2018.06.13 - Day 91

Yes Storm, I have especially become disillusioned with social media lately. I stopped Twitter and I start to see the manipulation behind Facebook – for example, the posts about environmental problems and cruelty to animals that try to get you annoyed or outraged in order to keep you there and seeing adverts

Tart starts to talk about the difficulty of knowing which path a spiritual seeker should take. There are no ‘Spiritual Consumer Reports’ to guide us. And we need to use our instinctual and bodily intelligence to guide us, not just the intellect, which tends to be overdeveloped in Western societies.

‘To illustrate a problem I doubt is unique, one of the reasons I was attracted to several spiritual paths in my past was that I had an immature need to feel superior to other people, in order to mask feelings of inferiority in myself.’

Tart, Charles T.. Waking Up: Overcoming the Obstacles to Human Potential (Kindle Locations 5495-5497). Fearless Books. Kindle Edition.

Tolle also talks about how he developed his intellect so he could feel good about himself in some area since he wasn’t handsome or good at sports. I see that trait in myself as well. I wonder if a highly developed intellect is as advantageous as we think. It can cut you off from people.

Morning practice - shmorning practice. I missed it again!

Super concentrated day - am just slowing down enough to consider meditation, although I did peek into Insight Timer this morning.

So yes, I'm going to talk about social media, and alternatives.

Disclosure. I don't have a Facebook account, never have, never will, though Jobe does and kids do. I've had a Twitter account for 10 years, but 98.5% of my tweets are dated 2011 or earlier. I have an Ello account that I don't use, ditto for linkedin.

Zen is right in spotting the manipulation. It's the same on Twitter. And this all stems from a misalignment between corporate and user incentives...

"Twitter makes its money from advertising, which means that its goal is to keep your eyes glued to the screen for as long as possible, and to convince you to interact with ads. Its goal is not to keep you safe from harassment, or to ban dangerous extremists, or to ensure your psychological well-being. Its goal is to make advertisers money by selling them an engaged audience." So says Microsoft software developer Nolan Lawson. (And substitute "enraged" for "engaged", to include Zen's FB comments!)

So far, so obvious. The algorithms are there to keep your eyes on the screen. After all, you are not the customer; you are the commodity that's being sold to the customers, with all your data, your likes, dislikes, friends, page views, clicks and mouse-hovers.

Enter the idea of having decentralized networks of distributed servers, each server running open source software, and each having its own community, its own interests, its own policies, and its own admin(s). Sounds like a recipe for chaos, right? How would you ever find anyone?

Let's take my favorite of all these social media alternatives: Mastodon. On the face of it it's a Twitter substitute. (There are other systems that attempt to substitute for Facebook, like diaspora* and Friendica, but to me none have the impact of Mastodon.) I'm finding Mastodon a lot more interesting and enjoyable than Twitter.

There's no company behind Mastodon, no Mastodon Inc, and no CEO on the payroll. Who wrote the software? Just some passionate young German guy who lives off Patreon donations! But it's open-source software, which means anyone could take it, alter it if they want to, and set up their own system. And they do! But here's the beauty. In general they don't compete but work together as a galaxy of interconnected servers - the Fediverse (which includes other systems that I'll not talk about, just because of space).

Mastodon servers (called "instances") aren't run on advertising. Most are run by donations. And so they're not trying to get eyeballs on the screen for sale to advertisers. Instead they're trying to create hospitable places for their users to hang out in, create in, socialize in, experiment with identities in, or just feel safe in.

Their size varies. The biggest instances may have hundreds of thousands of users. Many have only a handful. The most popular 'themed' instances have around a thousand or so users each, which may be around the right size to get a feeling of community and identity, and a balance between dominant personalities and anonymity.

They may connect to other Mastodon instances in the Fediverse, but only the ones they feel comfortable connecting with. They may ban connecting with others that contravene their individual content policies. So, for example, one instance may choose not to federate with another that is explicitly a home to sex workers. Owners and admins set the policies peculiar to their instance. Policies for some instances are loose, for others they're more well-defined. But you can choose which you want to join.

I'm pulling shamelessly from Nolan Lawson's writings on this - and already have - but you can read them for yourself here (BEWARE: nerdy in places!):
https://nolanlawson.com/2017/10/ "What is Mastodon and why is it better than Twitter"
https://nolanlawson.com/2017/11/15/ "Why I’m deleting my Twitter account"

Tomorrow I'll describe first steps on Mastodon - how to find a 'home' and how to find people - and answer some of my own dangling questions.