Tag: Social Computing

Trying to take off the Cynic Hat

I’d started writing a screed here about how Threads’ purported support for interoperation with other services through ActivityPub (an open standard) is a red herring, and how they’ll be locking it down as soon as they hit a critical mass (which I stand by, for what it’s worth – I give it two years before things start shifting, shutting down APIs, breaking interoperability, adding features that “only work in Threads”, putting their thumb on the scales for changes to the standard, etc). But I realized I was wearing my Cynic Hat, and yucking peoples’ yum doesn’t really help. I’ve already mentioned my concerns about their privacy settings and intertwining with Instagram – if, knowing that, you still opt to sign up, that’s up to you, go have fun.

So instead, here’s a few projects that are giving me some hope:

  • The Flickr Foundation and Wikimedia Commons are partnering to improve the bridge between the services. (For those out of the loop, Flickr has been quietly rebuilding itself since it was acquired by SmugMug back in 2018, and launched a non-profit – the Flickr Foundation – in 2022, to help steward the large body of public domain or creative commons licensed material that had accumulated. I have a soft spot for any project that aims at preservation and responsible sharing of creative work, and this seems like a good one.)
  • Several museums have begun making available high quality scans of many important works from their archives. Notably, the Smithsonian and the National Gallery of Art are both doing this. The Creative Law Center has a page with a list of museums part of this effort! (If you haven’t checked the Creative Law Center out, it’s a fantastic resource for explaining things like copyright, trademarks, licensing, and what to do about it all as a creator.)
  • Tumblr. Hear me out: after seeing it get run into the ground by corporate parent companies (for years!), seeing it get some genuine love and support from their new owners (Automattic, same folks who own WordPress) has been refreshing and appreciated. It has its own culture and customs, and while they’ve made efforts to provide some mechanisms for monetization (gotta pay that server bill somehow, right?), those efforts have very much been in keeping with the nature of the site and the people who use it. Time will tell on whether that’s enough for them to thrive, but that they’re at least trying alternatives to the current de facto default of highly targeted user-data-driven advertising gives me some hope. Obviously I’m more aligned with hosting your own shit, but if that’s not viable for some reason, going somewhere that at least isn’t going to actively sell you to the highest bidder feels like a good next-best alternative.

Social Network Power Vacuums

The continued collapse of Twitter has lead to all sorts of folks scrambling to fill the void. They’re all a bit of a shitshow in different ways (which, let’s be honest, so is/was Twitter). Will Blue Sky be the next Twitter? Will Threads be the next Twitter? Will Hive be the next Twitter? Will Twitter be the next Twitter? It’s all a bit laughable.

First there were the young scrappy services that were already trying to do a thing (think Mastodon or Hive), so already existed when the exodus from Twitter first started. None of those are going to get the mass inertia (and I think that’s a good thing, let them fill particular niches like they already were – hopefully enough folks stick around there that it just makes them more viable for their communities in the long run).

Now you’ve got the services that were either in development (Blue Sky) or fast-followed (Threads). Blue Sky might end up doing a thing – I’m not on it, but it sounds like a lot of “the cool kids” managed to land there. It’s still a semi-closed beta, so it’s got the “exclusivity” thing going (but folks say also means it feels more like pre-2013 Twitter). Threads is Meta’s fast-follow into the Twitter-like space, it just came out, and design-wise people seem okay with it, but is a privacy nightmare, and has the sort of dark patterns and bullshittery you’d expect from Meta (for instance, if you decide you don’t like Threads and want to delete your Threads account, you must also delete the Instagram account you linked to it).

Broderick had a good observation that’s been making the rounds:

I think hardcore Twitter users have rose-colored glasses about the site’s coolness. The reason for its success, if you can argue that it was ever really successful, wasn’t that it was cooler than Facebook. It was because of its proximity to power. The reason it was so popular with activists, extremists, journalists, and shitposters was because what you posted there could actually affect culture. The thing that ties together pretty much everything that’s happened on Twitter since it launched in 2006 was the possibility that those who were not in power (or wanted more) could influence those who were. And I don’t think it’s an accident that a deranged billionaire broke that, nor do I think it’s accident that we’re suddenly being offered smaller, insular platforms or an offshoot of a Meta app as replacements. The folks in charge clearly don’t want that to happen again.

Ryan Broderick, “Paying to use a site you can’t use anymore“

I think he’s right. I also think that will probably continue to be an anomaly. The “social media” era in general I don’t think has been a healthy one, both for individuals and as a culture. There have been some great benefits (rapid information dissemination in times of crisis, methods to have dialogue with folks in positions of power, etc), but it’s lead to some pretty massive drawbacks as well (a rise in depression and feelings of isolation, conflation with personal identity and “brand”, influencer culture in general).

