Comment by roughly
2 months ago
I've been working to get more involved with, eg, mutual aid groups and other forms of local capacity and resiliency building over the last year - one thing that's stuck out to me is how many of these groups' public face is an Instagram site. That might not have been existential a couple years ago, but given what we're seeing now with, for instance, Paramount making a rival bid for Warner based solely on their coziness with the current administration, it doesn't feel like the corporate media ecosystem is going to be an even "squint and you can kind of pretend" neutral territory for organizing and information dissemination going forward.
For all that tools like PeerTube, Mastodon, etc are clunkier and more limited than things like YouTube, Bluesky, etc, I think that argument is increasingly going to be irrelevant to their value - we need to start ensuring our capacity to go from 0-1 on media distribution, not from 10-100 or 100+.
> For all that tools like PeerTube, Mastodon, etc are clunkier and more limited than things like YouTube, Bluesky, etc, I think that argument is increasingly going to be irrelevant to their value
Their value is going to stay limited if people don't want to actually use them.
Technically proficient people may overlook something being clunky if it suits their needs in other ways, but it's a harder sell for the average user. And really, it shouldn't be an issue. Good UX isn't trivial, but it's not especially complicated or budget-busting either.
Users are also happy with clunkiness if it gives them other things they value. Ask any Windows user. Also, video game modding.
My general experience is that clunky software is what made people tech literate, and now that everything has safety barriers and protects the user from everything tech literacy has fallen.
Windows is also just convenience. Most use it because it comes with the computer
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This is acceptable. We now understand that privacy-focused solutions are not appropriate for individuals with average technological literacy, and we cannot depend on companies to self-regulate.
At present, the emphasis is on the potential of large language models (LLMs) and the related ethical considerations. However, I would prefer to address the necessity for governments or commissions to assume responsibility for their citizens concerning "social" media, as this presents a significantly greater risk than any emerging technology.
> Users are also happy with clunkiness if it gives them other things they value. Ask any Windows user.
In that case, the alternatives are also clunky. I use Windows, MacOS and Linux regularly, and all of them got serious UX problems.
There are some technical barriers to approaching fediverse platforms, but I personally see the main barriers being cultural.
I'm a big proponent of Mastodon and still love using it, but the culture (especially early on) was exceptionally protectionist and lots of people got bullied off for very silly reasons. I think the attitude is less like a children's secret club and more chill generally.
All this to say, I think this is will get better, but the best way to help the fediverse is to join it, be active, and be chill.
I joined Mastodon, was active, and was chill.
I was talking into the void. I gave up after 6 months of getting no reaction and finding nobody of interest to follow.
(Worse, half of what I wrote is now gone because my instance shut down and Mastodon doesn't even have a feature to migrate any content to a new instance.)
I joined Mastodon early on and stuck around for a few weeks, before I got tired of constantly being messaged by neonazi gay furries who were very keen to show me how excited they were to talk to me.
>but the culture (especially early on) was exceptionally protectionist and lots of people got bullied off for very silly reasons.
Had no idea that was happening. What makes your say that?
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> Their value is going to stay limited if people don't want to actually use them
Nobody really wants to use instagram either—there's basically nothing positive to say about the app or service itself—it just has critical mass.
Is this a "nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded" moment?
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At least for Mastodon and the rest of the Fediverse ecosystem it does seem that people actually want to use them, and more people every day.
People moved on from Mastodon to Bluesky because it was more responsive to user needs. I encouraged people to move to Mastodon but then watched them move on.
It is what it is - but it's worth being clear-eyed about what it is.
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> Their value is going to stay limited if people don't want to actually use them.
Namely, in the case of PeerTube, content creators. Youtube is convenient because it comes with builtin monetization. You can probably expect loud objections (rightfully so) from some of them if you download their stuff from Youtube to upload it to PeerTube.
If you don't have the content creators, you don't have content consumers and you cannot bootstrap a network effect (some services did bootstrap a network effect with plain and simple piracy, though).
I believe the UX is secondary to available content. People do make the necessary efforts if they think the benefit is worth it.
Is the UX even the issue with these competitors? The cost for bandwidth and storage and having fast enough servers is the real issue here.
To me a fatal flaw in ActivityPub systems is that your identity is tied to a server. Yes you can port it, but it’s a hassle. That means the server ops become these little lords over little fiefdoms and a server just dying takes your identity with it.
