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Almost A Month of Mastodon: Thumbs Up!

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

On April 1st I joined Mastodon, eschewing centralized social media networks because I felt like an experiment rather than a participant.

My experience so far has been great. I have some followers, not a lot, and I follow about twice as many as I follow (a good metric, I think). I interact with smart people, some who know more than me, some who know less, but everyone’s pretty polite.

It’s a sharp contrast to the other social networks I’ve been on – it actually reminds me of the good old days of the BBS systems, almost as if a few of us would form a party and go play D&D.

Sure, you have some annoying people now and then, but that’s life.

Centralized Social Networks: Blech.

Being away from the centralized social networks has given me perspective. In hindsight, this is what I saw:

Algorithms seemed to have washed the nutrients from my news feeds, instead pushing polarizing posts and spammy sales messages into my eyeballs. It was like a roundabout of billboards that I couldn’t get off – and what I did add to the networks was either not seen or interacted with.

On Facebook, with 1,250 connections, all of them felt distant, removed – not the flesh and blood people that I met, or the intellectually interesting that I had found. My newsfeed was repulsive.

“Hate Israel! Hate Hamas! Hate Russia! Hate Ukraine! Hate Republicans! Hate Democrats! Hate this one! Hate that one! Buy this! Buy that! Buy THIS AND THAT!”

Man, that’s tiresome. Hate takes a lot of energy and usually requires the suspension of the intellect in and an over-exuberance of negative emotion. I’m just not over-exuberant. To me it all looked like a litter box – and made me come to the understanding that walled gardens become litterbox prisons.

LinkedIn is pretty much a human caterpillar of professional brown-nosing. Everyone’s so worried about what a potential employer might think that they won’t rock the boat. They just want to be seen in a positive light, and so that network has become a beacon of bullshit as everyone’s interviewing and it’s a competition to be the most politically correct while maintaining some facade of professionalism all the time. It’s like being at an interview that never ends. It’s terrible, and oh- by the way – people always want to sell you stuff there too. Nobody cares what you can do, really, and the headhunters are more just about collecting skulls to make their bones. And Microsoft (LinkedIn) is constantly asking you to upgrade your subscription so that it can find you a job you’ll likely be unhappy with – otherwise they wouldn’t make money when you go back on bended knee.

At least in psychiatric wards, they give you drugs so you don’t have to experience the other inmates, and in that regard that’s what I believe social media networks largely do.

Twitter? Never really cared about it because I foresaw the trusted sources issue a year before the company even formed. People got into it for various reasons with no exit strategy, as most of us did with social media networks. TikTok I never got into, I don’t even have an account – it’s bad enough I was handing my likes and habits to Big Tech in the U.S., which because of FISA is a grey area of government – why on Earth would I want to hand more information to another government?

Meanwhile, On Mastodon…

I started off by following hashtags I’m interested in, and interacting with other people. 99% of it has been really good, thoughtful, and sometimes challenging in good ways – new perspectives to explore, new trains of thought to consider, new… well, new! Yet that was just the first week, and like a car, you really don’t know how well things are working until you lose the new car smell.

There’s an intellectual freedom I found there that was lost on other social media networks – the Fediverse has it’s own wonkiness, and there are criticisms of Mastodon by longer time users that I don’t understand yet. That’s fine. Most of the issues I see with people on Mastodon is that they want the same confirmation biases fed that they had fed on centralized social networks.

One person wrote today of the centralized networks, “where friends are frictionless and things are predictable.” That sounds a lot like an echo chamber to me, an algorithmic ant mill. I don’t like watching NASCAR because it’s a boring track, I never would have wanted to drive in NASCAR because it’s a boring track, so doing the intellectual and emotional equivalent seems less than ideal for me.

I interact as I wish – politely, even with people I disagree with, and I have yet to block anyone for being douchebags. All in all, it feels a lot like I want a social network to be.

A few people are worried about ‘reach’ – one person posted that they wanted Dan Gillmore to have as many followers on Twitter, which when I looked was 10,000 or more than he has on Mastodon, and he’s talked about ‘reach’ – but it’s really engagement that’s the way to measure things in social media, and even with that engagement, it’s about the quality of engagement.

Also of interest – I’ve found more quality blogs to follow on WordPress.com on the Fediverse than I have on WordPress.com in unit time.

All in all, I feel that I’ve spent my time better on the Fediverse through Mastodon than any other social network. You’re not swimming against algorithmic flotsam and jetsam.

I’ll be on Mastodon. Links are on both of my sites at the top. If you pop in, say hi, and enjoy the interesting people with the understanding that you don’t have to agree with people – just like in real life – but you can have conversations, sometimes hard ones, respectfully – rather than dodging them in the echo chambers.

