You raise a lot of good points. I considered changing the title of my submission to something more generically applicable, but considering the political bent of the article itself, I didn't feel...
You raise a lot of good points. I considered changing the title of my submission to something more generically applicable, but considering the political bent of the article itself, I didn't feel like it'd be right to give people false impressions just to get more clicks. The overall idea definitely has merit across the board, though.
As far as the issues being faced by bloggers, I don't really have much experience with that side of the internet so I can hardly call myself an expert, but it's true that personal blogs don't have the same level of reach and relevancy that they used to before the rise of centralized "ad-verse" platforms like Twitter. (As far as whether it's affected by the corporate interests on these platforms, that's an entirely different debate.) That being said, I doubt moving to Mastodon would help them regain that clout; if anything, it would make it even more difficult, since discoverability is much less emphasized on these instances. There's no popups of "who to follow," no posts by random accounts shown in your timeline because a lot of your mutual followers liked them, etc. It's solely reserved for people you specifically search for, see posts from, etc. What's more, there's hardly any celebrity or brand presence, or really any special power given to people who would be considered influential elsewhere. So I don't see why having a lot of left-wing bloggers make the switch would spur any kind of avalanche of new users.
This discussion kind of reminded me of a post I saw earlier which struck a chord with me. I screenshotted it so I'll post a link if I find it again.
Tumblr and Twitter got us addicted to this idea that "being connected" is what makes you more friends, and that blocking people is thus an act of aggression and pushing people away. But are we really happier just "being connected"? Are you actually any less lonely with a million strangers staring at you rather than in a closed space with a handful of friends you trust?
Connections are good. But we should be focusing on making good connections, not necessarily "more" connections.
By the way...this is why I don't necessarily agree with the common fediverse mentality of "cutting off the birdsite cold turkey". That's probably much easier to do when you have much less to lose by doing so, too.
To change people's social media habits requires, well...being social. It requires going back and forth and checking on the friends you care about and taking that journey together.
Yeah. RSS was perfect for following bloggers because it’s a persistent “inbox” of stuff. Facebook and Twitter are not great for it because timelines just bury stuff that’s old and everything just...
As far as the issues being faced by bloggers, I don't really have much experience with that side of the internet so I can hardly call myself an expert, but it's true that personal blogs don't have the same level of reach and relevancy that they used to before the rise of centralized "ad-verse" platforms like Twitter. (As far as whether it's affected by the corporate interests on these platforms, that's an entirely different debate.) That being said, I doubt moving to Mastodon would help them regain that clout; if anything, it would make it even more difficult, since discoverability is much less emphasized on these instances. There's no popups of "who to follow," no posts by random accounts shown in your timeline because a lot of your mutual followers liked them, etc. It's solely reserved for people you specifically search for, see posts from, etc.
Yeah. RSS was perfect for following bloggers because it’s a persistent “inbox” of stuff. Facebook and Twitter are not great for it because timelines just bury stuff that’s old and everything just comes in as an undifferentiated stream of content.
I mean, this is a very recent feature of Twitter, which it more or less took over from Facebook and Reddit. The platform works fine without it as well (I always turn of algorithmic timeline...
As far as the issues being faced by bloggers, I don't really have much experience with that side of the internet so I can hardly call myself an expert, but it's true that personal blogs don't have the same level of reach and relevancy that they used to before the rise of centralized "ad-verse" platforms like Twitter. (As far as whether it's affected by the corporate interests on these platforms, that's an entirely different debate.) That being said, I doubt moving to Mastodon would help them regain that clout; if anything, it would make it even more difficult, since discoverability is much less emphasized on these instances.There's no popups of "who to follow," no posts by random accounts shown in your timeline because a lot of your mutual followers liked them, etc. It's solely reserved for people you specifically search for, see posts from, etc.
I mean, this is a very recent feature of Twitter, which it more or less took over from Facebook and Reddit. The platform works fine without it as well (I always turn of algorithmic timeline because I hate the way it works). And it kinda works fine on Mastodon since Boosts and the Federated Timeline are a thing. But it doesn't work as fine as Tumblr did and it most certainly doesn't have the kind of search or recommendation capabilities as Twitter or Tumblr have, by virtue of the data not being centrally accessible without some kind of third party.
This is the chicken-and-the-egg problem of social media: it's where you are because that's where everything you want is, but it's there because that's where people like you are. It's probably...
This seems highly doubtful to me. Not many would leave behind their Twitter or Facebook that has connections to their real friends to be able to listen to what a blogger has to say. The point of "just keep using the Facebook account too" sort of accounts for it, but will anybody really miss seeing their favorite blogger's posts enough to join another site?
This is the chicken-and-the-egg problem of social media: it's where you are because that's where everything you want is, but it's there because that's where people like you are. It's probably possible to migrate from Twitter to Mastodon, but it'd take a long transition period and probably some kind of massive Twitter exodus to really cement it.
