Unfortunately not understanding or being sufficiently motivated by the threat of corporate social media is still prevalent among a good amount of lefties I know, but I find even when they are uninterested in leaving corporate social media they can at least understand the logic behind it in a way a lot of techy type people start to just get combatitive when you try to explain.

Most often when I have a conversation about this with someone who is very technically well versed with computers and the types of systems that are relevant to federated social media their response is to answer every one of my broader ethical questions by changing the topic to a conversation about technical details and they either utterly miss the point or outright refuse to have a discussion about it because they think I am being too cynical.

Ultimately these people only have one real argument which is to just repeat the mantra “stop being so negative, lets just wait and see before we jump to conclusions” endlessly about the same cycle of bullshit repeating over and over again.

Intelligence and expertise is worth pursuing for the benefit that comes from learning for the sake of learning, but it is true that there is a danger to knowing more and more about a very narrow subject in that it becomes more and more seductive to believe that the thing you are an expert in is a key to understanding everything else and that this gives you a righteous vantage to look down upon the genius of others and judge from afar.

Some of the smartest people there has ever been or likely will ever be throughout history have time and time again completely undermined their potential by falling prey to this delusional drug of a belief.

Because silicon valley thinks it can define reality however it wants and keep telling us not to believe our lying eyes.

Weirdly this seems to work better on techy people who don’t like thinking about politics but understand the technical details of this extremely well than it does on normie progressives because progressives just see the obvious predatory reality and don’t get distracted in minutiae connected to very obviously empty promises.

The tech press does not ever talk to progressives though…

I just think “community knowledge” is a much more nebulous concept it quickly extends into subjective topics that a mod curated wiki/sidebar might not fit. The sidebar more naturally represents undebatable axioms/foundations to the community such as a link directly to what a community is about or its rules.

Yes ok that is pretty much it or close, very cool!

So what wiki do you want to create ? :)

I have ideas, mostly very simple things like an easy to collate and edit list of game reviews on a gaming community that you could without too much fuss link to various different comments/threads where those games were actually reviewed by people. All I am saying is a somewhat more loosely formalized “check out discussion on this thread” kind of thing that would provide a touchstone for people curious to sift back through a community with lots of interesting posts.

To me the crux of the question is time though, on a corporate social media platform eternal newness is essential to the growth of the cancer. The past is always a distraction, liability and potential problematic solution to a profitable current problem.

To make this specific to Mobilizon with an example, wouldn’t it be cool if a fediverse user who regularly attended a monthly makerspace/diy-project-share-and-help meetups that are posted on Mobilizon could create a post sharing context from each of the events they attended together into a new experience/post that might be meaningful to people? They could submit knowledge, context and story to a community without having to express it as necessarily the official stance or perspective of the entire community but rather a particular users perspective on a series of fediverse events/posts and how they connect through individual experiences.

Maybe Mobilizon isn’t the best platform for that but then I would say Mobilizon should focus on building a nice simple elegant way for other fediverse softwares to do that!

oh, somehow I missed that heck yes!

edit I checked out piefed’s wiki some more, nothing groundbreaking but that isn’t the point, there is a simple elegance to having a nice thorough wiki capability right there alongside associated threads that can help curate content to add to the community wiki over time. I am impressed and very excited!

How does editing and submitting content to a particular piefed communities wiki work? That is the crux for me, I don’t want these tools to essentially just be more fiddly stuff for the admins/moderators to maintain, I am not suggesting chaos but rather that a regular user could submit a perspective, a particular organization and contextualization of information already existing on the community and it could exist in conversation with divergent perspectives on the same body of conversation and knowledge.

Something that is kind of a broad suggestion but it keeps bubbling up in my mind is the potential for some of these fediverse social platforms to be well situated to function as community knowledge bases.

To put it another way, why are these fediverse softwares restricted to sharing and federating content along the axis of time?

The thing I value most about reddit-like/internet forum like communities is they provide an amazing context to learn new things, especially things you didn’t even know you didn’t know.

At this point in time we are still stuck seeing social media as a goal unto itself, you interact online socially because you desire to interact online socially. This is all well and good, but similar to how Mobilizon helps facilitate that connection growing into something meaningful in the real world (events you can attend!) I am interested in ways in which fediverse software can be designed to help facilitate organically building community knowledge bases out of online social interaction.

