I may work on a future video on this topic, talking about chokepoint capitalism, surveillance, and switching costs, but for now, all I'll say is that Musk buying Twitter just highlights the problem with centralized social media platforms providing chokepoints for surveillance and discourse that can be shaped by wealthy individuals however they want. We should go back to forums, chatrooms, and personal websites. And to that end, here's a bunch of links to help anyone interested in personal websites get started!
- he/him
- duriansoftware.com/
the swift programming language is my fault to some degree. mostly here to see dogs, shitpost, fix old computers, and/or talk about math and weird computer programming things. for effortposts check the #longpost pinned tag. asks are open.
email
mailto:joe@duriansoftware.com
discord
jckarter
webzone
duriansoftware.com/code stuff
github.com/jckarter/fediverse
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in reply to @ChaiaEran's post:
There was a post somewhere where someone asked if the Arab Spring or Black Lives Matter could have gotten started on a platform other than Twitter (and, ok, i guess fb too), and I think that deserves careful analysis.
On a smaller scale, people have used twitter to ask for help with local problems (e.g. "my spouse is missing, please signal-boost").
There's a lot of social good that was made possible by the "Follow" button; by the ease in posting photos & video to all followers (e.g. video of abusive & violently criminal behavior by the police); by the fact that an account wasn't tightly bound to any one community or topic (and by the fact that we didn't need to make one account for local-neighborhood issues, another account for cat photos, another account for following political topics, another account for pixel art, etc); by the fact that involvement didn't require learning about HTML or CSS or SSL certificates...
And even if someone takes care of all the technical stuff for you by running a local server, what prevents them from being irresponsible with that platform? Distributing power doesn't mean there won't be abuses of power; it just means you're less likely to hear about abuses on the servers where you personally don't have an account, and that there will be a larger demand for more people to run operations because now there are many more self-contained sites that need attention. That, and/or many users will simply give up and not connect, because who has time for that besides righteous computer nerds? (And, as a computer nerd, I don't want this for us, because we already have plenty of other problems that we're trying to solve and not enough time to solve them.)
Having said that, the fact that it was possible for someone to just buy twitter is strictly bad. I think we're in total agreement on that point. Whatever system gets developed to replace twitter, it needs some way to prevent that from happening again.
I suggest reading this post by shel, it highlights a lot of my opinion. The vast majority of organizing will always take place in the real world, not on social media, and the way sites like Twitter are organized - mass surveillance, algorithms designed to generate anger, a discourse format seemingly built to elevate thought-terminating cliches and bad-faith misreadings, and extremely high switching costs designed to keep you on the site at all costs - are an extremely bad way to organize a community.
Additionally, if you want more of my thoughts on social media, I'd suggest checking out this post too.
