Hey nerds I worked pretty hard on this,
https://medium.com/tootsuite/this-isnt-about-social-media-this-is-about-control-112dea8a21fd
and I'm trying to help get more people on the platform. Maybe y'all want to read it? I am extremely vain but I think you'll agree with the premise.
@Mainebot i totally missed this, and it's already SUPER late but i promise to read it first thing tomorrow
@nightpool hey, whenever you have time it's ok :)
@Mainebot it's a good article! it's a little light on details, but that's fine! it's a blog article, not a treatise or anything lol.
I think I take a little bit of an issue with the framing around a chronological feed—honestly, most people don't care if their posts are in order or not in order or whatever. they care about the *motive*. people *care* about the fact that their facebook feed serves facebook's interest, not theirs. they care about the fact that facebook has a stranglehold on all news media -
@Mainebot and they care about the fact that their posts could disappear at any time, if facebook or twitter or tumblr or instagram decide they're not worth the trouble. if an advertiser decides they need to "clean up" or "protect their brand".
or if they're embarrassing to facebook—then there's a real risk they could be cut off from their oral history and *the vast majority of social interaction on the internet*.
@Mainebot like, we talk a lot about the nazis on twitter but seriously compared to facebook twitter isn't even a thing! facebook is so so so big that it's hard to wrap your head around.
and these aren't abstract concepts. *everything* i listed has concrete, real examples i could list from just the past 12 months! it's wild. it's fucking wild.
I agree with all your points, but I was constrained by the length. I'm thinking about a follow-up because it's worth expansion.
Also, it's hard to draw a direct comparison between Mastodon and Facebook, because fb is just... Feature complicated. A lot if different parts.
@Mainebot and you definitely gesture towards a lot of that in your article, and its a really good article, but it feels weird to focus on the linear timeline as a lynchpin here. Id be happy with a open social media platform that showed me posts in a completely random order. hell i'd probably be pretty happy with a non-chronological one!
the more fundamental thing is how these corporations twist and our distort social spaces into a parody of themselves, centered around advertisers. it's downright dystopian