I'm noticing more and more that the patterns “social” media provides are not the patterns we need or want for human-centered social media.
Some examples come to mind:
“If you don’t know why something is, follow the money.”
Let’s analyze the structure of existing social media in this fashion:
Assume that everything is made for maximal monetization.
How are current social media platforms monetized?
The answer is advertising.
When you ask “Why was this technical decision made?” what you are really asking is: “How does this feature serve advertisers?”. Try it.
Now, an obvious question comes to mind: If mostly every “social” media feature is a direct or indirect result of serving the advertising business model, why is so much of the Fediverse a direct clone of the features of these platforms?
and so on and so forth.
I understand that in order to get people away from the places that are damaging to them, we should first provide an alternative that feels familiar.
I posit that we have done that, and the big storm of people into the fediverse has not happened, and probably will not ever happen. They will always choose a “Bluesky” over a “Mastodon”, simply because advertisers are the best at the task of creating an advertising platform.
So where does this leave us, as activists, technologists, and dreamers?
First off, I think it’s incredibly freeing. We have a license to try new things! We can come up with new ideas in small groups, driven by the actual wants and needs of us as the wider fediverse, small friend groups, and individual human beings.
And best of all: advertisers are not our masters, and scaling is not our dogma!
However, there is always pressure to conform, to “just” implement “that feature that platform X (YZ) has”, “and wouldn’t it be nice if?”. Instead we should find new ways, ways that actually put the social back into social media.
I hope this post gives some of you the space to take a step back, think through the implications of implementing some new idea. Is it coming from a place of »trying to keep up«, or from a place of true love for the people who are going to use your work in their daily lives?
Okay, enough of this appeal-to-emotion hogwash, here’s a first idea I’ve had: We have this concept of actors, which maps relatively straightforward to an “account”, which in turn speaks “with the voice” of one person.
On the other side, we have “hashtags”, which are an open-form way of looking at a stream of related posts. Those are inspired directly from twitter and similar tag implementations.
What hasn’t been considered is the ability of multiple people to speak with
“one voice” yet.
First, I will post things of vastly different nature to my account,
ranging from programming topics to the political, or I will just post cute
pictures or funny things I see on X (yes, unfortunately all the truly funny people
are still on there …).
Second, other people might want to see only my
programming-related stuff, and don’t much care for my political commentary.
Lastly, I know some people whom I know to also have very interesting takes
on programming. I want them to fill my timeline with nice programming-related
posts which don’t even mention any of the current crazes that hackernews
and most of the blogosphere are circling around.
My current solution here is a kind of boost-bot, where multiple
people can be curators of a single activitypub actor, boosting posts as “one voice”
if you will. The admin can add people as curators, and they will be able to sign
in via DM from their fediverse handle.
I have a first such community-curated bot up at
@happy-programming@happy.softwaregardening.org
(src),
and I hope it can add a new dimension to how we communicate on the fediverse,
ideally a more “human” one.