@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. :(

@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.

@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.