Though there was hardly anything that I didn't already know, I liked the movie very much for its presentation that drove the point well to people who may not have understood how these platforms work, the privacy implications and the dangers therein. I've already recommended this movie to some more people.
As for the cultural impact of the movie, I don't think it's going to be much. Cambridge Analytica had so much news coverage during its time (along with public hearings by lawmakers and documentaries about it) and still did nothing material to the bottom line of these companies. They've actually grown bigger and become a lot richer since then.
1. Most people just wouldn't care enough to give up these platforms. While I've been enraged for a long time about these platforms, the big gap here is that there is no good answer to the question, "what are the better alternatives?" Don't tell me that Mastodon and Mastodon clones can be replacements for Twitter, Facebook, Facebook groups, Facebook events, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, etc. Where are the nice(r) mobile apps (not just some website designed for desktops) for any replacements?
2. Governments will not regulate these platforms in meaningful ways that create fundamental changes. Regulatory capture is what's looming around, where the current biggies make the rules and ensure that nobody else can beat them.
I will keep pushing people to switch to better platforms (even if they seem deficient in comparison), but I'm sadly not very optimistic about big changes in the next decade or so.
> Don't tell me that Mastodon and Mastodon clones can be replacements for Twitter, Facebook, Facebook groups, Facebook events, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, etc.
Of course not. Because Mastodon is a federated microblogging service. As that it is a good alternative for Twitter. My Mastodon client has a better UX than twitter, no algorithmic feed, no ads, no trackers, no distracting recommendations, and - importantly - breathing a friendly, open and largely non-toxic culture.
Sure, it only has a tiny number of users in comparison to twitter (about 4 million), but there is no reason this can be many many more. And hosted on a federation of 1,000's of servers. Much less risk to be de-platformed from your favorite walled-garden for obscure reasons.
The Fediverse is only at the start of its evolution, and things are becoming exciting for us devs. Diverse applications, PeerTube, PixelFed, write.as, Lemmy, many more, all start to be integrated together. A gradual process, as the underlying standards mature and new ones (content addressing, object capabilities, datashards) are being developed. Besides federated ActivityPub there's work ongoing to extend to full p2p contexts.
I'd say you should have Developer FOMO. To miss out on opportunities to stand out, and be part of a path that could be part of the solution to our social dilemma :)
> Much less risk to be de-platformed from your favorite walled-garden for obscure reasons.
Federation does absolutely nothing for this. The risk is probably even higher given how small most of these instances are. Much more likely to run into an admin/moderator.
I run a small instance and I don't think this applies. New signups are closed on my instance, and the only way to get on is for you to ask me for an invitation, or for a friend of yours who's on the instance to ask for you.
If you look like someone who I'd be likely to kick off my instance, I won't let you on in the first place. It's a private garden that I let my friends hang out in, not a public park where I have to let some asshole who thinks me and my friends should all be dead come in and rant and rave all they like.
"Oh I am totally being de-platformed! Free Speech! Filter Bubble!", you cry.
And then you discover that the Fediverse is split into multiple parts, and that there are instances that are delighted to let you say anything and everything you want as long as it is not explicitly illegal. You can even run one yourself if you have a bit of spare change! You can say anything you like on your own instance, you can follow anyone your heart desires. And anyone on another instance can follow you if they like. But no other instance is obligated to listen to you.
In the fediverse, you're more likely be able to say "Hey Lisa, why did you ban me?" than you can get into contact with the Youtube/Facebook/etc forces that be.
That may or may not be better because your admin may respond "Well because I think you're a jerk and disagree with your political views" but at least you can migrate to a new instance still instead of just being banned for all eternity.
If you want to keep your followers you'd need to migrate before they ban you.
But yes, I guess you can start over somewhere else while on big ones you're out forever. So in that sense I guess it is a tiny improvement. But if most of your followers were concentrated on server[s] that don't like you, you may not be able to reach them anymore.
> if most of your followers were concentrated on server[s] that don't like you, you may not be able to reach them anymore
This seems extremely unlikely. If the server admin doesn't like you enough to ban you, I strongly doubt you're going to have many followers there.
In any case, however likely or unlikely it is in practice, the incentives here seem exactly right to me. If you want the benefits of being part of a community, you have to respect its norms in your interactions with others in the community. The possibility of losing connections with people in that community if you are forced to leave it is part of the deal.