From my personal experience, I didn't really feel a significant pull to my Mastodon instance until I'd amassed a decent-sized network of mutuals whose posts I often saw and who often interacted...
From my personal experience, I didn't really feel a significant pull to my Mastodon instance until I'd amassed a decent-sized network of mutuals whose posts I often saw and who often interacted with my own posts. Screaming into the void can be fun when it's a new void, but after a while, the novelty of a new platform wears off and you have to have actual reasons to stay. In my case, though, I didn't try to leave the social media sites I was already on, and I essentially built a new social environment from scratch without trying to leave as a group with other people I already knew.
It's kind of worse than that, if I'm being honest, Lydia Conwell says: When in the introduction of the essay, Schneider writes: She could have made the argument that Schneider undervalues the role...
This link refused to work for me on any connection worked after retrying after 10 minutes, but saying you didn't even read the whole thing isn't a good look for someone who is trying to use it as a reputable source. Especially when the essay is only like 20 pages of actual text to read, with the rest being images and sources.
It's kind of worse than that, if I'm being honest, Lydia Conwell says:
Although admittedly I didn't read the entire essay, it seems to me that the elephant-in-his-essay is capitalism...
When in the introduction of the essay, Schneider writes:
I do not here dwell on ways in which the digital economy may be fostering a “new feudalism” of wealth inequality (Mowshowitz, 2001), although governance and economy frequently intermingle.
She could have made the argument that Schneider undervalues the role capitalism plays in the issue he describes. Instead she just kind of assumes they're talking about the same thing without checking. It's not a great look at all.
And this "I don't really know what I'm talking about but I'm going to say things anways" approach kind of pervades the whole post:
Whether this is deliberate censorship or merely an attempt to get bloggers to pay for advertising I do not know.
As genius as I am, I must confess I am no expert on decentralised social media
She also makes some statements that really display a lack of research on her part:
When Schneider talks of “Governance systems that seek to inscribe authority within commonly agreed-upon rules ... generally through the capacity to transfer that authority to someone else”, isn't this the Fediverse?
I mean...no, it really isn't. Mastodon may offer people the ability to switch between servers without leaving the platform or host their own instances but it's still built upon the same Admin-Moderator-User hierarchy Schneider describes. There are no mechanisms in the code to hold Mastodon Moderators or Admin accountable for their actions, not unless they design them themselves. Your only really option to dissent against tyrannical overlords on a Mastodon instance is to leave.
I do wonder however if extremist alt-right shitbags could flourish on Mastodon, and I see no reason why they couldn't, but you have to remember they already flourish on other platforms.
I guess this depends on what one means with "flourish" but they're already there: Gab is on the fedi now. Qanon has it's own fedi instances.
Also another nitpick: the conclusion is really wishy-washy:
There needs to be an exodus of the left, just a simple boycott of the ad-verse platforms. Having said that nobody needs to delete their old social media accounts. This need not be an instant or complete boycott. That's the beauty of the web; the old accounts can be kept while they still prove profitable. The decentralised platforms can be used alongside Facebook and Twitter, but I do think the decentralised platforms should become everyone's primary platforms.
"There needs to be an exodus, but not really an exodus. More like a boycott but not really a boycott. More like just using both centralized and decentralized platforms side-by-side, but also not really."
I mean which one is it? She can't have it all at the same time. If what she's doing is advocacy then at some point she kind of has to take a position and own it. Otherwise her words really just don't hold that much weight.
A few notes: First of all, I was confused right off the bat when she referred to the "2019 general election," wondering if it might've been a typo for an intended reference to the 2016 U.S....
A few notes:
First of all, I was confused right off the bat when she referred to the "2019 general election," wondering if it might've been a typo for an intended reference to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, but realized it was actually referring to the British elections last year. That's America-centrism for you! (Probably should've also been clued in by the spelling of "labour," tbh.)
When she refers to the "feudal structure" of social media and how they're administered unilaterally by admins who own the platforms, it's interesting to note that decentralized alternatives like Mastodon don't necessarily change that, since the same administrative structures remain in place. However, that doesn't necessarily need to be the case, and the instance I'm on is run as a cooperative. What's more, the fact that so many instances are available means people are free to migrate between them with minimal effort if the owner is behaving tyrannically (or is embroiled in a personal scandal). I wonder if there'd be some way to study the overall trends of moderation strictness and its effects on migration. Then again, considering that many instances are geared towards niche groups and have other cultural factors at play, it'd be difficult to do so without becoming incredibly subjective and making inaccurate generalizations. How does one even quantify "strictness," for example?
