Reading this criticism of social media platforms by Motherboard, I had quite a few questions, mostly centered around “does this apply as well to decentralized social media platforms as well as to centralized social silos?”
Decentralizing and open-sourcing the biggest web content services – microblogging sites, video hosting sites, photo sharing/storage sites – would satisfy the goal of reducing censorship. But:
- would it only reward and accelerate faster System 1 thinking over slower System 2 thinking?
- Would it help reduce instances of abuse?
- If this were to be as decentralized as email, would it allow for both big conglomerate-owned and small business-owned hosts to communicate with each other equally?
- How would this decentralization of social media interface with democracy?
Social media’s interfacing with democracy also been hotly debated for years, with its early centralized instances being praised as liberating to protesters in less-democratic societies, while it’s more recent instances are criticized for having rewarded and armed the ascendancy of more reactive, illiberal politics.
This, of course, has only taken place within the last 20 years. To compare the Internet to the enduring nearly-600-year utility of the movable-type printing press, which has helped propagate movements as varied as the Reformation and the Age of Enlightment, is disproportionate by scale of time. We still have yet to see how far that Internet-based communication systems will take us and accelerate our scientific, academic and political development with similar speed and depth as movable type. So far, it has enabled the development of the largest encyclopedia in human history, a development that would astound the likes of Vannevar Bush.
But what of social media, or specifically of microblogging? Is there a tangential benefit or empowering utility to microblogging? Does microblogging’s river of statuses help spread knowledge? And is there a benefit to decentralizing this tool beyond a few siloed hosts who compete against each other?
What we do know is that it is highly useful to journalists, activists, politicians and those who rely upon real-time, first-hand information provision and reception. However, if the tools also allow for others to poison the river with false information, microblogging becomes a liability. But will microblogging advance us beyond allowing people to report news, pop off at each other and start social movements quicker than traditional posts?
I think there is still some benefit to microblogging of statuses and asides, even decentralized open-source microblogging, but it doesn’t replace longer-form multimedia expressions. There is still a utility for WordPress as there is for Mastodon as there is for MediaGoblin as there is for PeerTube. They can all work together, work in decentralized server networks and talk with each other.
What about more traditional blogging and its benefits? The suite of blogging services which became available in the 2000s with the growth of RSS feeds and media enclosures allowed writers and broadcasters to publish and livestream multimedia works outside of the limitations of print and broadcast media, as well as to reach Internet-based audiences with greater flexibility than previously. Of course, this also allowed for System 1 thinking to take greater precedence than ever before, as filters for self-checking were less necessary than before. However, this blogging landscape was less centralized than the current microblogging scene. Blogger, LiveJournal, Xanga, Dreamjournal, Typepad, self-served WordPress sites, etc., all serve RSS feeds for those who wish to catch content from all of those sites. Did democracy also decline with this growth of blogging and podcasting sites?
Of course, what has also changed from earlier blogging – in a BIG way – is how people reply to posts. More sites are dropping Disqus or even their own comment systems, delegating to social media silos the job of hosting replies to link-syndicated content. On-site comment moderation and hosting is declining as centralized social media networks host the commentariat and are, through Facebook Connect, sometimes integrated into the on-site comment section.
This may slightly change if decentralized social media networks – enabled with ActivityPub – become the hosts of such embedded comment systems. But Facebook’s closest decentralized open-source cousins in layout structure are Diaspora and Hubzilla, while Mastodon hangs much closer to Twitter’s more haphazard style of treating every reply to a post as an original post in itself (a layout which has been criticized as elevating abusive posters and their replies).
We have spent the last few years despairing about how the centralized social networks have unleashed an abusive commentariat or maybe a more abusive, combative aspect of ourselves, or even both. Maybe this has a lot to do with the design of the system – with haphazard layout giving high visibility to every single reply to a post, with centralization of social media around a few massive hosts and their apps, with not allowing the full capability of filtering who sees/shares/replies to one’s posts, with prioritization around a constant river of media rather than a more deliberate layout, with a reliance on self-serve advertisements as a source of financial sustenance.
There’s a lot to “unfuck” about social media now that we have decentralized, customizable alternatives which don’t have to exactly replicate the designs of the silos. The silos were designed and programmed to keep users using the sites as much as possible in order to keep advertisers flush w/ cash, no matter how combative and toxic that many of these users became against each other within close digital proximity. A decentralized, federated social media shouldn’t have to rely on replicating the “addictive”, constant-river designs of Facebook and Twitter in order to attract users, although I understand that this is what we have to deal with in making or using open-source alternatives to anything that’s corporate, proprietary and popular.
Decentralized social media – basically, going beyond mere (micro)blogging to sharing/favoriting/quote-linking posts between servers – has an opportunity to serve a greater purpose to humanity and come under a more democratized governance than what we have seen in the last decade. But it also has an opportunity to be moved away from faster, more combative “System 1” thinking to slower, more thoughtful “System 2” thinking.
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