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The founding myth of all alternative social media spaces is that they are in their essence better places than Twitter.
But so long as their membership is open and their quality reliant on user growth …
in reality they will be essentially the same and the differences, if any, will lie in more subtle/complex aspects easily masked by the founding myth and the celebration it receives from its adherents.
In this alternative social media moment, I wonder how much of a movement there is, which would require IMO a coherent set of motives and beliefs widely held amongst participants.
Instead I wonder if there’s a good deal of myth making, platform hopping, novelty chasing and incoherent motives/beliefs.
I wonder if alternative social media is a movement at all, and if it is, whether it registers at all with outsiders as to what it is about so as to invite newcomers.
I also wonder if the great incoherence at the root may be a disjunct between techno-capital motives and social motives … with techno-capital motives reigning supreme and baffled by the indifference of those with chiefly social motives … with big social media being perhaps the wrong place to care about and act on techno-capital issues.
In about 6 months time, we’re going to be 2 years since the Twitter migration, and able to take stock after a raft of elections, a Reddit enshitification and continuous musk and zuck activity. Where will we be?
For me, I’ll imagine the primary outcome will be to have forced a number of people to wonder what the point of alternative social media is while appeasing nerds and helping *some* marginalised people.
And I’m not sure “we” have a good answer without the founding myths.
@maegul great thread and considerations
we definitely need better stories about why were doing this, and 'twitter but decentralised' is simply not cutting it. fedi microblogging has hit its limit like 9 months ago with that story, and i dont think bluesky has much more to go with that story either
@maegul think the period were in right now is a necessary transition period towards better stories and visions of how we can build healthy online communities
the outline I think starts to become visible (imho an archipelago of partially overlapping predominantly partially closed networks), but i dont think we can get to a shared understanding of that without working through this long transition period
@laurenshof @maegul I Beleive that there was a bit of a land rush where administrators wanted to set up gateways as opposed to communities. In the early days of the great migration capacity was a void that needed to be filled. However I Beleive in doing so we set up a culture of service providers as opposed to community builders. Idealky we'd move to a model of diverse instances that could stand in their own right but share the connecting tissue of the fediverse.