Mastodawn

i have a weird idea that i'd like some input on from fellow canadians specifically about mastodon/the fediverse. boosts very much appreciated!

i grew up in the 80s and 90s canada. there were rules about the % and types of "canadian content" broadcasted on tv/radio.

partly because of that, and federal-provincial funding credits, i got to grew up with canadian-produced tv series like the Beachcombers, The Friendly Giant, Mr. Dressup, The Raccoons, North of 60, The Elephant Show, Degrassi Jr/Sr High. it's a big list, and i'm sure you remember a lot more. some of it was great. some of it sucked. but all of it was very weird and canadian.

there was nothing i was fiercely prouder of than being canadian, because it was all around me.

and the in the 2000s some of that changed. cancon weakened. american productions got a huge foothold here, and suddenly we became inundated with american pop tv and music. i watched teens/adults become infatuated with US pop lifestyle, mostly because - i think! - we just didn't produce anything worth watching or listening to. even cbc.ca is 50% american headlines now, and it's painful

here's where mastodon comes in. i'm seeing that process happen again on masto. canadians posting endlessly about american politics and pop culture. i just checked the live feed of the largest masto instance in canada, and it was 100% american news opinions.

what i don't see - and please correct me if i'm wrong - is a cancon-oriented masto instance or fedi presence. one that *specifically* is organized around boosting/organizing/frontpaging canadian stories with canadian people in them.

i want to talk about our utterly unwatchable modern canadian tv series. or just how lame cbc radio 1's pop culture interviews are. or how heartbroken i was to see the team canada women's team lose a nailbiter.

i love that the fediverse was built around internationalism, but i've watched two generations of kids grow up with weak ties to their local weirdo canuck culture. they deserve a place where canadian stuff is front-and-centre, even if it sucks and we know it. i want to know the local news in coal harbour and fort st john and churchill.

what would that look like on the fediverse? would it be a masto instance? or something else?

feel free to reply here, or just write something up and tag with #canadaverse

#canada #fedizen #canadaverse #yeg #alberta #bc #saskatchewan #manitoba #yukon #nunavut #quebec #novascotia #ontario #newbrunswick #newfoundland #nwt

Glen Malley Feb 24

@vga256 Well, unfortunately the very public flame-out that the US is going through is dominating news and discussion pretty much everywhere. It sucks, but like most trainwrecks, people just can't look away.
That said, I dunno if you are talking about mstdn.ca specifically, but I definitely see plenty of Canadian content on it daily.
Was there something you wanted to see that isn't around? Maybe start the discussion.

@glen_malley that's the current front page. imagine this being your first exposure to a masto instance signup, and this is what you see as being representative of a canadian instance

i'm not pointing any fingers, because the specific instance doesn't matter. this is a fediverse problem, not an instance problem.

Glen Malley Feb 24

@vga256 I'm not really sure what you expect anyone to do about this. What people are talking about is what trends. You can't very well enforce that people can only talk about Canadian things on Canadian instances. You can't even programmatically define what constitutes "canadian" enough content.

@glen_malley okay, well - thanks for your input!

Cindʎ Xiao 🍉Feb 24

@vga256 This is interesting and I will have to think a bit about this! I am a bit younger but I still grew up in the era of lots of original Canadian children's programming on Treehouse TV and YTV, and tons of cultural touchstones that came out of that. It is again something that kids do not have nowadays.

I definitely think having a dedicated hashtag would be a good step. There's plenty of other hashtags that I have found good communities in, such as # hnom or # KpopMonday. One thing that helps with those communities too is the presence of regular events where everyone is checking and posting to the hashtag, such as hockey games or the weekly eponymous Kpop monday posts.

However it does not solve the problem of "people new to fedi will see very much American cultural content".

It also sounds like a good topic of discussion at tomorrow's @info / #FediMTL conference, which has a lot of Canadian fedi contributors speaking.

#canadaverse #CanCon #canada

@cxiao dedicated hashtags are a fantastic idea. that at least would improve reach for specific topics. hnom was a great tag during the olympics! (it gets pretty quiet during the regular season unfortunately)

i'd love to hear if there are any technical/actionable/doable outcomes from tomorrow's #fedimtl conf on the subject of canadiana.

to me, it seems that there might be a multi-pronged approach possible:
- hashtags for sure
- much better canadian maso instance-instance relaying support (it is currently totally borked)
- a specific canadian instance that manages its Trending hashtags very closely (this is how the front page gets dominated with US news)
- an instance devoted to posting cancon?

