'As media scholar Victor Pickard suggests, “Hopefully Twitter’s collapse will lead to a more expansive conversation about the relationships between capitalist imperatives and the communication [and] information needs of democratic societies.”
As users begin migrating to the noncommercial fediverse, they need to reconsider their expectations for social media — and bring them in line with what we expect from other arenas of social life. We need to learn how to become more like engaged democratic citizens in the life of our networks.'
All right, running with this: corporate sponsored "public spaces" aren't really public (as they are capitalist entities). Let's add "Conway's Law" [1.] to this, and extrapolate that perhaps democracies currently are repeating the design of the communication structures that comprise it (of which there are myriad, but assume the largest/loudest have more sway). Let's pick one nation, the US, and question: is the US democracy constrained by the current corporate-sponsored public-spaces/communication structures (which have been old media, i.e. print, but seems now new media, i.e. all online). A 'fediversification' of the public mind seems really important here, the question is how far can/does it go (techno-first generations seems fine, but let's say baby-boomers perhaps not so much?).
I'm curious what others think about this, and what resources can be shared to provide more insight into this question.
[1.] Conway's Law: “Organizations, who design systems, are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.”
I really don't get this concern. Web hosting is cheap. Like, astonishingly cheap. Mastodon instances take up a couple GB of RAM, some storage, and relatively light bandwidth. I would be shocked if an instance cost more than $40/month to host, and I'd reckon the typical instance is less than $20/month.
That's the sort of money people happily pour into hobbies without a second thought. Collectively my Discord server of like 30 people pay more than that on their premium offering. All it takes is one person in your community to foot a relatively trivial bill. Or, orchestrate a Patreon or similar.
I would be shocked if an instance cost more than $40/month to host, and I'd reckon the typical instance is less than $20/month.
That information is public for at least one moderately popular instance, fosstodon.org. According to https://hub.fosstodon.org/about/#current-funding the current cost is $1895.50 per month, plus $200.00 for the CDN. (And yes, last time I looked, their Patreon is going to be more than enough to cover that.)
This is something I’ve been feeling “all along”, but clearly the mental image of a typical Twitter use cases varies too much between stakeholders e.g. Mastodon backend devs, frontend Twitter app devs, casual users and heavy users. And Twitter employees, too.
To an addict like I am, Twitter timeline is something measured in tweets per second. It is a constant flow, a time synchronized operation, not something that I expect to be event based.
Mastodon devs and ActivityPub spec devs must have a complete opposite of that, that users only post content when there is something to say, and the post will be pushed when a post was made.
The latter model is certainly doable with the ActivityPub protocol, $20/month budget, and by stretch can be handled by Mastodon as it is built. But I think there is this misunderstanding, and it just seems that none of it is built to cater for those with the former model.
Hopefully Twitter’s collapse will lead to a more expansive conversation about the relationships between capitalist imperatives and the communication [and] information needs of democratic societies.
Key word being "hopefully". People either don't understand or care about the power differentials that these mega corps perpetuate and how it affects us, especially long term. People dislike Musk as a person, they'll be happier than ever jumping in bed with any other megalomaniac billionaire as long as they have the self-restraint to hide their cynical worldview.
This doesn't mean that federation, decentralization and privacy is dead in the water, but it does mean that the stakes are high, and you need to offer a better product than what ad-tech bloat gives you today, so it's certainly not impossible. You need critical mass, ease of use, technical simplicity and resilience against abuse, and then strike at a good opportunity for mass migration.
I don't think Mastodon today fulfills any of the criteria, let alone the core privacy features that are difficult to retrofit. I also don't think it ever will, because the OSS style governance model always leads to hard-to-use products and fractured communities whenever large and difficult decisions need to be made. (That doesn't mean that the fediverse can't be an excellent refuge for geeks and certain niches, which is great both for them and an incredibly useful lesson for future projects!)
Realistically, I think the Signal model is our best bet, given the world today. An ideologically convinced medium sized business/foundation built on OSS tech, with decently aligned incentives, but that respects UX enough to build a product that everyone can use.
It seems like this is going in a similar direction as suburbia and HOAs to me.
