 I want to add sone context (or really subtract some inferred context) from my recent toots about corporate social media: I’m saying this stuff on mastodon as someone who likes masto but it’s not masto evangelism. My argument is not “…so everyone should join the fediverse.” I don’t want half a billion people here. I don’t want half a billion people in any one place. That’s too much. It doesn’t work. Masto is fine, it isn’t gonna replace Twitter, I don’t want it to, and it’s not overtly scummy. 2 comments
And we, as human beings with social needs and a dependence on the internet as a major communication medium, are the host organisms. We are the nominally healthy body. And these big time platforms need the body, and have the adaptive sense to work slow so they can grow; but we already know how carcinogenic they are. We have seen everything happen. We know how it metastasizes, we know how the late stage plays out. I wish more people felt they could not start smoking just because everyone else is |
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And it’s really really possible to care only that much about it. Masto is okay, and it’s ethics aren’t transparently super fucked and extractive from the word go. It’s a low bar, masto clears it, lots of smaller sites and online communities clear it, and *none* of the hyper capitalist VC/SV/entrepreneur platforms do.
Growth for growth’s sake, scale without guard rails or fundamental ethical boundaries, is bad, period. It’s about the most literal a version of metaphorical cancer you can get.