Thanks for posting this, @DrStone. I must have been living under a rock because I have never read Mozilla's "Pledge for a Healthy Planet", which was referenced in this article, or specifically The...
Thanks for posting this, @DrStone. I must have been living under a rock because I have never read Mozilla's "Pledge for a Healthy Planet", which was referenced in this article, or specifically The Mozilla Manifesto which underpins the Pledge.
One question I've been thinking about recently is whether the problem with social media isn't just, as Mozilla puts it, their management by "profit- and control-motivated tech firms", but also because they're just simply too big. Dunbar's Number gets thrown around a lot but I do think there is some fundamental change (and not for the good) to how people behave when their social sphere gets too big. This Mozilla article states that they're thinking about how to better work in "hyper-scale social systems", but maybe what we need instead is just more smaller systems. --in some ways, like it used to be in the old BBS days. Maybe these new federated social tools do allow this, but I feel like there is always this big emphasis on how many views and likes a user's content has generated rather than on high quality relationships between the people in a more cognitively manageable sphere.
And since I'm already rambling, I wonder if anyone on Tildes has read an old book by Ivan Illich called Tools for Conviviality? There is quite a bit of silly socialist utopian dreams in the book, but I really like the emphasis on building tools around the human scale rather than simply on building tools that can scale and that are designed to achieve economic efficiencies. I think there is a really interesting analysis to be done, applying Illich's thoughts to modern internet design and usage, including social media.
I don't know if Dunbar's number is your cap. You can probably have a much much bigger cap, but there's some level beyond which people can no longer have a sense for anyone else's general...
Exemplary
I don't know if Dunbar's number is your cap. You can probably have a much much bigger cap, but there's some level beyond which people can no longer have a sense for anyone else's general reputation when interacting with each other. Think about any large institution, like a university or a big company. These are all much bigger than Dunbar's number, but they still have some sort of community and general group norms they're able to enforce because individuals are part of multiple circles of groups that overlap with each other. So if you're in the Jewish Student's group and you're a dickhead there, people in that group who are also in Student Government make sure your dickish behavior is known to other Student Govies. Then the Student Govies who are Varsity athletes transmit this information to the jocks and the theater kids who are govies transmit it to the other theater kids and so on.
Same dynamic in a big company. You can be a dickhead in the accounting department and even though nobody in sales will interact with you that much, their friends in accounting will tell them. It's the interconnected web of social connections that means everyone's only 2 or 3 nodes away from everyone else.
It worked similarly in IRC or forum culture. If you were a prolific enough internet person, you could go from one forum to another. If it was the same sort of community people would know each other and let others know about you. I think with some of the modern social media the scale itself isn't the issue so much as the lack of any kind of shared social context to put guard-rails around how people interact with each other. It's partly a whole bunch of anonymous randos with tenuous reading comprehension skills and partly a bunch of fully anonymous trolls and sock puppet accounts with no real ground rules for how people ought to act. The scale itself can probably vary depending on how well the design fosters a sense of shared context and stickiness around a person's reputation.
So for example, a site like Tildes I don't think can scale that informal reputation thing very well because, like Reddit, there's nothing to set one poster apart from another. Forums have avatars and signatures and people tended to post longer missives so, in addition to your contributions, there was a bunch of other visual clutter that my brain can associate with your contributions. Sort of like putting a face to a name it makes you more memorable. Since Tildes is small we can keep track of usernames but at scale, like with Reddit, that starts to break down and it just starts to look like a wall of posts and comments. You see it even here sometimes when there is a heated argument. The person at the center of the dogpile starts to talk as if they're arguing with one person and losing track of which points they were making with whom across the multiple threads of conversation they're having. It stops being communication between people and becomes 1 person against a mob.
I like the way you've described this, and I do agree that larger groups are possible when individuals are primarily within a smaller group but that these groups do overlap. And in fact from the...
all much bigger than Dunbar's number, but they still have some sort of community and general group norms they're able to enforce because individuals are part of multiple circles of groups that overlap with each other.
