An old fireplace
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The Post Social Media Age

Byrichard
Reading Time: 3 minutes

Someone asked Is decentralization the future of social media? and I’d take an extra leap. I believe that the Fediverse, made possible by ActivityPub, and the other one, made possible by the Authenticated Transfer Protocol both point to a different future

Playing With WordPress, ClassicPress and Firefish

As we play with the fediverse, and we experiment with WordPress, ClassicPress and Firefish, among other instances or communities one thing becomes clear. The social media age could be over, replaced by something akin to the blogrings of the 90s. What I mean by this is that the fediverse is a gigantic web portal. We add photos via pixelfed, video via peertube, conversations by mastodon, notes via Firefish, and blog posts via WordPress and ClassicPress, among others. The point is we’re on niche platforms, talking with other niche platforms without logging in and out constantly. Log in, in one place, and we’re connected to everything within the fediverse. We’re on a community of communities.

Post Social Network

That’s why we’re in a post social media age. In the 90s and the first half of the zeros (2000s) we were on websites for our niche interests. Eventually with Twitter, Facebook and the explosion of websites it was decided that oauth was useful to make logging into and out of websites almost instant. We didn’t need to think of a user name, password and all that crap. It was automatic, so we could surf between services more easily.
Remember in Twit podcasts of the mid zeroes Leo Laporte and others were speaking about signup burnout, about being tired of having to fill in forms for every single website they joined.
Now we’re beyond that. Twitter is x-tinct and Facebook sees that it needs to join the fediverse, not to be irrelevant. I would argue that it is idiotic of Facebook to join the fediverse because it already has four billion users, on a planet with 10 billion people. Everyone that is on the fediverse, probably quit Facebook years ago, because of the crimes that Facebook has commited, from helping fascists reach power, encouraging genocide, playing with making people depressed, and more.

The New Era

In the age of the fediverse photo sharing is integral to the fediverse, video sharing is integral to the fediverse, blogging is integral to the fediverse, and conversations are integral to the fediverse. We can generate the content of our choice, and share it on the fediverse and everything is already integrated.

Google Reader, E-mail and FeedReaders

With Google reader, e-mail and feedreaders we could subscribe to RSS feeds to dozens, or even hundreds of feeds at a time, but every day you need to go through and mark things as read, either by scrolling through them, loading the post or other. It’s easy to have hundreds, or even thousands of unread posts. With the Fediverse we don’t have that problem, we jump in and out when we want, and we see what is recent, rather than what is recommended. We can see what is recommended, but in my eyes the people we “follow” are already recommending things for us to see.

Corporate Social Media and the Cost of Quitting

“We have been advocating for interoperability between platforms for years,” he wrote shortly. “The biggest hurdle to users switching platforms when those platforms become exploitative is the lock-in of the social graph, the fact that switching platforms means abandoning everyone you know and who knows you. The fact that large platforms are adopting ActivityPub is not only validation of the movement towards decentralized social media, but a path forward for people locked into these platforms to switch to better providers. Which in turn, puts pressure on such platforms to provide better, less exploitative services. This is a clear victory for our cause, hopefully one of many to come.”

When Jaiku and Twitter were competing I preferred Jaiku, and when Twitter and Identica were competing I preferred Identica. I loved Google + but it was destroyed. I liked Google Reader but it was destroyed. I liked Instagram but it was bought by Facebook and destroyed. Facebook destroyed itself, by encouraging people to see stuff by strangers, rather than their friends, forcing people to seak new groups. Some of those groups were toxic, so I dumped Facebook.

With the fediverse you can be on three, four or five instances and follow all the same people across each instance. You’re not stuck to a single instance. There is no single point of failure. You can bounce from instance to instance, and occasionaly look for replies and reactions.

And Finally

One of the beautiful things about the Fediverse is that we don’t need to see ads anymore. We just see content, conversations and community. We don’t have to scroll down and see posts that look like posts, until you notice they’re selling cryptocurrency, magical cures, or other rubbish. Twitter was fun, but now we’re scrolling by an advert every fourth or fifth post, like it was with Instagram after Facebook bought it.

