#decentralization

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Social Quitting

In “Social Quitting,” my latest Locus Magazine column, I advance a theory to explain the precipitous vibe shift in how many of us view the once-dominant social media platforms, Facebook and Twitter, and how it is that we have so quickly gone asking what we can do to get these services out of our lives to where we should go now that we’re all ready to leave them:

https://locusmag.com/2023/01/commentary-cory-doctorow-social-quitting/

The core of the argument revolves around surpluses — that is, the value that exists in the service. For a user, surpluses are things like “being able to converse with your friends” and “being able to plan activities with your friends.” For advertisers, surpluses are things like “being able to target ads based on the extraction and processing of private user data” and “being able to force users to look at ads before they can talk to one another.”

For the platforms, surpluses are things like, “Being able to force advertisers and business customers to monetize their offerings through the platform, blocking rivals like Onlyfans, Patreon, Netflix, Amazon, etc” and things like “Being able to charge more for ads” and “being able to clone your business customers’ products and then switch your users to the in-house version.”

Platforms control most of the surplus-allocating options. They can tune your feed so that it mostly consists of media and text from people you explicitly chose to follow, or so that it consists of ads, sponsored posts, or posts they think will “boost engagement” by sinking you into a dismal clickhole. They can made ads skippable or unskippable. They can block posts with links to rival sites to force their business customers to transact within their platform, so they can skim fat commissions every time money changes hands and so that they can glean market intelligence about which of their business customers’ products they should clone and displace.

But platforms can’t just allocate surpluses will-ye or nill-ye. No one would join a brand-new platform whose sales-pitch was, “No matter who you follow, we’ll show you other stuff; there will be lots of ads that you can’t skip; we will spy on you a lot.” Likewise, no one would sign up to advertise or sell services on a platform whose pitch was “Our ads are really expensive. Any business you transact has to go through us, and we’ll take all your profits in junk fees. This also lets us clone you and put you out of business.”

Instead, platforms have to carefully shift their surpluses around: first they have to lure in users, who will attract business customers, who will generate the fat cash surpluses that can be creamed off for the platforms’ investors. All of this has to be orchestrated to lock in each group, so that they won’t go elsewhere when the service is enshittified as it processes through its life-cycle.

This is where network effects and switching costs come into play. A service has “network effects” if it gets more valuable as users join it. You joined Twitter to talk to the people who were already using it, and then other people joined so they could talk to you.

“Switching costs” are what you have to give up when you leave a service: if a service is siloed — if it blocks interoperability with rivals — then quitting that service means giving up access to the people whom you left behind. This is the single most important difference between ActivityPub-based Fediverse services like Mastodon and the silos like Twitter and Facebook — you can quit a Fediverse server and set up somewhere else, and still maintain your follows and followers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/23/semipermeable-membranes/#free-as-in-puppies

In the absence of interoperability, network effects impose their own switching cost: the “collective action problem” of deciding when to leave and where to go. If you depend on the people you follow and who follow you — for emotional support, for your livelihood, for community — then the extreme difficulty of convincing everyone to leave at the same time and go somewhere else means that you can be enticed into staying on a service that you no longer enjoy. The platforms can shift the surpluses away from you, provided that doing so makes you less miserable than abandoning your friends or fans or customers would. This is the Fiddler On the Roof problem: everyone stays put in the shtetl even though the cossacks ride through on the reg and beat the shit out of them, because they can’t all agree on where to go if they leave:

https://doctorow.medium.com/how-to-leave-dying-social-media-platforms-9fc550fe5abf

So the first stage of the platform lifecycle is luring in users by allocating lots of surplus to them — making the service fun and great and satisfying to use. Few or no ads, little or no overt data-collection, feeds that emphasize the people you want to hear from, not the people willing to pay to reach you.

This continues until the service attains a critical mass: once it becomes impossible to, say, enroll your kid in a little-league baseball team without having a Facebook account, then Facebook can start shifting its surpluses to advertisers and other business-users of the platform, who will pay Facebook to interpose themselves in your use of the platform. You’ll hate it, but you won’t leave. Junior loves little-league.

