We Lost Communication to Entertainment

What shits me most is that in the early months of the Reddit revolt was that people were organically posting topics of discussion and sharing personal original content. Then the bots came and posted clickbait articles dressed as news to drive clicks to the motherships of all these useless websites screaming for attention. It used to be your forum post would be locked if you only posted a link with no commentary or start of a discussion around what you were linking, the idea was to promote discussion, but that’s now gone and maybe the text on memes is the new version of that, I don’t know. Navigating away and filtering that is a daily process, but once you find that one or few communities and shut out the noise there are normal people living normal lives which is nice.

To me, the very goal of interoperability is not to force you into creating multiple accounts. Big Monopolies have managed to convince people that they need one account on each platform.

I want to have multiple accounts, because I like different interfaces for differences services. I like the PeerTube app and web UI for watching and interacting with video content. I like the Mastodon app and web UI for microblogs. I like Voyager and the PieFed UI for threaded discussions and link sharing. It’s always nice to see comments from Mastodon on PeerTube, or native PeerTube channels on PieFed. But that doesn’t mean I need one account that does everything. It’s good to have options.

yeah I sorta assume at some point the fediverse will be such that you only need one account. I don’t make any to be active with at the same time. I make ones generally when Im moving over.

This is a really good read IMO, I recommend everyone to check it out.

(From memory:) Social media isn’t communicating but Television 2.0…

Communications protocols are boring.

Yeah tell me that, I made one and it seems like it’s the most boring thing ever, sigh.

Deleted by author

This is not a new argument, but the author is a bit confused with the terms. Usually it is phrased as “social network” Vs. “social media”.

The problem with communication protocols was never the protocol part. It’s the communication part. A few sad humans never wanted to communicate in the first place and managed to become billionaires by convincing the rest of mankind that being entertained is better than communicating with other humans.

NGL, I too am ready to jump back onto listservs. I used to have several e-groups that got bought by Yahoo then mothballed years later. Still pissed off about that.

Then again, I cut the cord for cable TV in 1999 when I got cable internet, and never looked back.

I think the author brings some interesting points, but ultimately I think it’s a faulty premise.

The fediverse is whatever the user wants it to be. That’s the whole point really. If you want a reliable communications platform with zero dropped messages, aka email 2.0, then you can definitely build that on the fediverse and people can join such a platform if that’s what they want.

If that’s not what you want… Well then don’t join such a platform. Join another one. You do you.

We don’t need anyone telling us how to communicate or consume content or whatever we want to do with the fediverse. The whole point of the fediverse is that everyone gets to decide for themselves, so there’s no need to be prescriptive about any one approach.

I feel like the author is being a tad dramatic about Pixelfed. I think the whole “can’t see text posts” issue could be solve with a simple “Let me see text posts” toggle, either for the overall feed or hashtags, or account, whatever. The more customizable the better.

My second point is, expecting to have one account to see EVERYTHING on the Fediverse is insanity. Do you expect a Peertube account to read Mastodon posts? A Funkwhale that can look at Misskey? I think servives like Masto, wafrn, and misskey/sharkey should make efforts to have embeded posts from media based services like Peertube/Funkwhale, but different services have different purposes. Some people on Threadiverse (Lemmy, Piefed, mbin) probably don’t even have Masto accounts. Pixelfed’s main goal is to be similar to Instagram, a place to post pictures/images. Instagram doesn’t do walls of text, but if you really wanted to just write words and screenshot it. But why try to make something that “does it all”? We’re getting mad at Facebook for doing exactly that, they have games, vertical videos (Tiktok), marketplace, live streams, groups, instant messaging, and more bullcrap. Pixelfed deserves to exist just as much as Mastodon does.

My final point is, some people don’t want to do a whole blog in addition to their pic. Tumblr has a healthy blend of image and text capability, and some people just do text while others just do pictures. Some people just want to post a picture and communicate through that. Why does text have to weigh heavier than images? I feel it’s a bit unfair to make it sound like people only see brainrot and sensory overload on Insta/media-focused services. I miss many artists from Instagram and Twitter, I wish they’d migrate to Pixelfed or Masto.

I say this as someone who barely uses either Masto or Pixelfed, because it’s far harder to find content I’m interested in on there compared to Threadiverse. Here, we have neat, ordered communities where you get what it says on the tin. But you have to work to find what you want everywhere else, which would feel rewarding if we had the people and content to back it up.

I also think this is fair comment, but it also kindof misses a bigger point: and that is that the experience of media in our lives before social media kindof conditioned us all to separate ourselves into the categories of performer and audience, with the publisher in the middle with the power: and media has always laid the power in the hands of content publishers vs content consumers.

I loved early social networks pre-Facebook (newsgroups, messageboards, LiveJournal) as power was not yet consolidated in the larger publishers. The clever publishers always saw this potential to consolidate power and control media consumers more than ever before. Which has happened, as we’ve been trained for so long to be passive consumers.

The most important element of Burning Man culture for me was the focus on participation: no spectators. The media world wants the opposite and always has.

