I’ve started a French-speaking blog on https://afr.pm, using #WriteAs (which I highly recommend), but for now it’s empty.

I’m currently working on the way people use social media. How can social media bring happiness to people, how can they bring depression, compulsive behaviours, normalization of harmful relationships?

It also federates via ActivityPub, as @blog@afr.pm. Because https://write.as is awesome I guess?

I kinda love #Smithereens at the moment. I think I ~may~ push some of my friends to use it, not because of principles, but because it’s so peaceful and pleasant.

There are two ways to approach #SocialMedia: the first one is that of rational actions in finality, and the second one is one that of rational actions in values. According to #Boudon (building his theory atop of Max #Weber), an action rational in values is how people avoid unwanted aggregation effects: for example, we vote because if nobody votes, there’s no State at all [1].

Calling out social media in terms of #BigData, advertising, and dystopian futures boils down to principles: individual actions to avoid harmful collective aggregation effects; and people using social media to cope with social isolation are probably in a bad position to lecture others about principles. Calling out social media from the point of view of a rational action in values kinda misses the point, IMO, of user manipulation, and of the side-effects of treating a microblog (which is, like any blog, an iteration of the concept of marketplace of ideas) as a space to maintain deep long-term relationships and not, conversely, a place where one would consume files and database entries abstracted from the identities of their authors. The list of hamful side effects of microblog could go on, and for now I’d rather focus on saving people from what I’ve lived on #Twitter: holes in my brain, literally.

[1] And unlike what some anarchists seem to think, merely erasing the State without replacing it by another principle of deciding and enforcing collective rules isn’t anarchy, it’s chaos. You don’t catch up on 5 years spent slacking off by abstaining from voting (and also you don’t become an anarchist if you haven’t read them, but that’s derailing from the current topic).