@af@playground.bonfire.cafe

Hi there! My name's Antoine-Frédéric, I'm a sociology student writing about social media and how the web's enabling FAANG at unbon.cafe/afr.

Bug report:<p><br/></p><ul><li>Observed behaviour: navigating with my keyboard the "+" button doesn't seem to be selectable.</li><li>Expected behaviour: the "+" button should be among the first selected items.</li></ul>

As far as I’m concerned, for a capitalist, the "optimization" in "optimization for engagement" means "make X do Y as intensively as possible, regardless of their human rights". User metrics don’t necessarily imply it, silly me.

To emphasize a bit, the "optimization" in "optimization for engagement" means that it isn’t meant to be manageable by marginalized people, which is very different from post-capitalistic services like Bonfire (or XMPP, IRC, or tabletop games, bookshops… places and activities famously biased towards conviviality).

As far as I’m concerned, for a capitalist, the "optimization" in "optimization for engagement" means "make X do Y as intensively as possible, regardless of their human rights". User metrics don’t necessarily imply it, silly me.

Politics

We’ve reached the point where a 128 GB Corsair Voyager USB key is about as expensive as a 128 GB SSD drive, while being safer and more practical than a standalone laptop for a students occupy where too many people will have brought their laptops anyway

Also Muse are subtly hinting on the fact their album (Simulation Theory) is about capitalistic social media abuse, which is something I'm rooting for (not against Bonfire of course)

("Solace" isn't the right word. It's inspiring.)

Also Muse are subtly hinting on the fact their album (Simulation Theory) is about capitalistic social media abuse, which is something I'm rooting for (not against Bonfire of course)

@ivan Bonfire is the only social media I recommend to NPOs without feeling that I am compromising their values. Modularity isn’t a mere example of their interest for conviviality before the first line of code was written, it’s part of an ecosystem with their copyleft AGPL, the lengthy conversations with beta testers, and their own use of Bonfire to assign tasks and coordinate.
@ivan I didn’t mention that after having used crappy Android forks for years, it fit wonderfully in a Tails session. Slightly off-topic. Take this from a formerly paranoid person.
@ivan Bonfire is the only social media I recommend to NPOs without feeling that I am compromising their values. Modularity isn’t a mere example of their interest for conviviality before the first line of code was written, it’s part of an ecosystem with their copyleft AGPL, the lengthy conversations with beta testers, and their own use of Bonfire to assign tasks and coordinate.

Another piece of feedback: I feel like broken thumbnails on Facebook, Twitter, and Mastodon are part of the global semantics meant to deprecate cognitive resources. It isn’t useful in itself; I guess the image is entirely downloaded anyway, but it forces the user to click on it, which gives them a sort of alert fatigue related to anything richer than about 120 words.<p><br/></p><p>Please either show images as clickable attachments (XMPP style, you don’t download it unless you ask your software to do it) or show them entirely in the feed (honk style). Maybe set the latter as default and let the user define the former as an option.</p><p><br/></p><p>@BonfireBuilders <a class="hashtag" data-tag="bonfire_feedback" href="https://playground.bonfire.cafe/hashtag/bonfire_feedback" rel="tag ugc">#bonfire_feedback</a></p>

I’d welcome feedback on my own, or on my behaviour here in general. My goal is to help, not to bother or discourage contributors.

Feature request: a Bonfire extension to gamify reading books (or scientific articles).<p><br/></p><p>A caveat IMHO would be to compare how many books one reads with their peers (or how good these books are, which I’m afraid would show through how many followers I have if I made a Bookwyrm account). On the other hand, the knowledge I’ll get by reading one is sometimes too speculative as a motivation.</p><p><br/></p><p>It isn’t as if Bonfire worsened attention deficit… but it could give its users the additional energy/motivation boost that they’d need to do it.</p><p><br/></p><p>@BonfireBuilders <a class="hashtag" data-tag="bonfire_feedback" href="https://playground.bonfire.cafe/hashtag/bonfire_feedback" rel="tag ugc">#bonfire_feedback</a></p>

Another piece of feedback: I feel like broken thumbnails on Facebook, Twitter, and Mastodon are part of the global semantics meant to deprecate cognitive resources. It isn’t useful in itself; I guess the image is entirely downloaded anyway, but it forces the user to click on it, which gives them a sort of alert fatigue related to anything richer than about 120 words.<p><br/></p><p>Please either show images as clickable attachments (XMPP style, you don’t download it unless you ask your software to do it) or show them entirely in the feed (honk style). Maybe set the latter as default and let the user define the former as an option.</p><p><br/></p><p>@BonfireBuilders <a class="hashtag" data-tag="bonfire_feedback" href="https://playground.bonfire.cafe/hashtag/bonfire_feedback" rel="tag ugc">#bonfire_feedback</a></p>

