Yes the constant meta (and Meta) discussion here is tedious, and often much worse, but what you have to realize is that this isn’t just a social network, it’s a left/progressive political project. I don’t know how many left/progressive political orgs you’ve been involved in, but let me tell you, they are kind of known for endless, agonizing talk about process, factions, outside threats, inside threats, strategy, grievances, etc. And if you have a solution for that, you just might save the world.
@misc
You may get push back on the idea that the fediverse is an “explicitly left wing” project. But I think you might be right. And it’s already “baked in” to the very structure and concept of an open protocol based network.
We are refusing to automatically aggregate our users and their data to be monetized. We just want to socialize! We aren’t exploiting that human desire to connect to generate ad revenue or data to mine— or a social graph that can be sold and exploited.
@futurebird@misc I think it’s worth considering that there is the other side; your Gabs and a large number of “free speech” instances. They lean right or libertarian.
If we admit it’s a “left wing” project will that limit our reach (to who? the ana-caps no one likes? people so toxic they can’t go anywhere else?) — Is there an obligation to enforce minimum standards (don’t think we want this either) — but there is political meaning to rejecting the “social media company”
There isn’t a bright line (from a libertarian perspective) when it comes to monetizing users But there is for many here I think.
@futurebird@john@misc I would argue it's a left-wing project in the same way that Tumblr is. Fedi isn't left wing inherently, but it attracted a userbase that was. There were smaller right-wing pockets of Tumblr as well (gunblr for example)
@rushraptor@john@misc nothing about the structure of tumblr echos those values— except maybe some foot dragging from the owners when it comes to really mining the value from their users (but also the owners are kind of held hostage by the tumblr users after all they’ve been through together— they are still upset about the “female presenting nipple” bans)
@rushraptor@futurebird@john Like, you could imagine a fediverse populated with Ayn Rand acolytes, focused on decentralization in a more bitcoiny way. Decentralization isn't inherently left. It is inherently utopian I would say, and inherently a political project. And the people here (not Gab or TruthSocial) happen to be overwhelmingly left of center, at least by US standards. So that flavors the utopia.
@misc@futurebird@john there were more of those folks on here when Mastodon first started. I had a .social account in 2017 (still do but it is inactive) and back then it was fairly apolitical apart from the ban on outright Nazism.
There is a big gap between what a lefty values in decentralization and what your Rand fans value.
“decentralized” isn’t what excites me— I’m about the emergent ideas that thrive when you start with decentralization.
Twitter was too democratic (super small d) to be allowed to survive. Any nobody could say something to the “somebodys” of the world and if it resonated? it became impossible to ignore. That was intolerable for the people who have systematically dismantled that site.
I still remember when Twitter was new, and dinosaurs roamed the earth: My employer decided to make a foray into "social media." They gave us all Twitter accounts. I posted a comment on something, I don't remember what. When the "chief" read my comment, it happened to appear "below" some manager's PR comment in the chief's feed. I was immediately reprimanded and told to take my comment down because it appeared to contradict what the manager said, just based on the position in the chief's feed, even though my comment was independent of the manager's comment.
My opinion of Twitter at the time was that it sucked; and my opinion now is that it sucks so bad, it ought to be swallowed into a black hole and the information it contains only briefly burst forth when the universe ends.
@futurebird I agree that Twitter gave regular people too much access to power to be allowed to live, but I don't think the folks who are benefiting from its decline are competent enough to wreck it as thoroughly as Musk has done by accident
@rushraptor@misc@futurebird I think threads is already too mainstream for that, no? I mean, it’s already up to 70m users or something. I doubt it’s got a strong political bent.
@john@rushraptor@futurebird Yeah just feels like a mall to me. The overlords probably have that ideology but the vibe on the street level is very apolitical
Diversity, free speech and free software is "left", actually anarcho left. And it's anti-establishment.
Also GAFAM is US monopoly on peoples data so resistance from europe is/was more likely. As someone just said "left for the US".
That's democratic center in europe. This coding community in part is driven/supported by the CCC (chaos computer club) people and that's intellectual community nerds.
@misc@rushraptor@futurebird@john
The first part of your post basically describes nostr. Ironically, the Fediverse structure pretty well matches the “utopia” dreamed up by some ancaps of privately-managed microstates where people freely decided where to participate based on costs vs services rendered —this is basically the instances we have here.
1/
@misc@rushraptor@futurebird@john yet you'll find most ancaps sneer at the Fediverse with mostly unfounded dismissals, and I'm quite convinced that's due to a combination of cognitive dissonance and the fact that this was largely created and supported by people they despise, who were ready to isolate their attempt t into boring echo chambers.
libertarians always try to become cosy with anarchos, that's nothing new. GAB and those instances are blocked widely. They just use the tool because it's censorship resistant and free.
