Not sure I agree with all of his points, but it’s a start that we’re at least publicly acknowledging this as the end of an era (for good IMO)
I’m all in on the Fediverse. It’s messy and a little confusing, but it has the best shot at making things better for all. Including corporations.
It’s just a repeating cycle. Anyone making edgy commentary about decentralization was not around in the 90s. We think the shittification was caused by corporations, but corporations are just out to make money. Since we all need our 401k’s to grow, I find it insane more people don’t understand we’re all just playing ourselves.
The real problem going forward is how EVERY FUCKING LITTLE THING becomes a political minefield; totally devoid of any real, meaningful contribution to humanity.
Christ, I honestly can’t keep up anymore. What is a tankie? Am I woke enough? Should I like soy? Can I eat meat? Are electric cars bad?
I care deeply about other people and who they are as individuals, but I am starting to lose faith in our ability to create communities that can do anything but fight with eachother about what’s best for everyone.
Feel you with being unable to keep up. The thing is, most of the outrage is artificial; have to remember the incentive structures of media etc.
If its any consolation, I reckon the average person being unable to keep up with stuff during periods of rapid change has always been the case historically. Most conversations, discourse, etc that have shaped society have been either among small groups of powerful people motivated by various interests, or stuff like pamphlets, polemics nailed to church doors, talking points, buzz words. This riles people up and is effective at getting stuff done but not effective at all at having an actual conversation. So the average person just gets swept up in the tide.
I am not an expert in political history by any means but I can’t think of a single example in which people just talked to eachother to decide the direction of society. Seems like it has always been ‘waves’ or ‘trends’ or ‘forces’ and then ‘backlashes’ driving things. Historical developments and transformative change seems to just ‘happen’ and suddenly you live in a fundamentally different world.
Like, did we ever have a conversation, as ‘a society’ (if it can even be considered a singular entity) which resulted in the decision to put big tech corps in charge of running the main platforms we use to communicate with eachother?
Of course not; it’s like we woke up one day and suddenly heads of state are issuing diplomatic communications via goddamn Twitter so we all just use that now. Again, not a historian, but I think it was a similar thing with major historical shifts like industrialisation etc.
And then we get hit by the consequences, and are totally unprepared, as if they were unexpected. A small group of random people having a conversation over drinks could have anticipated pretty much every single issue we now have with big tech running our social platforms, and probably could have anticipated many of the pitfalls of industrialisation or globalisation (not saying these don’t have positives; but we’re dealing with the pitfalls now so it is what it is).
I think this kind of approach to discourse and societal decisionmaking is very vulnerable to being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information in the modern world.
I recently read ‘The Word for World is Forest’ by Ursula Le Guin, and am reminded of this part in the introduction: “They have built a system of inter-personal relations which, in the field of psychology, is perhaps on a level with our attainments in such areas as television and nuclear physics.” (Context: the Senoi people of Malaysia).
We haven’t developed our ‘social technology’; we’re operating on the same kinds of social tech in the past, which is simply not equipped to deal with a connected globalised world. I think this extends to stuff like academia and journalism. We desperately need an approach to making sense of the world in a calm and thoughtful manner; but since our social tech can’t really facilitate that, we’re doing… whatever it is we’re doing rn.
And coming back to capitalist incentive structures: inflammatory stuff generates more engagement, ad revenue etc.
I am holding out hope that smaller, FOSS alternatives which do not have such incentives will lead to better conversations
This is entirely my observation but the conversations I’ve seen on this platform seem more like actual conversations vs the almost-artificial ‘talking past eachother instead of talking to eachother’ I used to see on Reddit and Twitter.
Sorry for the ramble. My first post on any public-facing online thing since I quit posting on random forums like 15 years ago. I always lurked on Twitter and Reddit but feared that actually posting and/or getting into arguments would drive me insane so avoided it. Hello everyone; let’s be humane to eachother and enjoy eachother’s company. There’s enough alienation in the world as it is. Thanks for reading to whoever is still reading.
Former(-ish) active Reddit user here. Your comment hit home, because it pointed to “social technology”, capitalism, conversations and value of interactions.
Capitalism’s approach sees value in Reddit, Twitter, etc. as being advertising platforms and means of data collection. So anything from which they can’t make money is just there.
