Comment by webwanderings
7 days ago
It is not in human nature to scale their communities/tribes. Case in point, the continuous wars. It was foolish of humans on the early Internet to perceive ideas of forming large scale communities (business and ego motivations did that). If psychologists and anthropologists were techies and influencers of early Internet, we wouldn't have built such experiences in the first place.
Humans thrive in small scale and close knit communities. Unfortunately, Internet was not built for such ideas. It will take a while for the original intent of the social media to die out. First, the ego will have to subside. Then, the business motivations would need to shift to something other than profiting off the human communication (did anyone care to throw Ads on the old fashioned telephone lines? Or tag an Ad inside our snail mail? No). When the humanity reaches such proportion of correction for the sake of Internet, we might come back to our senses.
>It is not in human nature to scale their communities/tribes.
This is the noble savage myth of the internet. Humans do fine in large groups, as evidenced by the fact that I assume nobody posting here currently lives in a tribe of 150 people. If scaling wasn't in our nature we'd probably do less of it. It's precisely one of the few things unique to our nature. As Stafford Beer said, the purpose of a system is what it does.
The problem on the internet isn't the scale, it's that social networks aren't actually social, they're just networks. What makes large groups of people successful is a social contract, common rules, values and narratives, myths. Every "social" media platform is just a glorified train station. It's not social media, just media. To this day I haven't seen one online community that say, has given itself a constitution and a form of governance.
There's two ways to solve this, none of them are reverting to some sort of paleo-internet. The first is to reappropriate the internet back into existing structures, which is happening in a lot of places as nations start to enforce existing borders and the internet just becomes part of the existing social infrastructure, another interesting one would be internet-native states, network states is a term thrown around, by somewhat cringy business gurus unfortunately.
Here is more akin to a forum (or gathering in a physical sense) than a community. I only know a few usernames and that's because I've heard of the person behind each. The only central theme behind all my interactions is finding a post interesting, then reply to a comment once I've got something to say. I'm not interested in any individual, only on the discussion. Social media wants you to care, and care about a lot of things that are mostly irrelevant to your life.
So you missed one more: religion. If you were going to reappropriate the internet into existing - I take it that you mean, human - structure, then you might as well add religion here too. There have been no other factors beyond religion and national geographies, that have bound humans at a larger scale. IMHO, this is/was not the original intent when DARPA unleashed Internet beyond it's laboratory. Sure, we can reappropriate as we move along. But there is no precedence of a promised land here. The nation-states and/or religions have been at wars since the beginning of time. What's there to prove that a technology like Internet (throw AI of the future into it) would make things better for human nature to adopt. Just because we can scale does not mean that we may be scaling to something better.
The "continuous wars" is a weird comment. Unless you mean internet flame wars, because if "globalization" subsides real wars will happen more often. We kind of see it already as more and more people start leaning right heavily. Small communities breed radicalization.
They can have a positive impact, but only if you can choose one from a global network of said communities as an adult and you don't treat it very seriously (you leave when it becomes toxic). As a person born in a small village community... let's say I don't miss a single fucking thing.
I think you can put the point to even the least tech savvy that the group chat is maybe the best iteration of the social internet. Because the groups are small, self moderated and independent. I guess the irony is that it relies on tech is/was provided by mobile phones already. Maybe all the more important that we don't allow texting to be wholly absorbed or replaced by closed messaging apps.
This makes a lot of sense to me. As an individual, how do I help move along the transition to smaller communities?
The answer cannot be ‘you can’t’. Certainly what you said resonates with a fair number of people, and it only takes a small community to create a small community, right?
You only need two friends and a chat server to have a community. I've been running one for my friends, like a self hosted discord, for almost ten years. It is by far my most valuable online space. There's maybe a dozen users. Whatever. It's great.
Absolutely. I'm in about 10 communities like this. I don't think I need global reach or hundreds or thousands of "friends".
For a wider net, I have a self-curated feed on Lemmy and Mastodon. It's super clean and positive compared to suggestive social media.
The old Internet will never be back, but The Good Parts still exist and can be remade. I don't have to visit the shitty parts.
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I'm on a couple of email lists that have a similar vibe. A dozen or two active participants. No ads, no giant corporation trying to push engagement or steer the narrative. You just have to ignore the occasional FOMO feelings and understand that no, trying to find "community" in a sea of 10,000,000 users on a giant social network is not how we are wired.
> Self-Hosted Discord
How does one achieve this?
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By hanging out in the smaller communities and leaving the larger ones behind. You can't change the world, but you can choose how you live in it.
>The answer cannot be ‘you can’t’. Certainly what you said resonates with a fair number of people, and it only takes a small community to create a small community, right?
It also takes a culture. The small community needs to have a culture that empowers them to exlude the enlargement of the community and to prevent those wanting to open it to those not fit for it get to dictate terms...
The entire point of the internet is connecting small communities into one large community - this allows the sharing of information at literal light speed across huge distances.
> If psychologists and anthropologists were techies and influencers of early Internet, we wouldn't have built such experiences in the first place.
How would they have done anything differently? The social part of the internet also started out as (very) small communities. They still exist, too, but are relatively niche and certainly less active then they were before.
> did anyone care to throw Ads on the old fashioned telephone lines
Certainly, that is what call center robot calls trying to sell unwanted stuff are all about.
> Or tag an Ad inside our snail mail?
Certainly, it comes on stamps.
I think this is why I enjoy Mastodon at the moment. Not so many people, and self-selecting geeks.
If it gets popular I'll have to look at blocking all the popular non-geeky instances ;)
Furthermore, while human nature is relatively stable, the technology has increased in every way.
The Edenic simplicity of HTTP has been supplanted by TLS and tracking goop and lions and tigers and bears, oh my!