Another interesting point is that she often refers to left-wing bloggers and content creators "switching platforms," as if the goal is to fuel another traditional site to become the next Twitter or Facebook. While there are "flagship" instances like mastodon.social which offer a similar genre of experience to Twitter, I don't think it's accurate to proclaim Mastodon, and by extension the rest of the fediverse, as some kind of unified platform. She even mentions potential infiltration by alt-right extremists, apparently overlooking that there are already instances like Gab which already cater to that demographic. Yet those instances are largely silo'd off from other instances, and even those which don't explicitly defederate from them and block all traffic get some heat for not going far enough to protect people on other instances they're connected to. Thus, I'd be hesitant to call Mastodon a platform in and of itself, since that implies it's a unified space. At the risk of sounding pseudo-academic, I'd call it a "meta-platform," with the instances on it filling the role of separate social actors which operate according to various distinct ideas and may or may not "talk" to each other according to differences in said ideas.
A lot of this is just me rambling based on this article, so if anyone else versed in this topic has observations about this, I'd be interested to hear them.
I just don't think Mastodon is very practical to use. And I'm a techie. Regular people would have an even harder time. But maybe I'm not the target audience. I don't like or use Twitter. That is...
I just don't think Mastodon is very practical to use. And I'm a techie. Regular people would have an even harder time.
But maybe I'm not the target audience. I don't like or use Twitter. That is the shoe Mastodon is trying to fill.
That's fair. If you don't like or use twitter today, Mastodon isn't a good fit. But, that being said: It's the same protocol that powers this article, a blog. From mastodon, you can follow this...
That's fair. If you don't like or use twitter today, Mastodon isn't a good fit.
But, that being said: It's the same protocol that powers this article, a blog. From mastodon, you can follow this plume account, and get your blog updates. Or, you could use friendica, which is more like facebook than twitter, and uses the same protocol (At least, it can federate with it, friendica uses another similar protocol as a default). If you a more a instagram person, there's pixelfed. More a youtuber? Peertube.
All of them speak the same protocol. And all federate with each other.
Yea maybe it’s the fact that the promise of a “new Twitter” does not sound appealing to me at all but whenever I tried to look into mastodon I ultimately had to give up out of general frustration...
Yea maybe it’s the fact that the promise of a “new Twitter” does not sound appealing to me at all but whenever I tried to look into mastodon I ultimately had to give up out of general frustration with the process. It’s so damn complicated and confusing. Same with the WikiTribune thing. I got an invite, had a look and never came back since I plain don’t get the appeal. It’s probably a 90% UX issue and has little to do with the tech or content.
You raise a lot of good points. I considered changing the title of my submission to something more generically applicable, but considering the political bent of the article itself, I didn't feel like it'd be right to give people false impressions just to get more clicks. The overall idea definitely has merit across the board, though.
As far as the issues being faced by bloggers, I don't really have much experience with that side of the internet so I can hardly call myself an expert, but it's true that personal blogs don't have the same level of reach and relevancy that they used to before the rise of centralized "ad-verse" platforms like Twitter. (As far as whether it's affected by the corporate interests on these platforms, that's an entirely different debate.) That being said, I doubt moving to Mastodon would help them regain that clout; if anything, it would make it even more difficult, since discoverability is much less emphasized on these instances. There's no popups of "who to follow," no posts by random accounts shown in your timeline because a lot of your mutual followers liked them, etc. It's solely reserved for people you specifically search for, see posts from, etc. What's more, there's hardly any celebrity or brand presence, or really any special power given to people who would be considered influential elsewhere. So I don't see why having a lot of left-wing bloggers make the switch would spur any kind of avalanche of new users.
This discussion kind of reminded me of a post I saw earlier which struck a chord with me. I screenshotted it so I'll post a link if I find it again.
Yeah. RSS was perfect for following bloggers because it’s a persistent “inbox” of stuff. Facebook and Twitter are not great for it because timelines just bury stuff that’s old and everything just comes in as an undifferentiated stream of content.
I mean, this is a very recent feature of Twitter, which it more or less took over from Facebook and Reddit. The platform works fine without it as well (I always turn of algorithmic timeline because I hate the way it works). And it kinda works fine on Mastodon since Boosts and the Federated Timeline are a thing. But it doesn't work as fine as Tumblr did and it most certainly doesn't have the kind of search or recommendation capabilities as Twitter or Tumblr have, by virtue of the data not being centrally accessible without some kind of third party.
This is the chicken-and-the-egg problem of social media: it's where you are because that's where everything you want is, but it's there because that's where people like you are. It's probably possible to migrate from Twitter to Mastodon, but it'd take a long transition period and probably some kind of massive Twitter exodus to really cement it.