I like the way you've described this, and I do agree that larger groups are possible when individuals are primarily within a smaller group but that these groups do overlap. And in fact from the perspective of organizational design, I would imagine there is a lot of theory about how these groups and overlaps can be engineered and interconnected to pursue various organizational purposes, whether they are business or socially oriented. And, tying in what @nothis said above, a problem with many social media platforms now is that they open up the one-to-all interaction too easily.
So for example, a site like Tildes ... The person at the center of the dogpile starts to talk as if they're arguing with one person and losing track of which points they were making with whom across the multiple threads of conversation they're having. It stops being communication between people and becomes 1 person against a mob.
I've gotten to the point where I simply ignore Tildes threads once these multi-person scuffles break out. I think you're absolutely right that people lose track of who they're responding to and they just start flailing defensively. But also, after this long in the interneted world, it seems we still haven't overcome the someone-is-wrong-on-the-internet problem, and I find it painful to watch people trying to prove someone else is wrong.
This website talks about how to run a small social site, and I use a lot of the advice for running my regional Mastodon instance. Here’s the bit about keeping it small:...
This website talks about how to run a small social site, and I use a lot of the advice for running my regional Mastodon instance.
I'm part of a small slack group with friends. We really like the different channels to keep conversations separate. Does mastodon have anything like that? I don't like being on a closed system and...
I'm part of a small slack group with friends. We really like the different channels to keep conversations separate. Does mastodon have anything like that? I don't like being on a closed system and am willing to try for a migration...
This came to my mind in a recent discussion: What if the problem with social media is the scale at which it stops being a tool for personal connections and starts being a "broadcast"? If you...
This came to my mind in a recent discussion: What if the problem with social media is the scale at which it stops being a tool for personal connections and starts being a "broadcast"?
If you limited the amount of followers/subscribers, group members, etc. to a certain number (Dunbar's number is about 150 but maybe this would still apply to around 10,000), a lot of the larger problems with social media would disappear. Maybe we still need "broadcasts" for news, political parties, unions, sport events and entertainment in general but these should move to dedicated platforms that are regulated, like TV is by the FCC. Why should a random sociopath have the power to amass a following of literally millions for daily, instant broadcast of every thought? That is not "free speech" that is unregulated mass media.
Yeah in the earlier days social media was primarily for people to interact with friends they had met in real life. It was to intensify and deepen your actual social connections. Sometime after...
Yeah in the earlier days social media was primarily for people to interact with friends they had met in real life. It was to intensify and deepen your actual social connections. Sometime after 2012 or so it started to shift to people primarily forming social connections through social media first, and particularly with it becoming a mechanism for farming engagement metrics. This was good for advertisers, but it had the effect of making everyone's interaction with the platform mimic that of content producers. At this point the ratio has shifted on sites like Instagram to where the majority of my feed is from shit I don't even follow. All the socializing with friends happens in DMs.
Yes, I think this is a good point. Maybe the right way is to distinguish it is that we need both social media (which may best suit cognitively manageable group sizes) and we need mass media; but...
Maybe we still need "broadcasts" for news, political parties, unions, sport events and entertainment in general
Yes, I think this is a good point. Maybe the right way is to distinguish it is that we need both social media (which may best suit cognitively manageable group sizes) and we need mass media; but that these are two distinct things. Mass media, of course, has its own problems, especially when run as a corporate for-profit enterprise, but social media ends up with its own unique problems when it also tries to provide and emphasize that broadcast function. The way I'm characterizing this doesn't feel quite right, but I think you're right about the importance of the distinction between the two.
It took your comment to clearly delineate social media and mass media for me. Until now the problem has been vague and hard for me to think about. No idea why I struggled with that, but thank you....
It took your comment to clearly delineate social media and mass media for me. Until now the problem has been vague and hard for me to think about. No idea why I struggled with that, but thank you.
That said, social media which can rapidly transition to mass media is powerful. And powerful tools never seem to get retired.
What I mean is that, as long as social media exists in a form that can become mass media, individuals can do things they might never have before; I don't think that will stop. And seeing as how most social media platforms have evolved into this capability, it looks like a feature, not a bug.
