I wrote about Mastodon the other day. Here's the piece I wrote on ZDNet :
http://www.zdnet.com/article/is-mastodon-the-new-social-media-star-or-imploding-black-hole/
I'm impressed with its growth and stability so far. I'll be watching closely as brands try to work out how to monetize this new audience
@eileenb As @woozle noted, when epistemic (media) systems gain significance, the attract attention:
"Because of a high percentage of the population being present, there is now substantial power to be had by influencing the discussions that take place."
Or more accurately: as there are /returns/ to influencing an audience, those influencers will appear: direct & brand marketing, propagandists, polemicists.
So yes, the brands ... will come, like it or not.
@woozle @eileenb I see a fairly common progression of interests within a new media channel. Not necessarily in the following order, but close:
1. Technicians -- "shop talk"
2. Artistics and creatives, avant garde.
3. Organisations for internal use: business, government, academia, religion, etc.
4. External comms, management, monitoring, discussion.
5. Direct marketing.
6. Mass entertainment.
7. Mass marketing.
8. Propaganda and polemicists.
Merely changing platforms changes nothing.
@crecca See Elizabeth Eisenstein, "The Printing Press as an Agent of Change", or McLuhan's "The Gutenberg Galaxy".
*Absolutely* new media changes culture. Massively. And has, going back to language and speech themselves. Writing /literally created civilisation and history/. The printing press split the Catholic Church, lit off the Renaissance, sparked the 30 years war, and lit the fire under science.
Fascism relied on radio, cinema, and loudhailers.
@crecca TV didn't exactly bring forth a vast intellectualisation of the populace. Facebook (and Google and Twitter and Reddit) seem to be directly attacking liberal democracy themselves, with the help of #brands and #advertising.
If you want to look at where the Internet's been taking us in the past few years, look at what danah boyd's been writing at Medium, she's on fire.
https://points.datasociety.net/hacking-the-attention-economy-9fa1daca7a37
@crecca boyd's recent posts, all worth reading: https://medium.com/@zephoria/latest
@crecca The question is, /how/ do media change culture, do /different/ media change it differently, what happens when there's an absolute /flood/ of messages (I hesitate to even call it "information"), most especially where there's little or no selection for /truth/ as opposed to ... popularity or short-term financial reward -- yeah, thanks, #brands, all over again.
More: https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/t7qwp_va18sogdmm_xsslg
@crecca And if you're interested in the genesis of my awareness of media as an agent of social change, that goes back about 7 months:
@will Sure, but it also depends on those elements' capacities to change the rules themselves.
Bob Dylan: "Money doesn't shout, it swears."
Informational activities which are subsidised by, or reward, financial interests, or political interests, have a capacity to dominate pretty much anything else. Epistemic systems whose incentivisation is /anything but/ seeking deeper truth ... will return that, and /not/ truth.
RAW: Celine's 2nd law.
@dredmorbius @woozle @eileenb but like, if I run my own email server with me and 100 of my friends, and #brands are annoying, I'll just add them to my spam filter, ya know? This is a semi-solved problem.
The key, as usual, is for spammers to act like they're not spammy so people don't ignore/block/unfollow them. But by giving the power of instance creation to people, there's always an escape chute.
@will Check your priors: /if/ you run your own email server:
* You can afford a server. OK, falling bar, Raspberry Pi, $5, falling 10x per decade
* You can afford a broadband connection. Not ... too unreasonable
* Persistant network connection and address. This is a complexity bar
* Systems administration. Now we're at 5-8% of the population or less. Likely /much/ less. (OECD computer skills survey)
* Systems security
* Spam and abuse
* Content liability
Who can do this?
@will What's a /sufficient/ number of the population able to do this for it to bust out of the #brands / media lockdown level?
Can the fundamentally nontechnical (process, organisational, interactive, legal) elements ever be addressed with technology?
And even if you've got all that ... you and 100 of your friends are there. What if you want to talk to someone /outside/ that group of 100?
The problem I face is in finding the people interested in the same problems as me.
