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.

I’m quite happy with Voyager, never used anything else.

Definitely Antichrist material! 👍

This is the first time on Not The Onion I’ve genuinely been flabbergasted that it really wasn’t from The Onion.

I guess they’ve calculated that people will react with similar incredulity and thus brands awareness, but still, wtf.

🤮

This is not glamping.

In Melbourne there was one cycleway that was regularly strewn with furniture tacks.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boulie_Tacker

What if your hairstylist is on the Fediverse, avoids mainstream social media, and spends a lot of their spare time reading scientific papers?

This isn’t a surprise if I heard about it weeks ago.

Don’t forget MZB.

Thanks for this comment! It really explains exactly why Friendica is struggling.

Is a real shame as IMO events (and groups) are really important to get a critical mass of adoption in Fedi. I look at sites like Allevents.in which allow people to submit but most of their event data is scraped from FB. We need Fedi instances which make searching events easy. So many groups and individuals and organisations feel unable to leave FB because they can’t see anywhere else to tell people about events, at the moment that is pretty true. But it needs to be an allrounder site, not an event specialist site.

But not being able to connect to busy Lemmy communities would mean Friendica isn’t an ideal allrounder, and even if the Friendica instance got big and has very busy groups, it would have issues.

I hope that these issues get solved!

Oh, it’s dangerous and harmful all right : to their business model.

I think the big G is probably starting to get pretty nervous about self hosting. It absolutely is a threat to their existence. They are nothing without users.

There’s a lot of us fed up with enshittification and every video that helps people break free of their capture is extremely dangerous to them. Seriously.

🤮

I’m hoping to start a Friendica instance, it’s been around for a long time and actually has events, which is something NO other social network has managed to add and one of the main reasons people I know who don’t like Facebook will feel compelled to use it, there’s no other easy way to create and invite people to events.

I also tried to get people to try G+, before that Diaspora, and neither got many people interested: but I think Fedi has now proved its not going away. There needs to be sustained local push to relocalise communities, this is happening in a few places, and enough nontechy people are starting to really understand the danger of FB and the silo mentality.

Lolol. I thought this had to be on c/leopardseatingfaces 😂

I do concede that there has been a trend towards xenophobia that has been exacerbated by filter bubbles and even more by algorithms. But the balance is that people who once had no choice but to suffer ostracism and extreme isolation have been able find community online and have improved mental health and outcomes in many ways.

I certainly found this myself in the early days of the internet before the iron fist of corporatism grabbed this fledgling space, determined to extract value from it, and creating the nightmares of isolation and hate that are now Farcebork and its ilk. Fedi has been a welcome return to smaller communities that have to do the necessary work of self management, which reduces the hate and isolation that is promoted by antisocial media, even if it doesn’t stop it altogether.

My point is, the internet isn’t worse. Humans can be good or bad, but certain environments make them behave in worse ways, and these environments can exist both online and off.

Honestly? I live in a small town, and face to face isn’t much better. People are incredibly bigoted, and might be polite to your face but incredibly judgemental and small minded, especially to anyone perceived as different. Empathy is a skill that needs to be practised, like meditation. And many people lack it both online and off.

I’ve seen people say that Farcebork was like being in a small town, actively making that kind of everyone-knowing-everyone’s-business a reality again for communities fractured by urban anonymity.

But that was there in spades in the early internet, it’s just that normies hadn’t been beaten over the head by social conditioning by the corporate overlords yet to join in.

It’s human nature to think and behave tribally. So we should expect it to continue in the Fediverse, we just can’t shove the problem over to someone else to manage and take their tithe in eyeballs, and thus fracture our communities all over again: we have to do it ourselves. Drama fucking sucks, wherever is found, but we have to accept it’s our job to manage if we don’t want to trade our freedom for a padded cell.

OMG how did I miss seeing this before now

Interesting article, and it did change my view slightly of what ATProto is, but not by a huge amount.

Given the current political climate, a few days ago I randomly started wondering… what if some governments around the world acknowledged that communicating through Farcebok or Xitter is no longer tenable, and committed to providing social media infrastructure hosted in their own countries as a public good: “your tax dollars at work!”

Would ATProto make sense in these cases? They have the resources, and ATProto might seem more attractive/robust for that kind of scale compared to ActivityPub?