The "public square" talk is pure marketing from Twitter. It began in 2009 when Iranians held mass protests against their government and used Twitter as a way to share information as the state had turned off SMS texts. This led to wall-to-wall coverage on US news channels as Iran is of course denoted as an enemy state, and here was Twitter, an American social network helping spread free speech. This would happen again in 2011 during the so-called Arab Spring.
It's politics. Until relatively recently, the expectation that social media could be moderated even while acting as a "public square" (which was never a "base expectation of all social media" for anyone outside of a politically vested minority) was not controversial. Now people want to make "algorithms" illegal.
There are so many sites that all follow the same template... To sell sponsorships & ads and to companies, and then slap the illusion that public participation is vibrant. The only good model for a social site these days are smaller communities specialized around a niche, like specific cars or musician communities based on genres.
Even back in the day, people had extensive problems with community forums because operators usually worked based on collusion and favoritism and ad profit. There are far too many agendas involved in major "social" communities, and social is in quotes, because if you look at the tools dedicated to communication on these platforms, they barely facilitate communication and connection beyond public fandom, a lot of that is based on bot traffic.
If you look at live streaming, a ton of generic comments flood celebrity sessions, many operate chat bots to make their live streaming sessions look "active" with users. I think users are now beginning to wise up to the façade that social media is not really helpful once it grows big.
I think Jack's ideal of a social square is fundamentally at odds with the reality of how these social squares actually behave past a certain scale, especially with regards to moderation. Bluesky's approach to decentralised moderation has been really interesting to watch and seems to be working quite well. Granted, I don't think users should be responsible for it to the extent that they currently are, but it seems to be effective.
Yeah, I wasn't allowed to submit the original title, even though I tried to, and figured that dang would get to it if the thread got traction. I'm actually not 100% sure what the best course of option would be in this situation, but maybe I'm just not very imaginative with editing.
I'm at a point where I do not understand why social media is such a big deal™, with the exception of the prioritization of sharing breaking news and things like that. Otherwise, I'm at a loss trying to figure out why talk over platforms and protocols is significant. Much of it must have something to do with liberal ideals over the right to self-expression/speech and social media as the premier communications method. Yet still, I remain at a loss...
- The loss of the 3rd place in America due to commercialization of public spaces
- A lot of communities depend on social media for their existence. Ex: artists depend on social media networking for their livelihood. Traditionally they'd depend on a wealthy patron to support them but nowadays they support themselves off of a bunch of moderately well off patrons. The same applies to many types of musicians, content creators, etc.
- Social media presence and networking is weirdly important in the FOSS space for patronage so nowadays a lot of devs lean on it as well.
- Social media has become a support network for a lot of people. Jokingly said where everyone lends around the same 20 dollars.
- Niche communities only really exist on social media. Before "big social media" they existed on forums and before that they existed on the one big social media, the BBS. Without the internet these communities would just wither over time.
- Social media is really important for Open Source Intelligence.
> - Niche communities only really exist on social media. Before "big social media" they existed on forums and before that they existed on the one big social media, the BBS. Without the internet these communities would just wither over time.
I don't really see much "niche communities" striving on social medias really. There are less of them, but there are still a lot of old school forums which I believe still do a better job for small communities. I am still connecting almost daily to 2 of them + a few others more infrequently. I think the oldest was created in 1998. It is much smaller than at its peak but if you look at statistics it has been showing stable activity in the last 10 years with the usual seasonal variations (much lower activity in summer). I think there is still a place for those.
That feels like a list of the best things social media offers, but not the typical use case. The typical use case seems to be arguing, trolling, toxicity, and showing off.
Sure but your average user isn't sticking around for that. At least on Bluesky, Twitter, and Mastodon.
The average user doesn't really post all that often. They don't even necessarily retweet or like posts that often.
