... * Today's prevalent #social media could be a great...

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* Today's prevalent #social media could be a great communication channel, but it is thoroughly manipulated to optimize for profitable outcomes of the respective social media platform, and not to convey the truth. If you follow me and I post something, there is no guarantee you will ever see it, but you will see what a commercial or governmental actor pays money for to be shown to you. Not a basis on which you can solve any problem.

The list goes on.
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Like 2 January at 23:40 | Open on social.coop

6 comments

Johannes Ernst

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But it's why I work on the #Fediverse these days, the decentralized social communications network not controlled by any entity, and not beholden to making a profit. I believe, among many other things, that it has the potential to claw back communications from being manipulated-by-default to being not-manipulated-by-default. ...

2 January at 23:40 | Open on social.coop

Johannes Ernst

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And if we manage to re-establish a reliable communication channel with each other, at least for a large enough subset of people, we can also start agreeing on what the facts are again.
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2 January at 23:40 | Open on social.coop

Johannes Ernst

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There may be a golden age of information curation and fact-based learning in front of us!

(Don't laugh! If you don't believe that possibility, think of what future you believe in instead. I choose to be an optimist if a non-zero chance exists.)
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2 January at 23:41 | Open on social.coop

Johannes Ernst

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Of course, there is still a gigantic gap from the rudimentary Fediverse of today to such an age of facts, and another gigantic gap from the facts to actually finding ways of addressing the polycrisis, but I cannot see how else we could make progress.
(end)

2 January at 23:41 | Open on social.coop

Shoq

@J12t It absolutely does have that potential, which is the only reason I am here. But I am very troubled that except for some clients, the fedi has not broken out with developers as many assumed it would. Most activities still revolve around a few AP platforms. Remember all the blogging platforms we had popping up 10-20 years ago? And all those plugins, languages and libraries around them? I was hoping for that kind of explosive dynamism here. I worry about stagnation.

3 January at 0:06 | Open on mastodon.social

Johannes Ernst

@shoq I hear you. IMHO the market circumstances are not here yet where the fediverse can "break out".

Most importantly: the fediverse does not know (yet) how to attract the about 100x in money it needs to have any chance at breaking out.

Eg., money is needed to attract highly qualified people who know how to build and market products that can break out, and they can justify to their families why they work on this instead of something else.

But: IMHO we'll figure it out in the next 12 months.

3 January at 1:03 | Open on social.coop