If your followers are "real" followers, and if you are important to them, they'll get in touch outside the fed and will know where to find you. Maybe that's what we should strive for. I have 200+ followers on Twitter, but if you ask me, I can only name 15 with real, social interaction.
If that's how you define "real" followers then you might as well use an IM application instead. IMO the whole point of (Twitter style) social media is having effortless reach and interactions without explicitly sending stuff to anybody.
I had over 10 thousand and had many interactions with people but wouldn't feel like bothering them on other platforms (unless it was of the same nature).
And the few people who bothered to contact me personally felt a little awkward too. I don't necessarily want to be talking to these people directly.
The magic is you just publish whatever you want and people can look at it. They can comment but there's no obligation to respond. Having actual conversations with that many people would be a huge chore. The whole thing isn't about having relationships with people at all but about spreading information. It could be about yourself in which case there would be some implicit one way relationship but that's just one use case.
Maybe that's why people are feeling lonely. They think their voice should reach thousands of people while they simply don't care about those thousands. How can I expect someone to care about me when I don't care about them beyond a useless number or marketing campaign?
People are thinking of others as consumers while expecting to be treated as a friend?
I second this. While I foolishly didn't export the list of people I was following when I've decided to shut down my own instance and just use an already established one, I've seen other people switching between instances without really losing much in terms of interactions.
I guess the questions this raises next for me are:
Would this scale if a given instance somehow gained the level of adoption people seem to value in a Twitter or a Facebook? It seems to me that the major draw and reason people stay on those services is the fact that they can communicate with essentially everyone in one place.
Also, to follow the first question, given that a major (if not the only) draw for most users is the ability to communicate with everyone, wouldn't that result in relatively few (or one) instance gaining dominance over time? You want to be connected to all of your friends and family, of course. But then all of them also want to be able to read what Beyonce or Trump or Biden or Bill Gates is saying. Their barbers and bartenders want to post the latest specials to all of their current and potential clients. If you all have to agree on an instance/sub-network/server/etc to use, why would people choose anything but the one everyone else is on?
I guess it might make it easier to migrate to a better-run or better-supported instance and add a bit of healthy competition to keep things in line, but from what I've seen of Facebook and Twitter, the near impossibility of getting people to switch to another competing service en masse always overpowers any individual's complaints about the current state of affairs. Facebook sucks? Well, why not swap over to that new ServiceX? Well...sure it's nicer but nobody is on it!
I agree. The issue with social media isn't the tech, its the people and its power structures forming over social networks.
This whole thing, social media, derives from 2 types of issues: Errors/Flaws in natural thinking, and malignant hacking of brains.
The second will always arise when you have more than 100 people in a group, and said group has some non trivial impact on voting patterns.
At that point, this group is like a unprotected bank account - which will be hacked.
The normal response is to protect this account and to target hackers - but current social thought (excluding China) has huge issues when it comes to censoring speech - and especially political speech.
Add to it layers of additional complexity, (political parties can abuse the laws and say they are being unfairly censored), and the distance between this solution and the underlying human problems seems equidistant as that of current Social media and the same problems.
Good points. First of all, it doesn't matter which instance you're on. You can still follow your friends, influencers, etc. on other instances.. unless your instance has the other instance in its blocklist (e.g. if it doesn't adhere to moderation rules that apply on your instance).
Natural re-centralization is an issue, with mastodon.technology and mastodon.social being by far the largest instances. This could devolve to a situation like you have with email / Gmail.
Another challenge is that Mastodon as early adopter of ActivityPub has made a number of required implementation choices to fill in the blanks of the spec. They support a bunch of custom properties in the message format, plus they use the Mastodon client API instead of ActivityPub client-to-server. Their dominance wrt running Mastodon instances means they have a big say in how Fediverse evolves.
Luckily the project team is open-minded, and mostly on the same page to others wrt fediverse innovation.
Thanks for the clarification. I'm not terribly educated on the state of Mastodon/similar federated social media.
Also interesting that you brought up Gmail/email. I've thought for a while (admittedly as someone far more on the "user" side than the "developer" one) about how email is an example of how things might work better. For as much as Gmail and a few others have captured the vast majority of the average userbase for personal email, it's still reasonably easy to choose a different provider (and can even roll your own if you really thought it worthwhile).