Rachel Stantz Feb 24

@vga256 I’m from the US, but since childhood, some of my favorite television shows have been cancon, either through Nickelodeon, PBS, CBC, or just random Internet links. It’d be a damn shame if such a wonderful cultural treasure were lost to future generations. I’m glad you’re trying to do something about it.

@arjache it's funny that so many of those old shows made it over the border at the time - i'm still amazed at the number of people who grew up with Tintin or Babar or Degrassi over the border (to be fair - all of those shows were international productions)

it just weirds me out that the canadian dream from 2000-2020 was to become more american, and no one seemed to find that troubling. we lost all of those culture-defining shows by our own lack of care. :(

Pinchy63 🇨🇦Feb 24

@vga256 @arjache
There are lots of Canadian content on CBC. I love their shows. I post clips from This Hour Has 22 mins all the time. I would try blocking certain hashtags like USPoli, Trump, ICE etc and try following Canadian content hashtags. On the fediverse we get to create our feeds to what we want to see. It takes some time but it can be done. Good luck!

cwicseolfor Feb 24

@vga256 @arjache Cultural Americanization as an ideal would be bad, but from where I’m sitting I fear it’s a worse and wider-spread force - increasingly optimized financialization of every industry, which pits people’s “care” (in a world where provenance has been globalized and specificity thus erased by similar forces) against just absolute trainloads of money… which happened to be very financially successful in the US on perhaps unprecedented scale, and thus became an export.

Media specifically was always big money, but it used to require substantial upfront investment, which drives selectivity, and reliance on individual tastemakers assessing viable quality, which is I presume how I grew up with both Babar and Britcoms in Texas and certainly the ethos behind our PBS. The very same years you cite as the boom of “Americanization” in Canadian culture are years I remember railing against a perceived takeover of US media culture simply by *brute force money.* It started with hyperspectacle in the boom years of the early aughts, too much wealth in too few pockets sloshing around looking for more investment opportunities, but exploded after the US writer’s strike - unlike old media which required thought and skill, which DO have provenance even if it’s undersung, the rise of reality TV only needed shotgun investment in sensationalism, and eventually something would stick enough to be ad-inflated into a phenomenon. I too thought the problem was “lack of care,” indifference to quality by the public. I railed against it then. People told me I was exaggerating the risks of a total flood of sensationalist cognitive sandblasting. We got a reality TV president a decade later.

I suppose this is to say both: I think you’re very right, and also: that merely appealing to standards hasn’t been a sufficiently winning strategy in my experience; people will behave according to the norms around them, so structural changes are much more likely to work. (Dismantling Sinclair, who has tentacles in Canada and the UK also, would get a lot done.) Applying lists and using hashtags works within current Mastodon infrastructure to a point. Bookmarking search pages in browsers for local interests people haven’t tagged is another workaround. I don’t find any of these satisfying.

But I wonder if Mastodon’s makeup as a broadcast-type social media - all toots being almost on the same level of soapbox, the function of a singular à la Twitter - is maybe inherently skewed, like an ecosystem too similar to the one previously invaded by noxious species? I’m a huge fan of Friendica for this reason - although profit algorithms will keep churning in the outside world causing fedi to ripple in their wake, I think the function of Friendica’s having post audience control (like lists for post availability) makes it more likely that people will display context-specific personalities, and thus less homogenization on their social media, which is a major “habitat” factor for the worst stuff, imo. It lets humans act more like humans, which I think can inoculate somewhat against the flooded zone.

For a specific example I don’t think people (or news) in Canada talking about US fascism rather a lot at the moment is necessarily a problem (most of us wish the world had been more attentive to Germany before it finished its camps), but for Canadian media to be reporting about (and Canadians discussing) US fascism in the same circus-stupefied way US media is (trying to keep everyone) talking about US fascism is a MASSIVE problem, because habituation to that so-called “news cycle” (really, investment-backed reality-TV dopamine and serotonin hijacking) is the thing causing lack of care for craft, for provenance, for truth, for diversity and particularity, in deference to sheer sensational overwhelm.

@cwicseolfor and fwiw, I am doing some reading on Friendica so I can better understand its architecture. i hadn't really looked at it with any serious interest until now.

ultimately, getting online canadians to just talk with one another about canadian things is really hard.

cwicseolfor Feb 24

@vga256 I'm very appreciative of anybody technical doing that inquest - I am regrettably not, at least not by Mastodon's very nerdy standards, so all I know about the backend of it is that it was expensive for one specific instance admin to run for a few thousand people (but not specifically why, e.g. whether the server space was eaten up by video hosting vs. caching issues, or something else like that.)

