Avoiding the Global Lobotomy

Re:Avoiding the Global Lobotomy by yogthos on Saturday June 06, 2020 @10:01AM (#23439225)

I think the answer is to decommericalize social media. I use Mastodon Social and it has none of these problems because it doesn't aim to monetize the users of the platform. It's an open source project developed by the users for the users. It doesn't need to keep you engaged, it doesn't need to push ads to you, doesn't need to track you, and so on. This creates a drastically different user experience that's not designed to exploit the user and turn them into a commodity.

One simple example is that Mastodon allows you to disable notifications for likes and retoots, you can just ignore them completely. So you can just see when people reply to your posts and actually interact with you. This small changes makes a huge difference in the experience. And this is precisely the kind of feature that simply can't exist on a service like Twitter because that would result in lower engagement.

There's now a whole federation of such open source services using ActivityPub, and I really think it's the future of social media. The federation is inherently decentralized, with servers being run by regular people across the globe. You can find communities that focus on your particular interests, and there's no single entity deciding how the platform should work for everybody. This approach is also more resilient to censorship as servers are located in many countries across many different jurisdictions. This is precisely the way internet was originally meant to work before it got commercialized and turned into the nightmare that it is today.

This also directly helps with the problem of Overton-window-compression and normalcy-compression that the article talks about. You have some weird kink or idea, then you can run your own server for people who share it. You can even make it private.

Some of the ActivityPub services I recommend checking out are

https://joinmastodon.org/

https://pixelfed.social/

https://joinpeertube.org/

https://write.as/

come join us and help build a community by the users for the users

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Avoiding the Global Lobotomy by luckylion on Saturday June 06, 2020 @11:21AM (#23439768)

> I use Mastodon Social and it has none of these problems because it doesn't aim to monetize the users of the platform.

But it still does the likes & retweets part, right? Because I agree with the comment you replied to that that is the problem, not the intention behind doing it.

I'm unsure whether people would use Twitter (or Mastodon for that matter) if it wasn't there. I believe the real-time and constant feedback of belonging to some culture is what drives usage of social media platforms, and in turn influences what people present as (and possibly what they become) because they want positive feedback and want to avoid negative feedback.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Avoiding the Global Lobotomy by yogthos on Saturday June 06, 2020 @12:06PM (#23440122)

Mastodon does likes and retweets, but lets you completely ignore them removing the stimulus. So, the difference with Twitter is that you're constantly notified that people liked or retweeted your stuff, and you see the numbers. When that information isn't displayed then you don't think about it at all.

Having used both Twitter and Mastodon for a while now, I can definitely say that Mastodon is a much healthier environment. For me at least, it completely avoids the dopamine loop that Twitter creates, and I don't have the constant urge to keep checking it.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Avoiding the Global Lobotomy by jasondclinton on Saturday June 06, 2020 @01:50PM (#23440946)

I was on Mastodon for more than a year and loved it: great conversation that reminded me of the hope and promise of the Internet in the late 90's. Then my instance admin went AWOL, the site crashed, and all of my data and social graph were lost. I still can't get the admin to respond to emails. I could host my own server but who really has the technical know-how and time to do that kind of work? Mastodon has got to solve the reliability and/or portability problem. If I could have recovered my social graph on another instance, I would still be on the network.

Edit: I donated to the admin's Patreon account in excess of his hosting fees. But, that didn't cover his time, apparently. The admin is still active on GitHub after the server crashed; I guess he just lost interest.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Avoiding the Global Lobotomy by yogthos on Saturday June 06, 2020 @02:09PM (#23441121)

That's of course the downside of a federated internet model run by many individual administrators. Nowadays, there are very large instances that are funded, and are very unlikely to just up and disappear. Also, running your own instance is actually not that hard nowadays. Digital Ocean has a provisioned option where it's a one click set up.

Mastodon also has the option to do import and export right in the UI. So, you can easily export your network graph now. Migrating between instances has explicit support now as well https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/06/how-to-migrate-from-on...

And I think these improvements show that community run services like this do listen to the users, and evolve to make them more user friendly over time.

[ Parent | on HN ]