This also means your reach and what you see depends on your choice of server. I very much don’t want that.
It’s also confusing to non-technical people. Join Mastodon! But which one? How do I pick one?
Technically speaking, Nostr is better. Your identity is a key. Servers are just dumb relays.
Unfortunately it seems to be nothing but crypto bros talking about crypto, or was last time I checked. Nobody uses it.
> That means the server ops become these little lords over little fiefdoms and a server just dying takes your identity with it.
Or that means that everyone can be their own little lord reigning over their own little server, to the point that it doesn't matter, because effectively, network nodes don't need to be "big" to be relevant in a federated ecosystem. I'm not so much into ActivityPub, but I run an XMPP server for my family. I'm not saying that this is for everyone, but close-enough.
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> To me a fatal flaw in ActivityPub systems is that your identity is tied to a server
In contrast to Instagram, Facebook and co?
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Agreed, nostr makes a lot of sense when you read about it and then you go there... Once.
Moving to another mastodon instance is simple. It takes 2-3 clicks and off you go. I think what you say was probably true in the past, but today, nothing could be simpler than taking your stuff to another instance.
Just to say that I'm using NOSTR on my apps, most people using those apps don't even know about NOSTR at all but they all enjoy the quick login procedure without emails nor phones.
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The problem is that everyone is reading Instagram.
I don't understand why. I made an account recently in order to access a specific thing. I can confirm the app is 100% pure garbage. The home feed is garbage and navigation is awful (to keep you on the home feed). I uninstalled it after they were caught bypassing the permission system to spy on you, by binding localhost ports that web ads would access. The web app is no better garbage-wise (but it can't bind ports).
And it's the subcultures that you'd expect to be the most untied from corporate shackles, that are the ones most on Instagram. I don't get it.
I think it's two aspects - one is that Insta started out as the "not-facebook" platform and Meta's somehow managed not to fuck that up, and the other is there's a massive network effect - every tattoo artist, venue, and band are on instagram now, and it all becomes very self-reinforcing.
They're trying... They finally released a native iPad version of the app this year (after so many years), and its default pane is not the one that includes people you actually follow (like the phone app) - it's just reels, and you have to go looking for the right page in the menu to see anything from people you care about.
It's very revealing about where they wish they could have taken the app already, where you don't follow anyone, just trust the algorithm to force-feed you content. Doing that too quickly would instantly kill it, so it's been years of boiling the frog.
The 'Snooze suggested content in feed for 30 days' thing is already bad enough, if they stopped letting you do that Instagram would be insufferable to use.
> Meta's somehow managed not to fuck that up
But then they fucked up. Several years ago.
>bypassing the permission system
On Android you can't make a network service permissioned. And when you make a binder service permissioned it's up to the app itself to specify with what permission a caller needs in order to be able to use the service, or the service can choose to be unpermissioned. Either way apps on Android are free to host unpermissioned services that other apps on the system connect to. Chrome connecting to such a service did not have to bypass a permission since there was no permission protecting it.
What they were caught doing was opening some local port via TCP sockets (let's say localhost:9000) and then advertisements would connect to localhost:9000 to add themselves to your advertising profile even if you were in a private browser, had cookies blocked, or anything like that. Both Facebook and Instagram apps were caught doing it. Now, if they were formally caught by the legal system, they'd go to prison (,in countries other than the USA) so as soon as it made front page HN, they removed it from the apps.
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Instagram is useless unless their are people you want to follow or get people to follow you.
By definition someone’s actions, if repeated sufficiently often, define their real character.
You don’t have to take claimed pretenses seriously.
This is a bit of a harsh take. These same groups use Signal for all their internal messaging - by and large the will is there, but they're not tech savvy and we haven't given them viable alternatives.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
>> We need to start ensuring our capacity to go from 0-1 on media distribution, not from 10-100 or 100
And a dozen pirate networks stand ready to fill that void at a moment's notice. From oldschool torrent, to cyberlockers, to the dark webs of Tor and FreeNet ... there is an entire ecosystem of hardened video distribution schemes out there. Youtube was aguably born from piracy and fights in the courts to this day. The next thing, whatever replaces youtube, will likely also come from shadows.
This situation is so frustrating to me, and despite my attempts, nobody seems to get why it's problematic. I still have a Facebook account from over a decade ago that I use occasionally to access stuff that is only visible on Facebook, but by the time Insta kicked off I had already decided social media was bad, so I never got one, and it didn't seem like a great loss because I wasn't that interested in looking at other people's photos anyway.