I've explained it to lay people as "Facebook circa 2010 with no ads or algorithm," because it has a lot of the features that made Facebook useful - especially audience controls and branched rather than single-stream posting, such as events with their own comment sections, for which we'd just have to use hashtags here. But I really feel like that's underselling or limiting what it probably COULD be by comparison to something that started out evil and just happened to monopolize a lot of good talent and their ideas.

@cwicseolfor yeah, exactly. the devil is in the details with any kind of social media software. i don't care at all about 'does this scale' kinds of questions thankfully - the real question is whether there are enough toggles switches and controls to allow *meaningful* (self) curation.

if friendica is pre-2010 facebook, then mastodon is pre-2010 twitter. neither, to me, are a solution to this particular problem. i'm looking forward to figuring out what exactly friendica (or any other social software) is capable of doing.

the cool thing about all of this stuff is that, at least code-wise, it is modifiable!

cwicseolfor Feb 24

@vga256 I mean, my experience with really old Facebook was that whatever you wanted to see you could absolutely go find it, and just it, and it was part of what drove adoption. If you wanted to join ten pages about a niche cattle breed, regenerative ag, silvopasture, cheesemaking, heirloom veg, etc. but also klezmer electropunk music, then *that was what your visit to [site] would be about.* (I suppose I could compare Livejournal, but the Friendica user interface/ feature set was really more like facebook.) But if your friend ONLY wanted to hear about the heirloom veg, it was possible to arrange that. That self-curation was the point, earliest on.

And yeah, I think Mastodon IS pre-2010 Twitter, and I don't think Twitter is a good model for being a human, it was about brand-building in the most pejorative personal business development linkedin sense. It's a soapbox, a megaphone. It is the opposite of intimate; it rejects nuance because whatever you say, even in the absence of incendiary algorithms, had better be palatable and relatable to the two most unlike people in your follows (which is also a reactionary intolerance conditioned into people via dopamine cookies by profit algorithms, yes, but not solely.) The legacy of short character limits on many instances also feeds into that no-nuance quality even when people engage normal levels of conversational charity.

Twitter was a great place to notify people about your band, business, writing career; it was a good place to wear just one hat. But it's a terrible place to be a whole human. Mastodon structurally replicates some of that for both good and ill.

Facebook before the algos, despite its owner, was a place you COULD have those more nuanced conversations, longer-form posts, get into the weeds of things, meet your audience where they were - that is, if you used the tools, which some didn't, and which were eventually defeated by algo-froth. You could also curate the information coming into your page to what you wanted to see much more easily, without relying on others to "stay on topic." That's what I loved having back via Friendica, however briefly.

betahuman Feb 24

@vga256 We Canadians have a fairly unique problem when it comes to demarcating our own culture: we share it with the US, and they share ours (although they often don't know it), and they produce much, much more culture than we do by virtue of size alone. Walk into a bookstore in Canada, and you see books from authors from all across the Angloshphere - of which we make up about 11%. And we're just not isolated enough to distill much culture that feels distinctly ours out of the blend.

betahuman Feb 24

@vga256 (Quebec is a bit of a different story, but a decent argument can be made that they are, at least culturally, noticeably their own thing.)

By contrast, walk into any bookstore in Japan, and every book in the place is in Japanese. Any foreign books published for the Japanese market have to be translated and - to a surprising extent - localized. Whereas we can absorb US- and UK-generated cultural artifacts with relatively little friction, and vice-versa.

We're just not different enough.

@betahuman okay. those are among the problems. what do you see as solutions to making canadian content more accessible on the fediverse?

betahuman Feb 24

@vga256 Like Glenn said, Canadian Culture is what Canadians care about, and like you said, that shifted a fair bit after both 9-11 and, I would argue, the widespread proliferation of internet access. That shift was real, and my thesis is that it would take some equally powerful, transformative phenomena to shift us back toward the cultural protectionism that defined the Canadian media landscape until the turn of the century.

betahuman Feb 24

@vga256 The internet was the gradual, inevitable harbinger of this change. Various piracy options arose that broke the gatekeeping power of Canadian broadcasters; and I think you'd be hard-pressed to find too many Canadians who long to see that power restored, outside of a clique of mediocre Toronto bigshots. To the rest of us, this unprecedented freedom meant, above all, never being forced to endure Canadian Content by government fiat, ever again.