I'm guessing enough people want the ability to boost their signal into mass media that social media platforms must gain the function to be (traditionally) successful.
Essentially, at what point does a group become a crowd become a mob. I hadn't considered that, but interesting.
Dunbar's Number gets thrown around a lot but I do think there is some fundamental change (and not for the good) to how people behave when their social sphere gets too big.
Essentially, at what point does a group become a crowd become a mob. I hadn't considered that, but interesting.
I actually believe Mozilla to be the best non-profit in technology, they get the human component of their product (most visibly: a browser that actually has great usability). For a while, their...
I actually believe Mozilla to be the best non-profit in technology, they get the human component of their product (most visibly: a browser that actually has great usability). For a while, their attempts at providing online services seemed a bit weird/off-brand but I'm starting to get their vision. The problem with Mastodon and its many nodes, just like with Linux and its distros, is that there is no proper "starting point". The average user doesn't have the technical know-how (or patience) to "do the research" and that's why a lot of FOSS projects never get adopted by a significant amount of users. Mozilla might actually get that. They might brand their twitter clone a concrete name, wouldn't go on and on about the "fediverse" at the login screen and allow people to use it without even understanding Mastodon (being able to switch servers later would be a nice bonus, not the reason to join). Let's see.
Anecdotally, many of the most involved Twitter uses I know are on the lower end of the tech-knowledge spectrum, and they have all abandoned any attempts to get into Mastodon after more of an...
Anecdotally, many of the most involved Twitter uses I know are on the lower end of the tech-knowledge spectrum, and they have all abandoned any attempts to get into Mastodon after more of an attempt than they gave to get onto any of the other social media platforms.
The user-unfriendliness is more of a boon than a barrier for me these days so I don't mind, but if people are actually trying to position Mastodon as the next wide-scale social media platform, then it needs someone to take the reins and really make a foolproof onboarding UX for people that just want to make an account and go.
Hm, to push back a bit, the Mozilla that develops Firefox and vpn skin is a for profit company, which makes 95% of its revenue from a single mercy deal from Google. The non profit Mozilla is a...
Hm, to push back a bit, the Mozilla that develops Firefox and vpn skin is a for profit company, which makes 95% of its revenue from a single mercy deal from Google.
The non profit Mozilla is a separate entity for tax reasons (donations to non profits and for profits are treated differently). As a result, money cannot flow between Mozilla the non profit and Mozilla the corporation. The latter can only use money it generates itself or otherwise finances in the traditional forms.
For all intents and purposes for the Firefox browser, it’s developed by a for profit company which earns its keep and pays its developer from a exclusivity deal with Google.
(I worked at Mozilla Corporation for just under 9 years) Mozilla Corporation can (and does) send money to Mozilla Foundation. But funds can't go the other direction. But yes, the structure does...
(I worked at Mozilla Corporation for just under 9 years)
Mozilla Corporation can (and does) send money to Mozilla Foundation. But funds can't go the other direction.
But yes, the structure does put the Mozilla Corporation into a bit of a bind.
For all intents and purposes for the Firefox browser, it’s developed by a for profit company which earns its keep and pays its developer from a exclusivity deal with Google.
This is technically true, but you have to look at it holistically in terms of ownership and control. The Foundation is the Corporation's sole shareholder and thus controls the Corporation. The Corporation is "for-profit" in a legal sense, but that does not mean that it is actually run that way.
Only to some extent, as in the end the Corporation's funding is entirely from business ventures, its survival too is entirely dependent on business ventures. Things like the pocket acquisition and...
The Corporation is "for-profit" in a legal sense, but that does not mean that it is actually run that way.
Only to some extent, as in the end the Corporation's funding is entirely from business ventures, its survival too is entirely dependent on business ventures. Things like the pocket acquisition and subsequent tight integration into the browser, or the Google deal itself (it is somewhat antithetical to the mission to funnel all users into Google) are not necessarily actions that a more independent org would do, as neither really furthers their charter.
That's not to say that it's a bad arrangement - developers are expensive, really expensive, and it's somewhat doubtful a product mostly funded by donations could even get enough developers to maintain Firefox. But in general I wouldn't really see Mozilla Corp's incentive alignment as different from other for-profit companies. It would be difficult to distinguish their behavior from other companies in a similar space like Duckduckgo or Brave.