As to what that specifically looks like, well… I guess I am suggesting some kind of wiki-like system and I know that isn’t a new suggestion but I think people mistakenly see this kind of feature request as mission creep rather than a natural next step for burgeoning communities of niche experts who could solidify that sense of place into a real beacon for the internet on that topic by collating conversations into community posts of information and links. Specifically I think it would be fascinating to have a wiki like database where the source links for information stated on the wiki are sourced back to comments/conversations in threads on that community (which would source to external sources of course)… I think it would make the entire process of communities producing a formalized organized knowledge base much more transparent, organic and frictionless.

To put it another way, I challenge the Mobilizon team to think about “whats next?” after you make an event and connect people, what is the intended impact? I think the next step is to create a natural platform for both interaction/events and knowledge where conversations about events can naturally evolve into more formalized posts of information through whatever community mechanisms best fit that particular community.

Events and interaction feed into knowledge and vice versa, as of yet no social media corporation or community project has effectively grasped this as the central dynamo that powers online communities people actually value. I think Mobilizon because it is positioned as an event organizer for the fediverse is in someways uniquely situated to navigate that connection point successfully and show people what social media can really become if we see it as more than just cigarettes but for your smartphone.

Good point, my bad I was unconciously assuming we were talking about the english speaking part of the internet, but yeah definitely.

I don’t think it is, maybe we are due for another growth spurt but from here on out I genuinely think a critical mass has been achieved where it will simply make more and more sense for people to come here.

I do think we face a real inertia right now where the general public has become convinced corporate social media sucks because people suck not because corporations suck and we need to refute that misconception if we want the fediverse to have a vibrant future.

It is really frustating how evidently unhappy most users of corporate social media are about their social media use, yet they show no signs of stopping and when you start to provide an alternate vision of social media they immediately shortcircuit to “social media is bad, I don’t want more”.

I do think if we don’t start pushing back with an affirmative positive vision of why social media can be good we may see a period of depressed growth but I don’t see that happening yet personally.

Most people who are for bluesky don’t even care about an open internet or whatever, they just want their protocol to win or whatever.

Totally different

I have also not had great interactions tbh

Exactly!

Very cool!! I imagine this might be useful for other games too.

pre-emptive pikachu face strike

I have been trying to do that since I came here because you are precisely right google has become at best broken at worst an agent actively trying to manipulate you and reddit is entirely untrustable, keep doing what you are doing and don’t forget to have fun while you are doing the right thing!

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Thank you for linking!

No, this is not the same old shit, because while yes of course humans are still humans and will do shitty human things the difference is that there is no easy way to enclose the Fediverse and force an opinion, censor people speaking out against injustice. or hold the entire network hostage to push a profit for investors.

The Fediverse is still definitely vulnerable to those things, and who knows if longterm whether a large corporation or constellation of authoritarian regimes can critically undermine the Fediverse (we will certainly see attempts at some point), but no matter what happens, anybody can still spin up their own instance of Mastodon, Lemmy or any other fediverse software and start creating a new community.

From the perspective of an authoritarian ruling class, the problem of quelling dissent in the masses has gone from buying the one or two tv conglomerate networks that provide news for 100s of millions of people, buying Twitter and sabotaging it, or buying Reddit and paying someone to manipulate it with bots and ban people saying things they don’t like, to a Sisyphean hell of having to keep stamping out Fediverse communities wherever they pop up, in whatever country or legal context they happen to pop up all over the globe.

If you think that the Fediverse taking off and reaching a critical mass where lots of people use it daily for normal social media stuff isn’t a strategic failure for the dictators and ruthless capitalists willing to create mass murder if it nets them a profit, I don’t know what to tell you…

edit maybe this is going too into the conspiracy weeds here to be useful to conjecture about, but until the Fediverse took off virtually ALL online communities with any vibrancy were moving to Discord, and it scared the hell out of me because it would have made the attempt to silence dissent right now across the world and more specifically in my country a trivial task if there was simply no alternative that was anywhere near ready to function for people as a basis for their community. Corporate social media is full of voices refusing to be silenced about the Palestinian Genocide… but would those activists feel so comfortable and would corporate social media companies feel restrained at all if there was no truly no alternative to their social network for communicating online?

I will never forget how almost everybody in my life would basically laugh at me years ago when I voiced concern about Discord vacuuming up seemingly every significant online community, but just think about how right now would be vastly different if activists had NOWHERE to go online if they got banned from Twitter or Discord or Reddit…