Thoughts On Decentralised Social Media
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Thoughts On Decentralised Social Media

Byrichard

The web was decentralised for a long time. The internet and social networks were designed around different niches. We had niches for people that did sports in the same area of Switzerland, that wanted to discuss a variety of topics, for music lovers and more. The change brought on by MySpace, Twitter, ICQ, Facebook and other projects is that it centralised all those communities so that everyone was in different communities, on three or four social networks.


That centralisation internationalised certain networks, like Twitter and Facebook, although with a heavy US bias. With the decline of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter the implosion of social networks that happened before is moving in the opposite direction. We are going from a centralised to a decentralised social network landscape.


The more I use Mastodon, the more I take long breaks from the “federation”. People are arguing, disagreeing, and in general trying to impose a vision, onto people, rather than seducing them, and encouraging them to think the same way.


I watched an episode of Northern Exposure that deals with racism, bias and prejudice that I appreciate. In the 90s cultural differences and other differences were a source of discussion, and existential questions. People would explore what they felt, and try to find a new way of seeing things, to make them more open minded. People would aknowledge how they felt, and see about changing their views and attitudes, through discussion.


Twitter is swinging to the Right, and there are adverts every fourth post so it has become less welcoming. Mastodon has another related problem. People are saying “if you don’t think this way then you can leave” and “everyone has to behave this way, rather than that way”. I go to social media to have pleasant conversations and interactions, not to be told what, and how to think.


What I want is not a Twitter, Facebook or Instagram replacement. I want to find a new social network, in person, that uses Signal, or another IM platform, to converse with a small network of friends. I am tired of the big social networks that lack social warmth. I want to find a new community of like-minded people. Not easy, when COVID denialism makes being social a risk.

The Immature Coming of Age of Social Media
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The Immature Coming of Age of Social Media

Byrichard

Around a decade and a half ago I grew tired of seeing blog headlines that said “The top ten blah blah”, “Three signs that …” and more. It grew tiring to see all those headlines, to a point where it generated the term clickbait. The idea of a headline being written to attract people to a click where there was no content behind it.


Today I worry that the juvenile behaviour and attitude of social media, and to some degree mainstream media, is making it hard to have meaningful adult conversations. A lot of social media is about sensationalism, and tabloid superficiality, rather than meaningful, pleasant conversation and idea sharing.


I realise that terms like woke are apparently based on African American culture in the US to describe white people that are in tune with the reality of the situation, but I hate the term. When I worked in Human Rights I came across the term “The decade of the People of African Descent and I much prefer this term. It isn’t about race, chrominance or anything else. It’s about where a family might have originated. I have no problem with “of European descent” or other terms, because it brings the conversation towards migration and mobility.


Woke is a word that already has a meaning, that we use every single morning. To use it to insult others makes it a useless term, rather than a useful term. I used social media to find pleasant conversations, for friendship, and for more, as time advanced friendhips.


This is the time of year when people complain about the changing of the clocks, and I have the view that those who live far enough from the equator will love the move of clocks forwards and backwards, because it signifies the arrival of spring or the arrival of winter. It also signals an extra hour in bed when the weather is colder and more unpleasant, and waking an hour earlier, when the sun rises an hour earlier. I love the change of clocks.


Others don’t, and wnt to argue about how we shouldn’t change the clocks according to the season. People discussed their hatred of the clocks changing on Mastodon and my reflex is to keep the app closed, and to steer clear.


I loved social media when it was a pleasant, adult conversation about projects, aspirations, friendship and more. Now that it is childish bickering I prefer to take a step back. Why do we invest years of our lives on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other social networks, only to see them bought by immoral people, and ruined. The death of Twitter has degraded my desire to invest time and effort into any social network.


If the pandemic was over for real, rather than for commercial reassons I would give up on social media completely. I would use telegram or signal, with a group of people and chat. Paradoxically, not having a car, having a broken arm and then three years of pandemic, encouraged me to dump whatsapp, facebook, instagram and now Twitter. I ran out of things to give up on.


Now I’d like the pandemic to be over. I’d like for there to be zero new cases for two weeks in a row, for the entire country, or even continent, so that I can rebuild a real life, and forget about “social” media, at last.


And Finally


And Finally I really don’t get why Auttomatic bought ActivityPub. For me the product is not ready to be seen as a product. I think that sale was premature.

