I agree that ads are a crucial difference and also you have agency along many dimensions such as how posts are portrayed to you from user interface look, to defaults for NSFW content, to autoplay or not autoplay… all of that is agency to me that cuts off the potential for a toxic relationship at the root by making it so whatever part of the experience is unhealthy for an individual can probably be tweaked or minimized. Corporate social media just makes the UI however the hell they decide to make it and that is that until a huge amount of accessibility pressure forces some option to be added.

https://brutaldon.org/

Brutaldon is a great example of this accessibility through endless tweakability, you can view your Mastodon feed in a user interface that looks, feels and engages with you entirely differently, and there is no incentive for instances to block this kind of end user tweaking like there is for corporations.

I have never had an issue with pure chronological feeds, I think there is an intuitive fear that you won’t see everything or that important things are drowned out the more you add to a chronological feed, but in my experience even in very large feeds paradoxically after a certain point every interesting account you add makes the feed more reactive and dynamic to what is happening in the outside world since it is unlikely you are bound to check your feed when someone just happens to post to your feed, and you are rather more likely to see people that are posting on your feed because it has something to do with something happening in that moment such as a sports game or a breaking piece of news… because if you don’t follow too many high volume accounts most accounts won’t be posting to your feed most of the time. Your feed goes from being a short collection you browse all the way through to shooting stars in the sky above, you only see the ones that happen to go by right as you are looking in the sky, but that doesn’t mean that it is random that the shooting star is streaking across the sky in this moment… in terms of this metaphor.

Even still, to me the idea of an algorithmic feed isn’t necessarily bad, it just feels like exactly the kind of overengineered, manipulative and needlessly quantitative “solution” I typically hate. Beyond that kneejerk reaction though I can see the use for viewing my chronological feed and then apply algorithmic temporary tweaks to the raw feed to stress different views. Maybe I get tired of seeing the same posts so I apply an algorithm to sort out repeats, and thin out posts from accounts dominating sections of the feed (maybe by artificially spacing them out elsewhere in your feed in a transparent way?).

Of course what the people building social media software usually mean when they say “algorithmic feed” is exactly what Bluesky is doing, it is the desire to locate power in centralized entities that can influence the feed even if it is ostensibly open or… if everyone spontaneously decided to all leave… could become decentralized…

edit I also like to imagine algorithms that could bring up much older posts from interesting accounts in a way that pleasantly skips around in time, or maybe an algorithm that takes every “boost” or “repost” in your feed and temporarily adds in the posts from the boosted or reposted account into your feed and marks them with a “would you like to follow?” button? Something between the ‘subscribed’ and ‘all’ feed might be interesting and useful.

I walked away from my mastodon account for months and months, maybe a year? I don’t know… but then one day I said “ah, I want to use mastodon” and I logged back in and started using it again.

I should download an archive of my posts in case it disappears before I log in again but I never expected it to be permanent permanent, so whatever… and that just feels nice.

Nobody cares if you leave the Fediverse, there are probably people that will be happy if you leave if you spend enough time here hahaha, but at the end of the day there is no structural incentive trying to ensare you here if it isn’t doing something good for you and to me that is genuinely kind architectural design.

It makes me sad seeing people not on the Fediverse slipping into believing it is the format of Instagram that makes it inherently bad, not that it is owned by explicitly ideologically rightwing oligarchs, is monetized in an unhealthy way and is leveraged as a tool of mass manipulation… no it must be the simple joy of having a diverse mix of images, videos and text from accounts you find interesting served up to you in a way you can instantly react and connect with other human beings through… yes that is the evil thing!!!

I don’t know what to say to that other than… I had to read the Crucible in High School for English Class and like… I guess I understood the basic gist of the story???

sigh

Yeah I was going to recommend the film too, of course it is narrativized in many ways in the way big budget movies like this are, but I also think it does a better job than The Wolf Of Wallstreet at NOT making the villains unironically look cool at the end even though the takeaway is supposed to be that the villains are bad.

This is also a decent list of stuff to check out.

https://www.nypl.org/blog/2021/02/04/facebook-booklist

CORPORATE social media

No Zuckerberg made it to browse through all of the hot women at his school with other men more efficiently.

Facebook was conceived as a way to browse a web store of “female objects” easier.

Boys using toys for exactly what Men made them for…

ughhhhhh

I mean why did Zuckeberg make Facebook in the first place? The throughline here is direct.

First I re-emphasize this.

It is unclear when the statements were made.

Second does calling it a “successful resistance action” mean the person/people believed it was a moral or ethical?

Words matter here.

As Palestine is a political entity/governing body, yes it has no special right to exist the same way human beings have a special universal right to exist, have a special right to freedom and a special right to be meaningfully represented in the power structures they are enclosed within. These rights extend to Palestinians, Jews and everybody else.

A country is not a living creature, humans are living creatures.

Authorities also accused the group of supporting terror, highlighting remarks made by a prominent member who described the 7 October attacks on Israel as a “successful resistance action”. It is unclear when the statements were made.

This is all you have to go on!???

Where have I spoken positively about China?

You are trying to erase any nuance between being highly critical of the US, Canada and Europe and being pro-China or functioning somehow as a propaganda mouthpiece for China which I am not… which was the entire point of my comment on your post.

It also must be emphasized that saying “Israel has no fundamental right to exist” does not mean that jews living in Israel do not have a right to exist, or live in Israel, what it means is that the theological/ethnic identity of the COUNTRY of Israel that brutally excludes the humanity of others (including christians) living in Israel who aren’t jews, has no special right to exist as a political mechanism.

Countries are political constructions, they have no right to exist and they do not represent the identity of the people who live in said countries. People, countries and religion are THREE DISCRETE CONCEPTS.

If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck

Where is your evidence of antisemitism?

You aren’t even making a clear and coherent enough argument for me to respond to.

Nope, this is your bias speaking

before anyone says Microsoft/Xbox are idiots and are sabotaging themselves… yes they are but also this strategy is an extremely successful longterm strategy so long as you have enough money to survive the temporary collapse and can buy up large chunks of the industry during the downswing.

Eventually if you keep doing this then you own most of the industry and neither developers nor gamers have any choice but to accept the crap you serve them. Problem solved.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shock_Doctrine

This is one of the reasons why the narrative is nonsense that renting games is better because you can easily own “too many games” if you keep buying them and then… oh no!!! You own too many digital games!!!

When you buy an indie game you are supporting art whether you get to the game or not, remember that, which isn’t to say buy random games but I think this statistic underlines how much it does matter to the smaller game developers to take a leap and buy their indie games. It helps that they usually cost 1/50th the cost of a AAA game lol…

Fuck this, I lived through 9/11 and the stupid fucking Islamophobia that strangled NYC for a decade plus, fuck the NYPD for surveilling innocent muslim New Yorkers just trying to live their lives, fuck Christians who ignore the permission for violence in their own religion to clutch their pearls and fear monger about Islam, fuck dumb bigots who make generalizations about ~2 billion people.

TWO BILLION PEOPLE

How can you possibly deduce ANY meaningful generalization about 2 billion people that isn’t just a generalization about humanity more broadly?

Stoking Islamophobia has lethal real world consequences, people will and already have been radicalized into real and pointless violence from seeing these kinds of ideologies proliferating.

Yes Europe CAN afford not to be scammed.

This article is nonsense marketing.

No shit

Yes but part of the selling point a lot of the time does perversely come back to US-centric companies providing the leaders of Governments and Corporations a Backdoor-As-A-Service product to force upon those lower down in the pecking order.