@will That might be 100, might be 1,000. But they're kinda scattered all over the place. And it's hard to convince them to join Yet Another Instance of ... something.
I've been wrestling with that problem for ~30 years, though seriously maybe for the past 5-10.
Present iteration of Internet tech doesn't do much -- Web 2.0 stuff.
I've even tried finding my tribe, or tribes-of-intelligence. They're ... scarce.
https://redd.it/3hp41w
@dredmorbius @will
Is the bar "who can run an email server" or "who can run an email server that isn't shitty, insecure, and bound to become a spampot"?
Because in the former case, only the first three points count. (I.e., anybody with $5 and a broadband connection can run their own whatever server.)
@will @dredmorbius
In other words, by far the largest bar against people running their own servers is that even technically-inclined people vastly overestimate the difficulty of running your own server for whatever purpose.
This is because it's trendy in tech circles to think about scalability even when it doesn't matter. (You can run a mail server off a 386. There is no scale problem if you aren't google.)
@will Wilson wrote "Accurate communication is possible only in a non-punishing situation."
That's only half right.
You also get inaccurate communication where you reward anything /other/ than accurate, informational comms.
* "Publish or perish."
* Social status
* "Honest signalling" (honest or otherwise)
* #brands
Etc.
You might be able to scare off brands be creating a space that's not brand-friendly. Say, YouTube. Or 4chan or /b/.
@will I'm pretty down with Instances setting their own game rules, though you have a bit of a mismatch with the granularity of rules vs. user counts.
Social is 50k users, Cloud is 31k, JP is pushing 65k, Pawoo 70k. That's a lot of personal preferences to comport with a single Instance-wide policy.
Smaller servers manage better -- 100s to a few 1000s of users. But transparency here ... needs work.
There's also account portability/migration, in process, but Not Here Yet.
@will NB: I've /no/ problem generally with instances setting rules on who or what they talk to, and I've seen enough crap out of a few places that I wouldn't mind seeing a lot less from them. Your instance /is/ your FreezePeach zone, mine is not.
There's the question of what FS is and what its limits are. I've already linked earlier essays of mine touching on that, but going back to Mill, earlier, and discussions since, is enlightening.
@will @dredmorbius @eileenb For what it's worth, people arguing against "safe space" and "trigger warnings" are not being honest; they'll demand their own forms of safe space and trigger warning, but call them something different.
Removing "controversial" books from libraries, for example, or demanding various forms of warning (e.g. "parental advisory") on CDs and games.
Everyone needs safe space, but some of us have to fight for it. :-/
@woozle One of the calls for limitations was that politics not be discussed openly, without CW. I addressed that on my FAQ (see my profile Bio link), particularly:
https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius/236207
https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius/532278
And especially: https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius/532406
@dredmorbius @will @eileenb For Harena's sake, if nothing else, I tend to agree.
Meta-politics don't seem to be a problem, but getting into specific causes and people tends to bring in a lot of negativity that can make a place less fun to be around.
Maybe I should set up a Mastodon instance on issuepedia.org or cwre.org?
@woozle I think that would be a fantastic idea.
There's also the experiment of running a quiet space where a known set of people who can discuss difficult sets of topics intelligently might do so. The MKaTS model.
@dredmorbius The universe has decided that I will become familiar with Ruby on Rails, it seems...
Perhaps this time around I'll be able to scare up some help when things break. (I've still got a Redmine instance I tried to upgrade several years ago and was never able to revive. Blank screen, unhelpful error messages in log -- apparently a common symptom with borken RoR apps.)
@dredmorbius What are your preferred domains for this? Some obvious options associated with political-ish sites: issuepedia.org, iseeamess.com, instagov.com, cwre.org
I also have scicrit.com (for science criticism) and errorists.us (for criticism of the anti-reality movement) -- probly too specific.
coagitate.com was always going to be for the first instance of InstaGov... I could do Mastodon as a subdomain there even though the main site isn't started.
Thots?
@woozle Make it happen.
Tell people where it is.
/Where/ matters vastly less than /that/, though of the set, iseeamess is probably a better general fit.