I don’t know what shape things will go from where, what the transition will be, or if we’ll not actually move on and instead just limp along with a shittier, rotted husk of an internet. I think the corporate-driven shambling zombie outcome is just as likely (or more likely) as the outcome where we move past this and figure out a healthier, better method for interacting online. The internet is pretty shit right now, but shit can make good fertilizer, so a part of me remains hopeful that there’s a seed somewhere out there that will germinate and grow, and in like a year or three we start hearing about something that is surprisingly awesome. (I don’t think it’ll be any of the services from now, though.)

Check Check

The slow train wreck that is Elon’s Twitter continues to both entertain and dismay. Damion Schubert has a solid summary of the latest mess (blue-check/verification shenanigans), and why it’s yet another example of a tone-deaf cock-up by the owner. I particularly liked this gem from his post:

The problem is that status isn’t why the blue checkmark was important . And because he didn’t understand it, now the status associated with the blue checkmark is roughly as desirable to wear as a dead fish found in the anus of a rotting skunk.

Damion Schubert, “It’s Not About Status, Elon. Only Now It Is.“

Other “delightful” recent shenanigans include:

I’ve not been talking much about this tire fire lately, partly because I haven’t been blogging much at all, but also because it’s the sort of thing that you probably either a) don’t care about, or b) are already following along and are aware. But still, sometimes it’s useful just to touch base. It’s not frequent that you get to see as major a service as Twitter actively implode. It feels kind of like if you were able to get an accelerated, bird’s eye view of the fall of Rome.

More on Mastodon

Over at Ars Technica, Ben Klemens has an article diving into Mastodon and federation. It’s a good explainer if you’re curious about the standards underpinning the services.

The idea of an open web where actors use common standards to communicate is as old as, well, the web. “The dreams of the ’90s are alive in the Fediverse,” Lemmer-Webber told me.

In the late ’00s, there were more than enough siloed, incompatible networking and sharing systems like Boxee, Flickr, Brightkite, Last.fm, Flux, Ma.gnolia, Windows Live, Foursquare, Facebook, and many others we loved, hated, forgot about, or wish we could forget about. Various independent efforts to standardize interoperation across silos generally coalesced into the Activity Streams v1 standard.

Both the original Activity Streams standard, and the current W3C Activity Streams 2.0 standard used by Mastodon and friends, offer a grammar for expressing things a user might do, like “create a post” or “like👍 a post with a given ID” or “request to befriend a certain user.” The vocabulary one would use with this grammar is split into its own sub-standard, the Activity Vocabulary.

Surprising no one, I’m very in favor of moving back towards decentralization, open standards, and interoperability. Getting a few more high visibility projects would be a great step in the right direction.

November Flew By

I dressed up as a consistent blogger for Halloween, and then let the site lay fallow for November (two posts! Or three, if I actually get this post out today). Sometimes that’s just how things roll. No shortage of things to talk about – it would’ve been easy to fill the blog just with posts about the continuing train wreck that is the Twitter acquisition, for instance. Life’s just been a little busy, between work and Thanksgiving and my girlfriend moving up to Portland (I’m actually in San Francisco right now, helping prep for the move).

Here Be Rambles

An Implosion

Twitter is imploding currently, for a multitude of reasons. It’s been a while coming (I’ve talked about this several times before, for what it’s worth). I have a lot of mixed feeling about this: some schadenfreude, some grief at the disintegration of a service I’ve spent nearly 15 years on, some anger and disgust at how Muskrat has handled the entire situation. It’s a train wreck I’ve had a lot of trouble looking away from.

I suppose it’s worth clarifying: I realize the service itself is still technically functioning (there’s been some degradation in some areas, but the core service is marching along). But it feels… well:

That’s the vibe. In some ways the chaos is actually fun, but in a “last days of summer” sort of way.

SO, I’ve dusted off my Mastodon account, and have been using FediFinder to pull in as many people from my Twitter lists as I can. (It’s pretty straightforward: link your twitter account and your mastodon account, and then it searches your follows for mentions of their mastodon account, and builds a CSV file that Mastodon can then import automagically.)

Next steps is figuring out how to get everything hooked up so I can cross-post effectively, in a non-shitty way. I’m sure there are already plugins to do it, but figuring out which one to go with I suspect will be a little trial and error. Also: if you’ve got a mastodon account and I haven’t found you yet, please let me know! I’d be happy to follow and keep in touch.