betahuman Feb 24

@vga256 The perennial argument about whether CanCon sucked because the governing bodies were corrupt, or underfunded, or both, became a moot point. CanCon would now have to compete with everything else in the Anglosphere, for good and ill.

betahuman Feb 24

@vga256 Simultaneously, after the US reaction to 9-11, and the insanity that ensued, Canadian identity went from "Not quite Britsh, not quite French, and not quite American" to a much more strict "Not American" - in a moderately successful bid to distance ourselves from US hegemony while simultaneously ignoring our status as the greatest secondary beneficiary of that hegemony. The experience of maintaining this particular cognitive dissonance is now the only nearly-universal Canadian Experience.

betahuman Feb 24

@vga256 My thesis here is that CanCon was always an artificial category outside of Quebec; and Canadian identity is, on the whole, not a particularly meaningful concept in the broader world except insofar as we are somehow Not-American - an identity we cling to because it diminishes the guilt we feel by association.

betahuman Feb 24

@vga256 But to define oneself purely in opposition to something requires knowing it better than we know ourselves; hence the obsession with US policy. By this argument, Canadians are now more concerned with Canadian Culture (i.e., contrasting ourselves against Americans) than ever - it's just that Canadian products are now an even less significant portion of that culture than ever. And this is not a problem that I think social media of any kind can really help with.

betahuman Feb 24

@vga256 I do think that reaching out as you have is probably the best you can do. Reach out long enough, and you'll be able to find people who care about Hockey, Forever Knight, Lost Girl, and Mr. Dressup - albeit maybe not all in the same place. In the late 90's and early 00's, the internet was that place, and I don't think we can go back, much as I might long for it.

betahuman Feb 24

@vga256 TL;DR: To get the desired effect, you need either a server or a tag that somehow explicitly excludes direct discussion of the US. Moderation efforts on such a thing, if even possible, are probably more trouble than they're worth.

@betahuman i agree. i have no idea if there's an appetite for a canadacentric mastodon instance, but i'm willing to try!

betahuman Feb 24

@vga256 That's amazing, and I hope you find some semblance of what you're looking for! There must be at least a few things that unite Canadians strongly, aside from our non-American-ness and the fact that none of our ancestors loved us enough to move somewhere with a nicer climate.

@betahuman i think letting canadians figure out amongst ourselves what unites us is part of the solution. i'd rather see people arguing about which bad canadian sitcom was shittier, than which taylor swift album is the best one

betahuman Feb 24

@vga256 Just curious: have you always lived in Alberta?

@betahuman I grew up in the northwest territories and gaspésie

betahuman Feb 24

@vga256 Small world: ages 0-5 spent in High Level, AB and Dalhousie, NB. Not entirely dissimilar. When CBC was all we got, that had to have a profound impact, eh? I used to have a feeling that "being Canadian" really mattered, in a way that it never really did and never will again, which is now lost forever.

@betahuman omg, high level! 😆 i grew up in hay river, so i have MANY memories of passing through HL in the 80s. my mom used to get my sister and i to collect (steal) spilled grain from the railroad tracks/elevator there for our chickens and horses.

@betahuman as far as i'm concerned, all of that begins with everyday human beings. no outside force is going to swoop in and do the heavy lifting for us. that's the whole point of opening up a conversation like this.

again, i'm not hearing any solutions here. just defeatism.

Julia Evans Feb 24

@vga256 if we had starter packs (maybe we will soon?) one simple thing could be to make a starter pack of folks who talk a lot about Canada

similarly for Quebec, i was looking at https://qlub.social/explore and I saw a lot of accounts from France but not so much actually about Quebec. a quebec starter pack would be great

Qlub

Qlub, le réseau social québécois favorisant des échanges authentiques, sans algorithmes oppressants et respectueux de la vie privée. Rejoignez la communauté dès maintenant !

Serveur Mastodon hébergé sur qlub.social

Julia Evans Feb 24

@vga256 i wish i saw more cultural posts on Mastodon in general, i remember last year when Kendrick played the super bowl I don’t think i saw a single post about it (though this probably has more to do with the lack of Black people on mastodon compared to bluesky), and I haven’t seen much heated rivalry posting either

Clu | #RipNatenom 🕯Feb 24

@b0rk I couldn't agree more. Cultural topics, especially pop culture, are (still) really hardly present here. When the season 5 of “Stranger Things” aired, there were a few days with more than 2-3 toots per day, but that quickly subsided.
The same goes for “Heated Rivalry”.

What I do: I create follow lists with hashtags (that's *really* a huge plus here) for series, artists, etc. And if no one else posts, at least I do every now and then. Maybe something will happen in the long run.

