and Must doesn't have the assets to just eat the debt and keep going (most of his "wealth" is illusionary stuff he can't actually spend, because the assets' value depends on him holding them.)
Anyway, I agree with you on most of this! I'm rooting for cohost but I am going to wait until they weather the current publicity surge to bother to get an account.
I can get you an invite for the Cranky Old Fans discord if you'd like to try hanging out on a small-ish discord for fans of our basic generation and trajectory (Although if we keep sending twitter refugees in, who knows if it'll stay that way...)
(no subject)
Date: 2022-11-10 04:38 pm (UTC)(The Discord available to Anne Helen Petersen's Substack newsletter subscribers is a firehose of stuff, but generally really interesting range of links/chat/etc. and mostly things are divided by topic so finding the stuff you're interested in and muting other stuff is fairly easy.)
I'm working out how I want to use Mastodon (mostly with the authorial hat on: I have not been using the general Twitter much anyway.) I have a Cohost account, but I agree with
(no subject)
Date: 2022-11-10 05:16 pm (UTC)... *boggle* ... *gibber* ... *baffle* ... oh, wait, with that icon before the username.
That confused me completely before the rest of my brain caught up!
Just about everybody I know who "boycotts" FB, for entirely valid reasons, in fact outsources their FB presence to someone else.
Interesting – I hadn't encountered that phenomenon at all.
I want to say I'm a counterexample, because I get essentially no information even indirectly via FB. But perhaps I don't quite qualify for the first half of the sentence, since I was never "boycotting" it in the sense of willingly sacrificing the benefits for the sake of my morals. It's more that it never seemed like a thing I particularly wanted to join in the first place, and then when it turned out to be evil I just added that to my existing list of reasons not to bother, and counted myself lucky.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-11-10 05:21 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2022-11-10 05:41 pm (UTC)I'm not sure if my facebook/twitter absence counts as boycotting (I don't have accounts because I'm much happier without the opportunity to doomscroll, but there's no moral component to the decision), but I don't do that. Ramesh does occasionally (perhaps 3-4 times/year) forward on updates with major news but if he didn't I would be fine with finding out directly from close friends, and not finding out at all, or doing so much later from acquaintances.
I think there may be an introvert/extrovert difference between us in terms of social media needs though, in that I much prefer 1:1 interactions anyway, so it suits me just fine for virtually all of my online "socialising" to be done by email. And although at first I was worried about not being aware of meatspace events unless someone goes out of their way to invite me personally, that's actually been brilliant, because I no longer find myself going to parties out of a sense of obligation.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-11-10 05:47 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2022-11-10 06:34 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2022-11-10 08:03 pm (UTC)I'm not not using it because of moral principles. I'm not using it because it sucks. Its policies suck, its userbase sucks, its UI sucks, and above all its functionality sucks.
I'm allergic to bad software. I have to be careful about this sort of thing. If I have too much contact with FB, I could go into anaphylactic shock and die.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-11-10 08:13 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2022-11-10 08:18 pm (UTC)I have a Discord-ette which is a space for my friends to chat to each other, but I'm not sure it would quite work to bring all my DW friends over there, it's a narrower group. I mean you would be welcome, and I think there's a fair overlap between your friends and my friends, but also you probably don't need an additional thing in that category. I am also in a server about a mobile game I play, which has a bit of social stuff around the game chat, and that's fine, but I mostly want more direct social interaction rather than game-focused.
It's interesting to hear about you and Mike, it sounds like you have a good arrangement which isn't too much of an unfair burden on you. I definitely like having 250 people I'm broadly well disposed towards but wouldn't put the effort in to keep in touch with individually, and at the moment FB provides that better than anywhere else.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-11-10 08:20 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2022-11-10 08:23 pm (UTC)It's a smallish server that started out with a craft focus; a couple of the active people seem to be really serious bicycle nerds. There isn't the level of intense discussion you'd find on Metafilter proper, but it's a nice place for casual chat.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-11-10 08:26 pm (UTC)Musk is so rich that I don't understand the numbers any more, I can't tell whether he can just lose millions of dollars a day and not care, or if Twitter is going to bankrupt him (I almost hope so!), or somewhere in between. It's interesting to hear that he isn't as infinitely rich as he seems.
Cranky Old Fans Discord sounds fun, but I'm still a bit confused about having fannish versus offline identities on Discord so I'll pass for now until I can get that sorted out. I mean I'm sure you're people are all perfectly reasonable but it's crossing the streams a bit more than I like.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-11-10 08:28 pm (UTC)I really don't. I thought it was self-evidently dumb by several tweets in, and sure enough they promptly walked it back.
Like they said, which is what Denise said: how this ToS should be read is as evidence of how the people behind it think of their users and intend to relate to them, and from that one may extrapolate to how one thinks that will play out.
courtneymilan comes around to exactly the same conclusion Denise does: this ToS is evidence that "these people are not your friends" and you probably don't want to trust them with any asset of value to you.
