social-networking

An up close an personal look into why we should be extremely careful when sharing about ourselves online, no matter how shiny an app or network might be.

Music League makes music social in a way that social media algorithms, ironically, do not

The internet has become an extractive and fragile monoculture. But we can revitalize it using lessons learned by ecologists.

A vague dread grips you. Why is everything a little bit different now? The smallest details are wrong. Your favorite posters have vanished from all platforms. There haven’t been any new memes for some time, only recycled iterations of old ones. Influencers are coordinated in their talking points like puppets being pulled by the same strings. Your favorite niche YouTuber has only recently been posting new content with any regularity. Is this a message? Is this what schizophrenia is like?

We’re at the end of a vast, multi-faceted con of internet users, where ultra-rich technologists tricked their customers into building their companies for free. And while the trade once seemed fair, it’s become apparent that these executives see users not as willing participants in some sort of fair exchange, but as veins of data to be exploitatively mined as many times as possible, given nothing in return other than access to a platform that may or may not work properly.

Yet what’s happening to the web is far more sinister than simple greed, but the destruction of the user-generated internet, where executives think they’ve found a way to replace human beings making cool things with generative monstrosities trained on datasets controlled and monetized by trillion-dollar firms.

Their ideal situation isn’t one where you visit distinct websites with content created by human beings, but a return to the dark ages of the internet where most traffic ran through a series of heavily-curated portals operated by a few select companies, with results generated based on datasets that are increasingly poisoned by generative content built to fill space rather than be consumed by a customer.

See current activity on Bluesky in realtime.

Though it makes me feel like a grandmother on her deathbed to admit it, I remember the days when the internet was vast, when there seemed to be more places to go than anyone could ever visit and infinite things to read. What you saw was not determined by some highly protected coded algorithm that lives somewhere in the cloud. You could just go out and find it.

No posts today! Murdered by Elon.

One of the few aggregators I loved to use. Goodbye.

The tech industry is abuzz about a new standard for social networking that is more open, more user-centric, and potentially more powerful than Twitter and Facebook. But we’ve been here before.