At the very least, I can respect that LinkedIn is assigned a purpose for the social networking which it facilitates: doing business.
Everything within and about it is constructed for the purpose of companies and talents to communicate with each other. All brand pages are mandated to be just that: pages for companies. Group forums must exist for the purpose of networking among professionals and businesses. Profiles are designed as resumes. Very transparently corporate and capitalist.
What purpose do Facebook, Twitter, BlueSky, etc all serve?
They have none. These sites of the Big Tech variety are all expensive tech demos, playing at a pastiche of “community”. And look where that has taken their owners and users. Look where it has taken whole countries.
I no longer believe that a social networking site should exist without a purpose or target audience.
And now far-right types are winning the propaganda war and bending these purposeless social networking sites to the purpose of reverting every liberalizing political development of the last century.
Progressive, solidarity-oriented political types are on the backfoot because they found each other through these purposeless sites and did not expect/were not prepared for the possibility that their relationships or priorities would be threatened when oppositional powers gained the access to give these sites a contrary purpose.
Now these purposeless sites have given up on moderation, or have even reversed themselves entirely to satisfy the reactionary, authoritarian politics which have gained ascendancy since the 2010s.
Those who are disturbed by these developments are encouraging each other to dump Twitter for BlueSky, or even to give up on social networking altogether in favor of meatspace meetings.
Even after all of this, I’m not too keen on the idea of giving up on social networking entirely. But I am very keen on giving up on this social networking which has no theme, no purpose, no general focus.
I also want to give up on microblogging as a social networking exercise. The nearly two decades of attempts to create a distributed, decentralized, FOSS answer to Twitter or Facebook have not addressed the behavioral question at the heart of social microblogging: when does a microblog post or its authoring account cross the line from free expression into anti-social behavior, and how can it be successfully, sustainably moderated?
In April, it will have been 20 years since “microblog” or “tumblelog” were first identified as a format of blogging. The moderation of social microblogging has increasingly degraded with the number of features added to microblogging sites.
Lemmy is, at least in theory, a better application of the ActivityPub protocol than Mastodon/Misskey/etc. At the very least, Lemmy has some hierarchy to its moderation, in which the owners of the website can at least pretend to delegate discretion and moderation to topics of their own interest, while the microblogging apps like Mastodon struggle to scale moderation to every user.
Microblogging, on the other hand, should be returned to the generality of the blog, divorced from the industrialization of frictionless posting to a shared, common interface. Facebook and Twitter both integrating a common interface for posting and viewing posts, incapacitating the ability to design one’s own profile, was a massive progenitor of the downward social media spiral, one that, to an extent, Tumblr managed to avoid with its customizable blog profiles.
So:
- Progressive-minded people should learn to love the blog again, in its own right.
- progressives should also learn how to discuss in shared forums again, especially in distributed link aggregators like Lemmy
- Blogging and discussion hosts should have a purpose and theme for their existence;
- Wikipedia remains undefeated and unshittified.