I like the Fediverse and what it represents.

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Digg and Mob Rule

Byrichard

There is a copy and paste culture on the web and I don’t like it. When you go to Digg, to Youtube, to myspace and other websites what you find are short comments. They’re contributing nothing to the debate, in fact they make the online experience online less enjoyable.

There has been quite a vocal outcry from certain people about the HD DVD codec and how forcing articles to be pulled down and deleting user accounts was going against their user rights. In fact, there is nothing of the sort.

It was nice to see that these users would be held accountable for the content they link to and provide.

Adding fuel to the fire Kevin Rose said something in his blog to the effect that since so many people feel so strongly about this issue he would not pull down any more links. I don’t agree with this.

There’s a level of mob rule which I think is counterproductive. There’s all this talk about user-generated content and networking. Ok. Where’s the original and innovative content. Simply digging a story and putting a few remarks is not enough.

Do some journalism, do some research, learn the topic inside out and then post an informed opinion. I’m not going to be part of sites where accountability is irrelevant. It’s irresponsible for them to publish such information.

It’s also given a massive PR boost to Digg.

Digg, Kevin Rose and HD DVD

Just look at how they’ve shot up according to blogpulse’s trend analysis tool.

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Hit the ground running (waking up in Web 2.0)

Byrichard

There was a time when you would wake up and it’s only half an hour later that the world around you would be clearly visible. In today’s web 2.0 world you wake up and twenty other people are wishing each other good morning. Many are celebrating that it’ Friday and others have pathetic status messages about 40 days of celibacy, about being overworked and all those other messages.

Of course everyone has the right to their feelings and to their own experiences but as certain individuals spend more and more time online they notice these status messages and trends and get really tired. Look at the level of media saturation about the McCann story. I muted a podcast for mentioning the story. Careless parents lost their daughter, end of story. It’s not worth as much airtime as it’s been given.

Then there’s the “back from the dead media coverage” that gets just as tiring. If a royal driving a car doesn’t wear her seat belt and dies as a result of a crash then she should not be idolised in the way people have done. It should have been an opportunity to promote the use of seatbelts to avoid repeat deaths in such a manner.

Then there’s the enthusiast’s oversaturation of the media. In particular I’m thinking of the Iphone. Of course it’s a beautiful new interface, of course it’s ushered in the fully screen tactile device but for anyone outside the US the media saturation has become too much. If you’re an active consumer of new media news then there’s a good chance you would have read several thousand articles boasting about how great it was. As a result a lot of people got media burn out from the story. It’s only as a result of getting an ipod touch that I can tolerate those stories once more.

The 30 minute news round up in the evening preceeded by the daily newspaper has been followed by an era of instant access to news stories once they have been written. What this means is that for ardent consumers of new media it is easy to reach a burn out/saturation point. we, as new media consumers must be careful not to read about single topics so much that we are unable to hear about specific topics anymore.

Migrating Photos from Facebook to Google Photos

Migrating Photos from Facebook to Google Photos

Byrichard

There has been a shift within cloud services such as Google, Facebook and others. That shift is to make migrating photos from one service quick and easy. The old fashioned method would be to download media from service A before re-uploading it to service B. This requires lots of space on hard drives and this could be a luxury you do not have, especially with laptop drives being as small as they are.

By some paradox laptops have become so slim and small that we are still using 250gb to 1TB drives in devices, that if fatter, could hold 8TB disks. Imagine a laptop with an affordable eight terabyte drive. Imagine how different laptop user experiences would be.

Clicking Easy

That is not the point of this blog post. The point of this blog post is to say that moving photos from Facebook to Google Photos is as easy as to or three clicks, and most clicks are to say “yes, allow meta to access blah blah”, in this case Google services.

Fast

Moving Data from Facebook to Google Photos was very fast. It took a few minutes. It moved all the files from Facebook to Google before then incrementally adding photos to the relevant albums. Remember, back in the zeros and the tens we would upload photos deliberately and add album names. Facebook has sent these to Google Photos and Google Photos is now populating all of these albums.

