Discussion

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.

On one hand, the sociological tradition of the University of Chicago is mostly qualitative (interview, field research), rejecting statistics, which offers an excellent complement to the intensive quantitative data capitalistic social media get on their users. On the other hand, I’m not even sure they’d need to read Goffman; they could just correlate how profitable a user is with how many times they click on links, or on the "show more" button, or watch videos, per hour, and draw their own conclusions (links are bad, long posts are bad, videos are bad), without even developing a general correlation between cognitive resources and Goffman’s total institutions.

YES

I’d love to try the IndieWeb, but I’m currently trying to post Gemini content, exported to the web via kiln, and hosted on openbsd.amsterdam with vger, a read-only server. It could make sense to let the web frontend load replies; IIRC a French libre software blogger had forked the Hugo Archie theme to load Mastodon replies as comments; but I haven’t made a first-hand experience with the IndieWeb.

Most of what I think of social media is defined by its capitalistic model, that Mastodon is borrowing anyway (the fact that Trump uses its code base should be a red flag). In particular: yes, I’ve spent the last few hours waiting for notifications, but what I’ve found this last month stems from the deprecation of cognitive resources and the scarcity of attention. The Bonfire project keeps challenging my assumptions on social media, the way Diaspora* has swiped them (but I tend to remove it from my thoughts on this topic).

Maybe few social media have actually been innovative enough to dodge a capitalistic communications model. I mean, the software license isn’t enough to make it a common; I’m obviously referring to the Mastodon governance… but also to the Element client, which implements an obscenely complex norms and which is too costly to implement to be considered as a common IMHO.

There’s a French-speaking left-wing memes group on Facebook which is called "Ghibliposting" and I really want to re-create it as a topic, but I don’t want to commit to anything on social media… (Also where’s my Foucault book)

Sorry I'm tired. I didn't sleep well last night, I woke up 8 times.

I'm about 60% sure that Twitter is designed around Goffman's "Asylum" to optimize its communities towards aggregating isolated teenagers and turning into total institutions. This is, anyway, how these communities behave, and it drives both user retention and their AFK isolation. Isolating the victim is a classic abuse strategy and a lot of power dispositives accumulate to actually make Twitter users toxic, joke about ruining Christmas dinners with political discussions, etc. I've read Måneskin fans tweet about Twitter bringing up the worst in them.

Erving Goffman's "Asylum" is an excellent reading on how not to implement a social media : the capitalistic ones are designed to turn into total institutions for their socially isolated users. I won't mince words to please do-gooders, cutting millions of people's time schedules to the bone of meals and 5 hours of sleep per night, lifting social activities, studies, work, and family life, is a crime against humanity.

If #android users felt like they owned their phones, they'd start to do silly things like wanting to remove software and services they don't use. So we need to replace them every few years. Android is a sort of paid service and we get a new phone for "free", that we don't actually own.

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Thanks!!

Also I'd like to be able to share my entire TL (letting others add it as a list) with boundaries… @BonfireBuilders #bonfire_feedback

I'm aware this is probably a feature request, but I'd like to be able to click-share something I see in my own TL on behalf of an org, and use boundaries to show (to the collective, to managers, publicly…) who posted/shared something. @BonfireBuilders #bonfire_feedback

I'm interested in the "follow org accounts" use case – can we use boundaries to manage an account collectively without having to share the password? Which means posting, but also click-sharing as $ORG @BonfireBuilders #bonfire_feedback

It doesn't mean it would be better to draw than to take pictures. Just do something that makes you happy.

I don't mean to suggest that art should be hard, or that drawing would be more complex than having a conversation, but honestly it feels harder to learn than taking pictures.

I guess it's true for art in general, but when I took this picture I was marvelled by what I was seeing. A photograph is an (easy) act of creation.