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We need to be very conscious that the decisions that are made of how a platform works are decisions that affect how the people who use that platform will interact.

There should be a kind of intentionality – which is something I think Mastodon is doing way better at than a lot of social media projects – around functionality decisions.

But that intentionality has to go beyond merely meaning well. Good intentions poorly informed result in bad outcomes that were never intended but are, nevertheless, still bad.

There is a lot to be said for realizing that decisions for how social media platforms *work* are deliberate attempts to shape – to *engineer* really – human social life on a huge scale. On a scale so huge in fact, that it is not wrong to describe it as trying to *engineer societies*.

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