It was just this courtneymilan person didn't think a social media presence has value until someone spelled out its commercial value to businesses. Being that wrong about that disqualifies one as a serious person in this topic space.
Edit: I also have some other thoughts about how unbelievably dumb this ToS is, and how sabotaging it is of the entire enterprise, that Denise doesn't hit on. Later.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-11-10 09:02 pm (UTC)Musk's "wealth" is almost entirely Tesla stock and crypto, from what I can tell. If he sells too much Tesla stock, the value goes down, so he can basically only use it as collateral for loans, not spend it directly, and if anyone has to call in those loans, the whole structure collapses (A lot of very rich people live like this; a huge amount of passing as "rich" is nobody understanding the numbers after a certain point enough to call you on it.) Crypto is a similar problem - it isn't based on anything but what it sells for, so anyone who holds a lot of crypto will tank the prices if they try to convert a significant amount into anything other than more crypto. So yes he's still horribly rich, but not enough to take $40 billion in liquid capital for granted.
I am also confused about keeping IDs straight on Discord! I think to do it well you need a paid account, so I've stuck to only fandom-names so far. If you figure it out let me know! :D
(no subject)
Date: 2022-11-10 09:06 pm (UTC)If you don't have Facebook, you have to keep up with friends and family the old-fashioned way - phone calls and birthday cards and yearly group emails and so on. But those methods do still work! And I've actually found that as Facebook makes it harder and harder to actually keep up with people's personal updates, the Facebook people have starting coming to the "still talk to people on the phone" people for updates instead - I've checked in with my sister for distant cousin updates from Facebook and found out that my mom's info based on phone calls from her sister is better again the past few years, and I'm updating her instead.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-11-10 09:08 pm (UTC)PF is, IMHO, doomed in the long run - it has no financial plan. It's currently relying on donations from members to survive month to month.
It also has TOS problems and moderation problems, either of which will destroy it if it gets big enough to survive past the "we have no money" stage. But... they have no money.
But the culture is interesting, fandom-friendly and the kind of place many of us would like to migrate from Tumblr. Except. It's run by people who don't know what they're doing, have no roadmap, and are gonna collapse under the first big flamewar or legal challenge.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-11-10 09:14 pm (UTC)On the one hand: An atrociously written TOS is not a sign of a doomed site.
On the other: A startup with a botched TOS is not paying attention to (1) public perception of their business and (2) their legal documentation... neither of those bodes well for users.
Whether or not the TOS would hold up in court is entirely secondary.
...I'm also interested in the red flags you noticed in the TOS. (I remember seeing something that bugged me that Denise didn't cover but I don't recall what it was.)
(no subject)
Date: 2022-11-10 11:19 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2022-11-10 11:27 pm (UTC)I think Mastodon is going to be uphill work to be a place where you (or anyone) can promote their writing, because the federated nature limits reach, and because the ethos of the fediverse is a bit anti advertising and promotion. But let's see, if this influx gives it critical mass who knows what directions it might take.
What I want from Cohost is the opposite, a pseudonymous space for meeting congenial people without everything being tied to money-making activities. So I'm not worried if it's a secure place for commercial activity, I'm worried whether it can offer me reasonable privacy, and at the moment I'm not at all convinced about that, I feel like they would unintentionally (probably not deliberately) tell the whole world who I am in professional and public-facing roles.
The bad TOS I can totally see as a thirteenth-strike thing, it doesn't inspire confidence at all. But to me it's of a parcel with general flaky start-up-ness, like the fact that it doesn't always load pages properly or half the functionality isn't documented. Not a positive thing by any means, but also not a reason to write off the site from the start.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-11-10 11:51 pm (UTC)Sorry for the tag confusion between evil-Twitter-Jack and my perfectly lovely husband...
(no subject)
Date: 2022-11-11 12:44 am (UTC)As for social bookmarking sites per se, I liked delicious a lot and migrated to pinboard for my fanfic (and some non-fandom) bookmarking purposes. Now that pinboard seems to have been abandoned by its creator, I'm going to give Raindrop.io a try. (Sorry for not coding links but I'm mostly using dictation right now because of a rotator cuff injury and typing is a challenge.)
(no subject)
Date: 2022-11-11 02:08 am (UTC)I was talking about this with
The reasonable privacy is an excellent concern, yes. (And I am largely pseudonymous, I don't hide my pen name from people who know me as Jenett, and neither of those is my legal name, and I do want a moderate firewall between easy connections of me as Jenett and me as my legal name.)
(no subject)
Date: 2022-11-11 05:12 am (UTC)So, uh, I guess Patreon and Twitter engineers aren't allowed to have accounts on Cohost?
(no subject)
Date: 2022-11-11 05:19 am (UTC)This does not seem to be a walletname site. The parts of the ToS about usernames seem to be attempting to support the use of nyms, by setting out constraints in what sort of nyms one can have; I'm looking at the signup page, and it doesn't even ask for a walletname. Doesn't mean they won't later on – not least because they have a business model that relies on users charging credit cards, so walletnames will enter into it at some point.