Many journalists should feel called out by this.

Yeah I’m starting to think dansup projects aren’t real fediverse projects since everyone seems to have issues with with them.

So the main complaint is that Pixelfed clients don’t display posts without images even if one has followed the poster? And thinks it incentivizes creation of using multiple accounts/apps when a single one to interact with ActivityPub would be better? That seems like a fair thing to criticize but it seems a little dramatic to paint it as entertainment killing communication.

Communicating is entertaining

To me, the very goal of interoperability is not to force you into creating multiple accounts. Big Monopolies have managed to convince people that they need one account on each platform. This was done, on purpose, for purely unethical reasons in order to keep users captive

Goddamn, what a shit take.the big monopolies are trying to get you to sign up to each service using their accounts as the authentication IdP for other platforms. Having a central account to funnel data back to the mother ship is exactly why a lot of us DON’T want a single account. Hell, I have multiple Lemmy accounts for segregating what content I see.

Not sure I care any more about this dudetake when his base premise is so far off line.

This guy complained that a instagram clone only showed image post and not text, and as such it was breaking the Fediverse?

What a terrible take.

Ok, I opened the article, read a major part of it, not all of it, it’s a little too long and too “esoteric” for me. I’m a simple guy.

I agree there is a problem, I try to find communication. I can’t find much of it on Lemmy, where most “posts” are just links to articles, or reposts from reddit. I am missing small forums from the early days of the internet, where people knew each other… But I didn’t find it here.

I am responding to this post, but I didn’t even read OP’s user name, so I might be a part of the problem.

The article mentions Gemini, which is an unfortunate name for something that is not developed by Google (even if it was called like that before Google Gemini, if you don’t have a few billion dollars, you don’t want to share the name with something owned by Google), I wanted to check it out but failed.

The linked article “there is no content on Gemini” didn’t say what it is… It focused on what it isn’t… Or if it did, I lost patience before that part…

So I totally agree regarding the problem, but if you are trying to sell a solution, then apparently I am unqualified to use it.

Go away, ‘batin.

Good article, worth the read 😊

Dumb

This is a 4-months old blog post ( https://lemmy.ml/post/40940343 ), any reason to bring it up now?

Upvoted because its a high effort blog post, but honestly it reads like deranged nonsense.

In a communication network, you hurt the trust in the whole network if you create clients that arbitrarily drop messages, something that Pixelfed is doing deliberately

At least they admitted this was a wrong line of thinking. You can hardly call pixelfeds message dropping arbitrary. Its clearly based in whether there’s images. Tf did they want it to be like? Just another mastodon instance?

There were people like me, often above 40, who like sending emails and browsing old-fashioned websites. We think of ActivityPub as a “communication protocol” between humans.

It objectively is

And then there are people like Dansup, who believe that ActivityPub is a content consumption protocol.

Here’s where the nonsense really kicks in. Content consumption protocol? Wouldn’t any content consumption protocol intrinsically also be a communication protocol? But they say later that the users are the ones creating the content that gets consumed:

They are entertainment platforms that delegate media creation to the users themselves the same way Uber replaced taxis by having people drive others in their own car.

So let me get this straight… The content we’re consuming is… Messages… Produced by other people. And then we produce messages… Consumed by those people. So… Communication? Seems like the author thinks that just because the word “content” is used in thr activitypub description that somehow excludes communication. Nonsense.

But aren’t social networks also communication networks? That’s what I thought. […] But that was a lie. Communication networks are not profitable. Social networks are entertainment platforms, media consumption protocols. […] The point was never to avoid missing a message sent from a fellow human being. The point was always to fill your time with “content.”

How does communication networks being unprofitable imply that social networks aren’t communication networks? Just because corporations want social networks to function as content consumption doesn’t mean that its not still communication. Last I checked, every social media platform will make sure to let me know about every single DM, comment, @, retweet, reblog, repost, whatever that happens to me.

Like when I talk to someone IRL or attend a conference, by this bizarre logic, I’m just a consooomer of the audio CONTENT that they transmit over the air “content consumption protocol” to my ear interface.

My own interpretation is that social media users don’t mind losing messages because they were raised on algorithmic platforms that did that all the time.

The platforms don’t do that

It’s not Dansup who is missing something. It is me who is unadapted to the current society.

Never have I read something so humble yet so smug

The main problem with reliable communication protocols? It is a mostly solved problem. Build simple websites, read RSS feeds, write emails. Use IRC and XMPP if you truly want real-time communication. Those are working and working great. And because of that, they are boring. Communications protocols are boring. They don’t give you that well-studied random hit of dopamine

IRC and XMPP are unfathomable to the uninitiated and objectively more of a pain to use, so no, they don’t work great. People use WhatsApp and Telegram and Signal and Instagram DMs because it’s much easier. It’s crazy to say the problem with “communication protocols” is that they’re boring when people use them constantly. People also constantly communicate in the IRL protocol, perhaps this author hasn’t heard of it.

