BunkBlog

It’s been a few months since I did a survey of my current social media presence. Some things have stayed the same, others have shifted, and the various major platforms are becoming whatever they will be.

Threads, of course, is the biggest alternative for people leaving Twitter. It’s got the built-in Facebook and Instagram user base, so network effects have been conquered pretty thoroughly. Sadly, it also seems to have fewer features than the other big platforms. I can choose between “following” and “for you” or the unlikely to ever be used “saved” and “liked” posts. I have a shortcut on my browser to the “following” mode, because that’s what I want – duh, it’s what I chose. As with every social media site that has a profit motive, it defaults to “whatever the algorithm thinks you want to see” mode.

BlueSky has a pretty stable integration with ActivityPub going, although it’s still missing basic reciprocation – comments stay on their own sites, for example. Maybe the integration will grow to the point that BlueSky is a full fediverse member, but it may be a while. What BlueSky does have going for it over Threads is the ability to curate your own feed into subfeeds, and make those “lists” available for others to use. You may want a list of all the best FIFA players in the world, or whatever – make the list, and maybe other people will think it’s a good thing. There doesn’t appear to be a way to bookmark specific hashtags, but it seems nobody on any site is actually very consistent in using those anyway (it’s kind of why the algorithm has become so important).

Friendica remains a footnote – I repost things to it, but virtually nobody on the fediverse is using anything other than Mastodon. Also, I can’t get to Venera (my Friendica instance) from work, which really reduces my interactions with it. The interface is also a bit clunky compared to Mastodon. Because it does integrate as a peer with all ActivityPub sites, if I could get to it from work, it may have become my go-to. I do chafe at the character limits of Mastodon.

Mastodon, which looked like it was going to gain an actual respectable user base, seems to have plateaued at around one million active users per day, across all the various Mastodon instances. I have been happy with IndieWeb, and I love how easy it is to interact with people on all the other instances in the fediverse. Alas, that terminology may be killing engagement for non-geeks.

I still post a lot to Facebook. I am aware that Zuckerberg is awful, and that his site has done a lot of dirty things. But, it’s where people are, and it allows me to post more than a paragraph in a single comment.

How are y’all navigating the social media diaspora?

Hey, remember blogs? It’s beginning to feel like they might be making a comeback. I’ve been around these here interwebs a long time, and social media has risen and morphed a lot in that time. Meanwhile, actually owning your own domain and putting up your own shit there has never gone away and has remained fully functional. My first iteration of the BunkBlog was on GeoCities, in the SiliconValley subdivision, maybe unit 7309? Anyway, it’s long gone but the Wayback Machine still has some bits and pieces of it. My oldest post I can find is from 1998, and was about rude assholes on the internet. Some things are just evergreen, aren’t they?

Early Connections

Once upon a time, it required actual effort to have an online presence. Pre-Web, the presence you curated was on individual bulletin board systems (BBS) that each had their own culture and rules. Most BBSes were just one guy with a spare computer, or in some cases one guy with a computer that he left available during specific hours of the day. Of course, most of those only had a single phone line attached, so everything was done asynchronously, and discussions were necessarily fairly slow, often taking months to reach a consensus. We were social, but very deliberate – when we really wanted to have a gathering, we literally gathered. I had BBS meetups at pizza parlors and public parks. BBSes weren’t just limited to local areas, though. There was a decent-sized protocol called FidoNet, which used a “store and forward” system to send batches of electronic messages around the world. With the speed of modems and the frequency of sending batches varying wildly between FidoNet nodes, it may have been many hours, possibly even days, before your message reached its destination, but it opened the world to computer geeks.

By the early 1980s, it was becoming obvious that home computers weren’t just a fad, and that people liked reaching out to form online communities. Some companies popped up, such as Genie and Prodigy and QuantumLink and AOL and CompuServe (I had a QuantumLink account with my 1200 baud modem on a Commodore 64). Each had their own forums and communities, and because they were on bigger computers with actual infrastructure, it was possible to do real-time chatting with other humans. Then, the internet became open to commercial users, instead of just government and educational users, gradually through the first half of the 1990s, until the NSFNet fiber backbone was decommissioned and it became the wild west in 1995.

Social Media

We started to look for persistent connections and build communities almost as soon as the internet became accessible to all. Web sites joined “rings” that were built on various affinities, and by 2000 there were a multiple new tools available. LiveJournal was a personal site that went big, producing a new generation of people who were logging their thoughts and connecting with each other. We had communities devoted to nearly any topic imaginable, and we could tweak the style of our personal pages within some limits, so our web logs became blogs became our means of expressing ourselves. LJ had privacy levels, it had (eventually) nested comment threads, it had groups and filters and introduced the term “friend” to mean “some person that I like to read on the internet.” LJ reached a height of a couple million users, and then the owner sold it to a company that sold it to a Russian company and now it’s effectively dead in the USA. Along the same time, Myspace rose, offering another customizable cacophony of colors and blink text. Myspace flamed out even faster than LJ, being bought by Rupert Murdoch and then essentially killed off for personal use. Bands stuck around for a while, but even they didn’t persist much past the rise of Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and all the other sites we have today.

