Shoq 🌿Dec 11, 2022

What drove the internet in the 90s and 00s was that it was so cool to be doing good shit with it. Social media was like a giant manure dump all over that culture. We've never recovered.

The Fediverse and the death of Twitter promise a rebirth of that culture, if we don't let the cool kids and a lazy press bury the public in vapid bullshit again.

We wasted 16 goddamn years enduring Facebook and Twitter. In the end, they were both toxic and regressive. Can we please not go back there? Please?

Show threadDavid Wilson-BurnsDec 11, 2022
@shoq let’s consider how social media got that way: ad-funded business model. Rather than paying for a service that takes billions (or whatever) to run with a monthly subscription, we let the ads pay for it….then bitched about it. With the ads came the data and then the AI that effed the world. The only way this works is our financial support. It’s crowdfunded, and we’re the crowd. It will be worth a donation once in awhile…like for public radio, pbs, or Wikipedia.
Show threadAdam ElmanDec 12, 2022
@davidwburns @shoq The thing is - most people don’t care all that much about the ads, which is why Facebook, Twitter, and for that matter broadcast TV/radio and newspapers have always functioned the way they have. IMHO, there’s absolutely no reason why the Fediverse couldn’t have ad-supported instances alongside crowdsourced ones - if I want to use a site that is highly reliable and has fantastic moderation that occasionally shows me an ad, that’s my choice.
Show threadAdam Elman
@davidwburns @shoq The knee-jerk anti-capitalism I often see from old-school Fediverse folks reminds me a lot of the knee-jerk anti-capitalism I saw on USENET and elsewhere on the early Internet in the early 90’s, which didn’t stop anything. I think it’s counter-productive to what we really need to focus on, which is having a “public square” that can’t come under the control of a crazy/evil (take your pick, or take both) billionaire.
Dec 12, 2022 at 8:26pmWeb