Tag Archives: Mastodon

Producing actual Content is hard – Information Flow on Social Media Sites

This blog is the second incarnation of a private “news” outlet. Blogs and information channels dealing with personal stuff have a different topic selection. There is no need to stay ahead of current events. Your hobby and your interests may or may not be interesting for others. If you don’t want to deep dive into long articles, fancy content management systems, or blog software, then there is microblogging. Just write a few sentences, add a picture, and you are done. People used Twitter this way before it turned into a cesspool of questionable accounts publishing hate speech. So what about alternatives? The Fediverse looks ok, right? Right, but there is a catch.

Centralised platforms have an agenda. They usually need to earn money, so there is a general purpose and direction for the distributed content. News is a fine product to put on your platform, but creating it is expensive. If you ask real journalists, then news is something no one else knows before it is published. Plus, it is true and checked for errors in advance. Ideally, it is neutral, but information takes sides. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a decentralised platform where making money is not the principal goal? The Fediverse looks like the place you should publish your microblogging texts. I have spent some time on Twitter, deleted my account, and moved my microblogging activity to the Fediverse. The atmosphere is different. There are fewer news channels available. This may change, but it depends on the culture of the local Fediverse server. There are discussions about what content to federate, how the toots should look like, how you should mark the content (sensitive or not), and lots of other nuances in opinion. Moderating content is difficult. Given the people who will abuse your platform, you probably need to check the toots sporadically. And so you are back to the problems of centralised microblogging platforms.

My main argument in favour of the Fediverse is the missing agenda. While no billionaire with mental illness can buy the platform and destroy it, the volunteers can run out of resources. Keep this in mind and think about donating to your local instance or to Free Software in general.

j j j

Strange microblogging habits – “from social media (can be anything, sorry)”

I use a few social media network platforms. I never used Facebook, but I started using Twitter a long time ago. A few years later, a Mastodon account was added. The “community” is wildly different. Twitter is known for powerful shit storms triggered by a few words. There is an endless discussion about which system is better. Centralised, decentralised, moderated, unmoderated, free flow, free spirit, more social, less community, stupidity filters, and more is discussed. It all boils down to the fact that small groups have a higher IQ and less evil intent on average than large groups of humans. Manipulation happens on all levels. No surprise there. This is where my observation comes into play. I frequently read the sentence “From birdsite (can be anything, sorry)” on Mastodon when someone quotes a tweet from Twitter. Why?

  • “from birdsite” makes no sense. You cannot make something disappear just by refusing to call it by name. It’s the same as saying “because of the sun” instead of using references to the climate change.
  • “can by anything” makes even less sense. If you squeeze data into the maximum length of a tweet or a toot, then you will have to leave out some information. Furthermore, if I can write anything by using a microblogging account, then the published text will be anything. So anything you quote, be it tweet, toot or fart, will most likely be anything.
  • “sorry” is at the top of making no sense at all. If you don’t want to mention Twitter, have realised that microblogging platforms can be used by anyone or anything, then why the hell would you be sorry? If you really were sorry, then you wouldn’t cross-post the information.

From my blog (can be anything, sorry). 😂

j j j