its like kind of a weird thing for me personally as it seems like posting on instagram and facebook are to a certain extent become like my job. without even going into the privacy and advertising driving nonsense on both platforms, literally just from a UX standpoint both are really kind of terrible at this point. I was just talking to @palomakop about how tumblr was like kind of a way better platform for art and creative stuffs sharing and was just curious if anyone knows of anything even remotely similar that folks use these days for sharing stuffs? and/or maybe just segueway this into making a list of what kind of options there are for being social on the internet that arenāt corporate advertising driven platforms?
you already know this I think but just for the record mastodon Is a relatively popular decentralized social media platform.
There is an art instance with quite a few members I remember seeing. Donāt use it myself, (posting on scanlines is meeting this need for me for now - but Iām not doing it as work )
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It certainly seems like FB strives to make us passive consumers (via its model of content impermanence as a result of large volumes, limited distribution scope and inadequate value assessment) while simultaneously manipulating us into offering up enough personal information so that we can be targeted for gain - quite an impressive feat, all things considered. Itās only real strength is its ubiquity - but that is an incredible and seemingly insurmountable strength.
Sadly, I have no comparable alternative to put forward so this is just a soapbox.
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I do miss the glory days of Tumblr. Going from that to IG felt like a huge step backwards. Though Tumblrās parents have also been trying their darndest to screw up that space too. And itās a ghost town mostly. I still use it sometimes. But mostly I need to revamp my 15+ -year-old website. (Somedayā¦)
Though I often donāt have much to contribute (because I am not a super technical-minded person and many of the discussions here go over my head), I am glad this place exists, as well as the LZX forums.
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I donāt use any social media place except for place like this: (because they are really focused on synths and not much else. maybe cats)
scanlines
LZX community forum
muffwiggler
modulargrid
synthforum
and my own site + Etsy
I refuse to use FB, instagam, twitter and the likes. (and donāt understand why anyone would use them at all)
I have not found better options. Mastodon might be something but I have not looked into that seriously.
These days Iām mostly on IRC and discord.
again suggesting somwthing i dont use myself, but anyone tried pixelfed ? - certainly looks a lot like instagramā¦
although i have a feeling the main appeal of instagram is the critical mass
also less related, but i recently learnt about The e-mail messenger - Delta Chat , a very interesting messaging solution if you care about e2e encryption, want something decentralised and still can send messages to literally everyone (who has an email)
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its my hope that this space could facilitate discussions across the spectrum of electronic art making, and not only ātech talkā - is there something you think we could do to encourage more of this ?
This doesnāt really answer to @andrei_jay, and it may be obvious to everybody, anywayā¦Iāve worked with no-profit/anti-corporate collectives who provide online services. Of course there was/is demand for alternatives to capitalistic, ad-based mega-platforms. The conundrum: you have particular motivations and strong opinions, so you join the alternative service - but not enough people among your friends/peers do the same. Which implies you donāt get enough interesting new content - which leads to low engagement. So thereās that.
In the past Iāve played with https://ello.co - itās not a no-profit but it focuses on creators/artists and it used to make a point about respecting users.
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yeah the tradeoff for diy solutions vs corporate is always that individuals have to put more effort into things. and folks have mostly been trained to not expect to put that kind of effort into things! kind of a general issue in convience based capitalist societies in general!
im not so convinced that is the real problem here. most of the effort is done already by the open-source maintainers and developers.
for an individual to use mastodon / peertube / pixelfed it is basically the same as using twitter / youtube / insta - where is the extra effort ? sure these platforms might lag behind in some features, but even putting aside privacy benefits that not everyone appreciates theres still the ad-free experience and friendly admins / community focused roadmaps etc (compared to robo-bans and corporate lawyers) that make the overall experience much nicer for everyone.
if regulators / governments really did crack down on the crimes these tech giants commit, and facebook really did pull their services from europe ( like they threatened to do ) it could be the best thing to happen - the alternatives are already there, people just need a push !
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the extra effort is in going out of ones way to build communities as opposed to passively consuming the concept of a community. fb, insta, twitter, youtube all have very low effort built into them and its pretty much cost nothing for a āconsumerā to passively interact with them and receive a small but consistent amount of endorphins.
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like the difference between me clicking 'like" on something and taking a moment to articulate what i like about something, or articulating that i might like some aspects of a post but disagree with some other.
*clicks like on this post*
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i think itās mostly a matter of critical mass ā can i contact everyone i know on a single platform at a momentās notice ? which is not to say this doesnāt have an aspect of effort to it ā community building is effort. promoting open source & distributed networks is effort.
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To be clear, my comment wasnāt intended as a complaint. It is still reasonably interesting for me to lurk, even if I donāt have anything to contribute to most such discussions.
And I also think the discussions will, and have, naturally broadened as more people start, and have started, to participate here. Having founders/moderators [continue to] engage with and seed broader discussions could help speed that along. As a creator/facilitator of several IRL communities ā with varying levels of success ā I can say that one largely gets the community one models.
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ELLO (www.ello.co)
Pretty cool platform, has some momentum with artists and a good philosophy behind it.
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Hi, just to clarify, social media arenāt made to do something social, but to share something social youāre doing somewhere else.
Iām writing a blog, so I share my articles on a honk instance.
Iām currently highly critical of social media; I dislike them for the same reasons that someone dislikes money, and because the former is an emanation of the latter. Capitalists monopolize money and social media monopolize users.
So Iām super fine with using ActivityPub to make one big federation of decentralized social media which will scale naturally with lighter economic constraints, but for me āethicalā social media software fail at clarifying that they shouldnāt be used to make friends but mainly to get more eyeballs. Capitalist social media donāt do this because this confusion helps them to get dedicated, addicted users consuming ad on ad.
Personally I use a pubnix, which is both a community (interacting mainly on IRC) and a server providing the email used to create this account; HTML and Gemini spaces; and the honk instance maintained on honk.hmm.st by Ben, tilde.teamās sysadmin.
IMO, Mastodon tries to provide both a community (local TL) and a social media (federated TL, home TL). Whether it is a success or not varies from one user to another. Personally, deleting my accounts felt like I opened a window, and fresh air came in the room.
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