The average user is consuming content produced by your "high quality content" users. The artists, musicians, youtubers, streamers, journalists, blog writers, podcasters, and other types of content creators. They are the actual value add to the platform. The make content that the average user cares about consuming and maybe the average user pitches in their 2p here or there.
There are other types of users of course but by and large, you are going to expect that your average user is mostly consuming instead of contributing. Some platforms (like instagram) may encourage users to post their own content for their close friend groups but platforms like bluesky aren't really about that in practice.
IG is like mostly ads and product placement mixed with user content now. In fact it encourages regular people to do product placement, even if the actual product is a tourist destination.
Yeah. They built their platform as a close interpersonal platform ala facebook but much like facebook it's largely devolved into a wannabe tiktok-twitter amalgam.
For me it’s that it seems increasingly absurd that a handful of companies control such a large share of speech. I’m not a leftist even by American standards, but I see the current social media landscape as a privatization of the public square and this actually is a problem space that can be solved by the right protocols. We were blessed with open networking and web protocols many decades ago; we should also have open social protocols IMHO.
The problem is that social media is not and was never designed to be a replacement to public square..
Social media started as tool to allow people to stay in touch after their time together came to an end and eventually evolved\merged with forums as a tool to bring people with similar interest together.
The thing we have today that kind resemble a public square is a side effect of then needing to make money, that they decided to do by using ads.
In order to make more money with ads they need to keep people around for longer so they started taking content and spreading around to random people.
Kind like a public square but not really because you need to keep advertisers happy, so you cannot allow any speech in your platform that displeases the advertisers, or at least you need to ensure ads will not show next to speech that make advertisers unhappy or else they are going away and you now have a money problem (exactly twitter situation).
Public square is a end to end relation.. You go somewhere and speak and whoever is in ear shoot listen, if they don't want to listen they get away, if a lot of people that does not want to listen get together they make you leave, but you can always come back later.
The moment you add any kind of platform in the middle, specially one with an algorithm that decide what you should see, you are now bound to the platform rules and biases. And that is no longer a public square.
Social media today is, in my opinion, more akin to personal ads or letters to the editor in a newspaper then to a public square. It will spread your speech further then a public square but is bound to the rules and biases of the newspaper publishing then.
And I don't think any protocol can solve this. All a protocol can do is allow you to created biased silos where different types of speech live and they might or might not federate to other silos.
Basically federation allow you to turn social media in glorified forums, but it will never really replace public square.
> Social media started as tool to allow people to stay in touch after their time together came to an end and eventually evolved\merged with forums as a tool to bring people with similar interest together.
This actually isn't really true. It may be true for social media in it's current incarnation but the origin of social media, the bulletin board systems/BBS (and their progenitor the Community Memory) started as a means for hobbyists to share information and coordinate projects.
It would only be as BBS grew in popularity that they became a kind of digital public square/3rd place. Then with their decline, the graphical web/http based hobbyist forums (and eventually image boards) would rise repeating the pattern.
It would only be the modern incarnation of social media that would originate as an attempt to serve as a "digital rolodex for friends and family" but really out of all the incarnations of social media that would be a relatively short lived oddity before folding back into the hobbyist forums -> public square pattern.
But what is being discussed is social media current incarnation and that is exactly what i talking about. I even kind address your point when i said that it evolved\merge into forums, that were themselves an evolution of bulletin boards that in turn were evolution of older concepts.
But i don't see BBS or forums really as a digital public square anymore then current social media is. They were really silos were you would find people with similar interest, but was ultimately subjected to the will of the board owner or its moderators.
I see those more as an digital version of clubs then a public square.
Also the modern social media version of hobbyist forums\bulletin boards was also a short lived one and has being replaced by the addictive algorithm aimed at capturing our attention as much as possible that we have today.
I do not see anything in the past that could resemble what we have today, the closet parallel would be addictive drugs.
Surely some of the old community building aspects are still there in some platforms, but the biggest problem is that now we are seen a new generation of platforms being born from start aimed at the single goal of capturing our attention and get us hooked.