I do think that the one-account-per-human rule is misguided, but not terrible.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-11-11 05:33 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2022-11-11 05:48 am (UTC)...Hypothetically, anyone who runs a Discord server is "operating a product that competes with ASCC."
(no subject)
Date: 2022-11-11 06:55 am (UTC)I don't know when I last logged into FB, I find it so difficult to use now that I generally can't be bothered. I would definitely benefit, from a career standpoint, from being on there more, because there are a lot of groups geared to my professional specialties that are *the* watering holes for a kind of networking that does still dominate my industry, and that is way, way more accessible than the offline equivalent of the same. On the other hand, my approach to copyright and licensing is such that the mainstream industry possibly isn't the right place for me to try and position myself, anyway. It's a tough one.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-11-11 07:06 am (UTC)I knew early on that I would miss some birthdays and announcements from people I don't really know anymore. I accepted it. It is okay and I have never missed what I miss, as it were.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-11-11 08:14 am (UTC)...And has a neat suburban front garden of a life that reassures people - including recruiters and the HR departments of companies who do a *lot* of undiscussed background checking before they let people work on their trading floor.
And FB does, indeed, facilitate weak ties. I value that!
Some of those weak ties are what they are *on Facebook* and more than that where it matters. Neighbours borrowing the clippers, for that neat suburban privet hedge, if you will.
Also: I'm Hairyears on the Wandering.Shop instance of Mastodon, although I'm waiting for the dust to settle from the the Twitter disaster to settle before doing much there; and I've poked
(no subject)
Date: 2022-11-11 10:10 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2022-11-11 11:46 am (UTC)I gave a nod of recognition at that "male partner not on FB, female partner doing the social media labour" thing, as I know a few couples who do that. (And I also did a double-take over the jack username :-)
Metafilter talks Mastodon. My impression of Mastodon (I'm pw201 in the Mefi thread) is that, as you say, it's expecting too much of volunteer admins and placing too much trust in them. Possibly if Twitter does go down the pan, there'll be money to be made in professional admin-ing.
Or possibly not, if people aren't actually willing to pay for admin-ing at all. Mefi will probably die for lack of money, with the flame wars and weird moderator interventions caused by narcissism of small differences driving new and existing users away. (Kimberstormer's comment I thought was great for clarifying the mistaken assumptions driving the site's love of forming committees to pursue social justice goals). Not sure how DW's doing financially, my impression is they've found a niche and will keep puttering along.
As previously mentioned, I find Twitter and FB unbearable without 3rd party tools to block the crap. Someone who works out the UX and business model for a proper federated/distributed system where I can run events, post photos, and control privacy settings, will make a mint.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-11-11 04:39 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2022-11-13 01:14 am (UTC)I find myself actually using /LinkedIn/ somewhat socially now, especially since 90% of my IRL social contacts are in my field of work at this point.
I'm trying to make a go of it on Mastodon but haven't hit critical mass of enough interesting accounts/content (which makes sense because I've only recently joined up) - I added you switterbeet@mastodon.cloud
I was hoping to find more thoughts on Pillowfort in the comments here since part of me wants to believe that's where all the community I previously experienced on LJ wound up. *sigh*
(no subject)
Date: 2022-11-13 02:06 am (UTC)j4 coined a useful term for this, "compromise laundering".
Mastodon (specifically Mastodon, not other bits of the fediverse) seems at risk of this. Apparently a single person is lead developer of the software as well as operator, and, reportedly, sole moderator of two huge instances (mastodon.social, mastodon.online) with hundreds of thousands of users. (I haven't dug out irrefutable receipts, but these sources seem unlikely to be complete fabrications: 1, 2; CN fediverse drama.)
As well as being just too much work for one person, apparently the notion that moderation can be a one-person job is negatively influencing the design of the moderation tools that other instances get to use, which doesn't sound great.
If this bod eventually melts rather than moving to a more sustainable division of work (apparently it's not always been a one-person show), I expect Mastodon will survive through software forks and other instances (and if not, there's other instance software), but it's not great (and I need to find me a new instance).
I'm not sure I understand the limitation? I'm not finding instance boundaries to be a great barrier to discovery and reach.
(It might make a difference that I'm almost exclusively using the web UI rather than apps, so I'm not stuck with my instance's view of foreign stuff; hopping over to that instance's own presentation is easy. I dunno if being on the huge mastodon.social also makes a difference, since a lot of traffic comes through here.)
There's the "Lists" feature? (Not that I've tried it yet.) Or do you mean a public/shareable list?
(no subject)
Date: 2022-11-16 10:19 am (UTC)Facebook is vital for my friends who aren't going to put in more than the basics to keep in touch. I want to know what they're up to for kids/pets/deaths/marriages, and it's the only way I'm going to find out.
Re: Social link sharing, if you'd like me to set you up with a copy of my link poster then I'd be happy to to that. But you may not want to put them on here where your more personal blogging is :-)