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date = 2023-04-30
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https://mastodon.social/@trwnh/110290827199480228

nobody asked but i think fedi as a whole is actually kinda "bad" in the sense that it's holding us back from better things. it's like the "reform" option when we need radical change. and it keeps getting "worse". somewhere along the way we seem to have dropped the "blogging" from "microblogging", and what remains is incredibly muddled. contextual and ergonomic failure. we're copying "social media" and inheriting its flaws. ad-free and chronological ain't enough.

see, we're all mostly here to just hang out and spill a stream of consciousness, right? but there are problems inherent to the structure. context collapse (or no context at all), misuse of the medium (doing a "thread" instead of writing an article), and so on. everything just goes into the square hole.

i posit we can do better. but it's gonna require going back to basics and building out communication paradigms from the ground up. with thought given to effective communication, not profitability

but. (and this is where i am afraid of shit-stirring)

no one wants to do that

the people working on fedi past and present seem mostly invested in mass adoption, and the way to do that is to keep building on broken foundations. and it feels kinda cultish at this point, like the goal is "success" defined by "growth", and it's a branding game, it's lip service.

"mastodon", even "activitypub" itself, is seemingly about mindshare more than anything tangible.

i don't particularly want to call out specific people for this, because it's not just a few people, it seems to be a cultural issue. the framing is that we can replace those social media platforms instead of tearing them down as we ought to. mastodon wants to become the next twitter. pixelfed wants to become the next instagram. and so on.

on some level i think the people are just looking for validation of their work. but this leads to a kind of conservative outlook toward actually improving...

yes, this thread could have been a blog post. that's part of the problem

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i mean we stop doing "social media" as twitter and facebook made, and go (go back?) to clearly publishing and clearly discussing, as two separate things. remember blogs and forums? on blogs, you publish. on forums, you discuss. on "social media", this distinction gets collapsed. a "post" and its "replies" are all in this one big global context by default. who is the audience? what is the purpose? these questions don't have clear answers on "social media". corpos profit from this ambiguity.

in "social media", the audience is "whoever we put this in front of" and the purpose is "an endless feed of posts for you to graze from". contrast this with the intentionality of cultivating your own audience, and of communicating with them. fedi gets us halfway. we move away from the profit-oriented mindset, but we keep the trappings and mechanisms that were created in service of them.

tldr we're on the Web and we should remember that. death to "platforms". empower actual people to set up their own spaces and domains.

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there is an argument to be made that the right thing would not have been made clear if we hadn't kept making mistakes like chasing the big corporate players. i'd be open to this argument 10 or 15 years ago around the time of identica or diaspora, but since then it's just become more apparent that this whole space will never be anything more than a transitional holding-place for people who leave the walled gardens for... fenced gardens, i gues? and the better thing hasn't been built yet.

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here on the World Wide Web you have two threats: capitalist enclosure, and toxic community. and honestly the latter is probably less bad, because at least you have the self-determination to make your own community with your valued friends if the current one gets too bad. with the former, you have no escape.

in short, "social media" is a failed model invented by capitalists. what we need is a "social web". focus on people, not "content".

want to entertain yourself? that's fine, there can be media hubs and curators for that. but your communications and your media consumption should be separate.

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honestly as much as meta gets tiring, at least these are conversations that can actually be had with a nonzero chance at actually shaping things.

you think twitter or instagram gives a shit what its users want or think? nope, it's all about driving ad revenue