@b0rk good point. one big part of that i've noticed is that at least on my feed, masto skews very heavily 40+

Ben Zanin Feb 24

@b0rk @vga256 you haven't seen much Heated Rivalry posting?!??

Good golly

I'm uhhhhh

in a different situation apparently

@b0rk that's an interesting idea. i wonder how fediverse software - or masto in particular - could be adapted to support it.

Scott VE3QBZ Feb 24

@vga256 I talk about ketchup chips frequently, giving me very high cancon ratios, but then again, I'm also only an instance of one :)

🦠Toxic Flange (Gurjeet)🔬⚱️🌚Feb 24

@vga256 my personal solution was to follow more Canadian hashtags as much as possible, started building a list of canadian journalists and politicians.. i think it’s helped a bit but yeah it’s hard to find the. canadian content as i did on previous sites. i think your choice of instance really helps too, especially if you’re getting a lot out of the local and follow tabs content

@Toxic_Flange yeah, i do the hashtag and follow strategies too. and yet, there just isn't much canadian stuff to see. it seems to me that one solution might involve encouraging people to post *local* stuff going on in their lives? people don't seem to think that local news in yellowknife matters to anyone else, but for someone like me who lives 1500 km away, it's like gold.

90s Script Kiddie Feb 24

@vga256 An instance is a good idea, I think if you want more of these conversations a set of hashtags and a kind of coordinator account would be good. Give people things to follow and places to put their own takes on things. For what it's worth CBC has had some pretty good shows in recent years, Baroness von Sketch, Sort Of, and Workin' Moms come to mind.

@90sScriptKiddiw an account dedicated to frontpaging canadian content is a great idea. it's actually funny to me that no one has done that before. just boosting the hell out of canadian accounts/stories.

i think i've missed most of the good new cbc shows in the past 10 years. whatever i watched tended to ape american comedy/drama, and i never saw anything i found particularly unique. when i say weird canadian tv, i'm imagining stuff like On The Road Again with wayne rostad. there's something totally bizarre about driving through every hick town in canada and interviewing locals and yet being totally wholesome about it. i won't say it was great tv, but it *felt* canadian to me.

Magnesium Feb 24

@vga256 I've always thought of cancon laws as a form of censorship, whereas the bursaries and government grants for the Arts as the actual Kickstarter to Canadian originated content.

Now that we're on the Internet, the censorship side is harder to enforce ( and i'd argue shouldn't be), but we're not doing enough with grants and enabling the reach of good content to create the feedback loop that this is viable in the competitive world of attention grabbing content.

@magnesium for sure. but keep in mind that granting systems are equally censoring - they're totally selective based on their own rules about content too. i've worked through granting systems in the arts and sciences here, and their goals are to promote whatever cultural/political focus they're currently built around.

that being said: i absolutely appreciate that someone cared enough to actually build meaningful rules about what is canadian and what isn't. i'd rather be arguing with another canadian about what counts as canadian-enough-content, than promoting american libertarianism as some kind of cyber utopia.

the current fediverse absolutely favours populism and trendy american content, just due to a pure numbers game. that's a recipe for losing your culture if you're anyone but american.

Acroamatis 🇨🇦Feb 24

@magnesium @vga256

I always thought of it less as censorship (it's not as if networks were forbidden to air any specific content, they were just required to have a percentage of cancon) and more media protectionism.

And look at the Wheat Board or the Dairy Council - it's been a strategy that's paid off for Canadians in the past.

@acroamatis great points. the CWB and CDC both have their detractors of course, but they did exactly what they were supposed to do for farmers.

@vga256 the fediverse would go ape for the Red Green Show, I'm sure of it

@vga256 just take one look at Harold's Cyberdeck

Patch Arcana Feb 24

@greg @vga256 "If the women don't find you handsome, they should at least find you handy" is definitely some kind of Core Memory.

Tyler Bindon Feb 24

@patcharcana @greg @vga256 I adopted that motto myself

aburka 🫣Feb 24

@greg @vga256 the keyboard is upside down

John Francis 🇨🇦🦫🍁💪⬆️Feb 24

@greg @vga256 Harold owes a lot to Lewis Skolnick, Robert Carradine passed recently.

@greg @vga256 Harold was ahead of the times!

Soh Kam Yung Feb 24

How does this compare to the Commodordion?

https://www.linusakesson.net/commodordion/index.php

The Commodordion

@sohkamyung i see twice as much raw processing power