Except now, apparently - and I'm still not exactly sure how - business owners and activist groups and event promoters communicate everything about what is going on via... photos?! I suppose it's the digital version of flyers, except you could see flyers posted up all over town, in all the record stores or cafes you already frequented, friends could hand you them when they saw you out and about, you'd get bombarded with them when you left related events... And none of those situations forced you to enter a heavily-surveilled gated community owned by a spectacularly wealthy foreign company notorious for enabling genocide, live streaming murder etc.
I was at some event a couple weekends ago and an organizer came up to me saying that there was going to be an after and just check the Insta for the address, and I'm like... But I don't have that? Can't you tell me now? And because the site is login-walled even when at some point later in the day the thumbnail did appear, trying to click on it to see the details resulted in the login block and so I missed out.
But I am well aware that I am a teeny tiny minority of people involved in this boycot and so I'm only really hurting myself. The way I've heard it described by activists is that using Insta (or X or YouTube) is like tacitly accepting that we already live in a panopticon and thus all resistance has to take place within full view of the authorities, it just needs to be smart and present itself as something that isn't actually resistance, or that works around censorship using codewords, or this, or that, "just like how it's done in China". And it's like, great, the new generation of western activists who actually still live in a society which grants them some civil liberties have decided they're all doomed to exist under the totalitarian jackboot and practice their resistance accordingly. After all, you can't build a movement out there on the actually free fediverse or the small web where there's only a smattering of nerds.
I don't know if I should be depressed or just suck it up and get that stupid Insta account.
I'm on the same boat as you. Trying to find word about where the good local popup restaurants are, and apparently the only way to do it is to follow a bunch of random Instagram accounts. I finally tried to relent and make an account just to be able to read that stuff, but they wanted me to take a video of myself holding my government ID in order to prove my... identity, I guess? Not sure why that's necessary for an account I never even plan to post with, but it was enough of a barrier for me that I said nevermind. Now I just mention it whenever I'm chatting with organizers/proprietors, but I'm never exactly sure what to suggest as an alternative.
Email newsletters are pretty easy and universal.
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As a workaround, next time someone forces you to use Instagram go to https://flufi.me/ to see public content without logging in.
It’s not the solution but I cannot get other people to stop posting on proprietary platforms
>flufi.me
Naturally, gated by whatever Cloudflare setting it is that doesn't just block me but runs a CPU to 100% indefinitely unless I kill the tab
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It's depressing to me at least. I guess with things like this it works well if you fully buy in and don't understand or care about the privacy violations and psychological tricks they use. But even if I tried to ignore it, I just end up annoyed by the interfaces or workflows or stuff like that. I guess it's just the curse of having really non-standard preferences
Facebook simultaneously makes it hard for you to access anything without an account (connecting the world?) while also having been known to change people's privacy settings from Friends to Friends of Friends or Public
Zuck, you do not deserve to be spoken of in the same breath as actual internet pioneers
I have seen organizers get stuck in the dopamine loop of focusing on inspiring content that "increases engagement" and getting fixated on moderating trolls that it actually gets in the way of doing impactful work. I definitely on the depression train on this front. It's far worse than digital versions of flyers, people aren't incentivized to focus show up when they can just keep scrolling for their fix.
I "trade" my content in kind -- garbage in, garbage out style -- combining my short form renders on my commute with songs I think will match the rhythm then publish as a music video.
And I'm not chasing clicks, likes, nor monetization on that platform; I was fortunate to ignore FB's SSO with IG as I deleted that account a decade or longer ago.
I wish you were right, but you're wrong. It's a wishful thinking that I have been participatory in for decades. However, it will not come to fruition. Why? It's very simple: we, as a people and as a society, are not willing to give up convenience.
Secondly, the corporate media have been straight up propaganda centers for decades now and anyone who has been paying attention has known that for a long time now. That is not something that we are on the edge of our seats waiting to happen. It happened a long time ago.
Remember when CNN was meeting with the Pentagon so that the Pentagon could approve their stories during the Iraq War? Remember when the media constantly lied to us during COVID? Remember when they told us Biden's health was in pristine condition and that he was never better?
Don't try and politicize this issue in one way or the other. Anyone paying attention can see that there is no savior on the left or the right. It's the corrupt politicians vs. us.