Temporarily empty

Plenty of albums are “empty” as I write this post, but that’s because it takes time for Google Photos to read the JSON files and re-create the album structures with the right photos and other data.

Wrong Date

The other issue is that all the photos are marked as being created today, i.e. the date that the photos were moved from gallery A to Gallery B. I suspect that this will be corrected at a later stage, once the albums have been populated with the right images.

The Nice Thing

The nice thing about this quick experiment is that Facebook made photo sharing awful. There was a time in 2007 when Facebook was a network of friends, and friends of friends, but from Zynga onwards it became rubbish because it became about marketers and others getting ROI, at the cost of users getting rubbish.
Now within seconds I have access to photos from two decades of my life. I can, at a glance see photos, with the name of the event, and be transported to another era. It’s nice.

And Finally

This experiment was done with my backup Google account rather than the primary one. This experiment was with the free account and I am using 8.5 GB of 20 GB. I am well within the free tier.

Try it, it’s “free” and you’ll find exploring photo albums easier.

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A proposal for a crowdsourced portal acceptance system for Ingress agents.

Byrichard

People love to submit portals and portals add excitement to Ingress. The more portals there are the busier you are. Cities are fantastic places for ingress players for this reason. Geneva, Barcelona, Neuchatel and other cities already have hundreds if not thousands of portals but go to the swiss countryside, the spanish sea side or away from big cities and portals are few and far between. As a result of this rural players don’t have much to do unless they get in a car and create megafields.

What I propose is a crowdsourced portal acceptance system. The system would have two features:
Proximity to other portals. If you’re in the middle of the countryside and the portal is submitted then it is moved to the top of the submission list for quick approval. By getting remote locations to have higher portal density so users are encouraged to become more active. As people see them play so new players are encouraged to join in the game.

The second variable is based on geographic location. If a player in New York submits a portal then a player in Madrid from L9 or above sees the portal submission and decides whether or not it is too close to other portals, whether it is legitimate and whether it is worth validating. If a player from Paris submits a portal then a player can accept or refuse that portal.

Of course the second feature requires for the Portal acceptance interface to be opened up to players of level 9 or higher. The permissions would only be “approve” or “reject”. will allow players to question the submission and let a group of people decide on the future of specific portals.

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On moving from the Social media capital of Europe to Geneva

Byrichard

As a student it was not unusual for me to spend no more than six hours a day at home. The rest of the time I was out socialising, whether helping post grads with their work or with those from my studies. As a result of this I started to pay attention to many of the social networks. It had shifted from Facebook where all my real life friends could be found to more abstract social networks such as twitter, jaiku and others.

Through these networks I saw what everyone was up to and I could take the opportunity to go out and meet them occasionally at first and then more and more frequently as time passed. By the time I left England I had the opportunity to meet with one group every Friday morning and quite a few others on a number of different occasions. As a result my social life was built around what I saw via twitter and seesmic.

In geneva that social scene is pretty small at the moment. Some people are in Geneva, some are in Lausanne and others in Zurich. The problem is they’re not centralised therefore participating is not practical. That’s one of the weaknesses of social networking that I’ve encountered over the years. I do miss that aspect of life in England and I should attempt to recreate it here.

I’m not the only one facing this problem. Corvida of Read Write Web wrote about this topic recently and it’s an interesting challenge for Gen Y and early adopters. The majority of the users of mobile social networks congregate in one specific city and rarely move outside of it. As a student facebook was great to find out about events that were going on within that circle, then twitter became great once I graduated.

Now the challenge is to find what social network will be of interest in a city like Geneva. Would it be facebook used by most people in my age group. paying services that guarantee no results or simply going out into the physical world hoping to meet people that way.

Each method requires time and I’m not sure which is the most adapted to the lake Geneva region. It’s something I’m going to explore over the coming weeks. I want to rebuild a good physical world social network once more and see which tools remain relevant now.

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Does the World Wide Web Dumb us Down too Much to Read

Byrichard

Does the World Wide Web dumb is down to much to read is an article exploring the idea that we have too many distractions and that as a result we are unable to focus. Yesterday I wrote about blogging rather than writing twitter threads and this article goes some way to exploring the same theme.


