Naunihal Singh (@naunihal@mastodon.social)
mastodon.socialTLDR: Mastodon is very white, male, status quo, global north, and designed in a way to limit its potential for use in social movements.
Mastodon feels very different from Twitter, deliberately. It is truly like Live Journal. It is about people who are happy with their social circle and who think of virality and discoverability as a problem. They just want to communicate with the people they know, and limit other things. Ironically, it is more like a private gathering than a public space.
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The activist thing would be interesting to have a closer look at. I am somewhat sceptical of the claim, given that for example the impact social media had on the Arab spring protests was probably vastly over-stated. And in addition: not every internet mob is activism, even if participants might feel that way.
Social media very clearly has a huge impact on society nowadays, and activism relies on the ability to spread ideas to recruit people to a particular cause. Your attitude seems to be prevalent with the people of the background the author calls out.
That last part doesn’t seem like an argument and more an accusation. And for the first part, certainly, however for how many leftist activists i see only and how many people scream for society to “CHANGE CHANGE CHANGE” it has done nothing of the sort. Its huge impact is seen in specific areas, harassment of companies (employees) to deliver better products (bankruptcy), amber alerts, casual awareness of whatever the hell is THE thing we need to fight for… And yet nothing is solved becausr it’s an individual talking about paying attention to an individual and not giving applicable solutions, everyone loves Sophism apparently.
Your own argument is a form of sophism. The fact that people are still discovering how to use a new medium to effect change doesn’t reduce the importance of the medium in any way. Ultimately, ideas spread through people communicating with one another, and social media is one of the main means of communication today.
Been a while since i saw what i wrote, but if i remember correctly i called for the end of sophism by giving a solution, idk how tf that makes my argument sophist since a sophist would want an eternal argument, that’s all i’ll say here and thank you for your time.
Sophism is generally used to refer to an argument apparently correct in form but actually invalid. The claim that social media is not a valuable medium for effecting change is not a sound argument.
This has been the case since mastodon’s inception. Feature requests that were supported by a wide swath of the community have been shot down by gargron because he controls mainline. Changes have been made before without any discussion with or headsup to admins, even changes that instance admins can’t control.
If ppl want that to change, they need to move software. Move to a completely different implementation or move to a masto fork. Stop donating to the mastodon patreon and donate to the forks or other software. Help other groups in the fediverse get more influence so garg doesn’t get to run over everyone else.
Thr article’s TLDR is not wrong, what is wrong is its title, because that’s Internet design and has always been.
There is nothing inherent about the design of the internet that prevents information from spreading and going viral. The thread is talking about some design decisions that Mastodon makes that are at odds with propagation of information through the network.
I’d argue it’s search engines and social networks the ones that grant any level of "virality and discoverability ", not the internet itself. In the internet you need “third party” solutions for indexing or searching.
I mean, Mastodon probably intentionally lacks tools that enhance “virality and discoverability”, but that’s not the same thing as saying that it actively prevents information spread. You could in theory build a search engine for toots, or an alternate fork that does have those features. It’s even free and open source software, so it’s open to whatever.
Right, the internet is just a network that more complex things like social networks are built on top of. Hence why the question is with the design of Mastodon and completely unrelated to how the internet works fundamentally.
And I didn’t say Mastodon actively prevents propagation, rather that some design decisions are at odds with viral propagation. It could be possible to build separate tooling on top, or to create forks that are more friendly towards propagation. However, Mastodon is by far the biggest ActivityPub based network right now, and the way it works plays a huge role for how Fediverse can be used at the moment.