Tag Archives: technology

These sites are very useful for tracking the user growth of federated, decentralized social networks as well as their geographic location, site-wide themes, and primary languages. I’m also intrigued by Socialhome, which departs from the “river of statuses” social media layout to use a tile-based layout.

The problem with this fediverse is that Diaspora’s protocol isn’t compatible with OStatus, which is used by Mastodon and GNU social. Friendica and Hubzilla (which forked off from Friendica) are compatible with both protocols via extensions.

I also notice that the most populated servers – https://pawoo.net, https://mstdn.jp, https://mastodon.social (all Mastodon), joindiaspora.com and http://gnusocial.no all have likely hundreds of thousands of users.

Decentralized social media and System 1 Thinking

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Reading this criticism of social media platforms by Motherboard, I had quite a few questions, mostly centered around “does this apply as well to decentralized social media platforms as well as to centralized social silos?”

Decentralizing and open-sourcing the biggest web content services – microblogging sites, video hosting sites, photo sharing/storage sites – would satisfy the goal of reducing censorship. But:

  • would it only reward and accelerate faster System 1 thinking over slower System 2 thinking?
  • Would it help reduce instances of abuse?
  • If this were to be as decentralized as email, would it allow for both big conglomerate-owned and small business-owned hosts to communicate with each other equally?
  • How would this decentralization of social media interface with democracy?

Social media’s interfacing with democracy also been hotly debated for years, with its early centralized instances being praised as liberating to protesters in less-democratic societies, while it’s more recent instances are criticized for having rewarded and armed the ascendancy of more reactive, illiberal politics.

This, of course, has only taken place within the last 20 years. To compare the Internet to the enduring nearly-600-year utility of the movable-type printing press, which has helped propagate movements as varied as the Reformation and the Age of Enlightment, is disproportionate by scale of time. We still have yet to see how far that Internet-based communication systems will take us and accelerate our scientific, academic and political development with similar speed and depth as movable type. So far, it has enabled the development of the largest encyclopedia in human history, a development that would astound the likes of Vannevar Bush.

But what of social media, or specifically of microblogging? Is there a tangential benefit or empowering utility to microblogging? Does microblogging’s river of statuses help spread knowledge? And is there a benefit to decentralizing this tool beyond a few siloed hosts who compete against each other?

What we do know is that it is highly useful to journalists, activists, politicians and those who rely upon real-time, first-hand information provision and reception. However, if the tools also allow for others to poison the river with false information, microblogging becomes a liability. But will microblogging advance us beyond allowing people to report news, pop off at each other and start social movements quicker than traditional posts?

I think there is still some benefit to microblogging of statuses and asides, even decentralized open-source microblogging, but it doesn’t replace longer-form multimedia expressions. There is still a utility for WordPress as there is for Mastodon as there is for MediaGoblin as there is for PeerTube. They can all work together, work in decentralized server networks and talk with each other.

What about more traditional blogging and its benefits? The suite of blogging services which became available in the 2000s with the growth of RSS feeds and media enclosures allowed writers and broadcasters to publish and livestream multimedia works outside of the limitations of print and broadcast media, as well as to reach Internet-based audiences with greater flexibility than previously. Of course, this also allowed for System 1 thinking to take greater precedence than ever before, as filters for self-checking were less necessary than before. However, this blogging landscape was less centralized than the current microblogging scene. Blogger, LiveJournal, Xanga, Dreamjournal, Typepad, self-served WordPress sites, etc., all serve RSS feeds for those who wish to catch content from all of those sites. Did democracy also decline with this growth of blogging and podcasting sites?

Of course, what has also changed from earlier blogging – in a BIG way – is how people reply to posts. More sites are dropping Disqus or even their own comment systems, delegating to social media silos the job of hosting replies to link-syndicated content. On-site comment moderation and hosting is declining as centralized social media networks host the commentariat and are, through Facebook Connect, sometimes integrated into the on-site comment section.

This may slightly change if decentralized social media networks – enabled with ActivityPub – become the hosts of such embedded comment systems. But Facebook’s closest decentralized open-source cousins in layout structure are Diaspora and Hubzilla, while Mastodon hangs much closer to Twitter’s more haphazard style of treating every reply to a post as an original post in itself (a layout which has been criticized as elevating abusive posters and their replies).

We have spent the last few years despairing about how the centralized social networks have unleashed an abusive commentariat or maybe a more abusive, combative aspect of ourselves, or even both. Maybe this has a lot to do with the design of the system – with haphazard layout giving high visibility to every single reply to a post, with centralization of social media around a few massive hosts and their apps, with not allowing the full capability of filtering who sees/shares/replies to one’s posts, with prioritization around a constant river of media rather than a more deliberate layout, with a reliance on self-serve advertisements as a source of financial sustenance.

There’s a lot to “unfuck” about social media now that we have decentralized, customizable alternatives which don’t have to exactly replicate the designs of the silos. The silos were designed and programmed to keep users using the sites as much as possible in order to keep advertisers flush w/ cash, no matter how combative and toxic that many of these users became against each other within close digital proximity. A decentralized, federated social media shouldn’t have to rely on replicating the “addictive”, constant-river designs of Facebook and Twitter in order to attract users, although I understand that this is what we have to deal with in making or using open-source alternatives to anything that’s corporate, proprietary and popular.

Decentralized social media – basically, going beyond mere (micro)blogging to sharing/favoriting/quote-linking posts between servers – has an opportunity to serve a greater purpose to humanity and come under a more democratized governance than what we have seen in the last decade. But it also has an opportunity to be moved away from faster, more combative “System 1” thinking to slower, more thoughtful “System 2” thinking.

