@inquiline really enjoyed this, in so many ways! Great to have an analysis of, and a term for; #LossyDistribution. And the case study works brilliantly. As does the auto ethnographic approach!
It’s really important to discuss how #HashtagActivism is curtailed here; as well as how different hashtags in general fare here. Thinking also about the #ClimateDiary project. It frustrates me that - as I only realised about a year in - that I can’t see all posts. 1/2
@inquiline 2/2 this should really be changed at systemic level, but in the interim, might asking people to boost at least one post with a hashtag before using it themselves help? As far as I understand it, a connection and hence visibility is there once there has been a boost; or is it only following eaxh other? I have forgotten. #LossyDistribution
Pauline, I may not be understanding exactly what you're saying, but the crux on here is that you can follow hashtags. Just click on one and the follow button appears at the top.
Equally, this reminds me of your mention of wanting to see posts in other languages. Likewise, just follow a hashtag in that language, e.g. 'climat'.
Also, you can do as I did when I joined and either pin a post with hashtags, or put them in your bio. Hashtags are the thing.
@gsymon@inquiline yes, i know you can follow & search hashtags. But even when you do that, you do not see all posts with that hashtag in the fediverse, you only see posts by people you or others on your server are connected to (I think the connection can be a boost, but maybe it’s following). When i learned this I initially thought i would still see most #ClimateDiary posts as most of us connected, but i can’t be sure - if people i am not connected to use it I won’t see it.
@pvonhellermannn Thanks, Pauline. And yes I can see exactly why this resonates for you also. And it's so nonintuitive until you've been on here a while, and then it's disappointing. At the same time I do understand the virtues of federation/things being arrayed as they are.
@inquiline Many lessons to draw form this, thanks. I somehow missed the hot ass controversy (what a mess!), which sounds fairly fitting re:
> “Lossy distribution” aka ... the phenomenon of how posts get seeded in a manner that suggests they are viewable to a wide, undifferentiated audience; but in practice results in, well, loss. And not only loss, but unknowable, invisible loss.
It might be true for all things social web. Yet more so for the Fediverse?
@inquiline Thanks for the write up! I came across a donkey some time ago and now have the background to it. I wonder, if it would be possible to add semantics or origin to hashtags? In context it is usually clear that labor and labour mean the same thing. Could there be a rel=me attribute for a hashtag?
Ooooh, good article. Thank you. I second the observation that you have used #autoethnography well, both as a method in itself and as a way to resolve the research ethics question.
What surprises me is the implied norm of a social communication network that is coherent with perfect history, and is thus because it has a single technological/ownership platform. That's newish. Do we need a different term for the monolithic communication space?
I do wonder if there are comparable studies from that last great decentralised network, Usenet, which had many of the same issues ( @hrheingold ?) There were certainly similar episodes where the growing, reweaving tree structure of Usenet feeds meant that incomplete context/history led to social events (outrage, trolls, shaming, collective calming, failed or successful moderation, etiquette rules ("Emily Postnews") and so on). Other early networks (Fido) had the same property. Certainly administering a Usenet feeder site entailed talking to other sysadmins and shutting down flame wars sometimes.
@inquiline@yetiinabox@hrheingold Yeah! The promise of "perfect history" has always been an illusion of digital media even if some systems get closer than others (e.g., there is no perfect history of Twitter, despite centralization).
Plus, features like the kill file on USENET or bozo filter on The WELL mean that there is no universal user experience to reconstruct.
@Chanders 🤣 As I said a while ago, the charge of being on a noncommercial social network, populated mainly by Gen X and older nerds, on which I don't use my real name, for publicity is absolutely hysterical
You get a special thanks for your role in all this, ofc (dubious praise, I know). I have a half-written second draft that if I finish it will implicate you to a greater degree
@impermanen_ Me too. Tho if I finish the companion piece about moderation (ie things that were cut from this bc it was plenty long, and could be their own topic), that might be the one I’d more hope he’d see. OTOH probably next to nothing in it that various folks haven’t been pointing out for a long time, really
@inquiline (1) this is great! Genuinely helpfully reframed a bunch of things for me. Also funny. 🫏
(2) Maybe because "Twitter and Tear Gas" conformed to my experience, I thought academia was mostly skeptical of the impact of hashtag activism? (See also the small but related, and negative, lit on "politics as fandom".) The paper takes for granted that the value is more unambiguously positive.
Was dealing with that critique just out of scope, or is your position much more positive?
@luis_in_brief Thanks. I'm actually not taking a position here on whether hashtag activism is effective, but if I were, my answer wd be it can be a connective layer especially for people to find other ppl to organize with, but it is certainly no substitute for other kinds of action
What I tried to show here is that finding/hailing ppl to have opt-in convo is public sphere activity that Mdon makes really challenging; & how challenging it actually is is not obvious/intuitive for many users here
@luis_in_brief Glad if it was helpful in any way! Maybe not what I'd have wound up writing had I gone into all of this intending to produce a research paper 😂
I guess I do think if we are all here & hoping to have a go at viable noncommercial social media, it should support people hailing other people who want to be in posting community or orient around a topic or whatnot. Where that then goes, Idk
@inquiline does mastodon have any individual relevance beyond being the largest (and falling) platform on the fediverse? imho, the increasing MAU of misskey and lemmy is what is really relevant. Data from https://fedidb.org/
@mapto I don't know; does Mastodon have any relevance? 🤔 It brought over many tens of thousands of users during the moment/s when people were fleeing Twitter, and was written up in countless news stories then. It is also the subject of a paper I spent many hours experiencing, writing, and editing, to which you're responding, to tell me this topic isn't relevant. Do I have that right?