This is why there is such a mismatch when trying to fit the fediverse into the “social media company” mould. It’s like if you ran a logging company that never cut down any trees and just planted them instead— because it’s not a logging company— it’s a forest preservation club. “wow you are planting so many trees— when do you harvest?”
“well if we needed some lumber we have some trees marked, but we don’t need any now”
“This place is a failure of a lumber company”
@futurebird@misc I dunno. I mean, you’re right— the group of people who built and originally populated this place weren’t trying to compete with twitter or Instagram.
But I don’t think it was unreasonable that a lot of people — some old, some new — hoped that in the aftermath of Musk explicitly turning twitter into a right wing propaganda vehicle, that mastodon could be a place for the affected communities to flee to, and be frustrated that it didn’t work out.
@futurebird@misc I mean… I’m enjoying this place on its own merits. But I used to enjoy Usenet, so I’m obviously a bit broken. But it’s frustrating watching the old guard decide that the influx of new users is a reason mostly to dig in their heels and double down on some frankly weird local shibboleths.
And honestly? These days that phrase grates pretty badly. “Eternal september” was when what until that point had been a mostly male, almost entirely white group of enthusiasts suddenly had to deal with an influx of people who didn’t share their entirely arbitrary local shibboleths. The way the Usenet old guard reacted to that said a lot more about them than it did about the new folks.
I might also argue that it runs even deeper than left/right dichotomies. I was on Threads and deleted it today in part because Instagram has created a very specific and bland online culture built around consumption, reaction within a limited scope, and keeping you on the site. It's a political space in the worst sense, one designed to hide politics and actively discourage any politics.
Yea, it’s been said elsewhere, but we’re going through a fracturing or at least a breakdown of the sense that there is only one or two places to be online (however false that was, though there was a moment where it seemed everyone was on FB/Twitter).
Good spaces is what matters now. Relative size/population probably not so much.
@maegul@Dseitz@futurebird Good spaces and hopefully figuring out ways to communicate between them that exist somewhere between seamless AP federation and uncredited, uncaptioned screenshots.
@maegul@Dseitz@futurebird At this point, I want a TweetDeck like multi-client with multiple columns for different instances/ networks/algorithms, not just for myself, but to see what the effects would be.
Yep! The time for that is getting increasingly "ripe" IMO. Even just here on the fedi, we've now got substantial activities on pixelfed (pics), peertube (vids), lemmy/kbin (groups), masto/calc/misskey/pleroma/akkoma (microblogs) and bookwyrm and the blogging platforms too. But, IMO, the interaction between them is both less than ideal and difficult to accomplish. An aggregator UI could be a/the killer app.
Heck, I agree with her. I also punted Threads for practical reasons; it was distracting and hard for me to keep up with. Here at least I get feedback and can dip in and out of local timeline and fedi.
@futurebird@misc I think to a lot of people the purpose of a social media app is that there is the possibility of becoming famous and then profiting from it.
It’s the same curse of not taxing the rich people one day we may be the rich ones.
This particular space is nice because… what if we just don’t strive for fame and profit?
It’s also worth pointing out that younger generations have never seen an internet which is more about connection and less about fame.
@futurebird@misc with the federation protocols, however, isn't the data is available to be gathered, monetized, or surveilled? There's nothing to stop a corporate instance from federating and analyzing the data users provide (right?)
@seth@futurebird I think that’s largely correct. To the extent it is, it’s a flaw in the system as it currently is, but it doesn’t alter the utopian ideals we’re trying to achieve here.
Have you noticed how social media companies are closing their APIs and requiring logins? That it’s a public form of communication that anyone could work with is part of the whole point. Though given some of the debates about search (some do not want their posts searchable) I don’t know if we’re all on the same page on this.
Twitter was acceptable to me because I could search it and use APIs on it. Not shocked this is now gone.
Nothing to stop them but I think more robust responses and tools could be developed to discourage this behavior. Also, just being actively hostile has its own uses.
@jeremiah@seth@misc It’s not enough to have data on people— power is being the only one who has data on a group of people. If it’s effectively public it’s not as valuable. Social media companies collect all kinds of data on how we use their networks that simply isn’t even saved on the fediverse. Could they figure out that I like fountain pens and work in education? probably— but that’s weak sauce compared to what facebook knows about their users.
@futurebird lol I came ready for the pushback. ;) At most I think you could quibble about if it’s a left wing political project, or it’s a political project in which 90+% of the participants happen to be left wing*. It’s definitely a political project though. And there’s definitely a conflict between just wanting to socialize, and wanting to advance the goal of letting socialization happen differently.