Facebook can enshittify its user experience because the users are now locked in, holding each other hostage. If Facebook can use the courts and technological countermeasures to block interoperable services, it can increase its users’ switching costs, producing more opportunities for lucrative enshittification without the risk of losing the users that make Facebook valuable to advertisers. That’s why Facebook pioneered so many legal tactics for criminalizing interoperability:

https://www.eff.org/cases/facebook-v-power-ventures

This is the second phase of the toxic platform life-cycle: luring in business customers by shifting surpluses from users to advertisers, sellers, etc. This is the moment when the platforms offer cheap and easy monetization, low transaction fees, few barriers to off-platform monetization, etc. This is when, for example, a news organization can tease an article on its website with an off-platform link, luring users to click through and see the ads it controls.

Because Facebook has locked in its users through mutual hostage-taking, it can pollute their feeds with lots of these posts to news organizations’ sites, bumping down the messages from its users’ friends, and that means that Facebook can selectively tune how much traffic it gives to different kinds of business customers. If Facebook wants to lure in sports sites, it can cram those sites’ posts into millions of users’ feeds and send floods of traffic to sports outlets.

Outlets that don’t participate in Facebook lose out, and so they join Facebook, start shoveling their content into it, hiring SEO Kremlinologists to help them figure out how to please The Algorithm, in hopes of gaining a permanent, durable source of readers (and thus revenue) for their site.

But ironically, once a critical mass of sports sites are on Facebook, Facebook no longer needs to prioritize sports sites in its users’ feeds. Now that the sports sites all believe that a Facebook presence is a competitive necessity, they will hold each other hostage there, egging each other on to put more things on Facebook, even as the traffic dwindles.

Once sports sites have taken each other hostage, Facebook can claw back the surplus it allocated to them and use it to rope in another sector — health sites, casual games, employment seekers, financial advisors, etc etc. Each group is ensnared by a similar dynamic to the one that locks in the users.

But there is a difference between users’ surpluses and business’s surpluses. A user’s surplus is attention, and there is no such thing as an “attention economy.” You can’t use attention to pay for data-centers, or executive bonuses, or to lobby Congress. Attention is not a currency in the same way that cryptos are not currency — it is not a store of value, nor a unit of exchange, nor or a unit of account.

Turning attention into money requires the same tactics as turning crypto into money — you have to lure in people who have real, actual money and convince them to swap it for attention. With crypto, this involved paying Larry David, Matt Damon, Spike Lee and LeBron James to lie about crypto’s future in order to rope in suckers who would swap their perfectly cromulent “fiat” money for unspendable crypto tokens.

With platforms, you need to bring in business customers who get paid in actual cash and convince them to give you that cash in exchange for ethereal, fast-evaporating, inconstant, unmeasurable “attention.” This works like any Ponzi scheme (that is, it works like cryptos): you can use your shareholders’ cash to pay short-term returns to business customers, losing a little money as a convincer that brings in more trade.

That’s what Facebook did when it sent enormous amounts of traffic to a select few news-sites that fell for the pivot to video fraud, in order to convince their competitors to borrow billions of dollars to finance Facebook’s bid to compete with Youtube:

https://doctorow.medium.com/metaverse-means-pivot-to-video-adbe09319038

This convincer strategy is found in every con. If you go to the county fair, you’ll see some poor bastard walking around all day with a giant teddy bear that he “won” by throwing three balls into a peach-basket. The carny who operated that midway game let him win the teddy precisely so that he would walk around all day, advertising the game, which is rigged so that no one else wins the giant teddy-bear:

https://boingboing.net/2006/08/27/rigged-carny-game.html

Social media platforms can allocate giant teddy-bears to business-customers, and it can also withdraw them at will. Careful allocations mean that the platform can rope in a critical mass of business customers and then begin the final phase of its life-cycle: allocating surpluses to its shareholders.

We know what this looks like.