From my personal experience, I didn't really feel a significant pull to my Mastodon instance until I'd amassed a decent-sized network of mutuals whose posts I often saw and who often interacted with my own posts. Screaming into the void can be fun when it's a new void, but after a while, the novelty of a new platform wears off and you have to have actual reasons to stay. In my case, though, I didn't try to leave the social media sites I was already on, and I essentially built a new social environment from scratch without trying to leave as a group with other people I already knew.
It's kind of worse than that, if I'm being honest, Lydia Conwell says:
When in the introduction of the essay, Schneider writes:
She could have made the argument that Schneider undervalues the role capitalism plays in the issue he describes. Instead she just kind of assumes they're talking about the same thing without checking. It's not a great look at all.
And this "I don't really know what I'm talking about but I'm going to say things anways" approach kind of pervades the whole post:
She also makes some statements that really display a lack of research on her part:
I mean...no, it really isn't. Mastodon may offer people the ability to switch between servers without leaving the platform or host their own instances but it's still built upon the same Admin-Moderator-User hierarchy Schneider describes. There are no mechanisms in the code to hold Mastodon Moderators or Admin accountable for their actions, not unless they design them themselves. Your only really option to dissent against tyrannical overlords on a Mastodon instance is to leave.
I guess this depends on what one means with "flourish" but they're already there: Gab is on the fedi now. Qanon has it's own fedi instances.
Also another nitpick: the conclusion is really wishy-washy:
"There needs to be an exodus, but not really an exodus. More like a boycott but not really a boycott. More like just using both centralized and decentralized platforms side-by-side, but also not really."
I mean which one is it? She can't have it all at the same time. If what she's doing is advocacy then at some point she kind of has to take a position and own it. Otherwise her words really just don't hold that much weight.
A few notes:
First of all, I was confused right off the bat when she referred to the "2019 general election," wondering if it might've been a typo for an intended reference to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, but realized it was actually referring to the British elections last year. That's America-centrism for you! (Probably should've also been clued in by the spelling of "labour," tbh.)
When she refers to the "feudal structure" of social media and how they're administered unilaterally by admins who own the platforms, it's interesting to note that decentralized alternatives like Mastodon don't necessarily change that, since the same administrative structures remain in place. However, that doesn't necessarily need to be the case, and the instance I'm on is run as a cooperative. What's more, the fact that so many instances are available means people are free to migrate between them with minimal effort if the owner is behaving tyrannically (or is embroiled in a personal scandal). I wonder if there'd be some way to study the overall trends of moderation strictness and its effects on migration. Then again, considering that many instances are geared towards niche groups and have other cultural factors at play, it'd be difficult to do so without becoming incredibly subjective and making inaccurate generalizations. How does one even quantify "strictness," for example?
Another interesting point is that she often refers to left-wing bloggers and content creators "switching platforms," as if the goal is to fuel another traditional site to become the next Twitter or Facebook. While there are "flagship" instances like mastodon.social which offer a similar genre of experience to Twitter, I don't think it's accurate to proclaim Mastodon, and by extension the rest of the fediverse, as some kind of unified platform. She even mentions potential infiltration by alt-right extremists, apparently overlooking that there are already instances like Gab which already cater to that demographic. Yet those instances are largely silo'd off from other instances, and even those which don't explicitly defederate from them and block all traffic get some heat for not going far enough to protect people on other instances they're connected to. Thus, I'd be hesitant to call Mastodon a platform in and of itself, since that implies it's a unified space. At the risk of sounding pseudo-academic, I'd call it a "meta-platform," with the instances on it filling the role of separate social actors which operate according to various distinct ideas and may or may not "talk" to each other according to differences in said ideas.
A lot of this is just me rambling based on this article, so if anyone else versed in this topic has observations about this, I'd be interested to hear them.
I just don't think Mastodon is very practical to use. And I'm a techie. Regular people would have an even harder time.
But maybe I'm not the target audience. I don't like or use Twitter. That is the shoe Mastodon is trying to fill.
And other networks are even more obscure.
That's fair. If you don't like or use twitter today, Mastodon isn't a good fit.
But, that being said: It's the same protocol that powers this article, a blog. From mastodon, you can follow this plume account, and get your blog updates. Or, you could use friendica, which is more like facebook than twitter, and uses the same protocol (At least, it can federate with it, friendica uses another similar protocol as a default). If you a more a instagram person, there's pixelfed. More a youtuber? Peertube.
All of them speak the same protocol. And all federate with each other.
So Plume is for blogging/longform? I could get used to that. I'm not into Facebook or Instagram.
Yep, it's pretty cool :)
Yea maybe it’s the fact that the promise of a “new Twitter” does not sound appealing to me at all but whenever I tried to look into mastodon I ultimately had to give up out of general frustration with the process. It’s so damn complicated and confusing. Same with the WikiTribune thing. I got an invite, had a look and never came back since I plain don’t get the appeal. It’s probably a 90% UX issue and has little to do with the tech or content.