Every time I see some public figure complaining on their YouTube channel, or their blog, or god forbid on twitter itself, about the nightmare of algorithmic social media, how twitter is bad, how instagram is bad or whatever it feels like an Eric Andre skit
Standing outside the fence of the Fediverse next to an open gate screaming “LET ME IN, LET ME IN” and then a dozen people in the comments are like “uh, sure, come on in” and then they’re like “no thanks I am good”
I do want to be clear that what I am saying is not “the fediverse is uniformly better than corporate social media in every possible way”. Mastodon has interesting problems, some of which are quite bad! What I am frustrated about is that the mainstream progressive discourse about social media is frozen in this inaccurate static framing of all “tech” as right-wing because left-leaning pundits are mostly ignoring what left-leaning technologists are doing. I don’t know how to bridge that gap.
@glyph people (whether 'followers' or 'influencers' - both hateful words btw) are mesmerized by the sense of a vast agora where you can find anybody and reach everybody.
Ofcourse the walled gardens deliver on this only to the extent it fits their amoral business models.
But the #fediverse is in denial about the significance of this for wider adoption.
@tef I feel like the margins of this toot are insufficiently large to litigate the exact political compass coordinate of the corporate lib shills I like to pay attention to ;)
(But seriously I have observed this phenomenon across the spectrum of the left, from crooked media to some more news to like … red planet. Lots of people faaar to my left making similar noises.)
Given that she isn't especially welcome in various spaces on Bluesky, fedi would actually be ideal for her because there could be more separation between herself and the people who want absolutely nothing to do with her.
@glyph you pay money.
It really is that simple. The tech you hear about (mostly) buys positive press by using professional PR teams. They put out press releases, they invite journalists to launches, they put people forward for interviews.
We on the left seem to expect this to happen naturally. It doesn't.
@glyph It’s the same problem as the right-wing nuts when they do things like make Gab or Truth social. People want to own/run the place where “normal” people are. Where businesses are. Where municipal services are. I like Mastodon quite a lot, but it is not mainstream, even if all the lefties and techies went there exclusively.
@joesteel @glyph Thank the gods it isn't mainstream, it keeps the conversations better, and the small brain power required to join and use an account seems to be keeping most of the dims off here.
Whatever about echo chambers, I don't want to share spaces with awful people spouting hate and right wing ideologies, since Trump got in the first time and Brexit happened I realised the majority of people that vote are stupid beyond belief, and since then Covid and Trump getting back in has proven it
@glyph doing my best to resist the urge to turn into the "el problema es el capitalismo" meme guy, but i do think the liberal vs left distinction is critical here - lots of libs were 100% aligned with big tech before the latter doffed its flimsy mask recently, in wanting massive centralized for-profit platforms. the difference is trust in markets; on the left we know from history they can never vanquish the beasts they create, and we're alternately mocked and ignored for saying so.
@jplebreton that's the internet now, we all just take turns being annoyed by the capitalismo guy and being the capitalismo guy. sometimes it's your turn
@glyph oh i'm happy to be that guy 24/7, i just don't necessarily want to subject every random person i talk to online to that, particularly if i'm just vociferously agreeing with them!
@jplebreton I'm kinda amazed I've avoided getting just everybody in the world mad at me because I have some bone-deep neoliberal convictions and some stridently leftist views too. I think that burning "the system" down in favor of 5-year-plans is a roadmap for world-historic levels of human misery, but I also think that markets are going to produce roughly the same misery if they're not regulated to cut off feedback loops & externalities. (I laid most of this out in <https://blog.glyph.im/2024/01/a-centrist-i-guess.html>)
@jplebreton maybe we just have to have a global respiratory pandemic and a gilded age every 100 years or so in order to maintain an equilibrium. hoping we get to skip the world wars and nuclear annihilation this cycle at least
@glyph if we grant each other a bit of grace, i can see that you're not just saying "better things aren't possible" and you can see that i'm not just saying "burn the entire system down with no plan".
@jplebreton sorry if I even implied you were saying that! I just feel like there's a pull to polarize on one or the other side of that divide, but no, I think you've made room for nuance on many occasions, I don't think that we are at odds here at all ;)
@jplebreton if anything I was just trying to say that when _I_ am the capitalismo guy, sometimes people read _me_ as saying "burn it all down" when what I am saying is "we really need a legal and enforcement liability structure that reifies the modern structure of externalities of automated computer networks"
@glyph totally yeah, and i think the political economy around these issues as shaped by the forces of capital frequently tries to characterize extremely reasonable (and widely popular!) calls for accountability / checks and balances as like, this horrible scary attack on society itself, when it's clearly just a response to something not working! it's a frustrating time to be a critic.