Rigged ad-markets:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue

Understaffed content moderation departments:

https://www.dw.com/en/twitters-sacking-of-content-moderators-will-backfire-experts-warn/a-63778330

Knock-off products:

https://techcrunch.com/2021/12/08/twitter-is-the-latest-platform-to-test-a-tiktok-copycat-feature/

Nuking “trust and safety”:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitter-dissolves-trust-safety-council-2022-12-13/

Hiding posts that have links to rival services:

https://www.makeuseof.com/content-types-facebook-hides-why/

Or blocking posts that link to rival services:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/19/better-failure/#let-my-tweeters-go

Or worse, terminating accounts for linking to rival services:

https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2022/12/twitter-suspends-mastodon-account-prevents-sharing-links/

That is, once a platform has its users locked in, and has its business customers locked in, it can enshittify its service to the point of near uselessness without losing either, allocating all the useful surplus in the business to its shareholders.

But this strategy has a problem: users and business customers don’t like to be locked in! They will constantly try to find ways to de-enshittify your service and/or leave for greener pastures. And being at war with your users and business customers means that your reputation continuously declines, because every time a user or business customer figures out a way to claw back some surplus, you have to visibly, obviously enshittify your service wrestle it back.

Every time a service makes headlines for blocking an ad-blocker, or increasing its transaction fees, or screwing over its users or business customers in some other way, it makes the case that the price you pay for using the service is not worth the value it delivers.

In other words, the platforms try to establish an equilibrium where they only leave business customers and users with the absolute bare minimum needed to keep them on the service, and extract the rest for their shareholders. But this is a very brittle equilibrium, because the prices that platforms impose on their users and business customers can change very quickly, even if the platforms don’t do anything differently.

Users and business customers can revalue the privacy costs, or the risks of staying on the platform based on exogenous factors. Privacy scandals and other ruptures can make the cost you’ve been paying for years seem higher than you realized and no longer worth it.

This problem isn’t unique to social media platforms, either. It’s endemic to end-stage capitalism, where companies can go on for years paying their workers just barely enough to survive (or even less, expecting them to get public assistance and/or a side-hustle), and those workers can tolerate it, and tolerate it, and tolerate it — until one day, they stop.

The Great Resignation, Quiet Quitting, the mass desertions from the gig economy — they all prove the Stein’s Law: “Anything that can’t go on forever will eventually stop.”

Same for long, brittle supply-chains, where all the surplus has been squeezed out: concentrating all the microchip production in China and Taiwan, all the medical saline in Puerto Rico, all the shipping into three cartels… This strategy works well, and can be perfectly tuned with mathematical models that cut right to the joint, and they work and they work.

Until they stop. Until covid. Or war. Or wildfires. Or floods. Or interest rate hikes. Or revolution. All this stuff works great until you wake up and discover that the delicate balance between paying for guard labor and paying for a fair society has tilted, and now there’s a mob building a guillotine outside the gates of your luxury compound.

This is the force underpinning collapse: “slow at first, then all at once.” A steady erosion of the failsafes, flensing all the slack out of the system, extracting all the surpluses until there’s nothing left in the reservoir, no reason to stay.

It’s what caused the near-collapse of Barnes and Noble, and while there are plenty of ways to describe James Daunt’s successful turnaround, the most general characterization is, “He has reallocated the company’s surpluses to workers, readers, writers and publishers”:

https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/what-can-we-learn-from-barnes-and

A system can never truly stabilize. This is why utopias are nonsense: even if you design the most perfect society in which everything works brilliantly, it will still have to cope with war and meteors and pandemics and other factors beyond your control. A system can’t just work well, it has to fail well.

This is why I object so strenuously to people who characterize my 2017 novel Walkaway as a “dystopian novel.” Yes, the protagonists are eking out survival amidst a climate emergency and a failing state, but they aren’t giving up, they’re building something new:

https://locusmag.com/2017/06/bruce-sterling-reviews-cory-doctorow/

“Dystopia” isn’t when things go wrong. Assuming nothing will go wrong doesn’t make you an optimist, it makes you an asshole. A dangerous asshole. Assuming nothing will go wrong is why they didn’t put enough lifeboats on the Titanic. Dystopia isn’t where things go wrong. Dystopia is when things go wrong, and nothing can be done about it.

Anything that can’t go on forever will eventually stop. The social media barons who reeled users and business customers into a mutual hostage-taking were confident that their self-licking ice-cream cone — in which we all continued to energetically produce surpluses for them to harvest, because we couldn’t afford to leave — would last forever.

