Antoine-Frédéric
@af  ·  activity timestamp 3 years ago

⁂ Article

Criticism of the word ’microblogging’, outlining a few actual properties (rather than post length), pessimistic

Let’s talk quickly about the term ’microblog’.


For ’microbloggers’, publishing and thinking for clout, the term implies that a worthy blog post should be longer. In Mastodon/Pleroma interactions, length in itself can be perceived as an authority argument.


Now the usual microblogging mechanisms are the following:


  1. Built-in following/followers mechanism,
  2. clout-related notifications (favs/click-shares/followings), and
  3. a sort of interdependant federation mechanism (whether centralized or through a protocol).


Emphasis on the word ’interdependant’: the federation mechanisms are meant to create loose fabrics of mutual dependance, that depend themselves on their federation mechanisms. There will always be switching costs with ’microblogging’ services, that will be higher for the most abused, disabled, isolated, dependant, vulnerable people.


I’ll try to get a French research lab in touch with the Bonfire developers instead of pouring this pessimism of discutable quality 😅
Antoine-Frédéric
@af  ·  activity timestamp 3 years ago

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.

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