Twitter, As a Joke
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Twitter, As a Joke

Byrichard

Twitter went down and I didn’t notice, yet again. According to The Verge it has been down five times in five weeks. It goes down so regularly that it feels as if they have allowed the Netflix Chaos Monkey to run freely around Twitter code. They say that they need to rewrite the entire site.


Twitter had plenty of downtime many years ago but these were growing problems that were eventually resolved. It would go for months or even seasons without serious issues. They had learned how to make Twitter reliable. Now that so many staff have been fired the people with less experienced are stuck, trying to understand the old logic, and failing.


They want to rewrite the entire website. I wish them good luck. I don’t see how they can when they’re firing people, and overloading those that are left behind, with work.


“This paved the way for a single engineer to be staffed on a major project — one that is linked to several critical interconnected systems that both users and employees depend on. “

https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/6/23627875/twitter-outage-how-it-happened-engineer-api-shut-down


Google Reader, Jaiku, and plenty of services have lived, thrived and eventually been abandonned. Twitter is not something I rely on anymore, so whether it lives or dies, at this point, doesn’t matter.


I am no longer invested in the social network. I am no longer invested in social media, because social media has shown that it is a glossy mag, rather than a social network. Glossy mags are not social networks. They are advert sellers. I loved Twitter. I expect nothing now.


And Finally


I don’t want to use Twitter anymore for the same reason I stopped using Facebook and Instagram. I don’t trust those in charge to be moral. I expect that our data and attention will be exploited. We will be used.


I am not a user. I am a community member. Destroy the community, like you did with Facebook and Instagram, and I will migrate.


My issue with Twitter is not that it goes down, but why it goes down. I also have issue with who owns and controls it. No social network should be controlled by the Far Right, especially when algorithms affect what you see.

Twitter’s Not For Me
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Twitter’s Not For Me

Byrichard

Twitter has a new For You page inspired by TikTok’s For you page according to Quartz. Many years ago we had Seesmic, a video chat community where people could share video messages 24 hours a day. We even experimented with recording videos and sharing them by phone when this was still novel.



Tik Tok has a critical flaw, as do plenty of the more popular social networks. As someone said on Mastodon today, “You have to be fast to say something new, before hundreds of other people have posted every possible reaction. That is what’s wrong with social networks today. I use social networks because I think social media is an awful term, used to encourage abuses rather than empathy.


By shifting to the “For You” algorithm based model Twitter is making the mistake that Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and other websites have made. It is forcing people to see populist crap rather than personal and meaningful chats.


I saw someone tweet “I have 8000 followers and my tweets have 3 million views.”


Social media should never be about huge follower numbers, and millions of views. It should be about personal conversations that lead people to want to meet in person. It should be about connecting with people.


The more Musk destroys Twitter, the easier it is to stay away for hours at a time, and to spend minutes rather than hours on the site. I played with Substack but I don’t want to post too often because I don’t want to generate too much noise. I am also playing with a shorter form WordPress blog. With the short form blog I don’t mind being noisy because I clearly state that it is a Facebook/Twitter replacement.


As soon as websites use recommendation engines, rather than chronological posts, I move away and I lose interest. Social media should be relevant and timely, not algorithm driven populist mediocrity. Time to move on.

A Short Twitter Detox
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A Short Twitter Detox

Byrichard

I took a short twitter detox for two days. For two days I didn’t look at tweets, replies and more. For two days if I wanted to rant I couldn’t. For two days I couldn’t see replies. For two days I couldn’t read people complain.


It is good to take a break from twitter sometimes. I don’t believe in social media addiction. Social media is a conversation. If you can get addicted to having conversations then the world is messed up. Twitter is a social network, not an addiction.


What triggered me to take a twitter break, aside from the ownership change and the negativity I see on a daily basis, is the inability to change from the “home” feed. Until recently we could swap between algorithm driven timelines and chronological ones. The ability to switch between both has been made much harder.


Twitter is making the same mistake as Facebook did, which Facebook then did to Instagram. It decided that Twitter will now be a Right leaning tool for propaganda and disinformation, rather than a chronological timeline of tweets by friends and friends of friends. It will throw in sponsored content.


And Finally


You can get Twitter Blue for 8-11 USD per month, to get the blue tick, or you can get Wordpress Premium for 8 dollars a month, if you pay for the year in advance. This allows you to monetise your content and more. It also gives you full acess to a blogging platform, rather than simple microblogging. For four dollars per month you get the personal option, and you can get a personal blog. There are cheaper options. The point is that 8 USD per month for a product like Twitter is extortion, especially given the volatility of the site.