One abiding feature of the old online communities was moderation, via humans who either were paid or volunteered to police each forum for rules violations. Most would offer a warning or two for scofflaws, and if they were ignored the offender got chucked out the metaphorical airlock. Sadly, moderation does not scale very well, as we see in the modern social media sites. Trying to automate moderation produces nonsense. In multiple instances, I’ve seen people report or flag content that is offensive or violates a site’s terms of service (Nazi symbiology is the most obvious and flagrant), and the person reporting the content gets their account suspended, while the Nazi remains on the service. Robots are bad at making judgment calls.

It seems that lack of good judgment is not a problem to the owners of the modern social media sites, because they are not actually in the business of providing communities. They are in the business of providing demographic data to advertisers and data miners. As the saying goes, if you’re not paying for a service, you’re the product and not the customer. Facebook and Twitter don’t give a shit about you and your desire to reconnect with high school classmates – they just want that advertiser gold.

Profit Motives Suck

There are many things that capitalism has proven good at, with the appropriate level of regulation and oversight. I think many people have realized that monetizing human interactions is not a great thing for the humans. Various alternative social media platforms have come up over the years, attempting to break the network effect problem that keeps people on Facebook and Twitter. Mastodon appears to be the protocol that may actually finally beat the profit-focused social media world.

Mastodon is more a set of communication standards than it is a web site or platform. The main site, mastodon.social, has reached its capacity long ago. When I created my first Mastodon account, in 2017, they were already telling people to join mastodon.cloud for general-purpose uses, or to find one of the other instances that had already popped up. I’m not going to reiterate what others have written about the service, but the federation and deliberate nature of connecting, and the non-profit nature of the entire fediverse (get used to weird terminology), really seems like something that may take off.

There are thousands of Mastodon users, broken into different servers with different communities, but they can all (within limits) link together. If you’re tired of Mark Zuckerberg’s robots telling you that pointing to the hate speech is worse than hate speech, or if you’re tired of Elon Musk spreading misinformation on his personal web site, maybe check out Mastodon. It’s a slower, simpler, more social media site.

Oh, and read Cory Doctorow. He’s pretty damned clever.

I had the latest and greatest version of Facebook’s interface force-updated recently. Like so many recent website updates, it appears that the intended audience either can’t see very well, or is using the website with a touch screen. Here’s my standard home screen under the old theme:

This is what it looks like on a 1080p monitor if I maximize the browser. Obviously, I never maximize the browser for Facebook – it wastes half the width of the screen. But, you can see over a dozen links on the left, including my curated list of shortcuts, and you can see one full post from a group I belong to, and the beginning of another. Here’s that same data, with the new theme:

It still wastes some space if you maximize it, but it isn’t quite as egregious. What is egregious, though, is that Facebook now decides that I need to see “Stories” (a feature almost nobody uses on purpose) and provides the option to create a random group (a feature almost nobody understand the purpose of). Those aren’t optional, and they waste a lot of vertical space. Meanwhile, the “contacts” list, which was collapsible in the classic mode, is just there all the time, providing visual clutter.

Look at the “classic” theme again, and you’ll see small numbers next to some of the shortcuts on the left. This shows, at a glance, how many posts or comments are unread in specific groups or pages. The equivalent information in the new theme is just all clumped together in the fourth icon on the top row. That claims there are six groups with new comments or posts, but I don’t know which group unless I click that icon. Maybe some groups are things I care about deeply, and others only casually. Too bad – they’re all the same now.

Over in the chat and notification drop-downs, we have more insults to efficiency. I’m not going to show screen shots, because I don’t want to blur out everything repeatedly, but you can conduct this experiment on your own. In the chat menu, at the bottom of the legacy view, is “Mark all read.” Boom, now the slate is wiped clean and you are all caught up. That option is completely missing in the new view. In the notification menu, the legacy mode shows “mark all read” right at the top, very easy. The new view hides it under a menu of other options that you’ll likely never use.

There are a number of other minor annoyances. Even if you can’t use plugins (like Social Fixer that you can see in my screen shots), the legacy view allows you to switch from the much-reviled default “top stories” view into a “recent” view that is vastly more intuitive. The new view doesn’t have that feature on the “news feed” menu option (because that option is missing), and instead it is under the down-arrow in an option called “recent” – at least it’s there, but it’s more work to get to. When reposting a link, in the classic view, we have the option to “include original” which would repost the link and the commentary from the person’s post where you found it. In the new theme, there is no option — your new post will include the link to the source and nothing else.

Why does Facebook want to make using their service more tedious?