Semantic arguments about what is and isn't a public square aside, the salient point is that an enormous share of our national and international dialogues about culture and politics take place on a handful of social media platforms. Those platforms have sufficient power that state actors _indirectly_ use them to influence elections (and if the platforms can be _indirectly_ manipulated to influence elections, then the people with hands directly on the levers of these platforms can necessarily directly influence those elections).
The goal isn't, as you suggest, to eliminate bias, it's to democratize control. Consequently "all a protocol can do is allow you to created biased silos where different types of speech live which may or may not federate" is a perfectly good outcome! The goal posts are not and never were "eliminate bias" or "force everyone to hear opinions they don't want to hear".
Well, silos being a perfect good outcome is debatable.. I for one don't agree.. But that is already possible today, just not at the escale of most social medias..
But let's be realistic, that will never happen..
A enormous amount of dialog is taking place in just a few social media because that is the majority of the people are.. That is not a problem you solve by just throwing more tech into it..
And that is part of the problem, while people share the same space kind of equally, their ideas do not because of the biases of the platform.. And people end-up being flood with one only one side of the discussion whatever they like it or not..
Everything that bluesky aim to do already exist in some form or another but it never got traction simple because people are not there..
In my opinion a much more realistic future is countries starting to ban foreign social medias, as it is already starting to happen. Not that this would be any better then what we have today..
Truth is that is is an extremely complex problem with no simple solution..
> Well, silos being a perfect good outcome is debatable.. I for one don't agree.. But that is already possible today, just not at the escale of most social medias..
The goal isn't to produce silos, it's to distribute control. A bunch of subreddits under the control of Reddit Inc isn't "distributed control" even if Reddit allows moderators a degree of autonomy.
> But let's be realistic, that will never happen..
That's vapid defeatism. It absolutely _can_ happen, and we know this because plenty of other layers of the stack are decentralized (e.g., the Internet, the web, etc) and the decentralized social media world is growing year over year. While it still constitutes a small share of the overall social media landscape, these things are nonlinear, so all it takes is a single inflection point which could well be BlueSky or similar.
> Everything that bluesky aim to do already exist in some form or another but it never got traction simple because people are not there..
No social media app got traction until it did. I'm not saying BlueSky will be _the_ app that gets big, but "apps like BlueSky haven't made it big yet, therefor BlueSky won't make it big" could have applied as easily to every early social media network. Moreover, the Fediverse is already pretty large and it's a fair bit more tedious and less polished than BlueSky. One could easily imagine a privacy-concerned polity like the EU, or some Nordic state standing up their own AT proto instance for their citizens, which could serve as an inflection point.
the difference is that when you distribute control you also distribute the people and the discussions..
if instead of reddit you had thousands smaller sites\forums replacing each subreddit, that in principle achieve the same things as reddit does today, it would not have near the impact on society that reddit has..
today everyone is together in a sense participating in the same discussion and that is were the impact from social media in society comes from..
when you spread the control, you also spread the people and if you spread the people you also spread the discussions.. so instead of having one big conversation you have hundreds or even thousands of smaller ones.. and that does not have the same impact..
going even further, people tend to look for places with other like minded people, so you also end up with echo chambers where you are only exposed to the side of the conversation that you already agree with.. and very little of the other sides leak trough.. that diminishes the discussions even more.. there is no point in having a debate when the other people agree with you..
we kind of have a mix of both today happening in many fields, one in special is politics.. each side of the political spectrum have their own smaller groups acting as echo chambers to their members and it is where they coordinate but both groups also clash on the open social medias.. likely this is also happening on other places but not at the same scale..
and i am not trying to be defeatist, it is just a matter of analyzing how people behave or have behaved in the past..
people today are on the social medias they are because it is where they have being for a long time and they stay out of inertia.. add to that that those are the places where the people they want to see are as well, whatever that be friends, famous people, random content creators or whatever.. and in turn those other people are on those same social medias because that is where the people that watch then are..