Mastodon is also an option, that is free/donation based depending on whether you choose an existing server, implement your own, and whether enough donations have been made to be sustainable.

Taking a Twitter Break
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Taking a Twitter Break

Byrichard

For the first time since I took a Twitter break in 2007 I am taking another in 2023. The first time I took a twitter break I deleted my account but got asked to talk about Twitter for the RTS (TSR) back then so I went to my secondary account and started using twitter again. Since then I have continued to love and hate twitter in equal measure.


I don’t like that a billionaire could just buy Twitter because of a bet he made with web users on another site. I don’t like that no government system could stop him from making the purchase. I also don’t like that the board of directors didn’t block the acquisition.


Twitter from 2006-2007 was a communal social network where people conversed online before meeting in person once a week, and meeting at conferences on a less regular basis. It was a network of friends where everyone was connected to everyone else. Since 2007 it has been a cult of personality, but at least we could converse with each other.


With Musk’s purchase of Twitter it feels more hostile. It feels as though the Far Right is being made more visible. It feels as if trolling is being encouraged. It feels as though conspiracy theory spreading is being encouraged.


I stopped using Facebook and Instagram because I saw more junk than posts by friends. Before deciding to take my twitter break I noticed that I could no longer choose between a chronological timeline and an algorithm driven one. I am now stuck with seeing what the algorithms want me to see.


Twitter is now driven by the algorithms rather than the network of people we follow, and their friends. Musk and his teams choose what we see, how often we see it, and who can see what we tweet. Twitter is no longer what we make of it. It is what Musk and his teams want it to be.


I don’t want to be part of it.


Social media should be about fun, about friendship, and about personal connections. Social media now seems to be about being negative, complaining, and protecting ourselves by being anonymous on the one hand, and private on the other. On a good social media site we should use our names, rather than nicknames, and we should trust people not to blackmail us.


At this point I don’t know about social media. I want to revert to a smaller network of friendships, where we read each other’s content, comment, and develop friendships that lead to us wanting to meet in person. I don’t feel that way about social networks like Twitter anymore.

Limited Bandwidth and Twitter
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Limited Bandwidth and Twitter

Byrichard

Let’s take a step back from today, and let’s remember the 2006 tech landscape. In 2006 we had Symbian phones, GPRS, text messages. We used the world wide web whilst sitting at computers usually via wifi. We would tweet until the moment we left home, and then we had to rely on SMS to keep in touch with people that we either wanted to meet or communicate with.


At the time phones were small, with just a few lines of text at a time, and little to no media content. We used Twitter and Jaiku because they allowed us, in a time of limited bandwidth, to have a conversation either, sitting at a computer, or by SMS.


Eventually bandwidth and data plans improved and increased, especially with the arrival of the iPhone, but blackberry users had lived in the future for years beforehand.


Twitter benefited from the iPhone, and it was favoured over Jaiku, so it won, but Jaiku offered everything that Twitter took years to offer, in turn.


That twitter has only a third of a million users tells you about the niche that it has, and the use cases that it fails to provide to its users. Medium was spun off from Twitter and others a blogging variant. Facebook, Reddit and two or three other solutions offer web forum style websites.


Twitter lost its niche back in 2007 when it went from being a network of friends of friends, who come across each other, and talk between each other to a hashtag driven, celebrity following mess. It’s when I read this vox article that I thought of the topic.


The web of today is mature. Everyone, or almost, has a smartphone and uses the web for information and staying in touch. Bandwidth is unlimited for many. What we need is not another twitter. What we need is a local, social web, where people that are in the same village, town or country, chat together. For too long the web has been about talking with people thousands of kilometres away. We need to progress towards a local social web.

MicroBlogging and I
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MicroBlogging and I

Byrichard

Since 2006 I have thought of Twitter, Jaiku, Mastodon and Plurk as conversation channels, rather than microblogging. I go to these places and use them as chatroooms rather than microblogs. If I want to blog I have my full scale blog. This website, to keep me entertained.


I bring this up because at lunchtime today, the time at which I usually get tired with social media, two people frustrated me. One person asked for what reason Musk should have been stopped from buying twitter. The second said that without hashtags they wouldn’t be able to find content on Mastodon.