Switching email providers doesn't stop me from emailing people who use Hotmail or Gmail (ignoring for a minute any issues of overzealous filtering of uncommon mail servers). The individual services can implement their various extra features like spam blocking, auto sorting, etc. but for the most part, the common protocol means that an email from me@me.server can still be sent to a list of addresses at gmail.com, aol.com, hotmail.com, etc. If I want to send a message to people on Facebook, I need an active "valid" Facebook account that can be tied to their social graph.
The draw of the fediverse is that you can follow cross-instance.
I can be in my local community instance and follow people on say a major software instance and also an art oriented instance. It doesn't really matter who is on what instance. Connecting instances up is trivial - you join into the feeds generally.
Your instance more dictates your general discovery patterns and local moderation. In picking a local instance, I'm going to generally see discovery material related to my local area. If I joined an art instance, it would be art material, etc.
Generally well behaved instances (ie not spammy) shouldn't have an issue with getting federated, even if they're relatively small.
Unless you are building from ground up rules against types of mental virii, you are simply building a new circulatory/ neuronal system, without planning an antibody/immunity system.
Reddit USED to be relatively federated - dont like the subreddit mods and behavior, make your own sub, release hundreds of posts announcing it to users, and then users chose which sub they preferred.
Automod came along and white lists/black lists of words killed that system whole.
Now people send laborious messages on reddit to let people know of which new, new subversive subreddit has opened up. With all the credibility of a guy selling illicit goods on a street corner.
Not sure how you can prevent botting, and thence white lists/black lists of words.
I'm not sure I agree there's less deplatforming risk. It's structurally harder to be completely excluded from the network, since each instance has its own banlist, but that won't be of much comfort if you're banned from the instance with all your friends in it.
Unfortunately, Mastodon doesn't have a lot of things Twitter has going for it, such as search or trends. These two things make it easier to find others and to get a pulse on what's happening around you.
I just tried searching for "seattle" and it just gives me a list of my own posts that match it and users with seattle in their name. In the past search seemed to work differently (not sure what changed), but when I searched for "seattle" then, I mostly got back a list of prostitutes who were hashtagging their posts with city names—–not exactly what I'm looking for.
While many of us (technologists) were unsurprised, is there any reaction from friends and relatives who say, "wait, you knew about this and you didn't say anything?"
This doc is way less dramatic, but when the Snowden leaks
happened I responded to people with, "what parts of this could I have told you about that you would have believed if you hadn't seen it in the news?" Reality is, most people are more afraid of being thought of as an outsider than any conceivable consequence that befalls their perceived in-group.
> Reality is, most people are more afraid of being thought of as an outsider than any conceivable consequence that befalls their perceived in-group
I think that very nicely sums up the problem. Very few people are willing to socially isolate themselves this way. I've been working on an open-source self-hosted private blogging platform[1] that I have visions of being a facebook replacement, but the truth is very few people want to tell their friends: "follow me on this website I built with these separate login credentials". Reminds me of stories I read on here about middle school kids being ostracized for sending text messages without iMessage and showing up as a "green bubble"
> "follow me on this website I built with these separate login credentials"
That does seem to be one of the biggest hurdles stopping migrations from inferior platforms to superior ones. (The other main hurdle being network effects / the lack of interoperability).
It's like the saying "If you can get your ship into orbit, you're halfway to anywhere.", i.e. "If we had a single sign-on system that worked across the whole of the web, users would be halfway towards all the best sites."
> While many of us (technologists) were unsurprised, is there any reaction from friends and relatives who say, "wait, you knew about this and you didn't say anything?"
This was basically the reaction my girlfriend had after watching it.
> Though there was hardly anything that I didn't already know, I liked the movie very much for its presentation […]
This is exactly the same impression I had after watching the movie. There was little new information in this movie for me, other than the interviews with leading developers that now has turned on their own creation. That was quite powerful to watch.
> As for the cultural impact of the movie, I don't think it's going to be much.
The cynical part of me agrees with you. The hopeful part of me is encouraged by the fact that this movie communicates rather technical and boring information in a very human way, and that it shows how algorithm manipulates you, not some random folks that was targeted by Cambridge Analytica. This was much more relatable and personal than during the news coverage on how Facebook and Twitter was (ab)used during the last election, and that gives me hope.
The discussion has largely been relevant to political animals, nerds and idealistic people so far, and this movie feels like the first real brake out of that sphere and into the popular culture.
I'd slot the documentary right next to others that cover things like the horrors of factory farms, slave labor due to consumerism, etc.: while they can be incredibly moving, the impact on your day-to-day is so intangible that it's quite easy to ignore while making no changes to your habits.