Kill The Social Networks.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

There was a time when blogs were a big deal. We had our own network of blogs, we had a website called Technorati that ranked them and where we could see who was writing about stuff we were interested in.

The early blogs I found really great. We had people discussing all manner of things, with ‘pingbacks’ between blogs allowing for the crosslinking so even though you didn’t comment on their website, there was a link to the author referred to. WordPress.com does that, and to an extent it still happens in open source blogs, though a few things happened that changed the way things worked.

For example, at the same time, to make their sites more popular, crosslinking was done, and sometimes it was done to such an extent by people who had more marketing than thought that the search engines smacked it down in their search engine results. Search Engine results were important, so that was done more carefully. It was all very cliquish, and in some ways very elitist. Though I knew and even worked with some of the more famous bloggers, they weren’t interested in the content created. They were interested in their own audience, as well they should have been.

For all of the flaws, it wasn’t a bad system. It was decentralized, and the only real limit on content you could find was your ability to find it. Search engines cashed in a bit more because search engines were used a lot more. Nowadays, people are fed pulped fictions with some interesting stuff every now and then.

Social networks showed up and threw everything out the window. When you have centralized networks, you have the centralized ability to shadow ban people on the network, and once it hits critical mass, it becomes arbitrary, with the owner of the network enforcing their own version of what is right or wrong without even a conversation. Facebook does it, Twitter does it, Instagram does it… so the only path to not being shadow banned for something real or imagined is to simply leave the network.

But it doesn’t really end there. Now everyone is training an AI on user data, and no one has control over what user data they train on and how it is used. Chandra Steele writes a bit about how it feels like it’s the end of the shared Internet:

“…This is why the Tumblr and WordPress news [about selling information to AI companies] seems like a heavy blow to a shared internet. It’s taken away the possibility to return to the purer place we came from. PCMag Security Analyst Kim Key reached out to Automattic, which owns both platforms, and the company did not confirm or deny the rumors, though it did direct her to a statement that seems to indicate that if the deal goes through, users will be able to opt out from having their work included in AI training…”

“WordPress Wants to Turn My Old Blog Into an AI Zombie, and It Breaks My Heart“, Chandra Steele, PCMag.com, February 29th, 2024

It’s not the end of the shared Internet at all. Some of us don’t write on PCMag.com, and there are plenty of other options that exist. WordPress.com was just a later website built with open source technology, but before that we had GreyMatter, etc. She mentions 2009 for her blog – I was blogging since 1999. A lot happened in those 10 years.

These technologies still exist. If we want control of our content, we should move off of platforms where we cannot. I’m considering this myself in the context of WordPress.com. I only got here because I was tired of the trouble of maintaining my own sites, but during the time I have used WordPress.com, website hosting has improved to include managed open source content management systems, the open source content management systems themselves have become more easy to maintain and more powerful…

If you feel boxed in, get out of the box. I’m considering options myself since I feel my own trust was betrayed by WordPress.com, and they haven’t really discussed with us what is going on since that bombshell was dropped.

What we need to remember is that we always have options. The only way to effect change is to actually change ourselves. Don’t like a network? Get off it. No one will die.

If you write good content, they’ll find you.

Birthday Media

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 1 Comment

Birthday CakeAt one point, I thought that social media was worthwhile in that I could tell people, “Happy Birthday” at the appropriate time, which I had been unable to do before because I simply don’t remember people’s birthdays – something that some see as a personality flaw. They made me think it was a personality flaw by badgering me about it – particularly the women in my life who, oddly enough, always hated getting older.

You’d think that women would therefore not want to celebrate birthdays, but that is largely not true in my personal dalliances with the female of the species. We’ll get back to that.

So here I was, thinking all these social media services actually were doing me a favor, covering a personality flaw – largely so people wouldn’t think I don’t have this personality flaw, that I cared enough to stick calendar dates in a rolodex in my head for people I care about. And it became easier and easier – to the point where Facebook offers me to post on someone’s page something witty like, “Happy Birthday”, or something wittier that I might come up with in the time it takes me to read and react. I think I’ve written some atrocious things that way, but everyone seems happy enough.

This all came to a head today because LinkedIn offers me to ‘like’ someone’s birthday. How cheap is that? All I have to do is click ‘Like’, and presto magico, I have conveyed that I care that you were born a certain amount of years ago.

Yay.

So here’s the truth. While I am no longer someone who subscribes to religion, I had the misfortune of being born into a Jehovah’s Witness sort of background – I had no choice. And while not having that choice, we didn’t celebrate birthdays. Why? Well, as I recall the rhetoric, “Jesus Christ didn’t celebrate his birthdays!”. Thus the same rhetoric for Christmas.