Referring to this fediverse of course, not just anyone running Mastodon or AP
@bitpickup@misc The inability of the linux community to recognize the inherent political nature of their project has kept them from ever getting anywhere in the PC space.
i would love to hear you say more, if you were ever so inclined (i was initially attracted to linux, as a user, because of its inherent political nature)
@futurebird@misc “Decentralized” in this case is functionally synonymous with “anarchist”—the only word more ruined by its foes than “left”{-wing,-leaning,-ist}
"We find that the main difference between the left and the right is whether people believe the world is inherently hierarchical. Conservatives, our work shows, tend to believe more strongly than liberals in a hierarchical world..."
@markusl@futurebird@misc The orange regime did a lot of damage worldwide. The worst of and in people was being celebrated and normalized and here we are.
@siderea lol fair enough. I actually thought about framing it that way too - democratically run organizations - but I think it's questionable whether we are democratic, or just aspire to be. ;)
@misc "You have 3 leftests in a room representing five different political philosophies that all disagree with each other. It's going to take us two hours to decide which brand of trash bags to buy, let alone questions around tactics with respect to meta. That's just how it goes some days."
Hats off to any group of leftists who actually manage to pick a brand of trashbags. In my kitchen, it's just me with unilateral authority and in the last year since having a trashbag order delivered, I have angsted and quibbled and completely failed to come to a decision on that, and accidentally ran out the clock for making a choice and just received a surprise order of probably problematic trashbags.
@hrefna@misc Once upon a time we were shopping for a housing co-op, so we visited the business meetings as a vetting. One co-op ran their meetings by strict consensus, and since they had over 100 units this means they statistically pre-programmed the participation of a contrarian. This meeting's particular contrarian demanded that the appropriate procedure for selecting a committee be followed: that committee was to decide on the colour to paint the co-op's maintenance office. The office was a one desk, one chair affair beneath the stairs. One member was standing by the front of the room holding up a can of eggshell white saying 'I have a half used can right here and I can paint it right away, and besides, no one ever goes in there, so who cares?' Poor guy, it wasn't about that. It was about the small amount of power one person held over the whole room. Half an hour later they muddled through to a committee. We didn't stay for the rest. Functional anarchy needs to acknowledge minority dissent under a certain level and move on; consensus must be statically adequate rather than absolute, once the group is at the size that contrarians are inevitable.
@hrefna@misc As a European, the American right managing to cast antifa as a negative thing always seems so weird. Where I live (Catalonia) everyone is antifa, every kid sings Bella Ciao, it's as natural as breathing. Antifa literally just means being opposed to fascism. How could you not be opposed to fascism? Unless, you know...
Yes and. That's functionally true, and the Republicans are a fascist party, and also there's a little nuance there.
There's a long history of things being given labels that are not at all accurate, or that are only accurate within a very narrow context (NSDAP, DPRK, PRC, mantis shrimp, etc).
So on the one hand in full form being "anti-anti-fascist" means you are, you know, a fascist (and in this case they absolutely are) sometimes identifying terms can be misleading.
This is something that happens all of the time in US politics: something either gets labeled for a political purpose that may only have a tangential relationship to the actual content.
For example, there's a "Protect Minors from Medical Malpractice" act and who wouldn't be opposed to medical malpractice on minors?
Except that it isn't about that. It's about trans healthcare.
It's just in this case those opposed to antifascists in the US are, in fact, fascists.
@misc It often reminds me of a possibly apocryphal story about a French nobleman visiting a US town and complaining about how chaotic and squabbly it was - but then observing that the end result was self-governance. They didn't need the nobility to do it.
BINGO!! Because we on the left accept differences including differences of opinion but that doesn’t stop us from arguing about our differences & trying to persuade our fellow travelers.
I figure it’s the reason the Democratic Party doesn’t present a unified front including identical talking points like Repubs do—the Dems accept differences and don’t stifle internal debate. I recall former House Speaker Pelosi likened it to “herding cats.”
@misc
And that is why despite some people say they want Mastodon to replace Twitter, it will never be able to do so.
Most people don't want to join a "political project". They want to see cat pics / memes, see what the celebrities are talking about, learn about the latest trend, etc.
@sculd Mastodon won't but it's possible our work will evolve into something that is a bit lower maintenance. There's certainly a lot of work to get there though, and I agree that that work will naturally limit the appeal.
@misc Thismis adapted from a class on having effective business meetings: Give everyone an allotted time to speak, agree to follow the concensus, vote at the end of the debate. Those who won't agree to the concensus are out.
@misc basically you cut through it with an incredibly charismatic leader. A few good things get done, and then everything goes awful or he gets assassinated, and either way the good stuff gets undone in the aftermath anyway.
@misc@lisamelton I suspect there’s some kind of connecting to plain old personality here.
I’ll be the first to admit process is what I live for. There’s nothing better than drawing out the flowchart, figuring out all the edge cases, accounting for them, etc.
Actually following through on any of those plans, not so much.
Sorry — I call bullshit. OK, there are a lot of people here doing that, but plenty of other people doing other things: promoting their books or art, posting pictures of moss, or just shitposting.
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