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Still better than Twitter, but let's be honest
(i.imgflip.com)
Blog post by Christine Lemmer-Webber, co-editor of ActivityPub: https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/
The likely answer to this is that there will always have to be a large corporation at the heart of Bluesky/ATProto, and the network will have to rely on that corporation to do the work of abuse mitigation, particularly in terms of illegal content and spam. This may be a good enough solution for Bluesky’s purposes, but on the economics alone it’s going to be a centralized system that relies on trusting centralized authorities.
I mean... ok.
People assume that you need to "fix" social media.
Social media is bad by definition. Yes, including Fedi and Masto.
You're making it momentarily less crappy in a small region so that's where you are for a bit until it gets messy again and you have to move on.
Twitter is tobacco, Bluesky is weed, Fedi is vaping. The free information utopia of the 90s wasn't hijacked by corporations, it was wrong in the first place.
That's like saying food is bad. Most of society might be eating trash fast food with zero nutritional value, but that doesn't mean a healthy diet isn't possible.
I would posit that the fact I can converse with anyone anywhere at any time, makes the world a more connected and potentially peaceful place.
In fact I'd go so far as to argue, that thanks to the internet and social media, we are closer to global consensus as a species than ever before, in history.
Yeah, mostly because for a lot of human existence, we straight up didn't know what was happening even a couple hundred miles away.
But now we do. THAT IS GOOD. And that applies to any thought, event, or experience, be it a natural disaster or the latest chapter of a furry fanfic.
It used to be that people only formed communities where geographic proximity allowed for it. Social media has the potential to remove that limitation.
Does that come with downsides? Yes, but only if we let it. And I wouldn't even say that the immediately obvius downsides are the most pressing ones, not right now.
The most pressing issue with mainstream social media, is the fact it needs to make money, without its actual users being the customers. Instead of connecting people that wouldn't otherwise have crossed paths, or maintaining connections that would have otherwise broken, commercial social media maximizes engagement, which coincides with maximizing critical apathy, radicalization, and moral outrage.
Algorithms impose artificial forces that act on human social behaviour. A really big one is that people are a lot less likely to form communities online with people they don't already agree with about most things.
That has never been true in reality. People absolutely do come together and overcome differences. Reality often requires it. People who live or work together used to HAVE to figure it out, or go mad. Social media could be imposing that requirement globally.
Instead, because the effort required is a turn-off, commercial social media platforms are designed to not just let people avoid it, but to encourage them to do so.
We may be closer to global consensus than we have ever been before, but some of the systems we have built to supposedly facilitate communication, are actively taking us further away from it. But that's not inherent in how social media works. It's because of how it's been designed.
Engaging with society for real, takes effort, and a lot of it. Every piece of difference between how you personally view the world, and how everyone else does, tires you. You have to constantly do mental and emotional work, in order to comprehend the people you are engaging with. When actually doing that, no one can spend all day online. It tires you out, even as you enjoy the exchange of thought.
But since that doesn't make maximum money, who cares about connecting people across the world and facilitating mutual understanding!? Here's a post that confirms what you already think about that other political party, that other state, and that other country, and those other people! Here's two dozen more! Here's content you didn't even know about, and that is really a nothingburger, but which our algorithm has determined will flame up your feelings like a second coming of Hitler!!!
Bit of a wall of text, there and skimming the technooptimist take is dead on arrival with me there, so I'm not particularly interested in disecting it.
I'll say that comparing social media to food is maybe the most depressing thing I've seen all week, and there is quite a bit of competition.
You can also just compare it to communication in general. Maybe you can go your whole life never asking what other people think, but I can't, nor do I want to.
And I can not only find out what the person next to me is thinking, I can essentially sample people any place on earth on their thoughts and feelings. I think that is beautiful beyond words.
But I'm hardly an optimist. I am fully aware that we have utterly missed the train on climate change. Food production will crash. Millions will starve.
If you take the time to actually read what I'm saying, I'm not discounting the issues social media has, but I simply do not agree with your assessment that social media and its problems are one and the same.
Now, if you want to discuss whether well actually pull off solving them in time to not go extinct, that is a coinflip I wouldnt bet on.
But do you honestly believe that your comment, and mine, being possible, is a bad thing? Are the groups organizing relief efforts through social media after the LA fires, a bad thing?
I'm not sure how you define "social media" but to me it's an extremely wide term. To say it's all bad, is mad. You might say the good things can be done in other ways, but what are those other ways, that don't fit the definition of social media?