I’m not sure that celebrating them should be a sin in any religion, really, but hey, whatever makes you happy… I’m also not into a few other things being a sin, either. But let’s pretend for a moment that Jesus didn’t celebrate birthdays, even if it’s not true and there were omissions in the Bible (there weren’t potty breaks either, as I recall, so pooping could be a sin.) This leads us down a path where a calendar was set up BECAUSE the big J.C. was born, and a count was begun known as A.D. – anything beforehand, B.C. But that’s not accurate either if J.C. were born on Dec 25th, because then that would be the end and beginning of the year… and… that’s open to dispute too.

In other words, the reasoning behind not celebrating birthdays that I was presented with simply doesn’t make sense. Of course, they celebrate the death of Christ as well, as well as his resurrection. Absolutely nothing about his visit from the Tooth Fairy, or about a bunny hanging out, or elves… so let’s not go there because we may end up in a Mordor trying to get a ring into a volcano.

I eventually did have birthday parties, when people got together and acted like I was special one day out of the year. Just one. And I thought they sucked – not because people showed that they cared on that day, but because of the surrounding 364.25 days where I wasn’t.

So after all of that, here’s the thing. The only birthday I really cared about was when I was 21. I think the 23rd my auto insurance went down slightly in the U.S. – or was it 28? – and then the only way the auto insurance went down is by getting married. Clearly that wasn’t enough of an inducement for me…

And now, here I am, in my 40s, and I don’t care about my birthday. Sometimes I’m not even sure how old I am and have to do math – fortunately, we count 13th birthdays unlike how we count 13th floors in buildings, so the math isn’t tricky at all – and at a moment’s notice, I can figure out how old I am.

And I don’t care about how old anyone around me really is either. It’s not like it tells you how long you have to live – it doesn’t – but like Bayesian probability, it lets you know that the more years you live the more likely you are to die within the coming year. Think on that a moment.

So what are birthdays really about? About making people feel special, like you care. Like they matter to you on a deep level. How wonky is that? And this is why I think women seem so agreeable to birthdays despite the landmark of growing older.

Here’s my thing. If I’m not there for you for the rest of the year – if I don’t treat you like you’re special for the rest of the year – is this sort of like accepting your deity of choice, and begging forgiveness for all those times you masturbated, before you die? Try that last one without the Oxford comma. New dimensions to death. 

So, no. I’ve stopped clicking ‘Like’, and I’ve stopped posting atrocious things when forced to treat people like real human beings on what are allegedly joyous occasions.

The truth about me – as ugly as it may seem – is that I don’t care about your birthday. I don’t care about Valentine’s Day, for that matter, or Anniversary dates, and so on. I just don’t. Relationships are fluid.

If I like you, I at least try to be nice to you throughout the year.

If I don’t, I don’t.

And that’s that. So, I won’t apologize for not liking your birthday, or posting something on your Facebook wall, or tweeting something, or sending you nude pictures of me, or dressing in a clown costume, or whatever else, on your birthday.

Truth be told, you won’t even see me at your funeral.

Even if I show up.

 

Hitting Pause: Social Networks

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

3D Social NetworkingI’m displeased with social networks in general at this time, particularly after the last year of idiocy with the U.S. Presidential Election. It extends beyond that, and I will touch on that shortly.

I wrote about what I saw in June 2016 as related to politics in “Social Networks, Democracy, and Ethics” – and after the election, people are still wrapping their heads around it because they have been given their opinions from within the echo chambers of their social media accounts. It’s the allegory of the cave in that people are fed what they want to see, and it’s the hedgehog’s dilemma with a bunch of thin skinned and long-quilled hedgehogs.

Typically, I’m in the center – connected to all walks of life, around the world, of different opinions on everything. I’m in a prime location to watch people disagree, and when I try to explain the sides to each other I find myself tired. People are just going to have to figure out how to deal with each other. And, of course, everyone who reads this will think I’m writing about everyone but them when in fact the odds are almost 100% that I’m also writing about them.

The conservative that can’t allow for the free choice of others (ain’t that free will?). The liberal who pursues their ideology with the fervor of a zealot who, fortunately, isn’t armed by their very nature. The religious person who tears at science, the anti-theist who just can’t leave people be with their religion. The anti-Islamists, intent on calling all Muslims violent, and the Christian right, who has no idea just how much they have in common with the Islamists.

It goes on and on and on and on. And on. My newsfeed is littered with articles based on supposition and no actual facts, posted by well-intentioned people to poorly belabor their own perspectives.

The Internet has allowed these people to know about each other and, rather than hash out differences, it becomes a battle of tribes that I have lost patience with.

So: Pause. When you folks figure out how not to be assholes to each other… let me know. A smoke signal or something.