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I started writing a post, but felt that it was too negative so I stopped, and now I’m writing this one. I want to explore the way in which Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter and Reddit are still front and foremost on The Guardian Website, as well as many others.
As I write this Twitter has become x.com. Reddit has had several weeks of protests and Facebook reached over three billion users. The paradox, with Facebook is that it’s the most unpleasant “social network” I know. I find Facebook and Instagram deeply unpleasant to use.
The Slow Pivot Away From Corporate Social Media
The goal is not to speak about the social media giants, because plenty of people can do that. What I want to consider, is the lack of attention that is being given to Lemmy, Kbin, Firefish, Mastodon and the Fediverse in general. There is now a fediverse of social networks that we can use to share news, and life.
I don’t see any “share with Pixelfed” or share on “peertube”. I don’t even really see “share via the wordpress community.
By now I would have expected the Guardian, New York Times, Le Monde and other papers to start sharing their news stories and articles via the Fediverse, especially since making a website fediverse friendly is relatively easy, especially if you’re on a self-hosted wordpress blog. Within minutes a wordpress blog can be a fediverse server, if not sooner.
Professional Social Media
If I was working in Professional Social Media I would already have pivoted towards streamlining fediverse participation. With the fediverse a website, or instance, can be fully integrated within the fediverse, making it easier to engage, rather than more difficult. No need for people to sign in, to sign up, or even to browse away from their mastodon feed. Everything is integrated.
You can reply to a fediverse blog post, as a reply, and it’s seamless. There is no barrier to interaction, as we had with older social media websites.
No Navigating Away – No Threads
With the fediverse you can write posts of any length. You can microblog, if you wish, or you can write a dissertation. Both are native, so need to navigate from one website to another, and because character limits don’t exist, if you’re on the right instances, then there is no need for threads.
Threads and the Network Defect
Threads was launched and picked up 100 million users, but they were soon angry that they couldn’t cancel their accounts without destroying their Instagram accounts, but they also found that by not being able to see their followers with ease, the new site/app had little to no value, so 70 million left. It might have been quick to grow but due to design flaws it was also quick to lose users.
FB hasn’t learned
I left FB and IG because the sense of community was lost. The reason people fled Twitter too, is because of the disintegration of the communitiies that they wanted to be a part of. I said that Threads would not be of interest, and as we see, within a week it had lost its appeal.
Not Just Conversations
The fediverse is not just a way for people to chat with each other. It’s a way of sharing entire articles, blog posts, videos, photos and more.
Blog posts, articles and photos are more than that. They are the start of a conversation. If people comment then that content becomes more visible because it bubbles back to the surface again.
New Opportunities
in 2006 and 2007 Twitter was limited by the bandwidth that we had on mobile phones, wifi and home connections. In 2023 the environment is mature. Live video whilst walking, sharing of photos from anywhere, and more, have become common place. The Fediverse is already, video, text, audio, photos, articles, blogs and more.
The Fediverse as Portal
The concept of web portals is an old one, and one of the oldest ones still around is Yahoo. If used properly then the Fediverse can be seen as a portal, for communities to join together and communicate. The Guardian, New york Times and others should take advantage of the opportunities that the Fediverse provides people with.
The Crosscall Odyssey Plus fills two niches. It is a rugged weather proof phone rated to the IP 68 standard and is equipped with dual sim capability. This makes it ideal for the sports I enjoy, mainly via ferrata as pictured below and hiking. It comes with a smaller carabiner than the one pictured below. I swapped it for one of my own.
IP 68Â is a code to determine how resistant a device is to both particulate matter and liquids. 6 denotes that the device is dust tight so particulate matter will not make it’s way in. 8 as defined by the manufacturer denotes that this device can be submerged for half an hour at 1m before damage occurs. If you get caught in the rain or have to cross a river the phone should survive.
Another interesting feature is the dual sim capability. This phone allows for two microsims to be used at once. In my case I have a Swiss sim card and a french one. Both sims are constantly active so you can select whether to make phone calls from Sim 1 or Sim 2. You can also select which sim card is using the data plan.
It runs android 4.3 and works fine with the TomTom app, the ingress and others. I found that battery life is also comfortable. With me as a user the battery lasts for a day.
