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We get so caught up in the question "What if social media is bad?" we never really ask the question "What if we replaced it?"
This is explicitly a criticism of criticisms of the fediverse. Saying "Oh, I can't just stumble through infinite posts" as a criticism of the fediverse is basically saying that you want to leave social media, but have something the same as it.

the criticisms not only annoy me, but often make me question the motives of the person
Also - yes - marketing is harder on platforms made for people and not platforms made for products. Wow! Shock!
I have so very much to say, ironically this is not the forum.🤔
IT IS! I'M MY OWN ADMIN! If your admin complains and I'll instance block them and call them a meanie (not really)!
@silverwizard@convenient.em No nothing like that, but all alright a preview then.

Replacement.
Social Media did not spring forth from nothing in the recent past, for some the concept has been real for their entire lifespan. The medium changes names, ownership, format protocol, speed and reach. It is replaced, updated, augmented, or taken out back and shot in the head ( :googleplus: ) as needed.

Is there a need for replacement?

of protocol?
of format?
of owner?

or

Can existing technology be leveraged to augment and enhance the usage of social media as a valuable service and resource for the users regardless of protocol, format, owner, admin, or walled garden digital prison choices?

I say No, maybe, No, Hell No, and Yes.

since you asked.
So I mean, destroying social media is a three headed snake:
Legislative
Technical
Social

We need to have the tools to build things that let us escape corporate control, we must break up monopolies, and disallow groups to force us to give up rights of intercommunication, and we must socially understand that smaller communities are ok, and the ideas of Follower Counts and Viral are toxic.
Globally, you are going to be, at the very best, less than effective at any legislative goal.

Technical and Social are the areas of influence that can be effectively dealt with.

"disallow groups" is already on the wrong foot.

"Not everything is for me" needs to be a fundamental understanding of every user and seems lost in all the noise of every topic.

Treading on the various rights of anyone to setup and run their own social network their own way is kinda invalidating your whole point, isn't it?

Which means no matter how much you may disagree with their format/protocol/admin/monetization/datacollection/owner you give them that right to protect yours.

And no matter how correct your interpretation of the corporate evils and privacy molesting shenanigans, they have users you will not reach that deserve fundamental aspects of social media regardless of their ill informed choices.

2 choices, compete or change everything without changing anything.
I mean, disallowing certain kinds of corporate action is gonna happen

And no - part of this is dealing with the problem of allowing corporations power
Which quiet part? The fact that I'm anticorporation?
Personally, individually we can all be whatever stripe we like. But collectively solving a global problem it is necessary to communicate without a striped agenda. Concentrate on the inarguable and the clearest elegant solution.

Participate when and where it suits your agenda, or inarguably agree & Dissent, protest and act in opposition where you must.

But reality dictates that the clearest solution does not contain critical mass
interested in tossing all of it out and starting over with an particular ideological stripe.

The quiet part is that the eventual result will be changes in ownership/format/protocol/value that financially is often detrimental to the owners of the network of users we wish to be of service and educate.

and it can stay quiet because the same is true without our action or agenda (see waaay above.) the solution entails offering a value add to these various networks, it need not be presented as a dagger, pointy though it may be.
It should be clear to anyone with even a passing interest that any attempt at blanket moderation of human behavior is a fools errand.

This fact is unconcerned with scale, 1 human or a 3 million humans. If you tell them they cannot do a thing, they alone still get to decide to do or not do a thing.

In the "social media age" (Gyahh, I threw up in my mouth a bit, sorry) there is a constant struggle to decide what is and is not allowed, speech, video, image, joke, thought, etc.

And we all get it, "Have some decency damn", but some, in some areas of interest, will always have differing opinions of what is and is not acceptably decent.

Social outrage ensues to varying degrees.
The idea that humans are attracted to Fiction, Horror, Crime, Conspiracy, Violence, Tribal reaffirmation and inhumanity to man is somehow treated as a new evil of the social media algorithm is ludicrous on its face.

Social virality ensues to varying degrees.

These are useful and valuable though sometimes abhorrent pieces of data that are being monetized and manipulated to what many call disastrous consequence.

And there is where we can agree, the inarguable.
(Cannot believe I left SEX out of that list, I guess its true what they say about after you turn 50...)
So the main objective to that is that you have to believe something to change things. You can't build a hypothetical system which pleases everyone, you gotta build something you believe is good.
Inarguably good, no.