so beside the inertia you also have a chicken and egg situation.. people do not move to other social media because there is no content for them to consume.. and there is no content because there is no one to consume it..
the behavior that we have seen happen for most social medias is a shift across generations, where one generation want to escape the previous one eyes and then the previous one follow.. people started on facebook, and if memory serves me right, the next generations moved to instagram to escape their parents that where on facebook, eventually the parents moved to instagram, then to snapschat and so on, now they are on tiktok and we are already seen older generations moving there as well.. likely in a few years kids then will be on the next one whatever it is and people will follow..
now, there are a few special and\or niche cases, like reddit or deviantart, but i don't see those going anywhere anytime soon, we will have to see what impact AI has on those communities, but i think it is still too soon to tell..
Another one is twitter that i consider a special case because of how people use it.. majority of people there only follow big accounts, follow news, current events, etc.. it is a place where most people only consume and even when they post it is usually only to interact with those big accounts or events..
Now.. lets imagine that twitter blow up today and be gone tomorrow, and with Elon we never know.. But if that ever happen what i think will happen at first is that people will spread out but over time they will flock back into one single platform, it could very well be bluesky, or threads, or something else entirely.. but that will happen organically over time..
and i will go as far as to say that the platforms will have very little influence on the outcome of this.. and that whoever comes on top will be mostly because they were luck and not because they did something super right and\or the other did something super wrong..
also, i believe that whoever comes next to replace twitter will face the same challenges that twitter have, regardless of how much jack want and works to avoid it, because 99% of the people just want something that works, they do not want to worry about content moderation, federation and whatever..
now, i do see people moving away from twitter in the short to medium term for a number of reasons.. it could either happen fast because it is blocked somewhere or it could happen slowly because every day people is slowly getting feed up with it.. or even a mix of both..
but the point is, some external factor is making people move.. Elon making twitter bad in some people opinion is making then want to move, if Elon had never bought Twitter then people would not be moving..
And if that move really happens then my guess is on either Bluesky or Threads coming on top, and not because of any technical aspect on those platforms but because of Jack Dorsey was behind Bluesky and Mark Zuckerberg is behind Threads and it is know that people look for what is familiar to then.. And we will end up back where we started just with a different name..
I guess i was overly simplistic when i said that it will never happen when really i meant is that it will never happen naturally.. it can happen because an external force as it has happened before.. And like i said, i do see a chance of countries starting to ban foreign controlled social media and we could very well move to a situation where each country have their own instance and those instances start being federated to each other..
I personally don't thing the tech to make that happen is friendly enough for the non technical crowd yet, but we are surely moving in that direction..
Some people before social media arrived wondered the same thing. Having so many people in one place was a spectacle and something to see, but before that smaller communities whether they were forums or something else were generally a lot more fun.
Wish they had a similar discovery page for labellers too. I'd like to enable more "gimmicky" ones than I have, like "beans remover" that tags any posted photos containing beans.
It's a real effect. I got blocked from following Brian Krebs because someone (on a different server) said someone else couldn't be a Nazi because they were black, I said being black doesn't disqualify someone from being a Nazi, and someone on Brian Krebs's server reported it as racism.
I only got this reversed two months later by making my own account on Brian Krebs's server and calling out the admin in a public toot on that server.
He is, and I was. You cannot follow people who are on a server that has blocked your server. Your follow request will be ignored, and his new toots will not be delivered to your server. If you were already following him, this follow relationship is deleted on his end, his server will deliver an unfollow notification, and then will not deliver his new toots to your server.
You can still view his profile on his server using a web browser, which is not the same as following him.
I'm talking about Mastodon. Yes, I could also just go to his profile page on a web browser. I could also turn my screen off and go outside. I could also ask someone else what he said. Or read his blog. You're obviously missing the point.
Nothing about it works the same way an actual public square does.
It's a coliseum.