Rawen's Musings

Social networks, with all their weirdness and rage, are ubiquitous in our lives. From the humble beginnings of the online equivalents of “clubs” or sometimes town squares to the present day outrage harvesters and dopamine distributors, messing with our health. We spend a lot of time in them, sometimes unhealthy amounts of time, stripping ourselves of our privacy. Combine all that and you pretty much get my disdain towards social networks

And yet there’s a certain charm in all this. There’s a way to find diamonds in the sea of mud. Because while there’s a lot of brain-damaging content in many ways, at the same time you can find moments of wholesomeness and in rare cases even genuine friendships. Ironically if not for social media, I wouldn’t find some of the best people in my life. So maybe I’m giving the socials a bit too much scorn. And the recent rising star BlueSky or the rather niche yet resilient Mastodon (even though I have some issues with the culture there) give me hope that social networks can be freed from the rage machine.

Facebook … baby’s first social profile … aaand first hellscape

I think it’s not surprising that my first contact was with the small ‘f’ in the blue brick. Back then, my teenage woof me (I was already on the edge of furs just not dipping my toes yet) got his account there. Not really posting much as I haven’t got much to say and me being a very atypical teenager, I wasn’t really into the various weird bandwagons or shitposting. Over the course of time my account was pretty much just following other folks I know and maybe some small organisational things but that was it. Queue in the pandemic and my beginning of isolation and the site started taking its toll. Seeing people being utter idiots combined with FB or at that point Meta already being absolute fuckheads when it comes to harvesting your data eventually got me to a point when I said “ENOUGH!” and just nuked the account. Freed from the reins, I got a small sanity buff.

Twitter … An aggregator and a rapid news channel turned masturbation chamber

Yes, you read that right. I have nothing but utter hate towards the shitbird site. And it’s quite a shame it went this way because it was a neat aggregator of quick news for me. Quick overview about the things that are happening around with the ability to dive deeper when desired. However, and that was before the shitstorm, it was also a hive of utterly demented discussions and rage. Being on Twitter for longer periods of time felt like spending a night outside during an airstrike and hoping nothing lands on your head. We all know what happened later and now it’s nothing more than a dick sucking contest for the “overlord”. Long story short, fuck that place with a razer-covered shaft and whoever stays there, go choke on the that fucker’s dick.

Glimmers of hope, BlueSky and Mastodon

At the time of writing, BlueSky reached 10 million users. A rising star founded by the former Twitter owner and founder, built with pretty much the same idea in mind, except with the ability so be instantianed the same way Mastodon can. The feature came later since BlueSky was going for the “start small but jump at the opportunity and deliver on the promised features over time” approach and it seems to be paying off. You could say Meta’s Threads were quicker but keep in mind that Threads originated as a fork of Instagram and majority of the userbase was grandfathered in. BlueSky on the other hand grows organically, with a huge Brazillian help recently ;)

Currently the BlueSky feels like a Twitter of old, except cosier because a lot of the “bad actors” stay in their algorithm-infested shitholes. BlueSky hasn’t got any so everything has the emergent and organic growth. This makes it harder to go viral but that, in my opinion, is a good thing because it prevents you to do stupid shit just for the sake of the dopamine rush and motivates you towards giving your posts some substance. Sure, the really crazy stuff will always gain traction, but it’'ll most likely be something that’d get traction anyway.

With all that said, BlueSky should be approached with caution since we know who the peopl behind are and the risk of it falling apart isn’t zero. But the fact that it can be decentrtalised has that hidden bonus of being able to move around if the instance goes bad.

Which brings me to Mastodon, the pioneer of decentralised socials. Being the first in this field to gain more than the niche recognition, it’s often pushed away by newcomers due to “being too complicated”. While the argument has some weight in the form of Mastodon people being bad at advertising the network, the argument has about as much weight as saying “Linux is complicated”. I’ll probably have few words on that too but that’s for another time. There’s also the culture factor which on Mastodon is, how to describe it, tripping over its own rules. While the network itself is decentralised, the enforcement of rules and some of the drama around how the instances are supposed to be run happens as if the network had some central authority. This creates a bit of a “split personality” problem and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was one of the factors driving people away. Because you already have to conform to the rules of “your home” and suddenly there’s someone from a different home telling you what to do. It’s somewhat similar of having your neighbour barge into your house and tell you that the light in your bedroom should be green instead of warm yellow because that’s how it works in their house.

So yeah, I’ve a bit of a weird relationship with Mastodon. On one hand, it creates this feel of a welcoming small town but at the same time it has so many unwritten rules that posting there sometimes feels like carefully navigating a minefield. Which for someone like me who doesn’t really mince words is can be a little problematic.

Is future decentralised? Maybe

Both of the mentioned networks have one thing in common; they have no central authority or entity. This makes the networks resilient because it’s much more difficult to damage it or shut it down. Furthermore, as mentioned before, it makes stuff going viral harder which has the inherent benefit of keeping potentially harmful actors away. The decentralised nature also makes it more difficult for algorithms to settle in because you’d have to scrape the entire federation. And stuff like this can be easily identified and blocked in retaliation. And if that algorithm stays isolated in one instance, isolating said instance will lower the reach anyway. This can of course be abused but it also provides resilience towards bad actors in general.

So yes, I think the social media being decentralised is the future. And in my cautiously optimistic take, I’ll try keep my skies blue and learn how to care for the huge fluffy elephant.

R.R.A.