Very tempted to quit #Twitter now that I can't use Tweetbot by Tapbots. Yet will probably soon try the paying version of both twitter and linkedin, because I'm thinking a lot about social media. (If so I will put the double the monthly costs for twitter into mastodon...)
I'm really torn. I still think we need to fight for our digital infrastructure we co-created. Flight is an elite option, but indeed maybe I am elite and should spend more time writing for Wired, not to mention my book.
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Joanna Bryson, blathering (j2bryson@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 18-Jan-2023 19:50:16 JST Joanna Bryson, blathering -
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pettter (pettter@mastodon.acc.umu.se)'s status on Wednesday, 18-Jan-2023 19:49:43 JST pettter @j2bryson @alasaarela @drdelle Why would you need a central authority in that way? I mean, you could incorporate the whole structure into a global, democratically led state construct, but demanding that every industry is, essentially, a monopoly or oligopoly is not something I'd generally favour outside of that.
Sidenote: I don't think catering to the wants and needs of Henry Kissinger of all people is going to lead us anywhere good, neither in the past nor in the future.
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Joanna Bryson, blathering (j2bryson@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 18-Jan-2023 19:49:44 JST Joanna Bryson, blathering @alasaarela @drdelle someone like Kissinger once famously said something like "if you need to talk to Europe, who do you call?" The US now says the EU has fairly well solved that problem. Now the EU is leading in ensuring digital rights and protections. Who do they call when they need to work with the #fediverse on ensuring protections for their citizens? 3/3 #mastodon #digitalGovernance
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Joanna Bryson, blathering (j2bryson@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 18-Jan-2023 19:49:45 JST Joanna Bryson, blathering @alasaarela @drdelle I don't have to get all WWIII to say we may need corporation. There were 30,000 people working for #twitter when Musk bought it. Some of them were cybersecurity, some were the team that made it so news agencies could embed tweets in their stories that allowed readers to drill down & throw into the twitter thread. A lot were addressing EU regulations and otherwise addressing #AIEthics and #HumanRights and #dignity concerns. These public goods probably require centralisation.
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Joanna Bryson, blathering (j2bryson@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 18-Jan-2023 19:49:47 JST Joanna Bryson, blathering @alasaarela @drdelle I really hope you are right. I am not a networking specialist, maybe there's proveably a way to do this, but IMO we are either going to build something that doesn't provide the reach and discovery possibilities of #twitter, thus no longer a vector for #BLM or "first world" surfacing of developing world talent (listen to Maria Ressa on this.) OR we will be assaulted by state military operations e.g. Russia & China, and I'm not sure we could coordinate a response.
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Mikko Alasaarela :equel: (alasaarela@equel.social)'s status on Wednesday, 18-Jan-2023 19:49:59 JST Mikko Alasaarela :equel: @drdelle @j2bryson The protocol should be open and always available for everyone. Anyone should be able to build new services and invent new sustainable commercial models on it. This way, social will never become a silo again, but the innovation can still flourish and push the ecosystem forward.
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Detlef Steuer (drdelle@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 18-Jan-2023 19:50:07 JST Detlef Steuer @j2bryson @alasaarela But this exactly was the problem from the beginning: The other side could be bought, so it had to happen. Just like i.e. github. The #fediverse can not be bought, just like #codeberg can not be bought. If purchasing is possible, purchase will happen and always by someone in the 0.1%. We should use unpurchasable infrastructure designed to avoid any kind of lock-in. I do not see any actor declaring the birdsite a utility in the forseeable future.
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Joanna Bryson, blathering (j2bryson@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 18-Jan-2023 19:50:08 JST Joanna Bryson, blathering @alasaarela You may be right about the migration, but while Twitter is the only way for most people in most countries to contact power, and get direct information from trustworthy sources, we shouldn't just abandon it. We would be facilitating a weapon of autocrats: the private purchase of essential infrastructure. We need to stand up for the recognition and public control of technology that has become a utility.