You'll join a community subject to agreements that are periodically renegotiated, but those negotiations and the resulting enforcement will be done by idle members rather than those too busy to notice minor infractions. Likely a better fit with human psychology than living in a monolithic and decaying walled-garden, but also likely to result in spaces where people largely talk about what they do outside of them. Some people will still commute for business and will bring their cultural conflicts with them.
Suburbia and HOAs are at least somewhat coercive because they're tied to very expensive assets, and there's also an implication that you belong to essentially one of them.
There's no reason for that in the decentralized space. As a side effect of my oft-repeated belief on HN that I'm not convinced that a centralized single massive community of everyone is even really possible, expressed well prior to Elon buying Twitter, I have no presence on any of the major social media sites. I have many communities. HN is merely one of them. Each of them has a different social contract. Many of them are mutually contradictory in that either the implicit social mores or explicit social rules would exclude each other if taken in their totality... this is less impressive or weird than it sounds, the moreso as you take more and more restrictive views of what constitutes a "match".
This is, in my opinion, normal. It reflects the reality I live in. What is mandatory and verboten at the grocery store, the strip joint, your kid's school concert, a college classroom, etc. all differ intrinsically, and there's no getting around that. The attempt to jam the entire Internet into one walled garden was always doomed to failure, by its very nature. I think that while there are always technical pulls to centralization, and marketing/capitalistic pulls to centralization, in the end, the social pressures that make it impossible to control everyone in one space will always win out. I expect we're in a multi-decade decentralization here... not necessarily to the extreme that everyone runs their own instance, sure. But the idea that we can all agree on a very small set of social websites, and we will all agree that Silicon Valley Liberalism is the One True Social Contract is an absurd illusion brought on by too much VC money, just one more victim of the end of 0% interest rates.
So as the Twitter culture shock spreads out, I would say, the next culture shock thing to break is the idea that you have "one" social media presence or that such a thing is necessarily possible. Prepare for the Internet to spin out and once again match the reality of the real world, with different spaces for different purposes. You may not be able to have "one" identity any more than you can live in one social space in the real world. Indeed, the entire idea is kind of silly in the end.
Comments
'As media scholar Victor Pickard suggests, “Hopefully Twitter’s collapse will lead to a more expansive conversation about the relationships between capitalist imperatives and the communication [and] information needs of democratic societies.”
As users begin migrating to the noncommercial fediverse, they need to reconsider their expectations for social media — and bring them in line with what we expect from other arenas of social life. We need to learn how to become more like engaged democratic citizens in the life of our networks.'
All right, running with this: corporate sponsored "public spaces" aren't really public (as they are capitalist entities). Let's add "Conway's Law" [1.] to this, and extrapolate that perhaps democracies currently are repeating the design of the communication structures that comprise it (of which there are myriad, but assume the largest/loudest have more sway). Let's pick one nation, the US, and question: is the US democracy constrained by the current corporate-sponsored public-spaces/communication structures (which have been old media, i.e. print, but seems now new media, i.e. all online). A 'fediversification' of the public mind seems really important here, the question is how far can/does it go (techno-first generations seems fine, but let's say baby-boomers perhaps not so much?).
I'm curious what others think about this, and what resources can be shared to provide more insight into this question.
[1.] Conway's Law: “Organizations, who design systems, are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.”
I keep wondering, who pays to run all those servers, handle users on the servers, and for the people to spend time keeping it all up to date?
Will it end up with some companies running servers for people. Still, where does the money come from to cover the expenses?
Today, volunteers and goodwill. Tomorrow, likely the same actors that run free VPNs today, ie the tier-2 ad-tech/data-broker shadow industry.
I really don't get this concern. Web hosting is cheap. Like, astonishingly cheap. Mastodon instances take up a couple GB of RAM, some storage, and relatively light bandwidth. I would be shocked if an instance cost more than $40/month to host, and I'd reckon the typical instance is less than $20/month.
That's the sort of money people happily pour into hobbies without a second thought. Collectively my Discord server of like 30 people pay more than that on their premium offering. All it takes is one person in your community to foot a relatively trivial bill. Or, orchestrate a Patreon or similar.
That information is public for at least one moderately popular instance, fosstodon.org. According to https://hub.fosstodon.org/about/#current-funding the current cost is $1895.50 per month, plus $200.00 for the CDN. (And yes, last time I looked, their Patreon is going to be more than enough to cover that.)
