Enshittification of Social Media

A friend had the great idea of organizing a public speaking event in our group, so I dedicated to give a short talk about the current state of social media or rather it‘s Enshittification. The main point where the current updates to Meta‘s change in policies and it‘s abandonment of the fact checking program.

Just a short gist of the talking points, we‘ve got this policy change for example:

We’re going to simplify our content policies and get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender Zucker that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse. – Zuckerberg

You can read details about it on NPR

Then we have the Internal instructive examples, which I will not write about here and would ask you to read the article on the intercept

What options are there?

Feediverse (Federated Universe)

There is a great introduction about what the feediverse is in this Techcrunch article

To summarize it up, it‘s:

• Decetralized - this means that there is not one central controlling company, person or group that controls the platform.
• Ad-free
• Chronological feeds - no algorithm to push content. The content is displayed in chronological order as it was posted.
• Platforms talk to each other - You are not stuck to one platform or rather, you can use one platform and follow people from any other platform. Prefer a twitter like experience but your friends want to post images on Pixelfed (instagram replacement)? No problem. You can follow account from Pixelfed with your Mastodon account.

Downsides

One thing that needs to be talke about is the fact that traditional social media thought us that we get everything for free. I‘m sure by now you‘ve heard the statement: „if it‘s free then you‘re the product“. Since there are no ads on the feediverse, no possibility for businesses to reach people or buy personal data, someone has to pay the bill for these services. Depending on how many users are on one server, this could rack up costs of several thousand euro per month. Besides the monetary problem, there is also a time problem. Just because platforms are open source and don‘t sell data, it doesn‘t mean that it will keep out the bad people, whatever you define as being bad people. This then means that moderation is required which is done by volunteers. Keep this in mind when using such platforms and think about checking how you can help the admin of the „instance“ you are using. Most times you will find instructions on where donations can be made in the rules or terms for your instance.

Systems

And now finally to the existing systems which is not a complete list but currently the most popular ones.

• Mastodon - Microblog similar to twitter
• Pixelfed - Picture Platform similar to Instagram
• Loops - Video Platform similar to TikTok
• Peertube - Video Platform similar to YouTube
• Friendica - Facebook like Platform
• Lemmy - Reddit like Platform

Yes I know that Threads from Meta offers some support for the feediverse, but … it‘s once again Meta. So I have not looked into it and don‘t really care about it. You are free however to check what it‘s all about and how you can follow people from threads with your new choice of feediverse platform.

Putting my money where my mouth is

You can find me on these Platforms:

• Mastodon: crisl_at@mastodon.social
• Friendica: cris@friends.cvx.es
• Peertube: cris@video.infosec.exchange

And to really put my money where my mouth is .. here‘s the Video of my talk, sound is not great, we didn‘t do any professional recordings, there are no transcriptions but it‘s a start.

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