We think the end of the world is something that arrives all at once, but it is a series of progressively louder collapses of the way of things around us until we realize it has already arrived here and only just now its bow wake has caught up to stir us into an awareness of its presence.

I wish we wrote obituaries for ecosystems, we sorely need them.

hell yeah!

Good point

I agree that ads are a crucial difference and also you have agency along many dimensions such as how posts are portrayed to you from user interface look, to defaults for NSFW content, to autoplay or not autoplay… all of that is agency to me that cuts off the potential for a toxic relationship at the root by making it so whatever part of the experience is unhealthy for an individual can probably be tweaked or minimized. Corporate social media just makes the UI however the hell they decide to make it and that is that until a huge amount of accessibility pressure forces some option to be added.

https://brutaldon.org/

Brutaldon is a great example of this accessibility through endless tweakability, you can view your Mastodon feed in a user interface that looks, feels and engages with you entirely differently, and there is no incentive for instances to block this kind of end user tweaking like there is for corporations.

I have never had an issue with pure chronological feeds, I think there is an intuitive fear that you won’t see everything or that important things are drowned out the more you add to a chronological feed, but in my experience even in very large feeds paradoxically after a certain point every interesting account you add makes the feed more reactive and dynamic to what is happening in the outside world since it is unlikely you are bound to check your feed when someone just happens to post to your feed, and you are rather more likely to see people that are posting on your feed because it has something to do with something happening in that moment such as a sports game or a breaking piece of news… because if you don’t follow too many high volume accounts most accounts won’t be posting to your feed most of the time. Your feed goes from being a short collection you browse all the way through to shooting stars in the sky above, you only see the ones that happen to go by right as you are looking in the sky, but that doesn’t mean that it is random that the shooting star is streaking across the sky in this moment… in terms of this metaphor.

Even still, to me the idea of an algorithmic feed isn’t necessarily bad, it just feels like exactly the kind of overengineered, manipulative and needlessly quantitative “solution” I typically hate. Beyond that kneejerk reaction though I can see the use for viewing my chronological feed and then apply algorithmic temporary tweaks to the raw feed to stress different views. Maybe I get tired of seeing the same posts so I apply an algorithm to sort out repeats, and thin out posts from accounts dominating sections of the feed (maybe by artificially spacing them out elsewhere in your feed in a transparent way?).

Of course what the people building social media software usually mean when they say “algorithmic feed” is exactly what Bluesky is doing, it is the desire to locate power in centralized entities that can influence the feed even if it is ostensibly open or… if everyone spontaneously decided to all leave… could become decentralized…

edit I also like to imagine algorithms that could bring up much older posts from interesting accounts in a way that pleasantly skips around in time, or maybe an algorithm that takes every “boost” or “repost” in your feed and temporarily adds in the posts from the boosted or reposted account into your feed and marks them with a “would you like to follow?” button? Something between the ‘subscribed’ and ‘all’ feed might be interesting and useful.

I walked away from my mastodon account for months and months, maybe a year? I don’t know… but then one day I said “ah, I want to use mastodon” and I logged back in and started using it again.

I should download an archive of my posts in case it disappears before I log in again but I never expected it to be truly permanent, so whatever… and that just feels nice.

Nobody cares if you leave the Fediverse, there are probably people that will be happy if you leave if you spend enough time here hahaha, but at the end of the day there is no structural incentive trying to ensare you here if it isn’t doing something good for you and to me that is genuinely kind architectural design.

It makes me sad seeing people not on the Fediverse slipping into believing it is the format of Instagram that makes it inherently bad, not that it is owned by explicitly ideologically rightwing oligarchs, is monetized in an unhealthy way and is leveraged as a tool of mass manipulation… no it must be the simple joy of having a diverse mix of images, videos and text from accounts you find interesting served up to you in a way you can instantly react and connect with other human beings through… yes that is the evil thing!!!

I don’t know what to say to that other than… I had to read the Crucible in High School for English Class and like… I guess I understood the basic gist of the story???

sigh

CORPORATE social media

No, that is the healthiest/least draining thing to do, the militant and most effective thing to do is relentlessly shit on corporate social media with your old corpo account while moving the rest of your social identity to the fediverse.

Obnoxiously link to the fediverse, talk about it unprompted, strip mine the relevance of your posts to the algorithm before you leave.

I am not saying everyone has to do this, I am not even necessarily recommending it as a general suggestion but this is clearly the best way to hate on billionaire social media and fight back against it. If you have the energy, don’t throw away the value of your social connections to the corpo algorithm without first converting as much as possible of it to awareness of the fediverse and how shitty corpo social media is, if your objective is to fight as hard as possible.

edit corporate social media is toxic as hell, I make this point not as a judgement of people who just log out and never log back in to corporate social media, take care of yourself, this strategy is for if you have the mental headspace to do it.

Do Both

Yes but part of the selling point a lot of the time does perversely come back to US-centric companies providing the leaders of Governments and Corporations a Backdoor-As-A-Service product to force upon those lower down in the pecking order.

Oh yeah, I am livid about that ughh.

I hate Android with a bloodcurdling passion but yes.

Apple has the most condescending design philosophy I know of and I will never tolerate the degree of suffocation Apple imposes on devices you have purchased and own.

Also Android has F-Droid which makes Android categorically superior to iOS.

https://f-droid.org/en/

Get all of your core basic apps like flashlight apps, image gallery apps, file browser apps etc… from F-Droid.

Samsung? I hate samsung and yet I have an older used flagship samsung phone and ultimately that is what I recommend doing with Android, always buy near top of the line phones (samsung or otherwise), just go used and older until you hit a price point you are comfortable with. This reduces the headaches you will run into with Android a lot since you are always getting the experience Android was meant to give and that designers focused on especially when it comes to the hardware and camera + camera app.

I recommend Swappa for buying used electronics/phones since the website is dedicated to only those kinds of sales and provides a lot of confidence and comfort vs. buying off a random ebay seller.

https://swappa.com/

edit ALSO on Android you can change your launcher/homescreen, the idea that you can’t do this on iOS blows my mind even though it doesn’t surprise me…

DINO

Where I draw the line for whether it is ethical to light things on fire is when they start destroying rare knowledge and books as fast as possible for no other reason than to hoard and obscure knowledge for private benefit.

It is one thing to fund the creation of knowledge and then hoard it, it is entirely another to begin actively attacking and destroying pre-existing publicly shared resources of knowledge in the pursuit of monetizing access to that very knowledge behind a gargantuan profit motivated entity.

Meh just accelerate with F-force and then switch to G-force when you are up to speed and vice versa when slowing down, problem solved!

I don’t like Harris but Biden was far less competent and suited to the moment.

Obama’s biggest mistake was playing it safe with a DEI hire for an ideologically bankrupt, incompetent old white guy for his VP.

Harris doesn’t have charisma with normal people (though she is apparently great at getting fundraising from the rich and powerful…) but at least she showed some kind of awareness of how to play politics unlike Biden who stumbled through his presidency and failed campaign for re-election like a dementia patient sleepwalking out onto a busy highway.

Me neither