They were wrong. The important thing about the Fediverse isn’t that it’s noncommercial or decentralized — it’s that its design impedes surplus harvesting. The Fediverse is designed to keep switching costs as low as possible, by enshrining the Right Of Exit into the technical architecture of the system. The ability to leave a service without paying a price is the best defense we have against the scourge of enshittification.

(Thanks to Tim Harford for inspiring this column via an offhand remark in his kitchen a couple months ago!)

[Image ID: The Phillip Medhurst Picture Torah 397. The Israelites collect manna. Exodus cap 16 v 14. Luyken and son.]

#pluralistic #social media #post-twitter #post-facebook #switching costs #network effects #web theory #locus magazine #exodus #decentralization

[reportsofagrandfuture]

#city planning #permaculture #solarpunk #walkable cities #decentralization #housing crisis #sacrifices must be made

[seancurry1]

The problem with the previous ~10 years of the internet, an era defined by algorithmic social media feeds and endless growth, isn’t that the platforms have all my friends and their updates locked up in their walled gardens, although that’s certainly part of it. Nor is the problem that they’re all trying to make money, although that’s definitely part of it.*

The problem isn’t even the Nazis, white nationalists, Chris Rufos, TERFs, and all other manners of asshole that barge into spaces created and populated by well-meaning people, shit on the floor, and yell at everyone who asks them to clean it up and not do it again.

The problem is that the people in charge of those spaces won’t stop them from coming back.

What do you do when a party host won’t kick out the wild drunk that’s ruining the party? You find a new party. What do you do when the wild drunk shows up again and your new host also won’t kick them out? What do you do when this happens again, and again, and again?

What do you do when every single party you’ve been going to for the last decade keeps having the same wild drunk show up and shit on the floor?

I wrote about how the internet has changed, and how it’s changing again, over on my blog. Check it out!

#writing #the internet #decentralization #platform churn #newsletter

[kais-radwan]

Can we upgrade open-source decentralized services, tools, and networks so decentralization can be the default options for startups and developers..?? can we achieve big tech's security and stability with decentralized networks ??

Share any thoughts or ideas you have... what you think ?

NOTICE: I'm not talking about web3 or crypto.

#decentralization #technology #software engineering #coding #programming #software #open source

[desert-palm]

Tumblr will add support for ActivityPub, the open, decentralized social networking protocol that today is powering social networking software like Twitter alternative Mastodon, the Instagram-like Pixelfed, video streaming service PeerTube, and others. The news was revealed in response to a Twitter user’s complaint about Mastodon’s complexities. Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg — whose company acquired Tumblr from Verizon in 2019 — suggested the user “come to Tumblr” as the site would soon “add activitypub for interconnect.”

“Don’t stress,” he said, before clarifying that Tumblr first has to deal with the waves of new users coming in right now from Twitter but that support for “interop and activitypub” were due to come “ASAP.”

In short, this announcement means Tumblr would move from being only a niche blogging platform to becoming a part of a larger, decentralized social network of sorts — and one whose user base has grown in size in recent days as people flee Elon Musk’s Twitter in search of new communities.

#activitypub #tech memes #tech news #technology #open source #decentralization #twitter #news #techcrunch #computers #software engineering

[utopicwork]

Im going to provide a certain amount of p2p for sharing large files on the current net while it would be unrealistic to do it over LoRa efficiently which will let me pick Sonnet (p2p e2ee social media project) back up as a sub project of PierMesh, I'll probably leverage an IPFS gateway for this

#piermesh #webdev #decentralization

[wachinyeya]

#good news #swiss #clean energy #green energy #decentralization #switzerland

[essential-randomness]

This week's streams

See you today at 3PM PST on Twitch (see schedule for local time), to learn all about ATProto, the decentralized protocol that powers BlueSky, and how it differs from the protocol behind Mastodon!

On this stream I'll go through the "Bluesky and the AT Protocol: Usable Decentralized Social Media" paper, and explain its content in more accessible terms. Then, with any time left, we'll try to understand together how custom feeds work!

Also, I changed Thursday stream: because of "April 1st event" reason, we're holding a private workshop to teach collaborators and $upporters how to make PRs on GitHub and run Astro websites! With the excuse, we'll go through the FujoGuide Issue 2 exercises together and learn what issues people encounter.