The real value is the interactions and conversations these platforms are fostering. The IMDb Message Boards were a really fun place to discuss movies, but the suits in the IMDb boardroom came to the conclusion that having the boards hurt the engagement with the site, providing “negative experience” to the users. Which was just good old corporate bull for “it is too expensive to keep them up”. So they axed the boards (did not even keep them as a read-only archive!), deleting all posts, deleting all that tremendous cultural value that accumulated over the decades the Message Boards were operating.
Sad. But these stories (and now Reddit’s story, sadly) are the wake up calls we need to advance in our “social technology”. All we need is to realize thatour conversations and interactions with other people is the value in itself. Right now, the capitalist approach to everything is deeply rooted in the minds. We need to change that, and clearly separate societal values from capitalist values on the internet. I don’t know if this “Fediverse” is the way to do that. But I’m happy to join. I’m happy to try.
And Void_Reader - I’m really glad you posted this. This is my first comment on Lemmy, and I’m happy to be reacting to your thoughts here.
Man, I feel you on that part about things becoming a political minefield.
I remember when you could say anything on the internet and just not worry about it. Now if you piss off the wrong person you’ll have a mob knocking your door down in no time, having combed over every piece of information about you to find more things to be angry about.
When I was a kid I really did expect that to die down with religion, but it hasn’t. I expected people to have more relaxed attitudes but they don’t.
It has given me interesting things to think about. How do we contend with our nature which is completely unaware that we aren’t wandering around in small groups hunting any more? How do we find balance when our instincts are geared toward finding our group and taking out groups who are potentially threatening?
I’m just an idiot, but sometimes I feel like an alien watching our species.
I don’t wonder about whether I am woke enough or whether I should eat meat, but I spend a lot of time wondering about why we get hung up on things like that.
I think (and again, I’m an idiot) that our survival instincts just don’t know what to do in a world with so much information and so many members in our tribe. We aren’t built to deal with it. It comes at us so fast and we don’t want to be shoved aside and discarded and left to starve on the outskirts of society. Our brains can’t comprehend that we won’t be, that resources are plentiful, and so we struggle to keep up with pleasing our tribe while being terrified of the others.
This group is spying because this other group is a threat. We gotta get them before they get us. We have to convert as many people from their side to ours as possible because they will kill us, or, they want our resources.
I don’t know. I haven’t slept in two days and I’m working a double shift at Stop n’ Shit so I don’t know if I’m on the same page as you haha.
I don’t know if we can get past this point though. We were born from chaos, we struggle for order, and everyone is struggling against us for various ideas and feelings about what order is.
In less than 100 years most of us will be dead and we take ourselves so seriously it’s like we don’t comprehend that and we believe (juuuuust enough) that we’ll live forever.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t try to make things better, just maybe that we shouldn’t get so hung up on every little detail of it.
Honestly I don’t even remember what I was saying. I’ve typed too much to back out now haha. Cross your fingers that I’ll get some sleep tonight. :p
What kind of stuff do you want to say that you think will make people beat down your door?
Sometimes I wonder if 4Chan’s model is really the one we should be implementing, somehow. Remove individuality via the profile names and avatars people use to post under, and things seem to largely work themselves out (speaking as an infrequent visitor that has surface-level knowledge of the politics of 4Chan).
Sure, you can do something similar with throwaway accounts on places like Reddit, but it’s not quite the same.
This is not about petty politics and frankly I think your topic shift is completely out of place here. What this is fundamentally about is preventing any idiot with money and/or power from purchasing/capturing and then proceeding to ruin our townsquares like some wannabe totalitarian asshole. And some people will say that “it’s ok, because it’s a private platform and he bought/built it”. Ok, now it’s a million private platforms, he can go buy each and every one of them and we’ll easily make new ones and move to the ones he hasn’t vandalized yet.
Your anger is completely misplaced and weird af. Even with you complaining about specificly “woke”, soy, EVs and similar.
Wefwef has made it super easy for me to transition. It’s basically the Apollo interface for Lemmy.
I don’t agree with the author’s conclusion. I believe that Fediverse and FOSS software will eventually become better and less daunting for users to use. They will eventually rule the social scene.
Why? Enshittification. Capitalist platforms objective is to make money. As long as that’s their objective, they will always become worse. FOSS projects are truly social project where the ultimate objective is to create libre software for the sake of human connection. Money is not the ultimate leitmotiv of FOSS.
Didn’t they say they were bullish on fediverse long term?
