#SocialMedia#SocialNetworks#ContentModeration#Algorithms#RecommendationEngines#Messaging: "So you joined a social network without ranking algorithms—is everything good now? Jonathan Stray, a senior scientist at the UC Berkeley Center for Human-Compatible AI, has doubts. “There is now a bunch of research showing that chronological is not necessarily better,” he says, adding that simpler feeds can promote recency bias and enable spam.
Stray doesn’t think social harm is an inevitable outcome of complex algorithmic curation. But he agrees with Rogers that the tech industry’s practice of trying to maximize engagement doesn’t necessarily select for socially desirable results.
Stray suspects the solution to the problem of social media algorithms may in fact be … more algorithms. “The fundamental problem is you've got way too much information for anybody to consume, so you have to reduce it somehow,” he says."
Groups of people just coming up with new ideas, new designs, new innovations.
Not Google vs Apple vs Facebook and no one else.
This is pretty amazing. This list has grown tremendously since I started checking out the #Fediverse in I think like 2017. This just blows me away and makes me excited again for the internet.
#SocialMedia#SocialNetworks#WebScraping#Discord: "An online service is scraping Discord servers en masse, archiving and tracking users’ messages and activity across servers including what voice channels they join, and then selling access to that data for as little as $5. Called Spy Pet, the service’s creator says it scrapes more than ten thousand Discord servers, and besides selling access to anyone with cryptocurrency, is also offering the data for training AI models or to assist law enforcement agencies, according to its website.
The news is not only a brazen abuse of Discord’s platform, but also highlights that Discord messages may be more susceptible to monitoring than ordinary users assume. Typically, a Discord user’s activity is spread across disparate servers, with no one entity, except Discord itself, able to see what messages someone has sent across the platform more broadly. With Spy Pet, third-parties including stalkers or potentially police can look up specific users and see what messages they’ve posted on various servers at once.
“Have you ever wondered where your friend hangs out on Discord? Tired of basic search tools like Discord.id? Look no further!” Spy Pet’s website reads. It claims to be tracking more than 14,000 servers, 600 million users, and includes a database of more than 3 billion messages." https://www.404media.co/a-spy-site-is-scraping-discord-and-selling-users-messages/
One of the most frustrating things in modern technology is the effort spent trying to artificially restrict abundance. Take, for example, this tale from museum-worker Aaron Cope: I was out with a friend who worked for Twitter and I asked them whether it would be possible for the museum to “create 200,000 Twitter accounts, one […]
I was out with a friend who worked for Twitter and I asked them whether it would be possible for the museum to “create 200,000 Twitter accounts, one for each object in the Cooper Hewitt’s collection”. My friend looked at me for a moment, laughed, and then simply said: No.
In that blog post, Aaron reveals that the San Francisco International Airport Museum is using ActivityPub to create automated social-media bot accounts for all its exhibits and, possibly, every object it hold.
And why not! That would be close to impossible to do on a centralised service. But on a decentralised service under your own control, it is relatively simple. Perhaps I only want to follow the museum's canteen, or I just want to engage with a specific artefact. The Fediverse makes that possible.
This reminds me of the Melbourne "treemail" phenomenon. Every tree in the city had an email address, ostensibly so residents could email maintenance issues for a specific tree. Instead, people started interacting with the trees and sending them little love notes!
Dearest Golden Elm Tree, I finally found you! As in I see you everyday on my way to uni, but I had no idea of what kind of tree you are. You are the most beautiful tree in the city and I love you
A few weeks ago, I read about Ben Smith inventing Tweeting trains. With a bit of code, every train line in the UK was suddenly represented on the web in a convenient format. Well… Convenient if you were on Twitter.
Museums, trees, and trains naturally brings me on to the Internet of Things. I think it is fair to say that IoT is in a bit of an odd place right now. Matter is a confusing mishmash of standards. Security and privacy issues dog the simplest devices. Many people don't even want their toaster online!
For the majority of domestic uses, people want an Intranet of Things. There's little need to have your light-bulbs controlled when you're outside of WiFi range. Similarly, it is probably a really bad idea to have your hydroelectric dam connected to the Internet.
Which brings me back to the Fediverse.
On the one hand, it would be nice to be able to follow @Yellow_Line@Transit_Authority.gov - or even @Bus_Stop_1234@bus_company.biz - that would allow for hyperfocused data getting to the right people. It seems feasible that every civic object could have a Fediverse account. From the individual streetlights to the municipal sewerage system. Perhaps people won't send love letters to overflowing drains - but a social-dashboard of your civic environment could be both practical and delightful.
And, as for your domestic gadgets? Why not give every room, or every light-bulb, in your home a private Fediverse account? You could send a message like:
Hey @thermostat, please set the temperature to 19°C. Thanks!
That might be a bit much! But I like the idea of a private social network which consists of all my IoT gadgets talking to me and each other.
Oh, Zot! Nomadic Identity is Coming to ActivityPub: This could change the Fediverse forever
Years before there was Mastodon and even ActivityPub, there was Mike Macgirvin who created the Zot protocol, which Hubzilla runs on. One of Hubzilla’s most amazing features (apart from also integrating with Activity and the Fediverse, and having cha ...continues
#AI#GenerativeAI#OnlineCommunities#LLMs#SocialNetworks#SocialMedia: "Imagine you are at a crossroads in a complex project and you need quick answers on how to grapple with a problem. It is quite likely that you might turn to an online knowledge community for answers, one hosted by your company, or perhaps Stack Overflow, Quora, or Reddit. These communities have come to play a central role in knowledge exchange, in many corners of the economy and society, but they depend on voluntary participation from users just like you and me.