Ok I’m gonna sum up my opinion of Bonfire.<p><br/></p><p>It’s good. I’ve been victim of many kinds of surveillance capitalism so I tend to be critical of social media as a concept, but Bonfire seems to be manageable.</p><p><br/></p><p>A key concept for capitalistic social media is scarcity. Whatever they’re offering, they’re making it deliberately scarce (e.g. attention) to increase its value and trick isolated people into chasing it (e.g. clout). ActivityPub was one step in a more social direction (with native videos, blog posts, events reading, regardless of fundamental flaws in Mastodon as a publishing tool that Gargron probably won’t fix; he doesn’t seem to care) and Bonfire also goes in this direction, to express it poorly it especially shows as a publishing platform, and the brain stimulation reward that I’ve always criticized about notifications is really more manageable.</p><p><br/></p><p>The last time I’ve used it on a computer (i.e. the last time I’ve posted, because the feature is broken on mobile) I’ve stayed for 2 hours on my computer (especially because installing Alpine Linux on a Raspberry Pi made me anxious). Going out in the evening, I’ve felt silly for being so suggestible and asked myself if, like 5 years ago, I had no identity, no singularity. I wonder how asocial people (e.g. isolated highschool students) will appropriate Bonfire and if they’ll get "hooked" anyway. If they can’t diversify their activities by meeting other people, maybe Bonfire could be used to gamify reading books (similarly to Bookwyrm, but without its drawbacks, i.e. having to manage a new account).</p>

Feature request: a Bonfire extension to gamify reading books (or scientific articles).<p><br/></p><p>A caveat IMHO would be to compare how many books one reads with their peers (or how good these books are, which I’m afraid would show through how many followers I have if I made a Bookwyrm account). On the other hand, the knowledge I’ll get by reading one is sometimes too speculative as a motivation.</p><p><br/></p><p>It isn’t as if Bonfire worsened attention deficit… but it could give its users the additional energy/motivation boost that they’d need to do it.</p><p><br/></p><p>@BonfireBuilders <a class="hashtag" data-tag="bonfire_feedback" href="https://playground.bonfire.cafe/hashtag/bonfire_feedback" rel="tag ugc">#bonfire_feedback</a></p>

Ok I’m gonna sum up my opinion of Bonfire.<p><br/></p><p>It’s good. I’ve been victim of many kinds of surveillance capitalism so I tend to be critical of social media as a concept, but Bonfire seems to be manageable.</p><p><br/></p><p>A key concept for capitalistic social media is scarcity. Whatever they’re offering, they’re making it deliberately scarce (e.g. attention) to increase its value and trick isolated people into chasing it (e.g. clout). ActivityPub was one step in a more social direction (with native videos, blog posts, events reading, regardless of fundamental flaws in Mastodon as a publishing tool that Gargron probably won’t fix; he doesn’t seem to care) and Bonfire also goes in this direction, to express it poorly it especially shows as a publishing platform, and the brain stimulation reward that I’ve always criticized about notifications is really more manageable.</p><p><br/></p><p>The last time I’ve used it on a computer (i.e. the last time I’ve posted, because the feature is broken on mobile) I’ve stayed for 2 hours on my computer (especially because installing Alpine Linux on a Raspberry Pi made me anxious). Going out in the evening, I’ve felt silly for being so suggestible and asked myself if, like 5 years ago, I had no identity, no singularity. I wonder how asocial people (e.g. isolated highschool students) will appropriate Bonfire and if they’ll get "hooked" anyway. If they can’t diversify their activities by meeting other people, maybe Bonfire could be used to gamify reading books (similarly to Bookwyrm, but without its drawbacks, i.e. having to manage a new account).</p>

@baslow It doesn’t mean any of you all would be a naive developer with a tragic lack in humanities literacy, but… I’ve found myself arguing against letting users opt in for a dispositive of power which is only useful for capitalists, in a way that abuses their users (infinite scrolling). Eugen Rochko himself probably doesn’t understand why Fediverse users call him names under most of what he publishes.


I’m afraid I’ve been off-putting, but I’ve had an extensive experience with capitalistic social media, and I’d like to have a deeper conversation because I don’t want to mansplain any of you but I still want to warn you about things that I haven’t read elsewhere.

@baslow I wasn’t focused (it seems corelated to me using Bonfire) but I’m reading the article and these two sentences are interesting (emphasis mine):


The champions of debunking and the new information vigilantes are not interested in entertaining the possibility that the root cause of conspiracy theories may be located outside the mind and may require a reexamination of our economic and social arrangements. For them, the world is fine as it is; it is all a matter of bringing people in alignment with a reality which they fail to appreciate.


But what I’m trying to pinpoint is that the root causes for mental illness may be located outside the mind as well. Education, architecture, the structure of media… (Rather than the media contents themselves: from Twitter to RSS feeds to Gemini to the town library.)