Fediverse can win. But, it has to be dead simple to use. It has to be smooth. It has to be easy to grok. Literally, nothing else matters when talking about user adoption. My belief.
I don’t agree with the author’s conclusion. I believe that Fediverse and FOSS software will eventually become better and less daunting for users to use. They will eventually rule the social scene.
I would love this to be the case. But as a greybeard, I seriously doubt it. The masses will usually gravitate to places that explicitly cater to them. That usually means good UX and reliability. That usually means an org (read: company) spending lots of resources keeping things up and improving on UI.
That said, I’m personally willing to sacrifice a lot to be out of a walled garden. My hope is that the fediverse at least has a strong community, maybe ideally without the masses. Gotta start somewhere at least.
It can be done. One example comes to mind (not talking about the backend) is Blender. It’s a FOSS software that became one THE 3D animations tools to use.
Perhaps I’m a bit of an optimist but I truly think that Fediverse will begin to shine.
For the past several years as “social networking” morphed into “social media” and we saw the way it was wriggling into every corner of life, even to the point of affecting elections across the globe, I was worried more and more.
As we’ve sort of come to grips with the inherent flaws or evils or whatever of social media, I am expecting a time in the not too distant future where we’ll look back at the social media era with contempt, disgust, and shame (if we can remember how to feel shame).
I am expecting a time in the not too distant future where we’ll look back at the social media era with contempt, disgust, and shame
I genuinely hope this is the end of social media. It’s been growing more and more toxic every second for years. When my Facebook feed went from interesting events in people’s lives to nothing but opinion pieces (THAT NOBODY ASKED FOR), I got rid of that shit. That was years ago and it’s just gotten worse since then. Absolute failed experiment that has genuinely made the world a worse place.
That’s right, I remember the Facebook of 2010 when it was “Tonight I’m going to the concert of XXX” and “I am finally relaxing after a long day with a beer”.
Only your friends and their updates in chronological order.
The good times.
Just like we did with old NSFL websites, right?
I don’t really mind seeing this cycle wind down, however it does raise a question that’s existed even at the height of these centralized platforms…What the hell do we use to chat with individuals online? Discord might work okay in small groups, but it’s still a single company-owned platform, so those free servers aren’t going to last and you’ll lose that space eventually. The only big name alternatives that come to mind for decent cross-platform carrier independent chat are either owned by Meta/Facebook (Messenger/WhatsApp), or are Snapchat or Telegram.
Meta’s problems are obvious to those that follow tech.
Snapchat’s in a weird limbo so far as I’m aware, where it’s no longer as popular as it once was, as younger demographics I think are skewing to TikTok now, and I don’t know that it ever really saw wider or consistent adoption outside of those demographics. Beyond that Snapchat is just another single company desperately trying to monetize their platform as much as the rest.
Telegram’s probably the most viable competitor to WhatsApp if I’m not mistaken, but the head of it & group behind it are as questionable as Meta/Facebook, at least imo.
I guess the real alternatives might be to try to set up and host one’s own IRC/XMPP/Matrix servers, but…That seems impractical for small group chats, no? Or maybe it’s not as costly nor cumbersome to spin up & maintain as someone not too familiar with it might think? 🤷
Edit: As to email as another option for individual comms, uhh, well all I know is that’s probably the one thing you’ll frequently see many self-hosting folks recommend against trying to host yourself due to major email providers by & large blocking random small self-hosted email servers.
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You can also use one of the many open servers or the main Matrix one. It doesn’t matter, it’s all encrypted and federated.
It kind of does matter though…Maybe not a ton to those just chatting in them, but if you’re relying on someone else’s hosting, it’s only as good as long as it’s hosted (and as good as its admins/mods). Part of the reason I’d be a little more interested in sorting out hosting for smaller scale chat stuff myself, as of the many things you could self-host, it’s up there as one that makes more sense to me.
Also just checked out Delta.chat, and that’s pretty sick! Thanks!
One thing i know for sure, there ain’t no predicting the future with something like this. We’ll not know where we’ll end up until we are there.
Completely agreed. We’ll have to see where this goes.
I think the masses of people will latch onto the next easy thing.
Facebook might be a place where only Boomers go now, but it’s still incredibly influential and effective at manipulating the world around us in historically negative ways.
Reddit and even Twitter will remain for a while yet. Despite their best efforts to kill themselves