My model of this will be "Woozle's Mastodon instance".
(Also: classic instance of overbranding, IMO.)
@dredmorbius I have registered icmstdn.com
I'm kind of shocked it was available.
@woozle OK.
Though I'm not sure how this solves the overbranding problem....
@woozle You have ... many domains.
It's a little confusing, from the outside looking in.
@dredmorbius They're each intended to be separately memorable, with the possibility of being managed by different individuals. Also, shorter URLs than tying to package everything in folders. (Been there, done that.)
I'm open to eventual discussion on how better to manage that, domain-name-wise and in other respects.
(This domain is my 30th. But I don't have a problem. Really.)
@woozle I can guess as to the intent.
As I've already said: "From the outside, looking in..."
If you're trying to create some sort of unified presence, or make it easier for others to find a single spot to locate your stuff, speaking as someone who I suspect is among those more generally interested in your work, this makes it harder, not easier.
If you'll go upstream, I suggested ISeeAMess. Not the best branding, but prolly where I'd go.
/Not/ Yet Another Domain.
@will But other interests /don't/ have the same fears or concerns. Most especially demagogic or factionalising ones. Hell, they even feed off the energy and dynamic. SSC, "Toxoplasma of Rage".
http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/
@dredmorbius @will @eileenb This is another example of publicity skills, rather than virtue, deciding what rises to the top. This is a problem in many, many endeavors (e.g. music, fiction writing, politics...)
Designing systems (digital ecosystems) to counter this trend is a sort of meta-goal of my current work.
@crecca How, specifically?
I'd like to see some specific examples.
@dredmorbius uh, I'm not media specialist, unfortunately. But I'll try.
Change of nature implies something more than growth, scale, and so forth. But, I'd argue, changing breadth of definition is changing the nature. And, to focus on one thing from the list, propaganda has changed its definition to include things that are not deceitful intentionally. This was enabled by medium, because sender is no longer just government, or political party.
@crecca If you're referring to "useful idiots", the ... tradition is ancient.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot
Sun Tzu's "doomed spies": https://suntzusaid.com/book/13
Dating to 5th century BCE, or 2,500 years ago. Twitter and Facebook adoption at the time were somewhat smaller than today.
I'm not a media specialist either. I've come to realise that media are significant, and am making up for lost time.
Most of what I'm discussing I've learnt the past 6 months.
@dredmorbius No, I'm not, the point of origin of the propaganda is different, among other things. Message is different. Receiver is different.
In broad terms, the media that you use is affecting the message deeply, transforms it, according to the rules of the media. This is an old theory, though.
And regarding social media specifically – this is not very useful term here, and I find it artificial still.
@crecca I strongly suspect you're far less disagreeing with me than failing to understand me.
There are elements of information which are the same, despite medium. These are constant, through and far beyond human and pre-human history.
There are elements which are different: scale, time, reach, total informational volume. Access, somewhat.
Under those lenses, what we're seeing now has exceedingly clear antecedants, and relations and understanding can be drawn.
@dredmorbius I'd much rather admit you're right than admit I misunderstood something.
And you're not wrong! It's important to acknowledge the constants. But I can't yet get behind the notion that everything stays the same, when every where I look I see constant (sic) change and chaos.
Even though the flux is not obvious. "The history likes to repeat itself". "You can't change human nature". Bullshit.
Media is a mold for information.
1/2
Music for churches is different than music for summer parties on the beach.
Polemics are different on reddit and are different on the blogosphere, and different on youtube comments. And this is not a superficial difference, but an essential one. How we build our information infrastructure directs our reasoning in ways we can't escape, except by tearing it down and rebuilding it differently.
@crecca The search for a /common/ thread or structure makes the detailing of the /deviations/ from that far more clear.
If you can start from the basis of /this is common/ or /this is constant/, even if that is merely a working premise taken as unproved, then you can walk around the structure and look at what doesn't fit. Can that be explained by additional rules, random variance, emergent properties, external influences?
Deny that there is /any/ commonality: you lose all that.
Eileen Brown ☑️
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elementary
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will
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