Technology

My own anthropological pet theory.

Dunbar's number is the concept that a person can only have so many meaningful relationships. Another way of thinking about it is that we, as a species, feel most comfortable in tribes with a certain number of people.

Which makes sense. I hated, hated the little rednecky town that I grew up in. But when I moved to a larger city, the first few weeks were spent overcoming the loneliness of not knowing everybody around me.

What massive online social media does is essentially short circuit the behavior that we developed when we began urbanizing.

Now a person can be a member of twenty tribes without ever needing to leave their homes. If we are, in fact, only capable of a finite number of close friendships then every close relationship that you have online is energy that won't be spent on a physical one.

True story: I left Facebook in 2016. I had been miserable but didn't even think to relate the two. About a month after I jumped ship I got adopted by a group of fellow nerds nearing midlife. We hang out at least twice per week. Pub trivia, bowling, hiking. Those interactions are so much more meaningful than anything you can get on social media. By our nature, humans crave physical company.

Social media isn't going to "break" us. But, if nothing changes, it will further dramatically alter society.

Nostr? Isn't that just for crypto bros, Nazis, and Jack Dorseys?

I checked it out once and the chats I dropped into were all about people giving each other "sats" (nanobitcoins) and there were also some far-right weirdos.

Conceptually it seems kinda neat but if somebody says they're a big fan of nostr I'm gonna wonder about them

Your link is missing, FYI. We're currently discussing a Getty collage.

Which issue are they trying to solve? The censoring and control issue goes away with federated systems but there is the cost of having a running network. The corporate networks charge you the fee of personal info so it doesn't cost actually money.

In all honesty the biggest issue I see is that social media eventually leads to us seeing what most of society is really like... boring, bigoted and stupid. This exists everywhere, it's only that smaller networks like Lemmy just dont have the numbers to make those issues be so prominent.

How is this different to ActivityPub protocol that the fediverse uses? Seems like its trying to accomplish very similar things? Like how KBin and Lemmy can interact with the same content and have different layouts, apps, etc.

I suppose it's good to have alternative protocols for decentralized communication, but wouldn't it be better to focus on one and put more effort into improving it?

Why would we? Do we actually need it? I feel like it has done more damage to society than actually being useful...

Most people agree that Social Media is broken and that we need to find new solutions

Solutions for what? Algorithmically driven "content", made by people who don't care about the material they're churning out, as long as it gets them in front of eyeballs and lines their pockets?

The problem with social media, tech, and most of our other ills in society, is capitalism. Greed. MegaCorpX isn't building a social platform so that you can have a community. They're doing it to make money. You're just a cog in that machine for them, but they make YOU feel like you can be the star of it, and exploit you in the process. Along with it you create parasocial relationships that make literally no one happy, a fertile platform for mobs and harassment, constant self image issues, FOMO, doomscrolling, etc. etc. Not to mention giving a platform to bigots, white supremacists, nazis, etc., and feeding those ideologies, all while pretending like you have to let them be there because of "free speech" or "town square/public commons/whatev"

Social media is a MASSIVE net negative, and the answer shouldn't be "how do we make new ones after the old ones collapse?", but rather "how to we move on from the idea that social media is necessary, and just let it die?"