How do you figure? The simple calculus about this was that we were going to build our own reading list, but the exec at the time decided that Pocket was better than what we had planned.
Things like the pocket acquisition and subsequent tight integration into the browser
How do you figure? The simple calculus about this was that we were going to build our own reading list, but the exec at the time decided that Pocket was better than what we had planned.
I don't really care too much about the ethics in this case (Google financing all this...) but it always does make me worry a bit about the health of Mozilla. I'm glad they've been expanding their...
I don't really care too much about the ethics in this case (Google financing all this...) but it always does make me worry a bit about the health of Mozilla. I'm glad they've been expanding their income with other products, but it always feels like they're financially not as secure as I'd want to go all in on their stuff.
I knew there's two Mozillas but always assumed Mozilla Foundation is the one calling the shots as a non-profit NGO? I don't have a problem with Firefox making money per se, as long as that goal...
I knew there's two Mozillas but always assumed Mozilla Foundation is the one calling the shots as a non-profit NGO? I don't have a problem with Firefox making money per se, as long as that goal doesn't overshadow their others.
That's actually huge, because prior to this, the only (remotely major) social network that joined the Mastodon fediverse was Gab, and even then it was them trying to leech off the fediverse rather...
That's actually huge, because prior to this, the only (remotely major) social network that joined the Mastodon fediverse was Gab, and even then it was them trying to leech off the fediverse rather than contribute to it.
Mozilla are a big player and unlike a lot of Mastodon instances won't be under major threat of a shutdown.
Thanks for posting this, @DrStone. I must have been living under a rock because I have never read Mozilla's "Pledge for a Healthy Planet", which was referenced in this article, or specifically The Mozilla Manifesto which underpins the Pledge.
One question I've been thinking about recently is whether the problem with social media isn't just, as Mozilla puts it, their management by "profit- and control-motivated tech firms", but also because they're just simply too big. Dunbar's Number gets thrown around a lot but I do think there is some fundamental change (and not for the good) to how people behave when their social sphere gets too big. This Mozilla article states that they're thinking about how to better work in "hyper-scale social systems", but maybe what we need instead is just more smaller systems. --in some ways, like it used to be in the old BBS days. Maybe these new federated social tools do allow this, but I feel like there is always this big emphasis on how many views and likes a user's content has generated rather than on high quality relationships between the people in a more cognitively manageable sphere.
And since I'm already rambling, I wonder if anyone on Tildes has read an old book by Ivan Illich called Tools for Conviviality? There is quite a bit of silly socialist utopian dreams in the book, but I really like the emphasis on building tools around the human scale rather than simply on building tools that can scale and that are designed to achieve economic efficiencies. I think there is a really interesting analysis to be done, applying Illich's thoughts to modern internet design and usage, including social media.
I don't know if Dunbar's number is your cap. You can probably have a much much bigger cap, but there's some level beyond which people can no longer have a sense for anyone else's general reputation when interacting with each other. Think about any large institution, like a university or a big company. These are all much bigger than Dunbar's number, but they still have some sort of community and general group norms they're able to enforce because individuals are part of multiple circles of groups that overlap with each other. So if you're in the Jewish Student's group and you're a dickhead there, people in that group who are also in Student Government make sure your dickish behavior is known to other Student Govies. Then the Student Govies who are Varsity athletes transmit this information to the jocks and the theater kids who are govies transmit it to the other theater kids and so on.
Same dynamic in a big company. You can be a dickhead in the accounting department and even though nobody in sales will interact with you that much, their friends in accounting will tell them. It's the interconnected web of social connections that means everyone's only 2 or 3 nodes away from everyone else.
It worked similarly in IRC or forum culture. If you were a prolific enough internet person, you could go from one forum to another. If it was the same sort of community people would know each other and let others know about you. I think with some of the modern social media the scale itself isn't the issue so much as the lack of any kind of shared social context to put guard-rails around how people interact with each other. It's partly a whole bunch of anonymous randos with tenuous reading comprehension skills and partly a bunch of fully anonymous trolls and sock puppet accounts with no real ground rules for how people ought to act. The scale itself can probably vary depending on how well the design fosters a sense of shared context and stickiness around a person's reputation.