Our recent research indicates an intriguing shift is now taking place: generative AI technologies, such as OpenAI’s large language model (LLM) ChatGPT, are disrupting the status quo. Increasingly, users are gravitating toward these new AI tools to obtain answers, bypassing traditional knowledge communities. In this column, we delve into recent work documenting ChatGPT’s influence on user participation in online communities. A key insight we offer is that communities lacking social fabric are suffering most. We then propose a research agenda for better understanding these evolving impacts of generative AI."
The University of Manchester is now recruiting students for its 2024 intake in the MSc Social Network Analysis :fediverse: :igraph: :rstats: - run by the wonderful Dr Elisa Bellotti, a friend and dear conference buddy of mine
The Mastodon Recent Posts Data Collector retrieves recent public posts and replies from a specified public Mastodon server.
The Mastodon Hashtag Search Data Collector retrieves recent public posts and replies with a specified hashtag from any public Mastodon server.
Users of Communalytic EDU can retrieve up to 5,000 recent posts and replies from Mastodon, while Communalytic PRO users can retrieve up to 50,000. Communalytic users can start collecting data immediately without first having to create a Mastodon account or apply for a separate Mastodon API key.
These new data collectors will provide Communalytic users with a systematic way to collect publicly available Mastodon data for academic research and are being released as part of our work developing research tools, techniques, and visualization dashboards to support computational social science.
For more details, see Communalytic’s Tutorials page."
Bluesky vs. Mastodon: Which Twitter Alternative Should You Choose?
Bluesky and Mastodon are two social media networks with an aim to provide a decentralized platform for users. As microblogging platforms, they also wanted to pitch themselves as a Twitter alternative (primarily) when they started.
The Myth: Is the Fediverse Really That Complicated?
Let me start out by saying how I think this myth became the reality for many… Obviously, a few journalists declared the Fediverse to be complicated, and this got picked up quickly by those who were considering whether to open accounts in the Fediverse (I’m no ...continues
Elon Musk Gutted Their App. Now They Want To Make One That’s Billionaire-Proof: Tapestry will be RSS
“Twitterrific was our flagship app, and by far earned the most of any of our pieces of software we’ve produced. Its loss is still being felt revenue-wise to this day. We’re hopeful that Tapestry will help us regain some of that ground and help us keep our com ...continues
I'm trying to convince the last friends I have left on Facebook, X, Threads, or BlueSky to join the Fediverse. Some have tried but felt a sense of loneliness. Nowadays, many people are so used to doing what algorithms suggest that they can no longer make independent choices.
My timeline here, on the other hand, is beautiful.
I see what I want, I follow people who post what I like, and no one tells me what I should do. Freedom may come with a "cost," but whatever it is, it's worth the effort. Always. #Fediverse#Mastodon#SocialNetworks
I just did my little to include more organizations in the Fediverse proposing the use of Wordpress ActivityPub plugin. Let's see if they consider it and start using it and drop all the other social networks icons. #Fediverse#ActivityPub#Wordpress#SocialNetworks
"As the social media landscape changes and a new wave of digital spaces emerges, this Directory is meant to be a resource for our field — a jumping-off-point for further exploration and research for anyone who’s interested in studying, building, stewarding, or simply using digital social platforms. We hope this will inspire creative exploration, spark new collaborations, and highlight important progress."
Red line: Estimated average number of daily active users on Twitter in 2013.
Green line: About the time Twitter introduced the algorithmically sorted home timeline that users where up in arms against.
People today: Social media without algorithms just doesn't work! We have to let the ruling class control what information we receive, there's just no other choice. Deciding for ourselves, hah, so naïve!
We have a new pape on polarisation with an #ABM of naïve Bayesian agents. It ends a decade of thinking about #testimony from a #Bayesian perspective, so I thought I’d summarise that decade in a thread.
The Issue: Much of what we believe to ‘know’ we know through the testimony of others. Intuitively, how much I adjust my beliefs in response to you saying “it is snowing” should depend on how reliable/accurate you are (ie the likelihoods associated with your report) 1/9
All of this is bad news, because the reliability/accuracy of agents in a social network (i.e., all of us in real life, much of the time!) not only changes all the time as we hear more evidence/arguments from others, our reliabilities (including our perceptions of each others’ reliability) will mutually influence each other, see (just out a month ago): https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/17456916231198479
so what does this all mean? #epistemology#misinformation#SocialNetworks
#SocialMedia#SocialNetworks#LinkedIn#AdTech#Advertising#Twitter: "Professional social networking site LinkedIn has made new inroads into the digital advertising market, with higher demand driving up prices on the platform as brands seek to reallocate spending from Elon Musk’s X.
Annual advertising revenues at the Microsoft-owned group rose to nearly $4bn in 2023, up 10.1 per cent year on year, according to estimates from research group Insider Intelligence. It also predicted further growth of 14.1 per cent in 2024.
Marketing agency executives and advertising industry insiders told the Financial Times that prices for LinkedIn adverts — which are sold by auction and therefore set by market demand — were rising amid a surge of interest from advertisers. In some cases, prices have increased as much as 30 per cent over the past year, one executive said."
Polycentric is an Open-source distributed social network – Similar in some ways to Nostr
I’ve not done an in-depth look at this network but reading through their documentation shows it has a lot of similarity to the basics of the Nostr protocol and network. There is just not as much information available on the Polycentric site as there is alread ...continues
The rise and fall of Usenet: How the original social media platform came to be 50 years ago
Long before Facebook existed, or even before the Internet, there was Usenet. Usenet was the first social network. Now, with Google Groups abandoning Usenet, this oldest of all social networks is doomed to disappear.
These days, Usenet’s content is almost e ...continues