Twitter/Medium/Blogger co-founder Evan Williams told NYT that he’s sorry if Trump wouldn’t be president without having a Twitter account. His profile in the NYT dwells a lot on how the promise of mass media freedom offered by the largest corporate-owned social media/microblogging sites turned quickly into the toxicity we now know of.

I don’t know if the tech is to blame, since there are an insane number of factors which play roles in how this transition happened. I can cite how the ability to share posts allows users to irresponsibly traffic content which appeal to our base emotions. I can cite how corporate, centralized social networks – driven by advertisement-based profit motives – are the primary couriers of such disinformation and misinformation. I can cite how privacy and self-protection tools have not caught up with the exponential growth of these services.

The opinion from Cliff Watson in the article that these micro/blogging tools, even Williams’s current venture Medium, are relics from the apex of the Obama era, and are not ready for the post-Obama world, is a sign of the transition from the content freedom which was embraced for the last decade to an era of content responsibility to protect ourselves from psyops and abuse.

Treat Government Like an App?

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Thinking out loud:

Try thinking about law as the “source code” of an app called “government”.

It’s difficult to make a “hard fork” of the source code or write a new app from scratch that does “the same thing but better” with similar resources, but if the source code is a mess, the app is not going to work for all, or even most users.

The background, intention, language and timing of a contribution of source code and its contributor matters greatly in how that piece of source code is written and how it functions in the app. Trash in, trash out.

If one doesn’t plan out the goal or vision for the app and program the app with this vision in mind, you get an app that is messy and resource-intensive.

Just because the app presently attracts a commanding number of users doesn’t mean that the app is still the best in it’s class, only that it attracted its greatest number of users when it was the most viable compared to the other options. Now, most may only use it because it is what most of their friends and family may use or have used for a long time.

That app can always fail its users in some way, even if it’s a one-time massive screw-up. And if another app offers a better system at that moment, the formerly-dominant app will lose users and market share to the newer, better-featured app.

From Digg to Reddit. From Friendster to Myspace to Facebook. From IE to Chrome. From this government order to the next constitutional order.

MergeVR is Lovely

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I believe that the #MergeVR goggles are the best platform for cheap VR/AR headsets.

Not only are they made of stretchy, flexible Nerf foam, but they also have a pluggable hole for a smartphone rear camera, allowing for both VR and AR in the same headset.

these two features – an AR camera hole and Nerf foam – are *crucial*. No other headset maker – not even Oculus or HtC – have these features yet.

Mastodon

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Reading on Mashable about a new free and open-source social networking platform called Mastodon.

There are quite a few platforms like this: Diaspora, Friendica, GNU social, Hubzilla. They are software which you can install to host your own social network server but also allow you to connect, share, mention and tag other users on other servers.

This would make social networking more like how email works: Gmail, AOL, OutlookDOTcom/Hotmail, and Yahoo users can all email each other without having to be on the same host.

This is the opposite of how Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn​ don’t connect to each other. I imagine federated social networks becoming much more used if the big proprietary networks bottom out.

TV and Twitter Have a Hold on Trump’s Mind

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#MediaStudies

Which medium matters more for this admin: TV or Internet?

The camera-addicted chattering class is addicted to every bit of drama from this admin like crack cocaine. But the Republican president is more native and addicted to ad-driven TV than he is to his Twitter account. TV cameras helped him thrive from a “wealthy” troubled reality TV host to a Twitter-abusing fiend to a joke presidential candidate to our 45th presidency, all within a span of 13 years.

This admin feeds upon the live broadcasting cameras in the press pool. This admin subsists on the cameras at his “campaign” rallies. This admin feeds on subservient one-way peepholes projecting his aura to the receiving, angered “audience”.

Cameras are designed to receive an image at one end and expel a simulation of that image out the other end to an audience who can’t talk back to the image they see.

And cameras, like the most “objective” reporter who merely quotes power verbatim like an automaton to the masses, are projective things. They don’t talk back to power as it is happening.

Social media microblogging is a backchannel for replying back to a simulation of power. It is reactive to power, and has exponentially “democratized” the chattering class through a few key gatekeepers. A reactive backchannel masticates and mangles the simulation, but is not able to project itself back to the front end of the camera.

Imagine a two-way camera apparatus which would project the backchannel’s reaction in real-time to the eyes of power while the power is being broadcast.

Imagine this admin watching social media’s reaction in real time while giving press conferences.

Or imagine if there were no cameras present at these events. No gatekeeping ad-driven cameras projecting power in one direction, no gatekeeping ad-driven reporters.

Some how, we can give less passive acceptance to the one-way, helpless acceptance of the image of power – and its inherent authoritarian tendency – upon which this admin thrives.

The backchannel, as troubled and violent as it is, must become the frontchannel.

I think Google’s VR headset will flop. The Pixel and the Google Home will succeed, but the Daydream headset doesn’t have much utility. It’s nice looking (cloth is a nice touch), but it’s missing extensibility. It’s doing what Samsung Gear VR’s already doing. It’s not even as functional as, say, Worse, two words are missing from this conversation: “AUGMENTED REALITY.” Where’s the affordable crossover between VR and AR? At most, Daydream looks good only for the hardware specs and the in-world user interface. But there’s no utility beyond wearing it for a few minutes. I’d rather go for Merge VR. At least it will allow you a coverable hole in the headset for your camera.
One of my fave sci-fi short stories is “Flash Crowd” by Larry Niven. Written in the 1970s, it depicts much of what the world would be like if we had teleportation as a main mode of personal transport. Replace “newstaper” with “blogger” and you’d essentially update this short story by a bit. And smartphones, definitely need those. Meanwhile, we are on the cusp of autonomous, self-driving taxis. These may be the closest thing we have to personal teleportation.