> We (the internet community) made such a terrible mistake with #SocialMedia. We formed connections and communities and friendships [but] those connections are only allowed to exist as long as they are part of a profitable system. How awful it is to reduce human connection to that. To think that I am only allowed to maintain certain social connections as long as they continue to produce monetary value for an intermediary. An awful, awful mistake.
@smallcircles THANK You - great words! Also on this thread: "We spent so many years crowdsourcing these curated knowledge bases on a variety of subjects for free to the point that it's empowered the controlling companies to firewall them now and then make our input a commodity that they can turn around and sell to us....They take our words and ideas and give nothing back in return."
@smallcircles In a way the fediverse has only made partial progress on this.
We're still very subject to the whims of admins. If an admin decides to shut down their server, your post history and "presence" on the internet is very much taken down too.
Mastodon has migrations, which is good. But continuity is broken. Your old posts will stay on the old server, and disappear if the server goes down.
Should an admin get dodgy and just shutdown without warning ... then you can't even migrate.
Agreed. Larger community spaces: discord servers, subreddits--are owned by corporations. It is terribly hard to get around that, especially given that google search results are never going to send you to a forum in this day and age.
But personal connections: for the people I like and make friends with, I almost always send them the necessary details to communicate with me via email--or even letters.
@smallcircles good thing that I was never a Part of this, because I sticked to Blogging and made sure i own the Content I created. 😏
Maybe you referring to the broader Masses of People just using all the Platforms and Service that claim to be free and secure but selling there Data to make Money of it. 🙄
@smallcircles Well it’s not like reddit couldn’t easily be profitable with little community backlash if it was decently managed… hell if they just told Apollo it can keep existing if it shows ads, Apollo wouldn’t complain much and users could understand if it was well communicated.
@smallcircles I don't mind most of my relationships being structured around an economic one, what I dislike about IG/twitter/telegram type space is the manipulation by very powerful forces, which probably inevitably goes with capitalism.
@smallcircles tbh when i used to run my city server i couldn't understand why anyone would post valuable content on other people's servers. But people didn't think about it that way
@gvelez17@smallcircles
The way to understand this is: Human cognitive ability is much more limited than you'd think, or experience in your own life (because you learn to avoid draining activities).
Most people are busy with other stuff and do not have the mental bandwidth to use the internet properly (except, seemingly, scrolling through random addictive garbage on their phones). I'm not saying this majority of people is dumb or anything, but I agree that this is a bad state of affairs.
Because in the resulting attention economy, as somebody who is trying to generate value for viewers (so, content creator, what a word :flan_eyeroll: ), you need to be where the people are, and therefore you post to big social media websites.
The HN post actually shows a nice path of discussion that you can open with your friends and relatives to try and convince them of putting up with a bit of hassle by coming to a federated service with you.
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