Engagement is Not Engagement

John Green’s latest vlogbrothers video touches on something worth thinking about:

He’s talking about the low-calorie social media debates that drive what we call “engagement” – namely, more comments and likes or dislikes – which leads to increased view counts, and higher priority in algorithms (whether on Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, or elsewhere). I’m calling it low-calorie social media because these sorts of debates are easy to have an opinion on, but they’re not substantive (and I’d argue, often not nutritious either).

Actual engagement – something more lasting and impactful than just a like or a passing comment – is hard. It’s hard to build, it’s hard to sustain, it’s often messy. But it’s more fulfilling. Even when it leads to challenging questions or work to be done, you can at least feel like you’re making some sort of progress on something that is meaningful, whether that’s some form of volunteering, philanthropy, or do-gooding, or if it’s just deepening connections with either individuals or a community.

I think John is right that there is a place for those “instantly debatable” questions and topics. But I think it’s a lot like junk food: it’s fine as a snack, but if that’s all you’re eating, it’s just going to make you sick.

Virtual Spaces Roundup

I’ve bumped into a few different takes on virtual spaces in the past few months, thought I’d share a few:

Sprout (https://sprout.place): Sort of a scrapbook-meets-chat room vibe. What I think is interesting about this is that it recognizes that modern communication is often messy, with a variety of mixed media and different attention spans.

Skittish (https://skittish.com): This one is made by Andy Baio (who also runs Waxy, founded Upcoming, and is one of the organizers behind XOXO), and takes the idea of a virtual space quite literally. One of the neat things about this one (aside from the cute event spaces and avatars) is that it uses spatial audio, so if you need to have a quiet conversation with one or two people, you can literally move your avatars away from others and do so, without actually leaving the space or switching to another room.

WFH.FM (https://wfh.fm): This is less about communication and more about shared vibes. It lets you create a space you can then share with others (with or without the edit code to let others also add to it), where you can add various bits of media, gifs, videos, music. Like Sprout, it has a sort of scrapbook thing going on.

Hopin (https://hopin.com): This is a bit more of a traditional approach to virtual spaces, so more like a series of chat rooms that have video integration (both streaming talks, and also for group video). The most recent Write the Docs event used it, and I think it was pretty effective overall (no real hiccups that I could tell, though I wasn’t privy to the behind the scenes).

Crows Developer Conference (and again in 2021): Okay, SO. This feels more like Old Internet™ than anything I’ve seen in ages. The development team at Crows Crows Crows made an “alternative to GDC” during the pandemic, complete with talks and art installations and people roaming around a weird, weird 3d virtual space. I haven’t checked to see if it’s still running, but you can at least go read the promo emails and get a sense of what it was all about. The other spaces I listed are, y’know, usable/useful for y’all, but I had to include this one as well.

Anyway, just wanted to share a few services for folks to check out. There are plenty more out there if you bother to look – these are just a few I’ve personally bumped into lately. Virtual spaces: they’re not just chatrooms! They’re not just games! They’re not just commercialized saccharine sanitized corpo-shit!

The Metaverse is Bullshit

I haven’t really added much to the discourse about Meta’s attempt to create the “Metaverse” – a term pulled from a cyberpunk novel (Snow Crash) – largely because there’s frankly already plenty of folks saying what I’d want to say. But hey, they once again made “big advancements” today with the addition of lower bodies for their virtual avatars, and just… for fuck’s sake.

I don’t entirely blame the development team working on this. I’m sure there’s some very smart people involved, and some of them may even have prior experience with virtual worlds and game development – though that might be optimistic, based on the results so far. I say I don’t entirely blame them, because it’s a very high profile, expensive project, with a lot of direct pressure and visibility from the head of the company. That’s bound to fuck up a roadmap or two.

More Ranting INcoming

Ambient Friends

Found via Lucy Bellwood, Bobbie Johnson has a great insight on “ambient friendships“:

Social media is built on ambient relationships. You post, you tweet, you share; I read, I listen, I see. Maybe we interact briefly. But I can feel closeness to you without actually having it. 

To make things even more complicated, we can exist on both sides—creators and consumers of other people’s thoughts, and each other’s. But so often I see what you’re doing, you see me, but we’re never quite talking to each other. 

Ambient friendship.

Bobbie Johnson

Modern internet socialization in a nutshell, right there. There’s some thoughts churning connecting it to thoughts about some of Sherry Turkle’s work, but I’ll save that for another time.