 I no longer use Big Social, but here’s my current opinion of it: A message should be a message. You should be able to see any message as intended. Instead, people are forced to use screenshots in order to share messages across platforms. The fact that Meta, Google, Twitter, etc. won’t let a message be a message is an indictment of their platforms’ ongoing destruction of the open web. The Fediverse’s promise is that—hopefully and finally—messages will be treated as messages. 33 comments
@atomicpoet I‘d say it‘s probably a lot simpler than that: They decided that they wanted to own our time and attention so they could sell more to advertisers. Cross-linking helped social platforms grow, but it kept them from become the biggest because when people click links to a blog or another service, they are no longer spending time on your platform. Elon Musk actually kept a promise and released the source code to Twitter’s Recommendation Algorithm. And it reveals a lot. A key learning is that—unless you’re famous—if you put a link into a tweet, you’re pretty much treated like a spammer because Twitter HATES links! And why is this? Because Twitter (and Big Social) will kneecap interoperability every chance they get because they HATE the open web.  @atomicpoet An alternative, or additional, theory is that they hate the provision of independent evidence. Evidence-free ranting is better for engagement. At least Twitter lets you send a link. Instagram doesn’t support links at all. So if you want to share something off Instagram to Instagram, your only choice is to screenshot. Or tell people to click the link in your bio which, to be honest, most people won’t do because it’s inconvenient. This is why we all need to be skeptical about Meta’s eventual arrival into the Fediverse. Many of you ask me, “What’s the Fediverse’s killer app?” Some people say it will be clients. Some believe it will be the vast array of services. But I think it’s far more revolutionary than that: On the Fediverse, a message is a message is a message. Even if the message originates from somewhere else, it’s a message here. @atomicpoet on some level, ActivityStreams can be seen as just a conceptual evolution of rss. Hear me out. We wanted to federate what we published and make it easily accessible. Next, we wanted to federate interactions. The protocol has potential to become something that empowers a lot of new things. We didn’t know how big podcasts would become when we first saw rss. It’s hard to tell what big things will be built on top of this technology.  @atomicpoet I didn't ask what the next killer app would be. I explained what it could be. No other social app let's you create your own client interface the way the fediverse does. If that realization manages to take hold its a game changer. The message is the media. The media is what touches the sensorium. That is the client. @atomicpoet  @atomicpoet @programmablecat I’d argue the Fediverse needs no killer app as it doesn’t live within the realm of competition. And that’s its best aspect.  @atomicpoet I’m not staying on a social network that has meta on it. Either they get defederated or I leave. They do not play nice, and they aren’t ethical. Simple as that. @atomicpoet Not only are normal people annoyed at “click in the bio to learn more” on Instagram, brands are just as frustrated. @atomicpoet and Facebook years ago started to embed the content and pictures on their site so that you don’t click on the link and stay on Facebook. Their goal was a long staying time at their website and that means showing and selling more advertising. That’s made Instagram so unattractive nowadays, the amount of ads. Besides that that they grab the user rights of the posted stuff. Lunatic development of big social media. TikTok is the worst  @atomicpoet it’s even worse: you can put a link in a post, but you must pay, and it’s limited to one link @atomicpoet another explanation is that links take you off of the platrofm and platofms wanna keep your attention as long as possible  @atomicpoet  Social media hates it if you put in a link pointing outside their walled garden. This is monopolies 101 stuff.  @atomicpoet @atomicpoet This must be why a lot of accounts I follow put links in a separate tweet when they post them.  @atomicpoet Of course the more accessible, and probably easier, way to do that was to copy and paste. That's what I used to do. Still did between here and Twitter, until I decided Twitter no longer deserved my thoughts. If my friends wanted to see them they could just come here. As it turned out, very few did.  @atomicpoet I remember and loved Posterous, which offered superb cross platform blogging. I published from Posterous into Blogger and into my own website (with a custom endpoint file) every time I published a post. I was really sad when Posterous was killed off.  @atomicpoet i have a story about why instagram suddenly stopped having cards in tweets. when ig got bought by fb the devs decided to disable cards for ig purely out of spite. that shits rampant. they just dont want to work well with eachother. they wanna force people onto their platforms. @atomicpoet HEAR HEAR i am so tired of the screenshots without resources or context or anything that can even take you to the source. and it even removes the person who actually said whatever it is worth sharing, but there's no good way to do anything better than superimposed text 😂 we're such idiots sometimes.  @atomicpoet This is also a bit of a problem with some fedi instances --- text shouldn't have arbitrary small limits -- you should easily be able to write an entire blog post in a message just fine. |
Gregory's Server
Does Big Social know better?
Yes, they do! As recently as 10 years ago, it was easy to cross-publish and share across social media platforms.
Instagram allowed you to publish photos to Tumblr, for example.
You could share your blog to Twitter and Facebook without their algorithms punishing you for “spam”.
But a funny thing happened.
Big Social decided to that your thoughts and ideas were their intellectual property.