A journalism student at the University of Westminster worked on an item about addiction to technology and this is quite an old item. In 1998 (if I remember correctly) I was speaking to a security guard in Martinique about the internet and he talked about it as if it was a disease as if it was bad.
Back in my high school days would argue with my teachers trying to get permission to draw the graphs by computer rather than doing them by hand. This happened both in geography and chemistry. One teacher commented: “What about when you’re on the field?” going on to explain that technology would not always be at my reach.
Since then things have changed and technology has progressed to such an extent that I could now create that graph on my XDA Mini S and e-mail it to whomever I’m working for. Of course, the batteries might die but the potential is there and innovation is changing society as a whole.
In my bedroom, I have a MacBook pro, an iBook, one Nokia, one Sony Erricson, one xda, one 500 gig drive, one terabyte drive, and one 200 gig drive. I’ve got a lot of technology but my work is based around this technology. One phone is a spare, another is for Switzerland and the third is for England. This is so that I don’t need to pay international fees when making phone calls in countries I visit often.
As I’m writing this post I’m listening to music from someone’s playlist on last.fm and that’s American music streamed from a London based company bought by CBS fairly recently. The blogging software I’m using is open source and the image in the banner was taken in Les Diablerets Switzerland.
Topically last night there was a power cut in the street where I live and it took them several hours to fix. As a result of this, the wired life I am used to was put on hold for a number of hours. I didn’t go to sleep any earlier. I watched one of the blue planet documentaries instead, as you do.
As a side note, I did once believe in internet and technological addiction. I went to Tanzania for 21 days to help build schools and for a 7-day safari. During this time I decided that I would not touch a computer, I would have nothing to do with technology aside from the camera.
I walked down the muddy roads from one school to another. I saw a much simpler way of life. I saw a different way of life which I appreciated far more. In fact, I wanted to stay there so I’d avoid coming home to the stress of the IB. It’s during this trip that I saw that the addiction some people talk about does not exist.
Either you get with the times or you’re left behind. I’m comfortable with technology so use it constantly.
Finally, I’d like to address a comment at the end of the item about texting. Twitter and Jaiku should have been mentioned as extreme examples of technological addiction.
One of the unique things about Twitter in 2006 and 2007, especially during the first tweetups was that it was a network of strangers who became friends without meeting in person. The people I became friends with in 2006-2007 are still friends now, to some degree. I met them every week at tuttle events and tweetups.
At the same time Facebook was a network of friends from university, which then became friends from work, to friends from various activities. These were networks where, in the first case, you met new people, and in the second you consolidated personal friendships in the physical world online.
This morning I noticed a Fortune article titled ‘People are posting a lot less on public social media’: Creator economy investor says the old web is gone, replaced by ‘people who are professionally entertaining you’.
The entire reason for using social media is to connect with human beings, at a human level, and to develop friendships that go from the world wide web to the physical world. By being about influencers and other charletans Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and other social networks become worthless because it’s the cult of the amateur supercharged. The Amateur who pays to create content for free, so that others can benefit is absurd.
When social media was about human beings connecting with each other, getting along, and then finding the desire to meet in person social media was a pleasant and friendly place to spend time. That’s where social media outshines other media. Social media was about connecting people. Social media was about multiplexing. Social media was about our social networks being our social net worth to use some of the marketing terminology of the time.
“creators thrive when brands are happy to pay them to create content on platforms they’re creating content on,” Lee says.” On paper this is fantastic. On paper dehumanist content creators are creating social media content creators on a platform that undercuts the sense of self, and friendships. Plenty of content on YouTube is sensationalist rubbish. They might get sponsors, and their content might be monetised, but the content is mediocre, at best.
Instagram thrived when it was a network of friends sharing photos with friends. It became absurd when it put forward the impersonal influencer.
The paradox is that I’m curious about a lot of things. If I had found YouTube videos that were worth watching, about certain products, I might have watched them, rather than surfed to articles and blog posts. One of the issues that I find with TikTok, YouTube and other platforms is that the content creators are long winded and disingenuous. They write clickbait titles to force you to watch their content, but in doing so they get me to do the opposite.
