- cross-posted to:
- anticorporate
- cross-posted to:
- anticorporate
A conversation about platforms bringing people together, respect for diversity (also of opinion and culture) and enshittified walled gardens, between @ke5arin@mastodon.social and @andypiper@macaw.social with obligatory mention of @pluralistic@mamot.fr. 40 minutes well spent.
You must log in or register to comment.
The Fediverse is great, but perhaps just because of the lack of algorithms and other content-promotion methods I have found it a bit harder to break out of my ‘silos’ in some places. Lemmy isn’t too bad for this, but I’ve really struggled to find other people to follow and engage with on Mastodon as somebody on a small local instance. Little things like the Mastodon phone app not listing followers from other instances contributes to this.
Felt that. Lemmy perfectly replicates (and improves) on the things I liked about Reddit. I don’t need or want an algorithm for this, because you can just subscribe to all the communities you love anyway.
Meanwhile, Mastodon and Pixelfed are a struggle. Tagging is key since there’s no algorithm, but even after following like 50+ tags, I still don’t see exactly what I want in my feeds. I love fanart of games and anime, so I tried to pick pixelfed.art, but even then I don’t see much, and also realized a large amount of artists are on mastodon.art instead, and the federation struggles to show me people not on Pixelfed. Hell, both official and 3rd party clients sometimes break when viewing a non-pixelfed account page. You seriously have to work to curate a feed on these places that make you want to come back.
I was never really a Twitter person, but I absolutely used Instagram and Pinterest a lot to look at art before I dropped them, so now I use Tumblr to not shut myself off entirely from fan content. So it’s not a matter of me not liking Fediverse services like Pixelfed and Mastodon, but them lacking the methods necessary to make viewing content easier.
Don’t get me started on Misskey, the language barrier isn’t a problem for me as I am learning Japanese. But I feel a little lost with the UI, and once again, trying to find artists on other instances.
I only ever check my corporate social media now because I get DM’s for various business-related things.
The Fediverse, for me, has been the best experience. Most people are willing to have good-faith conversations. Those who don’t are easily blocked, and if they break the rules, moderators are on hand to make sure they go kaput.
Also, for the low low price of donating $10 a month (along with other subscribers) I get zero ads and no algorithm fuckery messing up my experience.
Can’t say that about any of the corporate media services.
The internet inherently creates information silos, because of the nature of how it works.
Cable TV, Newspapers, the Radio, etc. were all broad-cast networks, as in one person talks and that gets cast broadly to all listeners on the network.
Channels provided some level of user choice in what they listened to, but not very much. At most they still picked between only a handful of different options.
The internet fundamentally isn’t a broadcast network though, it’s a messaging network. When you publish a video on YouTube it isn’t broad cast to every one with an internet channel, instead, the users goes out and looks for the information they want and requests and YouTube sends it back to them.
This inherently creates filter bubbles because the information you receive is based on your own existing preferences and requests, which creates a feedback loop the reinforces your opinions.
What you wrote is probably true, but it’s not the end of the story. Ownership model of corporate social media creates incentives to polarize and divide people. It drives engagement and creates moats. Also, billionaire owners of those media have their own political goals, and are happy to use the platforms they own to advance them.
Undoubtedly, but we still chose to come to Lemmy because we visited it and saw a bunch of people that we mostly agreed with on it.
Think about how many Lemmy users block hexbear or lemmy.ml, or would spit in disgust when they visit gab or voat or something.
Users prune those sources because they aren’t interested in hearing wildly toxic fringe ideas (or flat out being propagandized to), but it’s still fundamentally up to you as a user to decide what you consider rationale and worthy of discussion, and then going forward the content you see on here is only what’s shared by very like minded individuals.
Don’t get me wrong, I think that Reddit and other corporate owned social media intentionally promotes rage bait and other distressing content, both in comments and posts, and that drives people to go even more nuts and become more polarized compared to a non-engagement driven algorithm like Lemmy’s, but even open and decentralized social media platforms create filter bubbles and information silos.
Sure. It’s in our nature to surround ourselves with like-minded people. Back in the old days, people would subscribe to a newspaper, watch TV and listen to radio stations, or go to pubs with folks they felt comfortable with, and that would often lead to gruopthink. There is only so much we can do about it with different platforms. The rest is up to us, individually and collectively. Being polite, open minded, thoughtful and critical takes effort. But it’s also in our nature.
Correct.
The corporate media platforms have algorithmically-driven content that is unregulated.
The fediverse doesn’t, which means you get two distinctly separate experiences.