They've got 50,000 users. That can't be typical, right?
This is something I’ve been feeling “all along”, but clearly the mental image of a typical Twitter use cases varies too much between stakeholders e.g. Mastodon backend devs, frontend Twitter app devs, casual users and heavy users. And Twitter employees, too.
To an addict like I am, Twitter timeline is something measured in tweets per second. It is a constant flow, a time synchronized operation, not something that I expect to be event based.
Mastodon devs and ActivityPub spec devs must have a complete opposite of that, that users only post content when there is something to say, and the post will be pushed when a post was made.
The latter model is certainly doable with the ActivityPub protocol, $20/month budget, and by stretch can be handled by Mastodon as it is built. But I think there is this misunderstanding, and it just seems that none of it is built to cater for those with the former model.
Key word being "hopefully". People either don't understand or care about the power differentials that these mega corps perpetuate and how it affects us, especially long term. People dislike Musk as a person, they'll be happier than ever jumping in bed with any other megalomaniac billionaire as long as they have the self-restraint to hide their cynical worldview.
This doesn't mean that federation, decentralization and privacy is dead in the water, but it does mean that the stakes are high, and you need to offer a better product than what ad-tech bloat gives you today, so it's certainly not impossible. You need critical mass, ease of use, technical simplicity and resilience against abuse, and then strike at a good opportunity for mass migration.
I don't think Mastodon today fulfills any of the criteria, let alone the core privacy features that are difficult to retrofit. I also don't think it ever will, because the OSS style governance model always leads to hard-to-use products and fractured communities whenever large and difficult decisions need to be made. (That doesn't mean that the fediverse can't be an excellent refuge for geeks and certain niches, which is great both for them and an incredibly useful lesson for future projects!)
Realistically, I think the Signal model is our best bet, given the world today. An ideologically convinced medium sized business/foundation built on OSS tech, with decently aligned incentives, but that respects UX enough to build a product that everyone can use.
It seems like this is going in a similar direction as suburbia and HOAs to me.
You'll join a community subject to agreements that are periodically renegotiated, but those negotiations and the resulting enforcement will be done by idle members rather than those too busy to notice minor infractions. Likely a better fit with human psychology than living in a monolithic and decaying walled-garden, but also likely to result in spaces where people largely talk about what they do outside of them. Some people will still commute for business and will bring their cultural conflicts with them.
Suburbia and HOAs are at least somewhat coercive because they're tied to very expensive assets, and there's also an implication that you belong to essentially one of them.
There's no reason for that in the decentralized space. As a side effect of my oft-repeated belief on HN that I'm not convinced that a centralized single massive community of everyone is even really possible, expressed well prior to Elon buying Twitter, I have no presence on any of the major social media sites. I have many communities. HN is merely one of them. Each of them has a different social contract. Many of them are mutually contradictory in that either the implicit social mores or explicit social rules would exclude each other if taken in their totality... this is less impressive or weird than it sounds, the moreso as you take more and more restrictive views of what constitutes a "match".
This is, in my opinion, normal. It reflects the reality I live in. What is mandatory and verboten at the grocery store, the strip joint, your kid's school concert, a college classroom, etc. all differ intrinsically, and there's no getting around that. The attempt to jam the entire Internet into one walled garden was always doomed to failure, by its very nature. I think that while there are always technical pulls to centralization, and marketing/capitalistic pulls to centralization, in the end, the social pressures that make it impossible to control everyone in one space will always win out. I expect we're in a multi-decade decentralization here... not necessarily to the extreme that everyone runs their own instance, sure. But the idea that we can all agree on a very small set of social websites, and we will all agree that Silicon Valley Liberalism is the One True Social Contract is an absurd illusion brought on by too much VC money, just one more victim of the end of 0% interest rates.
So as the Twitter culture shock spreads out, I would say, the next culture shock thing to break is the idea that you have "one" social media presence or that such a thing is necessarily possible. Prepare for the Internet to spin out and once again match the reality of the real world, with different spaces for different purposes. You may not be able to have "one" identity any more than you can live in one social space in the real world. Indeed, the entire idea is kind of silly in the end.