The problem with communication protocols was never the protocol part. It’s the communication part. A few sad humans never wanted to communicate in the first place and managed to become billionaires by convincing the rest of mankind that being entertained is better than communicating with other humans.

What problem? This whole piece goes on and on about “the problem” with communication protocols, but what is it? Its that more people aren’t using it? More people aren’t using…. Email? Yeah… Everyone I know uses email. You can complain that they aren’t “at inbox 0” and therefore not using it in the Holy Way you want, but they’re still using it. People use SMS and phone calls too. And the people who communicate on proprietary apps, via DMs, what’s the problem there? I guess that it’s proprietary? But if thats the case the problem is that nonproprietary protocols are either complicated (irc, xmpp), in their infancy (activity pub) or both (matrix). The problem isn’t that they don’t have addictive dopamine mechanisms. If that was the case than the eviiiiil demon Pixelfed should be doing way better, since it’s another of these sinful modern content consumption demons.

We believe that a communication network must reach a critical mass to be really useful. People stay on Facebook to “stay in touch with the majority.” I don’t believe that lie anymore

Oh, okay, so the problem isn’t that more people aren’t using email and IRC. There’s actually no problem?

I may be part of an endangered species. It doesn’t matter. I made peace with the fact that I will never get in touch with everyone.

Again with this unbearable enlightenment attitude. What endangered species, bro? People who wanna talk to other people? Hate to break it to you but you’re not special for that. Everyone wants to talk to people, and they do it, constantly, via multiple channels. I’m sorry its not using your preferred channels. I also prefer decentralized channels, of course. But all this means is that the problem is that people aren’t using decentralized stuff because its too daunting. Not that people are lowly sheeple who only want to consoom without connection. It’s such an unjustifiably haughty way to interpret things.

Two Incompatible Universes

There were people like me, often above 40, who like sending emails and browsing old-fashioned websites. We think of ActivityPub as a “communication protocol” between humans. As such, anything that implies losing messages without feedback is the worst thing that could happen. Not losing messages is the top priority of a communication protocol.

And then there are people like Dansup, who believe that ActivityPub is a content consumption protocol. It’s there for entertainment. You create as many accounts as the kinds of media you want to consume. Dansup himself is communicating through a Mastodon account, not a Pixelfed one. Many Pixelfed users also have a Mastodon account, and they never questioned that. They actually want multiple accounts for different use cases.

There must be at least three universes, because I’m not a part of either one of those.

I’m well above 40, and have certainly been online longer than Ploum. And I hate email and always have. To me, it’s too invasive - too demanding. An email says “You must take note of me and deal with me in some way.” I don’t like that being done to me and I don’t like doing it to other people.

A forum on the other hand - I get to write out my thoughts however seems best to me, then I just toss them out into the void. If others read them, great. If not, I still got to write them out, which is the part I enjoy most anyway.

My first experience with online forums was usenet, on which old posts are constantly falling off of the board as new ones are added. My first experiences with internet forums were the same. It wasn’t until later - years after I first went online - that I found myself on a forum that didn’t delete older posts. I found that to be intriguing and novel and relatively welcome, but I still dont see it as a necessity.

I’ve always created as many accounts as possible on as many different sites as possible. Entirely contrary to Ploum’s inexplicable assessment, I’ve never seen that as something I was locked into by monopolistic sites, and in fact, always saw it exactly the opposite To me, a single account is an artifact of monopolistic social media (and of the posters who are trying to create a brand). From the very beginning, in my experience, accounts were things I just created under whatever name tickled my fancy at the moment, so that I could post on whatever particular forum had just caught my attention. I might never use that account again, and that’s fine.

So when I went from my one and only account on Reddit to a couple of dozen accounts scattered hither and yon on the Fediverse, I saw that as reclaiming a freedom I had had to give up for monopolistic social media.

And while I certainly do my share of doomscrolling, I also post regularly. So basically, at least in my case, the entire passage:

…who believe that ActivityPub is a content consumption protocol. It’s there for entertainment. You create as many accounts as the kinds of media you want to consume

is wrong, and not just in part, but entirely, from start to finish.

My own interpretation is that social media users don’t mind losing messages because they were raised on algorithmic platforms that did that all the time.

In my own case, I don’t mind losing messages because I was here when messages, pages and even entire sites could fall through any of the myriad cracks in the wilderness of the internet at any moment, and that was just the way it was, so we didn’t let it bother us.

It wasn’t until later, when the summer children and the profiteers who were drawn to them invaded, that structure and permanence and identity and brand became important.

The main problem with reliable communication protocols? It is a mostly solved problem. Build simple websites, read RSS feeds, write emails. (emphasis mine)

Ah… yes.

The mention of RSS does more to ckarify exactly what type of netizen Ploum is than pretty much anything that came before.

I’ve never been the least bit interested in RSS.

To me, it’s something for the sort of people who get in their totally enclosed car in their totally enclosed garage, drive their fixed route to their totally enclosed parking garage, then ride a totally enclosed elevator to their totally enclosed office.

I’d rather get out and walk.