I’ve been surfing the web since the 90s so I have seen three or four decades of clickbait by now. I’m tired of the clickbait content. Influencers rely on clickbait tactics to get views, and I find this exhausting. I often browse YouTube for content, but within minutes I usually give up. Everything is sensationalist clickbait.
Most reels on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube are awful tabloid crap.
“The reason people follow social media creators, the reason they bother, is partly because of the authenticity,” Kaletsky says. “There’s nothing in the world that’s less authentic than an AI-generated character. So it sort of defeats the point in many ways.”
That’s precisely why I switched away from Social Media. Sensationalist clickbait is not honest. Sensationalist clickbait is not genuine. Social media is so busy getting algorithms to push rubbish upon us that they forget that the reason we use social media is to see what people we know are doing, rather than strangers. The issue is that algorithms are showing content by strangers. That’s not influence. That’s clickbait. that’s spam. That’s irrelevant.
The entire raison d’être of social media is to be a way to see what your network of friends are enjoying and what they think of things. It’s about engaging online, and desiring to do things offline. By keeping people isolated social media is undercutting its entire reason for existing. Why should I use YouTube or Instagram if I am shown irrelevant content?
If I want to know what strangers think, I have the open web. I have search engines, and I have news sites. Since the death of Twitter I find myself blogging more, reading more articles, and doing other things. I reverted to pre-social media habits.
Social media had a reason for being, when it reduced isolation and connected people. Paradoxically Facebook groups do that. I have a deep dislike of Facebook, but that’s where it feels like I could still find an offline community that could lead to in person meetings.
I’m tired. I am tired of reading about how influencers are being put forward. I am tired of seeing articles about how influencers are having to keep social media companies happy. I am tired of never seing articles about how social media companies ignore the Return of Investment for ordinary users. One of the consequences of this focus on ROI for “influencers” is that influencers use Mastodon and the Fediverse in the same manner, diminishing the ROI of being on Mastodon instances. The focus should be on connecting people.
Leopards are a strong animal capable of lifting animal carcasses into trees to keep their catch safe. It’s also the new Apple operating system and I purchased it. After taking about two hours to install the operating I’m quite happy with the new operating system.
Safari has had some new interactivity added. With most browsers the tabs are fixed at the top of the page and there’s not much you can do. If you’re in a playful mood then open up safari in Leopard and you can switch the tabs between each other. If you feel that one tab deserves it’s own browser window simply pull down the tab and it goes to a full size browser.
The user interface for the finder is quite a bit more fun. You’ve got coverflow for you pictures. What this means is that you can go through your pictures with no need to open iphoto and other applications. As a result the ability to be disorganised is greatly enhanced. At the same time looking at photographs and documents is quite a bit easier.
The time machine is an interesting piece of software that backs up your data every hour for 24 hours, then every day for a month and after that every week for as long as there’s space on the hard disk. If you’re on a desktop and your external hard drives are always plugged in then this is excellent. If you’re like me and you’re using a laptop the idea is not that great because the time machine is only active whilst I’m taking the time to plug in the hard drive. Setup is really easy therefore anyone with an external hard drive that mirrors the space used on their computer should be able to use it. If you’re using an internal spare hard drive does it work the same way
Items in the dock look the same as in tiger except there is a blue dot at the moment to display the applications that are currently active. The mail application has an RSS feed of apple news, just in case you’d missed the latest. You have both to do and notes included straight within the mail application.
The calendar has had one or two improvements of which the most useful is the pop out when you’re adding an event. In previous versions you would have to go to either side and type in additional information. With this one data input is overlayed over the calendar greatly increasing usability.
The ichat chromakey technology is quite interesting. If you want you can choose any background you want from the database of videos and photographs you have on your laptop. Simply choose the background you want. Move out of shot and wait till it’s seen the image. When you move back into frame you’ve got whichever background you chose. It works moderatly well depending on the type of background you’re using though.
Leopard is a nice operating system with a number of new features that make it fun to try out and use. The way information is displayed is interesting and the additional features like cover flow for document browsing, time machine for backup and more are taking advantage of the fact that people’s use of the computer has progressed over the years. By being better at media browsing the operating system is more intuitive to use. So far I’m happy with it.
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