We Lost Communication to Entertainment

What shits me most is that in the early months of the Reddit revolt was that people were organically posting topics of discussion and sharing personal original content. Then the bots came and posted clickbait articles dressed as news to drive clicks to the motherships of all these useless websites screaming for attention. It used to be your forum post would be locked if you only posted a link with no commentary or start of a discussion around what you were linking, the idea was to promote discussion, but that’s now gone and maybe the text on memes is the new version of that, I don’t know. Navigating away and filtering that is a daily process, but once you find that one or few communities and shut out the noise there are normal people living normal lives which is nice.

To me, the very goal of interoperability is not to force you into creating multiple accounts. Big Monopolies have managed to convince people that they need one account on each platform.

I want to have multiple accounts, because I like different interfaces for differences services. I like the PeerTube app and web UI for watching and interacting with video content. I like the Mastodon app and web UI for microblogs. I like Voyager and the PieFed UI for threaded discussions and link sharing. It’s always nice to see comments from Mastodon on PeerTube, or native PeerTube channels on PieFed. But that doesn’t mean I need one account that does everything. It’s good to have options.

This is a really good read IMO, I recommend everyone to check it out.

(From memory:) Social media isn’t communicating but Television 2.0…

Communications protocols are boring.

Yeah tell me that, I made one and it seems like it’s the most boring thing ever, sigh.

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This is not a new argument, but the author is a bit confused with the terms. Usually it is phrased as “social network” Vs. “social media”.

The problem with communication protocols was never the protocol part. It’s the communication part. A few sad humans never wanted to communicate in the first place and managed to become billionaires by convincing the rest of mankind that being entertained is better than communicating with other humans.

NGL, I too am ready to jump back onto listservs. I used to have several e-groups that got bought by Yahoo then mothballed years later. Still pissed off about that.

Then again, I cut the cord for cable TV in 1999 when I got cable internet, and never looked back.

I think the author brings some interesting points, but ultimately I think it’s a faulty premise.

The fediverse is whatever the user wants it to be. That’s the whole point really. If you want a reliable communications platform with zero dropped messages, aka email 2.0, then you can definitely build that on the fediverse and people can join such a platform if that’s what they want.

If that’s not what you want… Well then don’t join such a platform. Join another one. You do you.

We don’t need anyone telling us how to communicate or consume content or whatever we want to do with the fediverse. The whole point of the fediverse is that everyone gets to decide for themselves, so there’s no need to be prescriptive about any one approach.

I feel like the author is being a tad dramatic about Pixelfed. I think the whole “can’t see text posts” issue could be solve with a simple “Let me see text posts” toggle, either for the overall feed or hashtags, or account, whatever. The more customizable the better.

My second point is, expecting to have one account to see EVERYTHING on the Fediverse is insanity. Do you expect a Peertube account to read Mastodon posts? A Funkwhale that can look at Misskey? I think servives like Masto, wafrn, and misskey/sharkey should make efforts to have embeded posts from media based services like Peertube/Funkwhale, but different services have different purposes. Some people on Threadiverse (Lemmy, Piefed, mbin) probably don’t even have Masto accounts. Pixelfed’s main goal is to be similar to Instagram, a place to post pictures/images. Instagram doesn’t do walls of text, but if you really wanted to just write words and screenshot it. But why try to make something that “does it all”? We’re getting mad at Facebook for doing exactly that, they have games, vertical videos (Tiktok), marketplace, live streams, groups, instant messaging, and more bullcrap. Pixelfed deserves to exist just as much as Mastodon does.

My final point is, some people don’t want to do a whole blog in addition to their pic. Tumblr has a healthy blend of image and text capability, and some people just do text while others just do pictures. Some people just want to post a picture and communicate through that. Why does text have to weigh heavier than images? I feel it’s a bit unfair to make it sound like people only see brainrot and sensory overload on Insta/media-focused services. I miss many artists from Instagram and Twitter, I wish they’d migrate to Pixelfed or Masto.

I say this as someone who barely uses either Masto or Pixelfed, because it’s far harder to find content I’m interested in on there compared to Threadiverse. Here, we have neat, ordered communities where you get what it says on the tin. But you have to work to find what you want everywhere else, which would feel rewarding if we had the people and content to back it up.

I also think this is fair comment, but it also kindof misses a bigger point: and that is that the experience of media in our lives before social media kindof conditioned us all to separate ourselves into the categories of performer and audience, with the publisher in the middle with the power: and media has always laid the power in the hands of content publishers vs content consumers.

I loved early social networks pre-Facebook (newsgroups, messageboards, LiveJournal) as power was not yet consolidated in the larger publishers. The clever publishers always saw this potential to consolidate power and control media consumers more than ever before. Which has happened, as we’ve been trained for so long to be passive consumers.

The most important element of Burning Man culture for me was the focus on participation: no spectators. The media world wants the opposite and always has.

Yeah I’m starting to think dansup projects aren’t real fediverse projects since everyone seems to have issues with with them.

So the main complaint is that Pixelfed clients don’t display posts without images even if one has followed the poster? And thinks it incentivizes creation of using multiple accounts/apps when a single one to interact with ActivityPub would be better? That seems like a fair thing to criticize but it seems a little dramatic to paint it as entertainment killing communication.

Many journalists should feel called out by this.

Communicating is entertaining

To me, the very goal of interoperability is not to force you into creating multiple accounts. Big Monopolies have managed to convince people that they need one account on each platform. This was done, on purpose, for purely unethical reasons in order to keep users captive

Goddamn, what a shit take.the big monopolies are trying to get you to sign up to each service using their accounts as the authentication IdP for other platforms. Having a central account to funnel data back to the mother ship is exactly why a lot of us DON’T want a single account. Hell, I have multiple Lemmy accounts for segregating what content I see.

Not sure I care any more about this dudetake when his base premise is so far off line.

This guy complained that a instagram clone only showed image post and not text, and as such it was breaking the Fediverse?

What a terrible take.

Ok, I opened the article, read a major part of it, not all of it, it’s a little too long and too “esoteric” for me. I’m a simple guy.

I agree there is a problem, I try to find communication. I can’t find much of it on Lemmy, where most “posts” are just links to articles, or reposts from reddit. I am missing small forums from the early days of the internet, where people knew each other… But I didn’t find it here.

I am responding to this post, but I didn’t even read OP’s user name, so I might be a part of the problem.

The article mentions Gemini, which is an unfortunate name for something that is not developed by Google (even if it was called like that before Google Gemini, if you don’t have a few billion dollars, you don’t want to share the name with something owned by Google), I wanted to check it out but failed.

The linked article “there is no content on Gemini” didn’t say what it is… It focused on what it isn’t… Or if it did, I lost patience before that part…

So I totally agree regarding the problem, but if you are trying to sell a solution, then apparently I am unqualified to use it.

Go away, ‘batin.

Good article, worth the read 😊

Dumb