RESEARCH: On decentralized social networks like Mastodon, community moderators can choose to defederate — disconnect from another group to protect themselves from harassers and undesirable content.
The effects of defederation include reduced activity on blocked servers, but not necessarily less toxic content.
New in @CNET from Katelyn Chedraoui: people are fleeing the “mindless scroll spiral” of the big social platforms for smaller groups in places like Nextdoor, Reddit, and even Letterboxd.
According to New_ Public Co-Director @deeptidoshi : “We need to complement that with a movement to ensure that these small spaces are actually healthy.”
Corey Doctorow: Meta's "entire business is grounded in the nonconsensual extraction and mining of billions of dollars’ worth of private information from billions of people all over the world."
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Almost 15 years after the release of the movie The Social Network, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin is reportedly working on a sequel that grapples with tensions between Facebook’s growth and its integrity.
“Facebook has been, among other things, tuning its algorithm to promote the most divisive material possible.”
"The world’s emails, TikToks, classified memos, bank transfers, satellite surveillance, and FaceTime calls travel on cables that are about as thin as a garden hose."
🧩 HUGE news from Google's Jigsaw: they are releasing new AI-powered tools that can elevate comments with prosocial qualities, such as sharing a personal story or fostering human compassion.
New publication Sherwood (a Robinhood subsidiary) on Apple:
"The last time Apple’s [R&D] percentage was this high was more than 20 years ago, around when Apple released the iPod and was developing the iPhone. But in the meantime, Apple’s R&D as a share of sales had sunk. In other words, it’s raking in cash without commensurately redeploying it toward its next big thing."
these corps want you to do everything in public where they can run ads. fuck them and ads, but participating in public is very important as I said above.
it's just a different thing from the separate bubbles we want for close family, extended family, diff friend groups, work, orgs etc. people have sms chains, FB groups, Discord servers etc.
FOSS decentralized social can let us do both much better and they will overlap, but we need to think thru the distinctions.
As Nathan Schneider writes, as the internet's infrastructure advanced, and no longer needed sysops with absolute authority, why didn't these spaces become more democratic?
Turns out, authoritarian digital spaces are more profitable.
In this moment, as Congress weighs forcing a sale / banning TikTok, Signal President @Mer__edith says, "we need to weigh our choices and define what we’re actually fighting for."