I'm trying not to post "surprised pikachu face" memes about all of the people discovering that tiktok is now censoring coverage of protests, and mentions of Epstein.
And I'm watching as everyone tramples over to Yet Another Corporate Platform where the same thing will happen in a few dozen months.
Ya'll need to get out for real.
Or at least have a backup that doesn't run on OPP (Other People's Platforms)
**be nice**
**teach don't yell**
**girl, you can't even get off of youTube, don't be so imperious**
... but please, why can't anyone spot the pattern?
"It's O.P.P. time, other people's, but you get it
There's no room for relationship, there's just room to hit it
How many brothers out there know just what I'm gettin' at?
Who thinks it's wrong 'cause I'm splittin' and co-hittin' that?
Well if you do, that's O.P.P and you're not down with it
But if you don't, here's your membership"
It's totally about platforms.
Of course it doesn't. As my friend from Toronto hipped me, "O.P.P." stands for "Ontario Provincial Police".
(He laughed every time that song came on.)
It’s sadly predictable. Many people are so focused on being wherever they perceive everyone else is, that they don’t do any deep thinking about what pitfalls may exist in that location. Follow the money, ownership, and political influence, people. Sheesh! 🤦♀️
(I’m looking at YOU, Government of Canada…why are you still primarily posting on X?)
"Many people are so focused on being wherever they perceive everyone one else is"
To be fair ... this is part of the whole point of social media. To... be where the action is and all the people...?
I don't know how to break the cycle.
We've put some cracks in it though. That's something.
Thing is, if someone has a large audience, and they tell their followers they’re going somewhere else…many will, um, follow them. I think there’s a lot of SM paralysis among people who could lead their audience to better environments.
Years ago, we decided to xeriscape (low water, native plant gardens) our front yard. We tore up our lawn and replaced with native plants. Tried to get next door neighbours do the same, but they were uncomfortable because “no one else is doing it.” 🤷♀️
Attached: 1 video 🚨Watch | Issam Hijazi, Founder of UpScrolled, explains why he launched the platform after facing severe censorship and shadow banning by Big Tech and social media companies. Hijazi also reveals that Israel killed 60 members of his family in Gaza over the past two years. #Israel #Palestine #Gaza
It has "investors"
@futurebird Well, all businesses do. Some might be the "right" type of investors.
Anyway, just a thought
@dannekrose @futurebird that feels like a really good assessment of Mastodon. To me this is a feature, not a bug:
Having to choose actively with whom I interact is what makes me happy in the long run.
If everything is spoon fed to me, I see two main downsides:
- my brain shuts down and stops thinking
- another entity gets control of my time
This other entity has one goal: make money. And I don't want somebody else making money off of my time.
Some folks are trying to work on that. The problem is that there has been a conflation between ‘you control what is in your feed’ and ‘you don’t see anything that you didn’t put in your feed’.
My primary objection to platforms like Facebook and Twitter is that they are psychological profiling tools that sell ads / propaganda and masquerade as communication tools. Federation kind-of helps that, but Google showed with GMail that it’s possible to capture a sufficiently large chunk of a communication graph that you can still build these things. The main benefit of the Fediverse in that respect is breaking the monopoly: it’s as easy for Google or Facebook to crawl the Fediverse and build profile information as it is for anyone else, but they can’t augment it with private message content.
The problem that Mastodon and friends try to address is the lack of agency of users. Twitter turned the web back into TV: you could change channels, but they still controlled the content that you saw. To address this, they started at the exact opposite end: you see posts from people and hashtags you follow, but absolutely nothing else. The choices are all digital: follow or block people / hashtags.
In reality, people want much more analogue controls. Show me more cats (but not every post about cats). Tune down the US Politics (but a few posts a day is okay). Show me a few random posts that are popular.
Completely removing a recommendation algorithm gave a nice clean slate to start from, but that’s all. Recommendation algorithms are useful. The problem with other platforms is not that they have recommendation algorithms, it’s that their algorithms are opaque and under someone else’s control. The goal for people working on such things here is that the recommendation algorithm must be completely under the user’s control and must be able to answer, for any post that they see, why they see it. Oh, and it must actually be useful. It’s coming, but building it is hard!
I've been out of TikTok for a while. Where are they trampling to?
Out of curiosity. I don't plan to visit whatever corporate platform.
"UpScrolled"
Which sounds like a better place than twitter, but it's not open, someone else could be in charge later... same old same old.
I'm kind of grateful it's not YouTube Shorts.
An upside of youTube is it can be embedded in other sites. While tiktok and most new platforms can't they want to lock the users in.
I do expect youTube to try to eliminate this someday, but because they are old their algorithm is much less influential.
@futurebird I've gone back to Facebook several times to urge people to at least open a backup account on Mastodon. Not a single one has done it so far. I can't even get my son to join, he's on Reddit and Bluesky!
I really wish I knew some local people who were on Mastodon...
@futurebird personally I’m finding hilarious that one of the reasons to force a sale was because of “Chinese ownership/censorship” and the outcome is a thousand times worse.
Btw- Rednote/小红书 is still going strong…
@futurebird Most folks don't make rational decisions, they just behave however others who are like them behave. So it's difficult for them to follow an argument if it suggests all those others are making bad decisions. Because that would mean they have to think for themselves, which is hard work.
Also, most of these folks who can only follow the crowd, haven't even heard of the fediverse! It simply hasn't attracted enough media attention to penetrate their information spaces.
Knowing about a problem and doing something about it are two different things when people are anxious.
Someone pointed out that people often don't change their approach until the pain of doing nothing (or going back to something familiar) is greater than their fear of change.
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