So for example, a site like Tildes I don't think can scale that informal reputation thing very well because, like Reddit, there's nothing to set one poster apart from another. Forums have avatars and signatures and people tended to post longer missives so, in addition to your contributions, there was a bunch of other visual clutter that my brain can associate with your contributions. Sort of like putting a face to a name it makes you more memorable. Since Tildes is small we can keep track of usernames but at scale, like with Reddit, that starts to break down and it just starts to look like a wall of posts and comments. You see it even here sometimes when there is a heated argument. The person at the center of the dogpile starts to talk as if they're arguing with one person and losing track of which points they were making with whom across the multiple threads of conversation they're having. It stops being communication between people and becomes 1 person against a mob.
I like the way you've described this, and I do agree that larger groups are possible when individuals are primarily within a smaller group but that these groups do overlap. And in fact from the perspective of organizational design, I would imagine there is a lot of theory about how these groups and overlaps can be engineered and interconnected to pursue various organizational purposes, whether they are business or socially oriented. And, tying in what @nothis said above, a problem with many social media platforms now is that they open up the one-to-all interaction too easily.
I've gotten to the point where I simply ignore Tildes threads once these multi-person scuffles break out. I think you're absolutely right that people lose track of who they're responding to and they just start flailing defensively. But also, after this long in the interneted world, it seems we still haven't overcome the someone-is-wrong-on-the-internet problem, and I find it painful to watch people trying to prove someone else is wrong.
This website talks about how to run a small social site, and I use a lot of the advice for running my regional Mastodon instance.
Here’s the bit about keeping it small: https://runyourown.social/#keep-it-small
I'm part of a small slack group with friends. We really like the different channels to keep conversations separate. Does mastodon have anything like that? I don't like being on a closed system and am willing to try for a migration...
Matrix is the most slack-like experience.
https://matrix.org/
Which client for a regular guy?
Edit: for ios and also macos
I’ve had luck with Element. https://element.io/
I like the interface of Cinny.
Oh cool, thanks!
This came to my mind in a recent discussion: What if the problem with social media is the scale at which it stops being a tool for personal connections and starts being a "broadcast"?
If you limited the amount of followers/subscribers, group members, etc. to a certain number (Dunbar's number is about 150 but maybe this would still apply to around 10,000), a lot of the larger problems with social media would disappear. Maybe we still need "broadcasts" for news, political parties, unions, sport events and entertainment in general but these should move to dedicated platforms that are regulated, like TV is by the FCC. Why should a random sociopath have the power to amass a following of literally millions for daily, instant broadcast of every thought? That is not "free speech" that is unregulated mass media.
Yeah in the earlier days social media was primarily for people to interact with friends they had met in real life. It was to intensify and deepen your actual social connections. Sometime after 2012 or so it started to shift to people primarily forming social connections through social media first, and particularly with it becoming a mechanism for farming engagement metrics. This was good for advertisers, but it had the effect of making everyone's interaction with the platform mimic that of content producers. At this point the ratio has shifted on sites like Instagram to where the majority of my feed is from shit I don't even follow. All the socializing with friends happens in DMs.
Yes, I think this is a good point. Maybe the right way is to distinguish it is that we need both social media (which may best suit cognitively manageable group sizes) and we need mass media; but that these are two distinct things. Mass media, of course, has its own problems, especially when run as a corporate for-profit enterprise, but social media ends up with its own unique problems when it also tries to provide and emphasize that broadcast function. The way I'm characterizing this doesn't feel quite right, but I think you're right about the importance of the distinction between the two.
It took your comment to clearly delineate social media and mass media for me. Until now the problem has been vague and hard for me to think about. No idea why I struggled with that, but thank you.
That said, social media which can rapidly transition to mass media is powerful. And powerful tools never seem to get retired.
