Tag: Social Media

Social Media and Blogging

Where Will the Current State of Blogging and Social Media Take Us? by Jacky AlcinéJacky Alciné (jacky.wtf)

There’s this concept in engineering called the single point of failure; the notion that by centralizing a lot of critical processes, you increase the chance of failure (catastrophic or not) to occur. One could say that by using platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter or the like. Currently, my “identity” is still splintered across multiple places/services on the Web. To fulfill what I’m reaching at, I’d have to have jacky.wtf be the place where my images are posted from, my blog posts are published at, my check-ins are stored and so forth. There is a concern with security and it’s actually relatively reasonable.

I wish that I could post first on my website and have an entry immediately created on Untappd or Foursquare, etc. 100% POSSE. The community aspects of those services is what keeps me tied to them.

What if the problem with the Twitter mob isn’t Twitter but the mob?

The world is a terrible place right now, and that’s largely because it is what we make it. (WIL WHEATON dot NET)

Buuuuuuuuuut … I’m done with social media. Maybe I just don’t fit into whatever the social media world is. I mean, the people who are all over the various Mastodon instances made it really clear that I wasn’t welcome there (with a handful of notable, joyful, exceptions, mostly related to my first baby steps into painting), and it seems as if I was just unwelcome because … I’m me? I guess? Like, I know that I’m not a transphobe, but holy shit that lie just won’t die, and right now as I am writing this, someone at Mastodon is telling me that I am, because people said so, and I should apologize to them. I mean, how am I supposed to respond to that, when it happens over and over and over again? “You’ve been lied to about me. Please give me a chance” just doesn’t seem like a viable way forward with people who are, for whatever reason, very, very angry. And these people seem to have an idea of me in their head that doesn’t fit with the idea of myself that I have in my head. It’s honestly caused me to rethink a lot of stuff. Like, am I really the terrible person they say I am? I don’t think I am, but I’m doing my best to listen, and when I say, “please stop yelling at me and let’s have a conversation that I can grow from” I get yelled at for “tone policing” and honestly I just get exhausted and throw up my hands. Maybe I’m not this person they tell me I am, but I represent that person in their heads, and they treat me accordingly? This is one of those times when my mental illness makes it very hard for me to know what’s objective reality and what’s just in my head.

I quite often feel the same way about social media. I found this article suggesting that the problem with social media is the social, the mob. I agree.

Bad news: there's no solution to false information online by Ben WerdmüllerBen Werdmüller

It's clearly impossible for the web as a platform to objectively report that a stated fact is true or false. This would require a central authority of truth - let's call it MiniTrue for short. It may, however, be possible for our browsers and social platforms to show us the conversation around an article or component fact. Currently, links on the web are contextless: if I link to the Mozilla Information Trust Initiative, there's no definitive way for browsers, search engines or social platforms to know whether I agree or disagree with what is said within (for the record, I'm very much in agreement - but a software application would need some non-deterministic fuzzy NLP AI magic to work that out from this text).

Imagine, instead, if I could highlight a stated fact I disagree with in an article, and annotate it by linking that exact segment from my website, from a post on a social network, from an annotations platform, or from a dedicated rating site like Tribeworthy. As a first step, it could be enough to link to the page as a whole. Browsers could then find backlinks to that segment or page and help me understand the conversation around it from everywhere on the web. There's no censoring body, and decentralized technologies work well enough today that we wouldn't need to trust any single company to host all of these backlinks. Each browser could then use its own algorithms to figure out which backlinks to display and how best to make sense of the information, making space for them to find a competitive advantage around providing context.

There is a lot to think about.