Alright hear me out: the thesis of my argument is that early facebook (before Zuck made it completely unusable) was a legitimately good tool for connecting with people. But there were always individualistic elements to it. However subsequent social media that became popular, eg Instagram, Twitter, vine, tiktok, emphasized these individualistic aspects while downplaying the social aspects.
Okay so early facebook. You’re writing on each others’ walls. You’re forming groups with your peers, whether for important projects or just because you’re all friends. Essentially you’re interacting as equals on facebook. Yes you can still post on your own wall and have people comment. Obviously you’re customizing your own profile as much as Facebook allows. And there’s of course pictures. And Facebook had pages for companies and stuff, but it was possible to use Facebook as a social tool.
Now move to Instagram, or Twitter, or facebook. There’s really only one relation you can have, even with your friends, and that’s poster to commenter. This leads to a greater emphasis on curation of profiles, and becomes a perfect tool for brands and politicians. Essentially having a profile on these sites is like being given a megaphone to shout into the void, while early Facebook was closer being in the town square. Just look at the terminology - on Facebook you “friend,” on these other sites you “follow.”
I want to make clear I don’t think early Facebook was perfect social media, I just believe the sites that became popular after emphasized the worst aspects of social media, essentially removing the “social” part.
I’m not too familiar with older social media. I assume MySpace was similar to what I’m saying about facebook, just with more customization, but MySpace is a little before my time (it’s actually not, but I was just a really slow adopter so I mostly missed the MySpace thing).
There are some newer social media I like. I’m especially thinking of discord. But discord is essentially a gigantic group chat so I’m not counting it.
Anyway tell me why I’m wrong because last time I posted this no one really pushed back. I feel like this should be a pretty wrong take because it’s mostly based on vibes and nostalgia but I can’t think of any reason why it’s wrong. Please be as brutal with your criticism as possible.
I think this is really just nostalgia driven more than anything. In my view, the best social media practices come from fediverse apps, being open-source and community-driven. However, since fedi apps are not propped up by marketing and advertising revenue like Meta and X, they’re more of a niche platform made up of mostly 40 year old software engineers, and subsequently lack diverse spaces in the same way that traditional social media has the capacity to.
Hot take: the Fediverse reproduces all the atomizing qualities of modern social platforms (count how many people you interact with on any of these platforms that you actually know or are even within an hour’s travel from you) while also enabling the cheap and easy formation of incredibly ideologically curated bubbles for Nazis. It means we can have this bubble for Hexbear Thought, but there’s simply nothing about the ActivityPub protocol or any of its descendants that can escape the fundamental individualism of the interaction model. Being “community-driven” is meaningless when the “community” driving is 5 programmers and 200 idea guys, 30% of whom are cryptofascists (if they even bother being crypto- about it).
There is no universe where I can enrich my relationships with my neighbors by engaging with Twitter-but-GNU.
Inscribe this on your eyelids, that you might stay woke even while you sleep:
YOU CANNOT SOLVE A SOCIAL PROBLEM WITH SOFTWARE
I should make clear I’m not actually advocating for using Facebook or supporting Meta/Facebook. Obviously something open source would be better. I’m more just concerned with the design of a social media site and what purpose it serves.
i have to wonder if society at least in the global north is so atomized that we can’t make that kind of social media anymore