cwcopaLet us play a game:
Social Media doesn't scale at all and for the user it is more 'dangerous' than beneficial.
Change my mind.
Jerry 🦙💝🦙@cwcopa it seems like there is some implied subjective measurements in your position... Facebook scales pretty well, but is a POS. My mom, my sister, and my wife would all argue that social media is far more beneficial than harmful. But they do not have the same threat model as others.
@jerry My family would say the same, but do they know it better? I doubt this.
FB scales technically and feature-wise pretty good, but imo the platform isn't the main problem here, but the size of the community and the lack of media competence.
Besides the privacy-nightmare, the sheep-mentally of a lot of users (just follows, believes everything without further research...), peer pressure, envy, scams...
1/2
Mastodon is just as peaceful as it is because it is small.
The bigger the network, the more profitable is it for scammers/ spammers, the more toxic people are active (they are 'louder' than the 'normal' people) and it is getting so impersonal.
I hope I could describe it properly since it is 1:30 am and I am tired af.
Excited for some feedback.
2/2
varx/tech@cwcopa @jerry I think quite often about the concept of "horizons" as used in Karl Schroeder's excellent SF novel _Lady of Mazes_. I don't need to be in communication with all of Twitter. What if I were limited to a subset, but different people had different, overlapping subsets? It would be more like meatspace in some (I would argue) good ways.
@varx Sounds a little bit like Mastodon to me. Can you recommend this book?
@cwcopa Yes, it's fantastic. I'd say it kind of goes off the rails a bit towards the end, but not in a way that made me dislike it. Lady of Mazes is a fun story but is also just a glorious jumble of ideas worth pondering—mostly about a certain imagining of post-scarcity society and some of the bizarre existential challenges therein.
@varx Gonna check it out. Thanks for your short review.
@cwcopa It's tenuously in the same universe as Ventus, which is also excellent, very different, and is a free download: http://www.kschroeder.com/my-books/ventus/free-ebook-version
Both Ventus and Lady of Mazes are hard to describe without spoiling the setting, which you slowly discover over the course of the book. (Don't even read the "About" section in the page that I linked!) I'd say that the thematic ideas in Ventus run more along ecology, information theory, and sovereignty. More than that would spoil some surprises. :-)
@cwcopa As for Mastodon, I'd say yeessss, it sort of has horizons... but in the wrong way. In Lady of Mazes, they're coherent (which I won't expand on); in Mastodon they're incoherent.
All social networks have a basic horizon effect to some degree, which I think is good, but Mastodon has additional ones via the Followers-Only privacy level that I've griped about in the past. You end up seeing partial conversations that reveal some but not all information about the toots that are "private".