Not another gated community
I love Mastodon and the fediverse, I really do. But at its heart, it's still social media. We only allow people to know us the way we want them to. It's only when you know people more intimately do they find out who you really are. Even then...
Just take a look at your block list. Find one of the first. Look through their toots and their interactions. They probably seem decent. You may think "why did I block them again?"
But there's a reason!
Source
For my lgbtqia.space account:
- A bot that just auto-boosts certain hashtags
- Someone who blocked me on my beige.party account, for asking questions that they didn't have good answers for, so resorted to lashing out at me.
- The next five or six are all people who argued with a Fedi-celeb over the genderedness of "guys".
FYI, the correct response when someone tells you that a term you used offends them is to stop doing that and try to be better. Not to get into a debate about the evolution of language.
As for my beige.party account...
- Homophobe
- Reddit repost bot
- News repost bot
- News repost bot
- Ragebaiter
- Ragebaiter
- I don't remember why.
- Corporation outreach account
- Corporation outreach account
- Corporation outreach account
- I don't remember why.
For me, the things that separate the Fediverse from most social media platforms that I've been on (and I've tried out quite a few) are: (1) minimal knowledge investment to join, (2) lack of an algorithm, (3) minimally gated communities.
1. minimal knowledge investment to join
Facebook doesn't require much knowledge to join. Nor does twitter or tumblr or Myspace or Bluesky.
The Fediverse doesn't either, though admittedly the decision paralysis of picking a server can be a little intimidating.
SSB, or Secure Scuttlebutt, on the other hand, has a much higher expectation of understanding, and there are a few others around that are on the same tier.
2. lack of an algorithm
On Fedi, your home timeline is literally that: posts in reverse chronological order (newest first) of local posts and feeds you follow. There's no filtering except what you impose yourself.
Before I left Facebook (which was more than a decade ago), I had an argument with several people who followed me about how Facebook works. They followed me, followed the Page for my then-blog, but never saw any of my posts. Nothing I posted ever showed up on their feed.
And they blamed me.
I asked (mostly rhetorically) if they ever interacted with any of my posts. No, of course they didn't. And that's why those posts never showed up on their feeds.
Any social media platform that runs on an algorithm (not just Facebook!) prioritizes your feed to things you're most likely to engage with, based on your history of past engagement.
If you click Like on posts of cute animals, Facebook shows you more posts of cute animals. If you comment on rage-inducing posts of current events, Facebook shows you more posts of current events that are likely to make you angry.
They don't care what they're showing you or how you react to it, only that you're engaging with the content. As long as they keep feeding you engaging content, you stay on platform, and they pick up some ad revenue along the way.
And if there's something you don't engage with, even if you're following the account, well... they'll give you a few chances to interact with the account, and if you don't, you'll never see posts from those accounts on your feed again.
3. minimally gated communities
A long time ago, you could browse Facebook and Twitter without an account. Instagram was always a little more "gated-off" but it still wasn't bad.
These days, a lot of small businesses don't have websites, they just have Facebook Pages. Because it's "easier". Because "everybody's on Facebook".
Because when you have an account, you don't ever see the gates.
What do I see?
A blurred out page with a pop-up covering everything, telling me I need to log in or sign up.
The only posts on my Fedi accounts you can't see without an account are those that I specifically restrict, and those are restricted to followers only (which is absolutely something you can do on Facebook too!).
bonus point: actually distributed
Secure Scuttlebutt is also distributed, but (as of my last visit) requires dedicated software to interact with. While much of it is free and open source, the community is small enough that you're still very limited in your interface options.
Bluesky claims their goal is to be distributed, you know, eventually... but if you go out and look into the design of their platform, true distributed-ness is all but impossible.
Fedi, on the other hand, just is.
They've done it.
Admittedly, you do need some technological knowhow to self-host and spin up your own instance, but it's an option.
(Don't mistake me, that's if you want to self-host, not if you just want to join an existing instance.)
Good luck trying to do that with Facebook. It's a gated community, remember? Practically a roach motel when it comes to your personal data, and don't even get me started on their proprietary codebase.
No, Fedi isn't perfect.
But as far as options available to us, I think it is reasonably close and a sight better than many of the other options available.
I'm sure all I'd have to do to find a list of things people don't like about it is to take my mostly-inactive Bluesky account, ask the general population, and get one of my Fedi-celeb friends to boost it.
But I think there's a good chance that a significant number of those complaints would be from people who Just Don't Get It, either from lack of trying or lack of wanting to try... or because they want it to be something it's not.
Like another Facebook.
Oh, and to anyone who tries to correct me on Twitter's name, don't waste your keystrokes. I'll stop deadnaming the social media platform when whats-his-face stops deadnaming his trans daughter.
Leave a comment or continue reading: other Monday posts or more takes on social media.
