Gregory's ServerI suspect (and please note that this is really difficult to prove so it's just, like, my onionman) that through the explosive commoditization of software over the last 20 years we've all learned a kind of helpless adversarialism in our interactions with computers.
Because we don't control them! We have to fight tooth and nail for every affordance. So we either frame everything as a demand, or we just.. give up and live with spending our whole lives in a panopticon. There's no middle ground because outrage is our only leverage.
One of the reasons I'm here at all, and not in the online equivalent of a cabin in the woods, is that this silly fediverse thing is probably the closest we've ever come to pushing back on that in a way that can be appealing to the mainstream.
And you might scoff at that, because it's really popular to pretend that only nerds live here, but really: nothing like this has ever achieved even half of what this has so far. Nothing like this has ever been a viable alternative to corporate-run media for anyone not well versed in technology, except maybe bittorent.
It's fucking messy, but it's messy like humans instead of messy like corporations. I think we can fix human-scale problems, I don't think we even have a seat at the table to fixing corporate ones.
https://hackers.town/users/calcifer/statuses/110531948483085056
@megmac this resonates with me so much too. I have not enjoyed or stayed on any corporate social media. Part of why this feels different is how people behave differently but that is tied in with the lack of algorithms pushing reach and engagement and the corporate incentives making bad human impacts.