To join the workshop (or get a recording) become a $upporter here👇

[Patreon, Newsletter]

#codeblr #learn to code #programming #decentralization #decentralized protocols

[rhe-toric]

A Beginner's Guide to Understanding Smart Contracts on the Blockchain

Smart contracts are a key feature of blockchain technology that allows for the creation of self-executing contracts. In this beginner's guide, we will explore what smart contracts are, how they work, and their potential applications.

What are Smart Contracts?

Smart contracts are self-executing contracts that are stored on a blockchain. They are computer programs that automatically execute the terms of a contract when certain conditions are met. For example, a smart contract could automatically transfer funds from one party to another when a specific condition is met, such as the completion of a task.

How do Smart Contracts Work?

Smart contracts are executed on a blockchain, which is a decentralized and distributed ledger. The code for the smart contract is stored on the blockchain, and the contract is executed when certain conditions are met. Once the conditions are met, the contract is automatically executed, and the results are recorded on the blockchain.

Applications of Smart Contracts

Smart contracts have many potential applications, including:

Financial Services

Smart contracts can be used in financial services to automate processes such as payments, settlements, and insurance claims. They can also be used to create decentralized financial products, such as decentralized exchanges and lending platforms.

Supply Chain Management

Smart contracts can be used in supply chain management to track the movement of goods and automate processes such as verification and payment. They can also be used to create more transparent and efficient supply chains.

Real Estate

Smart contracts can be used in real estate to automate processes such as property transfers and rental agreements. They can also be used to create more transparent and secure real estate transactions.

Conclusion

Smart contracts are a key feature of blockchain technology that allows for the creation of self-executing contracts. They are computer programs that automatically execute the terms of a contract when certain conditions are met. Smart contracts have many potential applications, including financial services, supply chain management, and real estate. As blockchain technology continues to evolve, we can expect to see increased use of smart contracts in a variety of industries.

#smartcontracts #blockchaintechnology #decentralization #FinancialServices #supplychainmanagement #realestate #Automation #transparency #efficiency #digitalcontracts

[leadpac]

National Panchayati Raj Day!

Celebrates the pivotal role of grassroots governance in India.

#leadpac #politicalanalysisinhyderabad #telanganapolitics #politicalanalysis #politics #telangana #PanchayatiRaj #GrassrootsGovernance #India #LocalGovernment #VillageCouncils #RuralDevelopment #CommunityLeadership #Empowerment #Decentralization #PanchayatSystem #indian politics #business

[jadwiga-abremovic]

" Lenin said: "The proletariat needs state power, a centralized organization of power, an organized force for suppressing the resistance of the exploiters and for readership of the great masses of the population, peasants, petty bourgeoisie, semi-proletariat, and also for the establishment of socialist ownership". (Lenin State and Revolution page 142, Russian edition, free translation). "But it should not be forgotten", says Lenin, quoting Marx. "That the proletariat needs only the state which is withering away". That is how Lenin refers to this matter. And what does the bourgeoisie need? The bourgeoisie, the exploiting class, needs the state as a permanent force for maintaining the exploited classes in subjection, meaning the majority of the people. The bourgeoisie does not contemplate the weakening of the state machinery, to say nothing of its withering away, for it considers its system, the system of exploitation, immortal and perfect. Accordingly, the difference between the bourgeois state, no matter how disguised it may be by a democratic screen, and our state, for instance, is that the bourgeois state, an apparatus of force in the hands of a minority, meaning the class exploiter, oppresses the majority of the people and has the tendency to increase in strength. Here, although the state has the job of restraining the minority of exploiters and enemies of new Yugoslavia, it is gradually dying away, for its functions, primarily in the economy, are gradually being transferred to the working people. According to Marxist science, the state is a product of "class conflicts", and it will wither away when classes disappear, when there is no longer anyone to suppress or any reason to suppress them. Where is the beginning of this withering away process in our country? I shall mention only the following examples. First, decentralization of the state administration, especially in economy. Secondly, turning over the factories and economic enterprises in general to the working collectives to manage themselves, etc. The decentralization of economy and political, cultural and other aspects of life is not only profoundly democratic but has inherent in it the seeds of withering away not only of centralism, but of the state in general, as a machine of force. This is a fact which anyone can check on here if they want to. How do things look in the Soviet Union thirty-one years after the October Revolution? The October Revolution made it possible for the state to take the means of production into its hands. But these means are still, after 31 years, in the hands of the state. Has the slogan "the factories for the workers" been put into practice? Of course not. The workers still do not have any say in the management of the factories. They are managed by directors who are appointed by the state, that is, by civil service employees. The workers only have the 'possibility and the right to work but this is not very different from the role of the workers in capitalist countries. The only difference for workers is that there is no unemployment in the Soviet Union, and that is all. Therefore, the leaders of the Soviet Union have not, so far, put through one of the most characteristic measures of a socialist state, that of turning over the factories and other economic enterprises to the workers so that they may manage them. Since the Soviet leaders consider state ownership as the highest form of social ownership, the fact that they have not turned over the means of production to the workers to manage probably issues from such a conception of state ownership. Besides, this is altogether in accordance with the strengthening of their state machine. That is also a fact that anyone can ascertain for themselves, if they want to learn the truth." Josip Broz Tito, 'Workers Shall Manage Factories in Yugoslavia', June 26, 1950.

