Discussion

Feature request: arbitrary, federated vote to allow complex, online decision making, and prevent topics takeovers by rogue admins @BonfireBuilders #bonfire_feedback

Feature request: the ability to edit one's last post should be enough to correct typos while preventing abuse @BonfireBuilders #bonfire_feedback

Feature request: Discord-like circles API, to be bridged with comradery.co @BonfireBuilders #bonfire_feedback

(the link is to an online page containing an abstract and metadata. The full article must be downloaded as a PDF.

Abstract

Can decentralized, digitally-enabled movements sustain solidarity over time? What is the role of digital media in such a process? Existing studies point to the tendency of such movements towards fragmentation. We focus on the case the 2019 Anti-ELAB Movement in Hong Kong and one of the primary digital platforms for mobilization, LIHKG. We argue that LIHKG users maintain the dominance of solidarity through a strategy of normative crowding out, whereby users strategically promote solidaristic rhetoric and emotions while sanctioning divisive ones. Empirically, we analyze millions of discussion posts on LIHKG with rich text and emoji data. We first document the rising trend of online solidaristic contents despite contemporaneous tactical radicalization. Regression analyses further show that such a pattern can be produced by user-driven mechanisms in sanctioning solidaristic and divisive contents. This study has implications on the role of digital media and the sustainability of decentralized collective action.

From the full article:

In the Anti-ELAB Movement, we did see decentralization and radicalization trends over time, but we did not observe either diminished commitment or internal conflict due to the establishment of solidarity norms. In other words, the tendency towards fragmentation was counterbalanced by the presence of solidarity norms. We argue that such a creation of norms is one of the affordances of digital media. Before the digital age, it would be difficult to communicate and reach consensus across different groups within decentralized movements. However, the presence of digital media breaks this difficulty. In the Anti-ELAB Movement, participants were able to make extensive communication and coordination before and after launching a protest. While such contact is unlikely to achieve complicated consensus in decision-making extensive and iterative communication exposes users to the constant (re)negotiation of the collective frames of the movement, and makes possible the emergence of new protest norms. However, we caution that the norm-generating function is an affordance rather than an essence of digital media usage.

This article, while interesting and useful, is (necessarily) limited. "Decentralization", in this article, refers to the structure of the organization IRL, not to the social platform -- which seems to be some variation on Reddit or, perhaps, Discourse. Indeed, federation of posts might have been unnecessarily dangerous at worst, irrelevant and unnecessary at best.

Since, at least on first skim, the authors don't seem to have gone deep into consideration of alternative social media models it is interesting to ask whether how it might be possible to design an online platform that moves norm-generation and consensus-negotiation further along the spectrum from "affordance" to "essence".

I don't know why but I feel like scarcity is interpreted as environmental pressure and for this reason creates extrinsic motivation, as the need to have better relationships with your environment – until the urban and normalized, but pathological point where you're trapped in it.

There's a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.

The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.

CC0

Maybe because attention on Twitter (thus on Mastodon and Pleroma) is deliberately scarce, which makes valuable contents hard to find. A pretty bad microblogging service if you ask me.

Ok my bad, microblogging isn't a bad concept. But its current implementations (besides twtxt and bonfire) conflate the last three use cases.

Microblogging may be good, actually, but Mastodon and Pleroma keep me hooked as well, make me aggressively look for excuses to get people's attention AFK, etc. (Although I'm reading 1984 and that's enough to get mad.) I believe the difference lies in the intents I put when I write something, i.e. that Pleroma makes me write to get someone else's attention. The UX makes it different here.

I've identified 4 kinds of social media users:

• advertisers,
• students and mums keeping in touch with (family) friends,
• entrepreneurs, bloggers, artists, and so on, trying to promote their "brand", and
• outcasts, looking for psychotherapeutic listening (deep, non-judgemental)

Microblogging was a bad idea not only in its usual "Twitter" user farming-inspired implementations but also because as the concept it is, it intrinsically conflates the last three use cases. However I'd like to suggest as well that social media can be genuinely good because they isolate people in small clusters, and this helps them to keep in touch with their relatives. Of course it's pretty bad for sharing online resources to a large number of people, this is why we've got blogs and Gemini, RSS/atom feeds, and links.

J'entends bien, mais qui achète ce pétrole (et surtout, qui pourrait s'en passer, qui ne peut pas et pourquoi) ?

This is the single most dangerous corporate web portal I've ever seen

A Geminaut may argue that micropubnixes, i.e. pubnixes providing Gemini pages and emails, would be social media with consent baked in…

This page does a great job, especially at suggesting that reading on Gemini brings a different experience, a different mindset than one may find by merely reading blogs.

We generally brand the Fediverse as an ethical social media but I'd argue that it should be the opposite: Twitter, Instagram users are changed into breaking other users' consent, while we try to respect it on the Fediverse. We could pitch it as "social media, but with consent (hopefully) baked in" (e.g. contents warnings).

It could be improved by disrupting infinite scrolling, or even scrolling (i.e., Emacs-style paging), but things are improving… slowly, as always.

This article (which you may have encountered before), first published in 1969 and added to in 2000, should be of interest to anyone who wants to think about non-capitalist perspectives on community, hierarchy, egalitarianism, and the commons.

#seizethemeansofcommunity