The main reason I'm hoping the #fediverse will become the dominant social network is because of how a profit motive affects "social" companies:
* MySpace: sold, then killed, then made a zombie.
* Facebook: Enabled multiple genocides via outrage amplifying algorithms, tracks your every move, even if you don't have an account.
* Instagram: Bought by FB, has become so obsessed with toxic positivity that museums have to show their art on onlyfans.
* Twitter: Lesser version of FB + Muskocalypse.
All of these social networks (well, except FB, that started as a way to objectify women) started as great places to be, but got slowly but surely made worse because they had to monetise their users.
And unless you're a bar, or a club, or something else that asks for entrance fees, or consistently sells things to its guests, the main way to monetisation has been ads, and selling your guests' data.
Now, this led these companies to starting to track people, and to maximise engagement.
And to maximise engagement, the infamous algorithms came about. Because it turns out, having a reverse-chronological timeline, isn't super engaging, at least not in that "need-one-more-hit" way that profit maximisation requires.
This will lead to A/B test, after A/B test, tweaking variables, and keeping the variables that lead to more engagement, without actually looking at what those are.
Turns out, one of the biggest engagement drivers is outrage, so inevitably, the algorithm pushes outrage.
And this is why I think, that if we want social media at all, it can't be for-profit, because for-profit social media will lead to choices that are inherently bad for our mental health, our privacy, and for society as a whole.
Without the profit motive, we don't care about engagement, we don't care about pleasing advertisers, we don't care about tracking.
We just care about the utility of the thing. Both for enjoyment and for being informational.
That's not to say the #fediverse is perfect, there's too much gatekeeping going on, the CWs can feel a bit overbearing when done on mundane things, CW policing is something that should stop immediately, and there's of course going to be bros being bros.
But those feel like problems we can solve, and I don't think we can solve where the profit motive leads us.
René Braun
Daniël Franke 🏳️🌈
MaryPot
Tio
Jim Neal