I might be argumentative on social media but that is not why I use social media. Ideally I want to use social media to have pleasant conversations that eventually lead to me wanting to meet people in person, or failing that, to collaborate online on projects. This lunchtime I found two arguments and my reaction was “I don’t want to invest hundreds or thousands of hours on a social network, like Mastodon, to have it be as big of a waste of time, as twitter, in recent years. I use social media to be social, not to argue.


Social media is an investment in time, attention and more. I stopped using Facebook and Instagram because I felt I was making money for others, without having any benefit of my own. The more posts you see, the more Instagram and Facebook earned. In the end I was tired of giving them a steady stream of cash. At the time I thought, If I took the time I spent on IG and FB and invested it on my own website then it would do better, and I’d get just as much engagement. This is tongue in cheek. If I am being ignored I might as well be ignored on my own website.


At the end of today I will have gone two days without tweeting. If I manage two weeks then I will have kicked the habit. I need to find a replacement. Blogging is one productive distraction.

Taking a Break From Twitter
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Taking a Break From Twitter

Byrichard

I have used Twitter almost every single day since I created my first account in 2006. During this time I have met a lot of people, gone to a lot of events, learned a lot and been part of communities. The decision to take a break is not an easy one to make, because it involves losing touch with a community. It involves leaving a social network at the moment when you’re following and conversing with more people.


Twitter icon transforming into the Mastodon M
Twitter icon transforming into the Mastodon M


I feel obligated to take a break for two main reasons. The first is that it makes rational sense to leave social networks when their ownership and morality swing to the Far Right. I don’t want to read news by Far Right newspapers, watch their news, listen to their shows, or be part of their social networks.


Theoretically I could simply shrink the number of people I follow and keep my tweets private, and I’d be happy with that. The real reason I want to take a twitter break is that I don’t want Musk to win. I don’t want him to be able to tweet “oh look, the servers are under pressure” and having leading poll questions that provide false justification for immoral points of view.


From a European perspective we cannot continue to use an app where disinformation is seen as free speech. We cannot be on a social network where the mainstream media, despite their Right Wing ownership in many cases, is denigrated and where he wants “citizen” journalism to thrive.


“So it’s perhaps no surprise that Musk, a billionaire businessman, went off on Apple this past week. He understands that the iPhone maker is an impediment to his financial goals.” source.


If I stop using Twitter, it is because those in charge at the moment go against sense of ethics and morality. I don’t want to be part of a network where people are brainwashed and misled. and where mob mentality is encouraged, rather than rational reason and thought.


Twitter should never have had an IPO. It should never have agreed to being sold, as it enriched greedy people, but with a cost to society at large. It should have become a non profit organisation, working as a medium by which for people to communicate with each other globally, where morality and ethics were prioritised, where rational, decent people made decisions.


We have Mastodon now, and with time Mastodon will be as vibrant as Twitter, but for now using Mastodon means being isolated from a community we enjoy, meeting in a place we no longer want to go to.


And finally, I don’t want Twitter to go away. I want user engagement to drop long enough for Musk to rethink his political lean long enough for twitter to become a place for good, once more.

Mastodon has Eight Million Accounts Today
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Mastodon has Eight Million Accounts Today

Byrichard

Mastodon has reached eight million accounts today. That’s close to the population of Switzerland and two million less than London. Mastodon is growing because it was ready to scale up at the right time. As Musk and Twitter shift towards the Right, and as Musk perpetuates conspiracy theories, on a daily basis, so he prepares the idea conditions for other social networks and opportunities to thrive.


As Twitter loses users, and engagement so other social networks are more likely to thrive. Every day I check on Twitter, and every day I am repulsed by what he is sharing. Every day I feel that I should abandon Twitter. I don’t, for now, for a simple reason. On twitter there are conversations to be had twenty four hours a day, whereas on Mastodon, you have to wait for people to show up. That wait is a good reason to do other things, like return to Twitter.


What I am waiting for, impatiently is for enough people to leave Twitter for Mastodon, for Mastodon to be entertaining at all times, without long moments of silence. I am not convinced that Mastodon will be the ideal Twitter replacement. For now it is a curiousity that has the ability to scale up as required, within the current requirements.


Mastodon is to “microblogging” what WordPress is to blogging. It’s a way to create an instance of a service which you can either use in solitude, and yet access what others are discussing, or a way of having a small personal community. We’re used to syndicated blogs. The fediverse is almost the same, but goes by the name “federated”. In both cases it’s spread across servers, more flexible, more adaptive to demand, and easier to sustain. Wordpress and other content management systems could be written to take advantage of this distributed networks of communities.


That’s it for today.