Well, I've deleted my Fediverse account again. Hopefully I won't make the mistake of joining again in 6-12 months.
It seems to me the problem is with the very idea of social media, it's inherent to it. It used to be very active in various mainstream social media and got excited about the Fediverse after closing all my accounts elsewhere... Well, at the end is more of the same. I left all form of social media (centralized or federated) three years ago and it's been really good for my well-being.
I agree with you, but let's be honest. It doesn't help that the Fediverse is implemented mainly as cheap imitations of better-known, corporate-owned platforms. IIRC, Diaspora* was founded with the explicit aim of out-Facebooking Facebook while being decentralized/federated. GNUsocial, Mastodon, Pleroma, etc. all want to out-Twitter Twitter while being decentralized/federated.
But the fundamental problem is that nerds for whom high school (and possibly college/university) were miserable experiences are building platforms that turn the internet into a global high school cafeteria.
Agreed, too. Sadly, I don't think there's an easy way out of this situation. I do think one of the most important and often overlooked factors for a positive change is increased computer literacy among the population. Computer literacy as in "how to make your machine do what you want", not as in "how to select options in program/service X", which is what computer literacy seems to mean nowadays.
I'm all for increasing real computer literacy, but I see two factors working against any meaningful effort to do so:
1. The powers that be don't want the average person to understand how to make computers work for them.
2. Most people probably never wanted to deal with computers in the first place, and are happy to leave such thankless work to people they despise as "geeks" and "nerds".
Of course, the problem with the second issue is that people who are content to be Eloi and leave the technical stuff to Morlocks tend to forget that Morlocks have their own word for Eloi: dinner.
thank you for writing your personal experience with the "fediverse" I was going to jump into the craze but really haven't had the time. Reading through your posts about this has made me glad I didn't take the plunge.
I don't think I've posted much about it, but TBH social media just isn't worth it.
Everything Is Social, Part 1These links aren't mine, but I agree with a lot of what this person is saying in these blog posts.
Thanks for these links. I'll need to take some time to read them, but on first glance, they seem to match my experience.
Thank you for the links, it is a very long read so I will have to read it at my leisure but I hope it shed light on a lot of things that make sense. For me the beginning of the end of the internet started when MySpace made it's appearance and it went down hill fast when facebook reared its ugly head.
That sounds about right. Web 2.0 was mainly a mistake. Web 1.0 forums were enough, as long as they stayed smol.
By "Fediverse" I assume you mean Mastodon? Fediverse =/= ActivityPub
Yeah, I mean mastodon/pleroma/misskey/etc. The distinction doesn't really matter to me.
Any FOSS and federated medium is part of the Fediverse, so if you use Matrix, PeerTube, Pixelfed, Diaspora, Lemmy, anything like that, you're still using the Fediverse lmao