What I mean is that, as long as social media exists in a form that can become mass media, individuals can do things they might never have before; I don't think that will stop. And seeing as how most social media platforms have evolved into this capability, it looks like a feature, not a bug.
I'm guessing enough people want the ability to boost their signal into mass media that social media platforms must gain the function to be (traditionally) successful.
Essentially, at what point does a group become a crowd become a mob. I hadn't considered that, but interesting.
I actually believe Mozilla to be the best non-profit in technology, they get the human component of their product (most visibly: a browser that actually has great usability). For a while, their attempts at providing online services seemed a bit weird/off-brand but I'm starting to get their vision. The problem with Mastodon and its many nodes, just like with Linux and its distros, is that there is no proper "starting point". The average user doesn't have the technical know-how (or patience) to "do the research" and that's why a lot of FOSS projects never get adopted by a significant amount of users. Mozilla might actually get that. They might brand their twitter clone a concrete name, wouldn't go on and on about the "fediverse" at the login screen and allow people to use it without even understanding Mastodon (being able to switch servers later would be a nice bonus, not the reason to join). Let's see.
Anecdotally, many of the most involved Twitter uses I know are on the lower end of the tech-knowledge spectrum, and they have all abandoned any attempts to get into Mastodon after more of an attempt than they gave to get onto any of the other social media platforms.
The user-unfriendliness is more of a boon than a barrier for me these days so I don't mind, but if people are actually trying to position Mastodon as the next wide-scale social media platform, then it needs someone to take the reins and really make a foolproof onboarding UX for people that just want to make an account and go.
Hm, to push back a bit, the Mozilla that develops Firefox and vpn skin is a for profit company, which makes 95% of its revenue from a single mercy deal from Google.
The non profit Mozilla is a separate entity for tax reasons (donations to non profits and for profits are treated differently). As a result, money cannot flow between Mozilla the non profit and Mozilla the corporation. The latter can only use money it generates itself or otherwise finances in the traditional forms.
For all intents and purposes for the Firefox browser, it’s developed by a for profit company which earns its keep and pays its developer from a exclusivity deal with Google.
(I worked at Mozilla Corporation for just under 9 years)
Mozilla Corporation can (and does) send money to Mozilla Foundation. But funds can't go the other direction.
But yes, the structure does put the Mozilla Corporation into a bit of a bind.
This is technically true, but you have to look at it holistically in terms of ownership and control. The Foundation is the Corporation's sole shareholder and thus controls the Corporation. The Corporation is "for-profit" in a legal sense, but that does not mean that it is actually run that way.
Only to some extent, as in the end the Corporation's funding is entirely from business ventures, its survival too is entirely dependent on business ventures. Things like the pocket acquisition and subsequent tight integration into the browser, or the Google deal itself (it is somewhat antithetical to the mission to funnel all users into Google) are not necessarily actions that a more independent org would do, as neither really furthers their charter.
That's not to say that it's a bad arrangement - developers are expensive, really expensive, and it's somewhat doubtful a product mostly funded by donations could even get enough developers to maintain Firefox. But in general I wouldn't really see Mozilla Corp's incentive alignment as different from other for-profit companies. It would be difficult to distinguish their behavior from other companies in a similar space like Duckduckgo or Brave.
How do you figure? The simple calculus about this was that we were going to build our own reading list, but the exec at the time decided that Pocket was better than what we had planned.
I don't really care too much about the ethics in this case (Google financing all this...) but it always does make me worry a bit about the health of Mozilla. I'm glad they've been expanding their income with other products, but it always feels like they're financially not as secure as I'd want to go all in on their stuff.
I knew there's two Mozillas but always assumed Mozilla Foundation is the one calling the shots as a non-profit NGO? I don't have a problem with Firefox making money per se, as long as that goal doesn't overshadow their others.
Yes, the foundation is the sole shareholder of the corporation.
Google. Still not entirely evil.
That's actually huge, because prior to this, the only (remotely major) social network that joined the Mastodon fediverse was Gab, and even then it was them trying to leech off the fediverse rather than contribute to it.
Mozilla are a big player and unlike a lot of Mastodon instances won't be under major threat of a shutdown.