#josip broz tito #theory #yugoslavia #marxism #leninism #syndicalism #communism #anarchism #council communism #decentralization #market socialism #titoism #balkans

[mostlysignssomeportents]

When people get kicked off the major platforms for being racist, or organizing mass-harassment campaigns, or doxing their enemies, they end up on right-wing fever swamp apps like Parler and Truth Social, and, inevitably, they are said to have retreated to “the internet’s dark corners.”

But you know what?

Dark corners are good, actually.

#weird web #decentralization #Monopoly #big tech

[reportsofagrandfuture]

#city planning #functional supply chains #electric vehicles #degrowth #decentralization #future of shops is 100% local and personal #Youtube

[kais-radwan]

Decentralization beyond web3

Decentralization is much more than web3 and cryptocurrencies... It's about freedom, peer-to-peer communications, decentralized graph databases, secure AI data policies and encryption. Decentralization is when developers own their projects, and users own their data.

#decentralization #coding #artificial intelligence #open source

[seancurry1]

Hey, I really liked your article on what the Internet is like in 2024. For many of us the way it is now is all we have ever really known. How did people navigate an internet before Google owned search bars and the same 10 or so sites ran public opinion?

Thanks for the ask, anon! I got into that a little in the beginning of the article that excerpt was from. Repasting here, and I'll elaborate further down:

There was a solid three years in college—maybe even longer—when I literally read every single article on CollegeHumor.com and Cracked.com. Whenever I had some free time (an abundance I was tragically unaware of at the time), I’d type their URLs into my browser bar, scroll down to the last article I read, and start reading. Once I was caught up, I’d check in on a handful of other sites the same way (mostly webcomics, and a few blogs). Questionable Content, Penny Arcade, XKCD, Ctrl-Alt-Del, and, yes, even some more embarrassing to admit than CAD that I’m not going to mention here were all readily-available in my browser bar’s autocomplete. When I ran out of new stuff to read, I’d hit StumbleUpon, or Reddit, or Digg. There were always some new URLs out there for me to uncover, good or bad (and there were a lot of bad ones), and I loved finding them. Please don’t take this as me flexing my OG internet cred; nothing I’ve said here is all that different from the mid-00s experience of any online American goober. I say all this to point out a fundamental shift in how the internet (at least the internet that I’ve experienced, within my social and geographical bubble) has worked over the last ~10 years. Those early days were defined by websites, not social feeds. When I “went online,” I went to specific URLs to see what the people behind them were up to. Sure, there was Twitter and Facebook, and Myspace before that, but those were still avenues to direct traffic to websites, more or less. People went on those platforms (and later, those apps) to be social, not make content. The most “content creation” you’d do on Facebook in those days was upload a selfie or tag all your friends in a party photo from the night before.

Before the feeds, everyone had a website, and you'd spend your online time going from URL to URL to check in on them. If you've ever heard the term "blogroll," this is the time that was from.

