https://simulacrum01.substack.com/p/why-im-leaving-fediverse-distributed
Alright, I'm leaving. Here's my article. I'll leave this account up for 7 days to let these words soak in, and then I'm deleting it.
I'm not going anywhere else. This was the last train home. Goodbye, good luck, and may we meet again.
This wasn't a thought-out and planned article — this was a hastily constructed "leaving" note. Yeah, "I'm leaving" posts aren't very original, but it is what it is. See ya.
@mahal "you can’t fix social problems with technological solutions"
True, but you can point them out.
I can agree with most of your points... What I don't agree with is that opting out is a better alternative. I think personally it can be, but I also feel it is the responsibility of the people to be informed. Therefor, opting out can be incredibly selfish. CAN be, not is.
@Jon_Kramer I meant to reply the other day, but I was busy.
Thank you for your thoughts. I'm not sure what you mean by "opting out as a better alternative," as that frankly isn't an argument I'd made (if you mean Threads, personally, I'd always opt out myself).
If you do mean threads, let me reframe what I said in the next thread:
@Jon_Kramer This article's core purpose was to make an argument for a democratic (in function, not metaphor or technological allegory) Public Service Media.
What it *doesn't* do is pick a side on the #Threads federation debate, not because I want to remain "neutral" (actually, if I was running an instance and given a choice, I'd immediately defederate).
Instead, the purpose was to show the functional pointlessness of federating or defederating, as well as this whole talk about "decentralisation" when the infrastructure, no matter how distributed, is centralised.
Another important point in the article I wanted to express was the political context of "interoperability."
Interoperability is an important function towards attaining Public Service Media, but that must be implemented via legislative forces mediated by a reliable institutional body that doesn't pander to capitalist lobbying or state-political interests.
In other words: if you leave interoperability to capital — to the markets — and especially leave no mediator but the platforms and their hosts, then we're playing a losing game.
Everything in mention here are political efforts that you cannot ever, ever, ever solve with technological solutions, and this is a misconception many raised in capitalist "democracies" seem to have!
@Jon_Kramer The thing with the #Fediverse is that the die was cast long ago. Long, long ago, from its very inception.
Look around you.
Everything you are surrounded by — nigh everything — are *simulacra.* Mastodon is a simulacrum of Twitter, Pixelfed is Instagram, and so on.
The selling point of this network of simulacra, for some reason, is that it is decentralised. Yet not only is the infrastructure centralised within the distribution; but also, the inherent dynamics of labour and capital (as mentioned in my article) innately empowers those with wealth, leaves the network's morsel of democratic infrastructure weak to sabotage (as is happening now), and encourages functional centralisation.
If people think that's wrong, they only need to look at the instances and how people have centralised into them.
The point isn't that centralisation is bad or decentralisation is good either; but rather that we have ignored the political elements of organising a public space so much and left it all to code and technology that people have dug themselves into a hole and the sunk-costs of organising a nigh anarcho-capitalist network (in INFRASTRUCTURE) are so high that many people rather ignore that elephant in the room and carry on.
The "social" makes one half of "social media," after all.
@mahal wrote
Everything you are surrounded by — nigh everything — are simulacra. Mastodon is a simulacrum of Twitter, Pixelfed is Instagram, and so on.
…nd Twitter was a simulcrum of tumbleblogs, and…
On the Internet, we mostly evolve rather than invent. (Not counting email lists, my first social media was Usenet in the late 1980s.)
p.s. I find the most interesting accounts to follow in the long tail of small/medium instances.
@david_megginson And Facebook that of MySpace, and YouTube that of MTV — we could go on!
Evolution of technology without the evolution of political infrastructure ends up recreating the political problems of their predecessors with greater force (not to mention that this cannot, even in technological function, be called an evolution).
Centralisation-decentralisation is a false dilemma that fails to see the crux of why Silicon Valley platforms are what they are and what allowed them to become such horrifying things, and that is what my article points out and criticises.
Again, it is also not to call those who use it rubes, as I had used it for a while now as well in hopes of finding something better, and definitely, this isn't scummy like Bitcoin or something; but I also can't keep pretending anymore.
The reason why I've scheduled to leave is because I don't want to become a victim to silicon valley again in a situation that I could more or less see coming.
@mahal I hope you find what you're looking for (sincerely).
In my opinion, decentralization is a political goal — it's about sharing power more than protocols. The internet beat out proprietary networks because it was decentralized; email beat out other electronic communication because it was decentralized; the web beat out Minitel etc. because it was decentralized. In most cases, though, it took a long time. (Remember when everyone used CompuServe or AOL?)
@mahal The reason the big walled-garden social-media platforms succeeded is that they produced centralised, pseudo-trustworthy metrics about number of followers, likes, etc that people could cite and "monetise," e.g. "I have n followers, so I'm more important than you" or "Pay me to promote your crap."
Fortunately, that's harder to do in a distributed environment like the blogosphere or the fediverse, when there's not a single Keeper Of The Metrics.
Well, it's kind of a political question in a way, but I'd tend to focus on the goal of providing users the experiences they want and value, and that decentralized sharing of power can transfer power to users to help them reach their personal wants.
So you're missing the factor in the story that big social media platforms gave users experiences that they wanted, with different platforms giving experiences that different users wanted.
The experiences on Facebook and Twitter were VERY different, with users choosing to participate in one or the other or none based on their personal preferences.
The instance focus of Fediverse lets us add many new, potentially different experiences to help users find the one that best matches their individual wants.
And yep, that happens through distributing that power downwards.
