The path of least resistance states that some big company owning social media isn't a problem, until it is.
If things seem competently run, you'll give them a shot, start posting, entering a bunch of personal data, tell your friends.
I think it will be harder to convince people to do that going forward. We've had a sort of 'social media reset' the past 6 months or so, and if anything, it seems to be accelerating (as all the big platforms start doubling down on really bad ideas.)
Ultimately the web is transient, and stuff can change over time, and a site that was once trusted can lose that trust.
Better, I think, to exist on a platform where no one owns you, your data is exportable (and importable, some places) and your follow graph can move with you.
You get to watch flameouts and personalities and bad admins in realtime here, too, lots more of them than just one.
But you're ultimately not beholden to any of that. You can move until you find your people, and your followers come with you.
Kbin and Mastodon are spit and bubble gum, MacGuyver in a closet hacking out a working solution whereas the big names have development budgets counted in millions of dollars.
This has been the hardest thing to explain to people. Yes, there's the case where a lot of features probably should have been prioritized (in retrospect) but it's not a failing of the platform that it wasn't available with full feature parity to a company that spends millions of dollars a year developing and enhancing their website and spreading the load across a large server infrastructure, with hundreds (literally hundreds) of employees who do nothing but write code. For a living. Full time.
The 'in our spare time, after our day job' volunteer DIY army has done amazing shit here in the Fediverse, but (in my opinion) you come off like a bit of a dick when you ask why the volunteer-led hobby software doesn't have the hot shit features of a bigger platform.
It's fine to recognize the shortcomings of the software, but just realize it comes with certain tradeoffs.
For instance, you know something else we don't have here?
The rights to sell all your data or charge you for API access.
Also, I don't think anyone predicted all the big social media platforms would fall the fuck apart this quickly.
Fediverse platforms weren't entirely "ready" because there was no big warning sign before the tree trunk made a loud 'crack' sound and the beast started falling.
A network of people willingly federating--and importantly setting firm boundaries of what is acceptable behavior--which reflects the real world better than anything else ever has.
And unlike every other place we didn't start out in a deficit to the tune of millions of dollars that has to be repaid to someone who owns us--forcing us to build monetization into the platform.
@oliphant some of this reminds me of years of using FOSS software. The majority of people, even the "tech savvy" still use MS and Apple systems every day because of the polish and convenience... but the amount of people coming over to the FOSS side is more than enough to make a good enough place to live, we don't need everyone over here.
@oliphant it happened before like layers of "cowboy" con men (& women) working a share sale scam?
Anyone remember MySpace? It's time ran out!
Friends Reunited? It was Sold to MSM's Rupie Mudroach! Mmmm so he killed it!
I ran dial-up bulletin boards! The only way so share stuff? oh! Before your time? 🤓
@oliphant I've been a reddit mod for many years and I'm completely amazed that they allegedly have so many full time programmers and yet never bothered to build decent moderation tools. Facebook surpassed them almost immediately with its group mod tools. I have seriously no clue what Reddit employees actually do besides make the frontend look cute.
My limited experience with free software (that does extend back some 20+ years) is that the biggest problem isn't the macgyvering, but the inability of even big projects getting (or being able to retain) graphical design, and clear user interface.
Making software appealing to use isn't expensive, but the "eating your own dogfood" has led to assumptions of at least advanced level understanding of C++, etc.
@oliphant We are in for a bumpy, interesting, crappy and exciting ride along this new age of social media. It is weird to make demands on quality as if it had massive venture capital level of funding or half a century of development like Linux had. When Facebook became popular its UI was at some point a laughing stock versus the one from VKontakte.
@oliphant I have been contributing to an extremely large open source codebase for decades now. I must say there are many more coders working on open source than usability experts. It's not a matter of dollars, the incentives seem to be not there.
@oliphant is there actually anything in the license for the software that would legally prevent an instance owner from selling user data or charging for API access?
@referencemoth So I think charging for API access would likely break the access needed for a site to work for federation purposes. Like you'd be connecting to the API for the purpose of filing a moderation report.