@inquiline
Getting mansplained on Mastodon about a paper about mansplaining on Mastodon is absolutely perfect. Also, it is necessary for the phrase "intemperate donkeykeeper" to now be enshrined in the lexicon 💯
@inquiline
Just finished reading through, this is an excellent contribution to our understanding of the fedi's potentials and potential limitations in regards to online activism. Though this may fall outside of your definition of lossy, one idea that occurs, in comparison to the twitter experience, is that it and the other capitalist networks also introduce effective lossiness in the form of the algorithm (and more deliberatively, censorship). There were algo-induced Rashomon moments on twitter.
Would agree with your conclusion that activists could be better off in the context of non-centralized network ownership, assuming that further development takes their needs into account. Given sufficient critical mass, a hashtag campaign can achieve its ends under lossy conditions, as they certainly did on twitter; and here, with the fragmentation of moderative ideology and the prospect of a social media purposefully built for community organizing, possibly even more effectively. Lots to think about, great paper!
>>the other capitalist networks also introduce effective lossiness in the form of the algorithm (and more deliberatively, censorship)
Yes, IMO this is a really good point and I wouldn't want to overstate the contrast from a user's perspective in particular; tho the mechanisms behind the lossiness differ as you point out. Wish I could add this as a FN!
@inquiline
Appreciate your consideration of that idea! Yes, either way, there are headwinds; but one could argue that it's more favorable terrain for the activist to face the mostly disorderly lossiness of the fedi over the engineered lossiness of, say, a cryptofascist billionaire-owner. As you note, further development pathways will be key (i.e. are we building a space for communities to organize in, or a twitter clone to conquer the world?)
@ophiocephalic@inquiline Can I ask what you mean by “algo-induced Rashomon moments”? I may be being overliteral here, but to me the point of “Rashomon” is that people will have differing accounts of the same underlying reality. The issue with algorithms on Twitter – again, as I understand it – is that people were shown what amounted to different realities. Is there something I’m missing or misunderstanding?
@adamgreenfield@inquiline
Depends on what you mean by "reality". There were dustups on twitter which people perceived differently because of what they were or were not exposed to by the algorithm
@adamgreenfield
I've heard that from Twitter users too. And as @ophiocephalic & I were discussing the other day I wouldn't want to overstate the contrasts--centralized social media is not presenting with perfect fidelity a communication record either. But the mechanisms are different, & here, it's extremely non-intuitive that what you're seeing is only partial & different from others' views, until you start seeing clues that things are missing.
@inquiline@adamgreenfield
Yes indeed. Also, no intention here to steal focus away from @inquiline 's piece with an only tangentially-related idea. The Rashomon reference was a riff on a theme in her paper, so it might make more sense in that context
@ophiocephalic (And more generally, @inquiline, I see that I haven’t yet said directly to you what I’ve been saying to quite a few others: the coinage of “lossy distribution,” so far as I am concerned, represents the founding moment of Mastodon Studies proper. BOOYAH. 👊)
@adamgreenfield LOLOL. Thanks! (tho, I suspect people who've been writing about Mdon for a while might be offended by this take; nonetheless I think we can safely say that if you haven't been harassed by a donkeykeeper on here, you're missing the full epistemic basis from which to opine)
@inquiline I’ve read a tranche of that stuff, believe it! But IMO it all lacked a certain je ne sais quoi – a situatedness, an immersedness, possibly an assness. This is the first paper I’ve seen that captured what it feels like to be here.
@adamgreenfield ❤️. It's really been an absurd little ride, hasn't it. I mean all of it, not just Donkeygate. But, I wouldn't know you w/o it
Someone said that this line in the paper "Having people acting like perverts, assholes, and dipshits in the mix was actually crucial to a site that could be fun to use" is proof that I "get" this place--but ofc I swiped that line (w permission) from someone else here, a better poster than I
@inquiline Please accept my apologies. I did not consider that my doubt and opinion would be perceived as questioning your deeds or liberties. I did not think that bringing up another metric to the discussion and trying to contextualise it, would be seen as an act of hostility.
To everyone else that commented and gave labels here, I'm sorry and I withdraw with my own observations about the social dynamics exposed here.
@mapto Thanks, appreciate it. (This kind of misunderstanding can be modulated a lot by tone & framing that expresses intent. If you'd prefaced your remark with "Interesting paper. Do you think Mastodon itself is already becoming less relevant..." I think it's safe to say the reaction would have been pretty different, because it would have been perceived as conversational, not antagonistic)
@adamgreenfield I do kind of love that by the time I go to look at the original offending post you're replying to that the poster has almost always been suspended already! Means I don't know what idiocy or hate they were peddling but that's kind of a perk. @mapto@inquiline
Too bad it is only customary to include endorsements for books, not articles:
"This has got way out of control, mainly because of your own need to self-promote and dramatize a very small initial disagreement and a couple of silly posts... Your dramatizing of it is understandable: we were all young academics wanting to change the world once, and we need to flag up causes!"
(an excerpt of an email sent to my workplace by the asstodon antagonist, naturally)
"From cat videos to corporate logos, digital screens & spaces are crowded with animal bodies...JB examines the role of animals in the spread of global communications. Richly illustrated study links the contemporary proliferation of animals on social media to the collection of exotic animals in formative years of transcontinental exploration and expansion"
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