Let's say it's 2006 and I have a blog with a bunch of dedicated readers. Somewhere on my blog's page, I would have section dedicated to linking out to other blogs I liked. That was the "blogroll", and before that there were "webrings" which accomplished a similar thing in a slightly different way.

Webcomics were really, really good at this. They organically created a lot of the social infrastructure that earlier internet ran on, and that the later web 2.0 stuff was built on.

After a while, RSS readers became much more user-friendly, and blog owners made their blog's RSS feed as accessible as possible. If you input a website's RSS feed into your RSS reader (RIP Google Reader, we didn't deserve you), then your RSS reader would update.

[Random screenshot of Google Reader I found online. This was Google's take, but all the other ones more or less worked the same way.]

It looked a lot like email, to be honest. And on that note, I think the recent surge in newsletters is recreating that experience, to a degree. I subscribe to over a dozen newsletters, from Substack and other platforms/outlets, and I filter them all out of my inbox and into a separate label. This is a screenshot of my newsletter inbox:

I don't have to log into Twitter, or Threads, or Bluesky, or whatever to get the content I want from the people I want to get content from. I don't have to worry about how the algorithm is sorting it; this feed is always chronological. There's nothing between me and the writers, artists, and other creators I want to keep up with.

With the collapse of the algorithm-driven era*, I think we're heading back to this (or at least, I think we should be). What's great about this is: we don't have to be beholden to the whims of platforms anymore. We can just get the stuff we want from the people we want.

*The algorithms are still very much alive and still very much want you to keep yourself hooked up to their slurry, but they've dropped their end of the bargain. The spell is broken, there's no longer one place that feels like everyone is logging into to talk about whatever's happening on the internet in any given moment. Elon Musk ruining Twitter was the final thing that broke the spell, but it started happening after everyone got mad at Facebook for helping get Trump elected in 2016. Now that everyone's looking for something else to replace what they used to get from algo feeds but failing to coalesce in one place again, that's never going to come back.

So that all answers your question: "For many of us the way it is now is all we have ever really known. How did people navigate an internet before Google owned search bars and the same 10 or so sites ran public opinion?"

But I'd like to focus on the second sentence there for a second. You're right, right now it feels like Google owns search bars and the same 10 or so sites run public opinion. However, that's only because we've all given that power to them. I understand it, and sympathize with it. Creating an intentional presence on the internet is a lot of work, and it's hard to keep up with it as all the services we use to do it change their policies and settings.

I think this straight-to-the-source model would be better for all of us in general, and the best part about it is you can just start doing it for yourself whenever you want. You don't have to wait for a platform to start offering it, just find the writers and creators you want and subscribe to their newsletters. If a platform changes something that puts a wall up between you and the people you like there, doesn't matter. You're following their email newsletter and will still get those emails as long as they keep sending them.

That early internet I described was full of people still figuring out how it all worked, so the gears and inner workings were a lot more apparent and easier to play with. As the internet has gotten more polished, those gears have been covered up and less visible, but they're still there.

In fact, every Tumblr page has an rss feed, just add "/rss" to the end of its URL like this: https://seancurry1.tumblr.com/rss. You could set up an RSS feed yourself, or figure out a way to convert RSS updates to emails. Here's an IFTTT recipe to do it, but I'm sure there are other ways.

The platforms all want you to think the way the internet currently exists is the way it's always been and the only way it ever can be, but all the gears are there if you look for them. You can start ripping the guts out and seeing how it works for yourself, and even make it better.

Anyway, happy to pass on my Elder Internetter knowledge if you have more questions! I think we're at an exciting turning point in the internet where the power to shape our experiences is up for grabs, but it's up to us to grab it.

#internet #decentralization #platforms #algorithms #newsletters

[violetmadder]

"Ad-driven social media platforms are willing to tolerate monumental volumes of abusive users. They’ve discovered the same thing the Mainstream Media did: negative emotions grip people’s attention harder than positive ones. Hate and fear drives engagement, and engagement drives ad impressions.

Mastodon is not an ad-driven platform. There is absolutely zero incentive to let awful people run amok in the name of engagement."

#Mastadon #Fediverse #SocialMedia #Moderation #Decentralization #ParadigmShift