111–120 of 158 posts
> Social media was supposed to connect us, but most of it has turned into ads, division, and loneliness. I'm betting on ATProto as a way to fix that I disagree with the premise here. I think the core mechanics of social media, ie instant communication between random strangers about random topics, creates toxic interactions regardless of whether it's manipulated by engagement algorithms. Some of the most toxic convers…
Maybe it's because I watched The Expanse too many times, I'm kinda attracted by their concept of COMM system. Based on how it was depicted, it's a site-to-site (thus P2P) based system that allows encryption, hop-via-proxy and multi-stream transport (embedding files in video call). When they want to send a message, the data is first stored in a local "COMM Buffer" and then the system will handle the actual transmissio…
People younger than me may want to read up on UUCP/NNTP/Fidonet systems, which did this. Ideal if you don't have FTL communications, or are just limited to a really slow phone line.
> People get on social media to do things, maybe it's gather info, maybe it's to learn, maybe it's to make contact etc.
Yes, exactly. There's this odd cognitive dissonance because people who make social networks are really into the process of "making a social network", but for everyone else it's a means to an end, and usually as part of a "community", however that ends up being defined.
> Think about it this way: if you build a social media, then you WILL inherit all the problems of social media as well
Yes - and those are not new. A certain segment of people are optimistic/privileged enough to not believe the problems are real until it's too late.
> Social media was supposed to connect us, but most of it has turned into ads, division, and loneliness. I'm betting on ATProto as a way to fix that I disagree with the premise here. I think the core mechanics of social media, ie instant communication between random strangers about random topics, creates toxic interactions regardless of whether it's manipulated by engagement algorithms. Some of the most toxic convers…
Mastodon/ActivityPub has a lot more to offer than mastodon.social but getting to that also means leaving the Twitter look and feel and folks realising they don’t have to follow trends set for them by influencers and big VC funded operations. If it’s really a social experience, it should have a people-first focus.
And it really is not about protocols - at the end of the day, email and RSS can also form a social network.
> Social media was supposed to connect us, but most of it has turned into ads, division, and loneliness. I'm betting on ATProto as a way to fix that I disagree with the premise here. I think the core mechanics of social media, ie instant communication between random strangers about random topics, creates toxic interactions regardless of whether it's manipulated by engagement algorithms. Some of the most toxic convers…
> Social media was supposed to connect us, but most of it has turned into ads, division, and loneliness. I'm betting on ATProto as a way to fix that I disagree with the premise here. I think the core mechanics of social media, ie instant communication between random strangers about random topics, creates toxic interactions regardless of whether it's manipulated by engagement algorithms. Some of the most toxic convers…
Bingo. Not a big (or even a small) user of social media. But small, focused communities are where I see it bring the most value for the user.
They are also where I've seen the most interesting initiatives since the 90s. The rest is just influential "people" broadcasting their content.
How does ATProto solve the problems that the last 10–20 years have shown seem intrinsic to all social media once it hits a certain scale? For example: A simple simulation of social networks rapidly reproduced three well-documented dysfunctions: partisan echo chambers, concentrated influence among a small elite, and amplification of polarized voices - creating a "social media prism" that distorts political discourse.…
I prefer the Fediverse to BlueSky, because it solves your three problems. I choose to see every post on my (small country) instance, so if there is an echo chamber, it's an instance-shaped one. Which I like - I see the range of views prevalent in my small country. "Elite" posters depend on posting good content and are rewarded only by other people boosting their posts. I tend to use Mastodon which makes finding a pos…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This _isn’t_ the core mechanism of social media. When social media took off, Facebook and Instagram that really did allow you to connect with people that you knew from real life. Twitter was different, and more like microblogging, but I still see the real value of social media to be what the un-shitty versions of Facebook and Instagram were.
I always wondered about this.... in the beginning of instagram, i would follow maybe 30, 40 people, open it 2-3 times per day, and every time there would be 3-5 new photos of random stuff taken by those people (lunch/dinner plates, views from the window, beer glass on the bar, whatever). Years later, i would follow 200 people, and i would open instagram once per day and all i'd see were random peoples photos and vide…
Not totally[0] but you'd almost never know it because of all the ads and other junk that Instagram insists you see before the stuff you actually want to see.
(see also YouTube, Facebook, etc.)
[0] although I know a few people who have either limited or stopped posting because they feel there's no point if people don't get to see it. Me, I post for myself (and future historians) and if other people see it, grand.
I'm betting on domain names, HTML and email.
And that means making closed port 53 illegal on your home fiber... good luck!
Also need to open port 25 outgoing on that same fiber.
And we all need routers that run dd-wrt, the problem is all routers that support dd-wrt are sold out because support always comes late in the production cycle.
It's hard work to self host, but it's the only work worth doing.
I'd be curious to see how ATProto stacks up against ActivityPub in the long run. I was very excited by the prospects of Mastodon, PeerTube, and a few other Fediverse apps. I even started implementing my own ActivityPub library based on their RFC before I fizzled out. But, the Fediverse never really seemed to take off in the mainstream. Mozilla launched their own mastodon instance around 2023 and then closed it in 202…
To be fair, given Mozilla's recent record, I'd take that as a positive sign of the Fediverse's potential.
(Nope, not forgiven them for fucking up and closing Pocket. Never will.)