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Mikko Alasaarela :equel: (alasaarela@equel.social)'s status on Wednesday, 18-Jan-2023 19:50:15 JST Mikko Alasaarela :equel: @j2bryson Slowly but steadily, people will move to the place where the most innovation and best conversations happen. There's already 15 third party apps for Mastodon on iOS, and many Android and web apps to use. The best UX designs are already better than Twitter, only losing in speed, which is hard to match with the decentralized model.
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pettter (pettter@mastodon.acc.umu.se)'s status on Wednesday, 18-Jan-2023 20:41:28 JST pettter @j2bryson @alasaarela @drdelle Well there are already both companies, nonprofits and cooperative associations running Mastodon instances. What's missing, exactly?
I think lowering the cost of participation (through federation) and increasing the sense of actual human involvement (more admins/mods/user participation) is overall a good thing - I don't think that the current monopolist social media model was ever truly sustainable in the long run. It was always exploitative. >
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Joanna Bryson, blathering (j2bryson@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 18-Jan-2023 20:41:29 JST Joanna Bryson, blathering @pettter @alasaarela @drdelle ha ha ha I totally wasn't trying to say anything positive about Kissinger, I'm not that informed but wouldn't be surprised if he was a war criminal. But seriously, thanks for the main question. I don't think we want ONE company, but we may need SOME companies. We need to figure out how to best regulate these "natural global monopolies", and we haven't, but in general too little variation is brittle / DOA, too much is entropy. Modularity of some form seems to work.
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pettter (pettter@mastodon.acc.umu.se)'s status on Wednesday, 18-Jan-2023 20:43:48 JST pettter @j2bryson @alasaarela @drdelle As for regulation, internet regulation has always been a fraught subject, honestly, but when it comes to regulation, the only things you can meaningfully catch without massive overreach is domestic servers and generally economic activity. I.e. you can ban companies from operating in certain ways easy from servers within your jurisdiction, and from soliciting e.g. ad money from within it with a bit more effort. More than that? Very hard.
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pettter (pettter@mastodon.acc.umu.se)'s status on Wednesday, 18-Jan-2023 20:49:39 JST pettter @j2bryson @alasaarela @drdelle I don't think it's necessarily useful to go all "as above, so below" on the workings of human society and human biology.
That being said, it's important to consider _for whom_ a certain system is legible. E.g. a convoluted neighbourhood or local custom can be entirely legible and perfectly comprehensible to locals familiar with it, but entirely opaque to outsiders, including outside authorities (yes, I'm cribbing off Seeing Like a State here)
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Joanna Bryson, blathering (j2bryson@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 18-Jan-2023 20:49:40 JST Joanna Bryson, blathering @pettter @alasaarela @drdelle The international order is interesting now, there is more or less anarchy at the top level, but governance the next step down. As far as I can tell, brains work somewhat similarly. It may be that with ICT we can afford more diversity / complexity because we have prosthetics to help us keep it transparent (apparent, comprehensible). Without clarity giving true legitimacy, we risk facilitating corruption, helping the bullies and warlords.
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Mikko Alasaarela :equel: (alasaarela@equel.social)'s status on Wednesday, 18-Jan-2023 22:10:55 JST Mikko Alasaarela :equel: @pettter@umu.se @j2bryson @drdelle Great conversation! I always thought Europe's regulations essentially kill the possibility of local small businesses thriving in any data intensive industry, because only big American giants can handle the bureaucracy, red tape and lawsuits.
Further, the American giants are the only organizations advanced enough to be able to offer instant gratification for users in exchange for their data. Small companies can't do that, and as a result get denied access to any meaningful data to evolve competitive AIs or digital products in general.
What Joanna is saying is simply admitting this status quo, meaning that Europe made itself a vassal to the Americans through bureaucracy. A gigantic self-own.
Europe has BTW given rise to majority of the open source technologies that Americans have successfully monetized. The anti-capitalist sentiment of early Mastodon users will lead to either the feared embrace-extend-extinguish by an American giant, or it becoming irrelevant niche network.
