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...
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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.
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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.