It reminds me of when I was working at a grocery store in Texas (HEB) and they experimented with hanging the cow's corpse that was being butchered in plain view. I guess in an effort to look fresh.
Well, people complained about it. They said that it was gross, and the store went back to butchering before opening. Just looking at meat as pink saran-wrapped blobs that appear on shelves lets people ignore inconvenient truths. And I think we have this type of preference in all parts of our lives from social media to ignoring death itself.
>> but I'm sadly not very optimistic about big changes in the next decade or so.
Yeah. I liked it a lot as well, even though there was nothing new.
This documentary is like walking into a crack house and saying "Hey guys! I've got this great PowerPoint presentation on how bad crack is for you!"
Nice idea, I guess, but there's no reason at all I would think it has a chance of accomplishing anything.
These efforts appear, make a splash, and then ... dissolve. I wish it weren't so, but there are some extremely powerful social forces at work here. A TV show ain't going to do much.
I quit FB 5 years ago due to a couple other friends quitting and explaining their reasoning. If .1% of FB or Twitter users delete after this film, I'd say it's still a win.
This type of thing reads like "please compost, recycle, and take public transportation" stuff. That's what I thought of the movie too.
Andrew Keen has the right answer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRbI-Ui9vEI) but nobody likes it. We're still all stuck in the John Barlow trap, thinking that if we just tweaked things here and there all will be right.
TLDW:
i think anonymity is a huge curse i think if we can do away with anonymity then we can begin to rebuild democracy and of course ultimately it comes down to all of us
ultimately we need to learn to be responsible not to insult not to propagandize and i think that will only come just as we look at each other as physical people in a place like this that will only be that will only eventually be realized if we can do away with anonymity
so a new social contract new ways of reinventing democracy through analog and a more creative and responsible regulatory attitude towards um to to big social media and internet companies
cool story, bob29 the 18 day old account with no profile info ;)
I'm just teasing. HN survives on a strong culture, and a moderator who appears to be inhuman, or at least doesn't need the kind of sleep and bathroom breaks we associate with human beings.
Losing pseudonymity would be a high price to pay, for a bunch of reasons. Moderation, on the other hand, doesn't scale.
Perhaps that's a feature, not a bug. Maybe the scales moderation can't reach aren't scales we benefit from having.
It depends on whether you're for or an enemy of the EFF's type of libertarian politics which he definitely is and so am I. I'd even put Jaron Lanier in that camp too. His solution is just make everyone pay. But I guess in such situations you'd have to use your card and you'd also lose anonymity but then you'd have to pay for all your services and I think that's worse. I don't have gripes about the ad model at all, most people see ads as a nuisance anyway. Also if AI is driven by the big data it gets from the people, it's people that facilitate such trends and that's what I am more worried of.
People will weaponize that power vacuum and not everyone is an engineer that just wants to build something. There are people with nationalist interests, theocratic interests, religious interests, and profit interests all in the way of that and this will never change. It's why the internet was way better when it was just engineers and smart people. Also why America on paper looks awesome but in practice doesn't live up to the hype. It's why the freedom of thought Internet got us nothing more than the degeneration into fascist, theocratic, and communist trends. You may agree with the theory that anonymity, no government involvement of any kind at all, anarchist self organizing systems, etc outweighs the bad, but I don't. Not when the central argument for such thing is turned on it's head and totalitarianism is the "fight against the man" which in this case would be liberal democracy.
If nothing else, this makes for a great explainer video. Find somebody who needs to know it and show it to them. The key problem is that 99.9% of folks even when they understand the problem can't fix it.
Having said that, knowing beats not-knowing. There is good here.
> Don't tell me that Mastodon and Mastodon clones can be replacements for Twitter, Facebook, Facebook groups, Facebook events, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, etc.
It has been for me. But I am very aware that the fediverse is far from ready to capture the large masses currently using all the regular social networks. And that's fine, if the fediverse were growing at the same rate as VC-funded, growth-hacked social media platforms, that would worry me greatly. It takes time to build tools and communities that is made by and for the users of said tools.
I find Mastodon to be a much better experience to use both on the web and on the apps available for my Android phone, than Twitter. I have tried to use Twitter again a few times the last years, but it's not the same anymore. I used to be an active Twitter user. I prefer being a part of my Norwegian mastodon instance, in addition to one of the larger English-speaking instances.