Even assuming you did it, it would be a custom implementation for your own server and I suspect people would leave a server that did that, because there's 99% of other servers that don't do that.
As for selling user data...
I am not a lawyer, but...
My understanding is that one of the reasons Twitter/Facebook have an enormous TOS is that in order to send your data to third parties you basically have to agree to them doing it.
This is especially true in the case of the GDPR laws in the EU, a user has the right to be forgotten. So not only forgotten from your system, but also forgotten in every system to which you might have passed that user's data.
Legally, if a user says "Delete my data" but I still have their data (which I sold, hypotheetically) floating around on some other site, I could be sued for that.
I'm pretty sure if I just started shopping the email addresses of people on my server to third parties, I'd be in deep legal shit.
@oliphant you could just put that in the terms of service for your instance right? I don’t think any of these issues are actually prevented by the software or source code.
@referencemoth@oliphant just to add: although you can put whatever you want in a TOS most of it is meaningless in most EU if it circumvents or goes against the law. GDPR requires explicit consent (opt-in) for most things not directly needed to provide the service. Even then many companies ask for it, e.g. for a bank account: I'll have a consent box for the opening process. I will also have separate consents for marketing et al, to which I can say no to without affecting the account opening.
@ncrav@oliphant how does the GDPR interact with federation? If an instance in America is federated with an instance in the EU and the American instance has no physical presence in the EU what happens to GDPR policies? 🤔
@referencemoth@ncrav I mean, the short answer from what I saw online is "If you federate with people from the EU, you have to be compliant."
So GDPR still affects my instance in the USA.
Users have the right to be forgotten, etc. If you notice that's built into the platform. When you delete your stuff off of a Mastodn server, it's really gone.
and without any integrations with trackers, the site doesn't need to remove any of your information from third parties, either, when you revoke your account.
All the information to be deleted is right there, in one place.
@referencemoth@oliphant as a note there were actually US companies that blocked the EU in the beginning due to the GDPR, like the LA Times, don't know if there's any still doing it.
@ncrav@referencemoth So I was around when the hammer dropped and suddenly we all had to be GDPR compliant.
Initially, to avoid lawsuits, many US companies that weren't ready to comply had to do radical stuff like that and shut down traffic, etc.
But at this point, pretty much every legal compliance department has experts in GDPR that ensure the company complies with all legal requirements....
Or, in some cases, knows which legal requirements can be avoided or bypassed due to superceding laws in the USA.
(Free speech laws are very broad here, and the Supreme Court has essentially ruled that US citizens can't be tried against any free speech laws that are less permissive than the ones that already exist in the US.)
@referencemoth@oliphant that's a good question but I guess in the same way that people that want to operate here need to comply. These days it's mostly stipulated that the law that applies is always the one where end-users/consumers are, unless there's some state level agreement dictating otherwise. Be it GDPR or VAT.
@oliphant I now see app dot net as a hybrid experiment in social media: no ads, much less privacy-suck because it was a paid service. BUT it was for profit and despite generating a lively ecosystem of client apps it was shut down for failing to please its venture capitalists. Subscribers to media don't want their content to be owned but I find reason to suspect that the platforms themselves should not have owners and rather be held as a commons.
@oliphant This is why I really don't see Hive scaling well. It was a project from someone really passionate about the work that she was doing, but she seems to want to make something closer to a Twitter competitor than something newer and with more ownership.
No hate to Raluca Pop, but I think apps like that have a short shelf-life unless a clear line of succession and upgrades to the backend can scale with user growth.
@oliphant fair but…
People are addicted to numbers, to the feeling of getting however many likes, to the dream of “making it”, selling yourself, becoming an influencer. Looking around, people are addicted… it has become so that the whole reason of going to an event is to post it somewhere. And the saddest part and the paradox is: the majority of them won’t leave until the majority is somewhere else…
Gee I hope I’m wrong!
@oliphant email servers: we've seen all you social media fads and kings-of-the-hill come and go, and yet here we remain, like a rock. (now: kids, get off my lawn!)
Add comment