Yet any statistical increase in the good from those that choose to participate is "better" than without.

The question is how small do you want that stat to be?

You can increase it without perverting the good, Without painting with a brush that is colored arguably incorrectly bad by some who you are trying to welcome and encourage to participate for the increased common good.

You just have to focus on the attractive good. The inevitable side effects to you may be that good, to others their personal benefit or flexibility or utility are the attractive "good"

Not advocating hiding the motivations. Just been around open source longer than its been called that and witnessed perfectly reasonable intelligent folks throw lifetime's of work out the window over ideological disagreements unrelated to the solution being crafted to the detriment and death of said solution.

It is an important fact to face up front, its on a list...
...

No solution is perfect, everyone is flawed, you can learn something new, you can refine and even discard your beliefs, you are often wrong, mistaken, ignorant, and stubborn. Facts are integral. Your head full of jelly is completely unique, just like everybody else's, So don't get too attached to it's representation of what should be, as to what actually do be, and what can be.
OK, but I don't need to not argue for it. Legislative changes are the only tools we have to cap power.

Obviously as an anarchist I would rather invidivual communities make those decisions, but at an inter-communal level you need some standards. People who build walled gardens should be left to starve in them, not allowed to push more people into them. That's just common sense. And so we must use the most pro-social sanctions to discourage them. Right now that's law.

Banning walled gardens *is* an intermediate step, and the frustrating part is that any reasonable read of antitrust laws show it's an enforcement issue, not even a legislative one!
The walled garden is called that because it is an attractive place to hang out. Its pleasant, undemanding, chill.

Trying to convince the folks inside it that they need to pour this gasoline on it and light it up, well it is an uphill battle.

I'm not arguing against any particular legislative action, I'm saying that actually enacting a common rule on a global scale is impossible at current global economy, geopolitical environment.

I am arguing that the cost benefit analysis says that convincing your legislative representative to cripple his donors is hard enough when he and many of his constituents and colleagues don't have an iPhone in his pocket and is Tweeting on his iPad.
Sure, I agree this is an uphill battle. But I am fairly certain it's a minimum action to maintain a society. Full stop.
That is a very All or Nothing self defeatist attitude though.

Your progress will always be marked as not there yet or all done in a day and be completely dependent on other's action.

That is a way to go, but it sounds like a difficult recruitment speech.

What does the landscape look like along the way? What does it look like at the end? How did you help?

I don't know, I've been working on this problem for more than a decade, and I'm pretty dug in on my approach, which again, not the correct forum to get into (we'd be here for days), but I support everyone's attempts at more just and equitable world, even if I could use a few extra hands.
OK, but what is your support? I believe that as long as we allow people to spend billions to control media as we know it, it's over. The whole game is over.

What other options exist?
The existence of liars does not invalidate the truth.

Globally, you cannot disallow people to spend their resources however they like. (Locally you may be able to enact laws)

These corporations DO exist. They are funded and can spend.

What you want is for them to spend it in ways you agree with.

and now we near going beyond what I am willing to publicly expound on at this stage.

But in a word, USERS.👥
Yes, users should move, and making that easy is important, but also, we can't pretend the social media we have is a valid model.
That is just it, why make that judgement?

It exists.

In the future, something else will, what is important is to enshrine the necessary civic education as part of the experience no matter the medium.

Move them to where? A site deemed "better"?

I'm all for better, but even here, a noticeably better place, is a lot of the same minus some problematic bits removed (this not a criticism). So starting from an agnostic point of view would seem the sensible approach, rather than anything but what we have approach. I prefer the what we could have viewpoint

In that way, migration is not the goal or the ginormous obstacle it appears to be.

Informed choice is the goal. Not losing your workflow while navigating an ever changing digital social space is the goal. Achieving positive social change is the goal.

I don't really care how much cash Jeff and Elon have cuz it wouldn't matter if I did.

I care about their users. Not new prohibitions. Education & empowerment.
Like I started with, we all ask if it's bad, and not if it should be replaced
They don't actually have any power, they have users and money.

Facilitate their users but let users learn through usage that the money, content, data and power always belonged to the user.
See why this is not the correct forum yet?
Wait until you find out what power is!
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