The first thing I would look at is the quality of writing and the quality of information. Are we reading articles that are clickbait, that have little content of substance and being little of value? Are we reading a guardian long read article that has been researched over days, weeks or months? Are we in the living room with family around providing us with distractions or are we in bed reading a book before sleep?


When I was at a conference there were four clusters of people. One group were outside talking, another were in the common room and then two of us were walking around and talking about nothing and everything at once. I bring it up because on the top bunk in one room I saw someone reading a book as we talked on the bottom bunk.


I also saw him reading in the lunch room and at least one other people. Rather than join in and enjoy the distractions of being at a conference he was in his own world reading a book.


I am in my own world as I write this blog post. I am sitting in my living room with the balcony door open so that fresh air can come in. I am writing this on my phone because the computer was updating its OS.


Reading and writing take courage. For a period of time you need to decide that you don’t want to read the constant streams from twitter and Facebook. You decide that you’re content in the moment. There are no external inputs.


When I lived in Weymouth I knew everyone that worked in bars, shops etc. I would spend hours a day out in the center trying to find people to spend time with. Paradoxically I also read a lot. I think this is when I read all but one of Kundera’s books. I also read quite a few thick books of fiction, including Lord Of The Rings.


For me the distraction of the World Wide Web has always been to find new technology and innovations but it has also been about finding friendships because, as an introvert socialising in person can be lonelier than solitude. The extroverts speak and we go into passive listening mode.


This is relevant because if we speak about the dumbing down of society we must also look at what we want to get from our distractions. In my case I want to meet new people and establish new friendships that would make a road, train or plane trip worthwhile. For years now I haven’t found this to work via social media so the “always distracted” occurrence is gone. It frees up time to work on projects such as this blog, to walk, to hike, to watch television series, to look for work, to volunteer at events and live in the moment and finally to watch YouTube content and tv series online.


We could say that we are becoming too stupid for the long form but look at the state of films. Back in the early 2000s I went to see a film every few days. After nine months of this I knew the film formulas so well that I lost interest. When I am alone I never watch films. When I am with female company I almost never finish the film.


It is not that I can’t focus for an hour and a half. It’s that the content is so mediocre. The films have no story and we feel no empathy for the characters so the allure of watching these films is gone.


We should also think about marketing when discussing the increasing idiocy of people. Marketing wants us to be gullible. Advertisers and public relations professionals want us to be interested in something only long enough to purchase the product. They don’t care about the environmental impact and social cost. For the first two years twitter and Facebook were excellent for networking and establishing new friendships. That’s why they were such compelling distractions back then.


We say that people are less focused than ever and that they are being dumbed down but then look at PVRs, Netflix, Amazon prime and more. We got so angry with all the adverts that we stopped watching over the air television because we no longer wanted to waste time being forced to see the same five to ten adverts every ten minutes. We are the ones reducing the distractions.


Related to this I would also look at binge watching culture. If you watch one or two episodes a night you’re going to be more focused than if you spend a day watching an entire season. When it’s television we call it bingeing. If we had a book we would call it “engrossing”. It wouldn’t be vilified.


The point is that if you’re reading a book you can’t check for tweets or scroll through Instagram because to stop looking at the page is to break the stream of consciousness. With TV series you can tweet, check e-mails and more. It’s vidzac or some other silly marketing term. It’s playing in the foreground until we get distracted and then it’s background noise.


We shouldn’t discount the lowest common denominator when speaking about intelligence and attention. Tenk.fr and curiositystream are documentary video networks. YouTube has plenty of intellectual content for those that are looking for it. The content with the most views is the content that algorithms are pushing on us but this does not mean that is the content that people wanted to view. The trap of the lowest common denominator is that it over-represents distractions whilst making intelligent content invisible.


If we went back to chronological timelines twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other social networks would paint a different image of the society we live in. Emotion would be replaced by intellect and with this intellect conviviality and intelligent discourse would re-emerge. We would see that intelligence is not declining.

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