We are a species of sentient social individuals, currently transitioning from national scale thinking into planetary scale thinking.
If the internet and social media can't be molded into the tools we need to boot-strap pseudo-hivemind-thinking onto humanity, I don't know what can.
Say what you will, but for us to take care of this planet, the individuals most in need, and overall just make better decisions on a global scale, we need that, badly.
Yes, I believe it's a bad thing.
I also believe that patterns in communication emerge on large scales, and I believe most of those patterns are noxious, or at least that the noxious patterns disrupt most of the positive patterns, even without maximizing for engagement (but especially when maximizing for engagement). It is fundamentally different to engage communication personally than through broadcast media than through peer to peer social media. The behaviors each generates are not the same and the results of letting that communication run over time are also different.
We have historical examples of this. Changes brought about by mass media first, then social media. It's not philosophy, it's sociology. It can be measured.
Also, you keep trying to make this sound optimistic and making it creepy. "Kickstarting the hive mind" and "planetary scale thinking" aren't as bad as "that's like saying food is bad", but they're up there. I extremely don't want those. I have started blocking US media actively in my feeds to avoid those specifically. And hey, turns out it's pretty healthy. I feel a bit better.
The hypothesis is that shutting down all social media would be even better, but I haven't tested that one since 1994.
Do you consider book authoring to be social media, then? Should print be abolished? How is modern social media more than just a supercharged version of writing down your ideas, printing a shitload of copies, and handing them out in the street?
I'm fully aware. I'm not exactly excited about it, rather it's something I think is necessary for human society to function at the scale it has grown to.
And we're not going to become an actual hive mind. But unless it becomes "normal" to make decisions in a way that doesn't screw someone over on the other side of the world, down from us as individuals, up to our representatives in government, the world will continue to be shitty. That's what I'm referring to when I say "hive-mind" or "global" thinking.
We used to be able to live our lives within the confines of a tiny plot of land, and nothing you did within that plot of land affected anything outside that plot of land.
That is no longer the case. The materials of our homes, clothes and devices are made of, and the labor to assemble them. Our food, and the immense logistics around producing it just in time for us to consume.
All these things and so many more, and how they are achieved, have global implications.
As a species, we don't get to go back to the simple life anymore. We have responsibilities now. Ones we will likely fail to live up to, sure, but responsibilities nonetheless. And I don't think we can even attempt to function as a species without global broadcast communication, or whatever you want to call it.
That actually doesn't mean individuals can't opt out. If we can figure out how to make every t-shirt cruelty free, then yeah, you don't need to think about which one you wear anymore. And even before then, I don't think there's anything wrong with some living life as passengers in society.
That's fine. The social media I think would be best for us is one that nowhere near everyone needs to engage with. Not everyone needs to connect globally, the same way you don't need to know everyone at work, or every person in your city.
Everyone using it all the time is something commercial social media strives for. Because it needs to make money. And not just some, but ALL the money.
When it comes to communication, there IS such a thing as too much. If you only ever talk, then you never do. And if you refer back to my original comment, the kind of social media I want to see, takes very real effort to properly engage with. That kind of social media can't be something you use every day. Or even the kind every person wants to, or needs to, use.
We don't need to connect every person to every other person. But I think there does need to be systems that connect some people in every community, to a couple other people in every other community. And each connection doesn't even need to be the same few people.
The part that matters is that if done right, I think social media could teach us to stop playing the prisoners dilemma by endlessly defecting on a planetary scale.
That's something communication of all kinds achieves on a daily basis in millions of tiny instances. No-one has really built a system of communication around aiming for exactly that. In fact, most modern platforms very deliberately do the opposite.
Do I consider book authoring to be social media? No. That's mass media. Single origin, broadcast destination. At least once books started being printed industrially and sold as commodities. The definitions of these things are not new and are pretty well established.
And it had its share of fundamental changes compared to prior communication methods. People died. A LOT of people died.
Now, I used to think the people at the time saying print was bad and had to be controlled (and there were many) were the equivalent of modern social media naysayers and the Internet would bring a similar expansion of human consciousness past the growing pains.
I started being less sure about that maybe halfway through last decade and I was pretty convinced it wasn't true during the pandemic. Didn't even need the whole Musk/Trump stunt to get there. I don't necessarily think we can go back but I also don't think that the upsides are nearly as many as with print. Plus a bunch of the people that are gonna die this time are not dead yet, so I have a bit more empathy for them.