51–60 of 148 posts
tl;dr: people have a huge diversity of preferences for social media, we need to rearchitect social networks to allow them to express those preferences while still connecting with each other, I think atproto enables this and is where I'm betting on.
The closest platform that is a somewhat known group of people coming together in a semi-private space seems to be Discord. You can have as large or as small a community you want, you can have known people, unknown people. Mastodon comes close as well, but the effort to start a discord community is so much smaller compared to running a Mastodon instance.
What are people using now instead of Facebook (for broastcast and interaction with friends/family)? Chat groups in WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram etc fulfills part of it but that's only a subset since people in one chat groups know each other to a certain degree.
Nothing. I see them when I see them. If there’s something urgent we call each other or send an SMS. There’s no need for daily, weekly or even monthly updates. This makes meeting and talking in person always interesting because there’s so much to sync that we’ve all had time to digest beforehand. In the beginning when I left Facebook over ten years ago it felt alienating. Then it felt too quiet. Then whenever I met pe…
It feels paradoxical to say that, but I think it's true both that social media is bigger than ever in terms of flurry and activity, and that normal people participate less (outside scrolling the feed passively). A few people are semi-professionalizing in it now, influencers with sponsorships, local celebrities and trendsetters etc., while normal people's normal life updates are dwindling. The Pareto split is sharper.
What he describes existed and didn’t scale comparing to modern social media. It was called LiveJournal.
I think modern social media is a huge problem but don’t see we can fix it without regulation. It’s clear that all the current incentives point companies towards engagement and rage bait and away from anything actually “social”, and I think it’s unlikely that any new social network that tries to fix these issues would achieve widespread usage. Have any countries proposed legislation to help reign it in? What would tha…
I think banning algorithm based feeds is a start Getting rid of any non personal accounts also. So no companies, brands, or meme accounts, and accounts that exist for non personal content only.
It exists: Whatsapp Also Discord and Reddit are not too bad for more strangers with common topic based chat that isn't too algorithmic.
The closest platform that is a somewhat known group of people coming together in a semi-private space seems to be Discord. You can have as large or as small a community you want, you can have known people, unknown people. Mastodon comes close as well, but the effort to start a discord community is so much smaller compared to running a Mastodon instance.
Wouldn't this also extend to Matrix/Mumble/XMPP/TeamSpeak then?
I don’t want to be limited to „meaningful connections!“ I stay in close contact with those who are dear to me outside of social media. I want to stay connected to some random coworker I enjoyed working with in 2011, because I enjoy watching them from a distance, getting married, settling down, that kind of stuff, and occasionally comment on these things. This used to be a strength of social media before algorithms ca…
I wonder if that voyeuristic use case is good for people/society. People used to naturally fade from each other's lives, maybe you saw each other in the street if you stayed in the same area, you could ask them about their life in person. If you were closer friends, they'd show you the photos of their wedding or vacation when you visited for dinner or hung out. Even in the early version, these life updates became a c…
There are people who fade out of one’s lives for various reasons, but it doesn’t mean that the relationship has to end at that. There are many schoolmates, coworkers, etc. who I wish l I had some idea where they were now, which I don’t have right now because of my general avoidance of social media.
This is just a way of keeping on the pulse and generating common context if said pair were to meet again, instead of simply awkwardly smiling and trying to end a conversation as soon as possible.