> Where are the nice(r) mobile apps (not just some website designed for desktops) for any replacements?
I feel like pointing out that the fediverse isn't really growing at any significant rate. Looking through some pretty-rudimentary-but-best-we-can-get stats (https://the-federation.info/), the number of users active in the last month hasn't really changed compared to a year ago, remaining steadily at 400k-500k.
I personally find that slightly demoralising, but as someone already pointed out, there are fediverse platforms that are inches away from being usable (Lemmy, Mobilizon, Zap, Epicyon).
> While I've been enraged for a long time about these platforms, the big gap here is that there is no good answer to the question, "what are the better alternatives?"
This assumes we want something to replace these platforms. I for one want no social media. I admit I can't prove they are damaging no matter the implementation but I challenge anybody to prove the contrary.
"social media" doesn't have to mean "wall-to-wall influencers and hyper-targeted bad-faith political ads disguised as individual opinion".
The original promise (a more convenient+reliable way to contact infrequent acquaintances, plan events, read/report local events, and broadcast personal updates) is certainly something worth having.
IMHO social media has a natural tendency to mean "wall-to-wall influencers and hyper-targeted bad-faith political ads disguised as individual opinion". If you build it, they will come - there's a strong practical motivation for these people to try and be there in any social medium that gets popular.
In the absence of a strong mechanism to actively, effectively keep them out or kick them out (what would that be? It's not easy) social media will become like that unless that's a niche platform that almost nobody uses, so all the influencers and political ads don't care because they are somewhere else - but they will follow the eyeballs wherever they go.
Rather than surgical regulation, which as you rightly point out is often prone to capture, I would instead propose a cruder but effective governing instrument: the Pigovian tax
Trace the chain of incentivizes further upstream, and what do we find? What animates the system? It’s advertising revenue, of course. So let’s tax the living hell out of advertising revenue.
Fundamentally decreasing the profitability of a market is a sure way to disincentivize profiteering interests in it.
I'm applauding every effort to compete with the big players, but I also hope that anyone who spend time trying to solve these problems builds interoperable systems (open protocols etc).
What I really like about the ActivityPub protocol (though it is not perfect), is the way it makes permissionless innovation a thing again. People can build tools and communities to their liking and at the same time be a part of a much larger ecosystem. One example is a rather fresh project based on this protocol, trying to recreate reddit/HN's functionality, only federated: https://dev.narwhal.city/ (https://git.sr.ht/~vpzom/lotide)
Yeah we will be open sourcing it, mostly the governance/economic model will be built on parity substrate so anyone can deploy or upgrade that system. I think solving the ad driven business model is much more important than decentralizing the content servers, hard to meet the UI/UX standards most people have when you go this route also.
This is surprising to me. I didn't think that platforms that leverage network effects were typically well-suited to open sourcing unless it was something federated. Are you worried about the system being gamed or usurped by someone willing to be more exploitative?
I think proof of stake/liquidity providers with lockup creates enough incentive to keep the network effects within one system. Open sourcing the application side is a bit trickier.
Similar reactions from me. Every other day we see articles those focus on these things. Significantly nothing new; in fact I cringed at some moments. I guess I/we are not the target audience.
For cultural impact: Nope. It's gonna stay in people's mind few days. Then again back to normal.
what about something like a non-profit? I was quite disappointed that keybase.io sold to zoom. I always thought more of it like a neutral public utility.
As for the cultural impact of the movie, I don't think it's going to be much. Cambridge Analytica had so much news coverage during its time (along with public hearings by lawmakers and documentaries about it) and still did nothing material to the bottom line of these companies. They've actually grown bigger and become a lot richer since then.
1. Most people just wouldn't care enough to give up these platforms. While I've been enraged for a long time about these platforms, the big gap here is that there is no good answer to the question, "what are the better alternatives?" Don't tell me that Mastodon and Mastodon clones can be replacements for Twitter, Facebook, Facebook groups, Facebook events, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, etc. Where are the nice(r) mobile apps (not just some website designed for desktops) for any replacements?
2. Governments will not regulate these platforms in meaningful ways that create fundamental changes. Regulatory capture is what's looming around, where the current biggies make the rules and ensure that nobody else can beat them.
I will keep pushing people to switch to better platforms (even if they seem deficient in comparison), but I'm sadly not very optimistic about big changes in the next decade or so.