There's a better way, though. We could create a vibrant ecosystem of small companies that enforce the openness of the ecosystem to a point that it is impossible for a single entity to take over. The companies should be allowed to monetize to fund innovations so that no large company can outrun them with money.
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pettter (pettter@mastodon.acc.umu.se)'s status on Wednesday, 18-Jan-2023 22:10:55 JST pettter @alasaarela @j2bryson @drdelle Being an anti-capitalist early user of Mastodon I was doing perfectly fine with it being a niche network, actually.
There's perfectly fine options to monetize already, and a bunch of small companies are already doing it. What do you think is missing, more specifically? Do you just want to not have to bother about the GDPR and/or AI Act (whenever it comes)?
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pettter (pettter@mastodon.acc.umu.se)'s status on Wednesday, 18-Jan-2023 22:14:53 JST pettter @alasaarela @j2bryson @drdelle Personally, I'd like to see every city library funded to the point they'll run a torrent tracker and a fediverse node, and enough resource equality in global society to the point where you could just casually run a server for file sharing and socials for your community, whether that's family, sports association, village, role playing group, polycule, neighbourhood, or whatever.
Because the only way companies will run our socials is if they can own everything by it
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pettter (pettter@mastodon.acc.umu.se)'s status on Wednesday, 18-Jan-2023 23:07:54 JST pettter @alasaarela @j2bryson @drdelle No it doesn't require 'business models', it just requires resources. Resources that can be gathered, supplied and distributed in ways not driven by profit, be that via some state-like mechanism, voluntary contributions, or something similar.
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Mikko Alasaarela :equel: (alasaarela@equel.social)'s status on Wednesday, 18-Jan-2023 23:07:55 JST Mikko Alasaarela :equel: @pettter @j2bryson @drdelle Mainstream social media users will go wherever they have the best experience and largest audience. The best experience is where there's universal search (which Mastodon OGs don't want), algorithmic feeds (also despised by Mastodon OGs)(I don't mean current addiction-based ones, but more feeds filtered by topic interest), acceptance for commercial behavior for creators (many Mastodon OGs are against that too) and many other things that the current mainstream social media platforms offer.
To create a true alternative to the existing big social media giants, there needs to be enough well-funded servers to take in the traffic, and enough well funded apps to compete with the existing apps. This requires business models to be in place, and regulations that allow decentralization (as per what Joanna said earlier).
If Mastodon stays niche, then it is not relevant, and it can stay like the current one forever. But then it won't matter in the big scheme of things, and won't create a meaningful change to the current status quo.
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pettter (pettter@mastodon.acc.umu.se)'s status on Saturday, 21-Jan-2023 06:58:31 JST pettter @j2bryson @alasaarela @drdelle Eugen ( @Gargron ) is German, but contributors are and have been from all over the place, as usual for open source projects
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Joanna Bryson, blathering (j2bryson@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 21-Jan-2023 06:58:32 JST Joanna Bryson, blathering @alasaarela @pettter @drdelle ha I googled where mastodon started and it said Atlanta GA but that's the band...
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Mikko Alasaarela :equel: (alasaarela@equel.social)'s status on Saturday, 21-Jan-2023 06:58:34 JST Mikko Alasaarela :equel: @j2bryson @pettter @drdelle Agree with this. Interesting to see if Europe will be able to give rise to successful non-American-born, open social media platform that enables people, small businesses, and entrepreneurs to thrive on it!
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Joanna Bryson, blathering (j2bryson@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 21-Jan-2023 06:58:35 JST Joanna Bryson, blathering @pettter @alasaarela @drdelle I mostly love your vision, but don't forget that companies are made of people and the vast, vast majority of them are dedicated to mostly creating great products or services and paying their staff decent salaries. Even large corporations are mostly OK, it's the supersized ones (or just dominant in a particular sector) that we know we have to regulate through antitrust, but that process got seriously derailed in the 1990s. We're trying to restore it.
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