Honestly? I live in a small town, and face to face isn’t much better. People are incredibly bigoted, and might be polite to your face but incredibly judgemental and small minded, especially to anyone perceived as different. Empathy is a skill that needs to be practised, like meditation. And many people lack it both online and off.
I’ve seen people say that Farcebork was like being in a small town, actively making that kind of everyone-knowing-everyone’s-business a reality again for communities fractured by urban anonymity.
But that was there in spades in the early internet, it’s just that normies hadn’t been beaten over the head by social conditioning by the corporate overlords yet to join in.
It’s human nature to think and behave tribally. So we should expect it to continue in the Fediverse, we just can’t shove the problem over to someone else to manage and take their tithe in eyeballs, and thus fracture our communities all over again: we have to do it ourselves. Drama fucking sucks, wherever is found, but we have to accept it’s our job to manage if we don’t want to trade our freedom for a padded cell.
Interesting article, and it did change my view slightly of what ATProto is, but not by a huge amount.
Given the current political climate, a few days ago I randomly started wondering… what if some governments around the world acknowledged that communicating through Farcebok or Xitter is no longer tenable, and committed to providing social media infrastructure hosted in their own countries as a public good: “your tax dollars at work!”
Would ATProto make sense in these cases? They have the resources, and ATProto might seem more attractive/robust for that kind of scale compared to ActivityPub?
I think, If we have any credible threat, it’s going to be from the Governmental gross anti-tampering laws, forced moderation, or backup regulations. They could make it legally difficulty for us to exist
This. I have considerable concern that Fascists will straight up ban Fedi if enough people shift to it. They don’t like not being able to control everything, Fedi is far too much actual freedom of communication.
I do concede that there has been a trend towards xenophobia that has been exacerbated by filter bubbles and even more by algorithms. But the balance is that people who once had no choice but to suffer ostracism and extreme isolation have been able find community online and have improved mental health and outcomes in many ways.
I certainly found this myself in the early days of the internet before the iron fist of corporatism grabbed this fledgling space, determined to extract value from it, and creating the nightmares of isolation and hate that are now Farcebork and its ilk. Fedi has been a welcome return to smaller communities that have to do the necessary work of self management, which reduces the hate and isolation that is promoted by antisocial media, even if it doesn’t stop it altogether.
My point is, the internet isn’t worse. Humans can be good or bad, but certain environments make them behave in worse ways, and these environments can exist both online and off.