> OK, fine, now we need to define social media.

Here's my definition of the elements of "toxic social media":

1) the automated surfacing of messages from random people because they are "popular" (i.e. highly engaged) mixed in with personal messages. This is the amplifying effect that makes things hot.

2) the immediacy - a message can be spread insanely rapidly, faster than any individual humans can understand or respond to it. This is the fuel.

It's the fact that it happens at an inhuman scale that I think is the biggest part. Email at a human-to-human level is like letter writing. Information can travel through it, but it can't amplify by bypassing the human connections in the way that Twitter trending topics can. Likewise 1:1 or limited-sized groups on Whatsapp.

I'd even put Facebook groups into that bucket, so long as they're full of humans who know each other. It's once you get to groups with millions of people who don't know each other directly that things get out of hand.

You raise a good point. Is the problem "social media", or is it simply democratized publishing? Would a "fediverse" of distributed blogs really be more resistant to misinformation, or would it just be harder to censor? Is this simply a problem inherent to the internet?

In the old days, the number of available channels for mass-distribution of opinions was low, and people were in general restricted to face-to-face communication with a crowd, or possibly calling a radio show or sending a letter to a newspaper. This made it easy to control the spread when someone voiced opinions or information that were disruptive to society. Today, many people around the Globe have considerably stronger protections of their free speech compared to 50 or 100 years ago, and this combined with the fact that channels for mass-distribution of opinions is now a commodity, freely available to billions of people.

Seen in that perspective, social media could be considered a part of the problem simply for being a way for people to voice their opinions, but as you wrote, a "fediverse" would not be more resistant to disruptive opinions. It will be a problem as long a people have a variety of ways to communicate with lots of people.

The fediverse would be better because it wouldn't have an algorithm choosing things to show you based on what keeps you engaged.

Why not? In the era of the attention economy, an algorithm generating engagement keeps people more engaged.

I think it's naive to assume that a fediverse wouldn't eventually include somebody developing such an algorithm that becomes popular among the average user base.

It is even more naive because everything already optimized for engagement by selective pressure without algorithms. Headlines were the original clickbait.

Blaming algorithims is the "big lie" essentially of repeating something enough that people eventually believe it is true. I noticed it before and dismissed it as the bullshit it was but even computer literate people are falling for the hysteria.