I've said again and again that I consider it to be of the utmost importance that the #Fediverse grows far beyond its present size. My reasoning is thus:
All major commercial social media platforms are either owned by #fascists , or by people who are only too happy to bend their knees to the fascists for the sake of profits - and thus are also fascists for all moral accounting purposes.
And they have used the power of these social media platforms to heavily promote fascists, or opened the door for fascists to promote their agenda. The resurgence of fascism we are seeing in the world these days was largely done with the aid of social media - outrage farming is an _extremly_ effective tactic for promoting fascism, especially when the social media algorithms actively support you.
I think we can all agree that fighting fascism is important (and if you _don't_ agree, go away - I don't want to talk to you). Thus, we need to attack the mechanisms that allow fascism to grow - i.e. commercial social media.
Now, maybe there is a future where we won't have any kind of online social media, but barring a complete collapse of civilization I am not seeing it - humans are a communicative species, and have always used the latest technology for that purpose. Thus, I don't see the concept of "social media" by itself to go away any time soon.
But replacing _commercial_ social media seems much more achievable - after all, the problem is #Capitalism, not #SocialMedia itself. Thus, we need to grow _noncommercial_ social media until can replace corporate social media. And as far as I can see, the Fediverse is the most viable noncommercial alternative out there.
The main objectiion to "growing the Fediverse" that I have heard is this:
" #X, #Facebook , #TikTok and the others are full of assholes. If the Fediverse grows as big as they are, all the assholes will come here as well!"
And I can understand that fear. We need to be careful about _how_ we grow the Fediverse, and there is much work to be done. Our moderation tools, for instance, could be much better than they are (just ask #BlackMastodon ...). However, of all the social media systems out there, the Fediverse alone actually has the potential to develop _better_ moderation in the long run - while commercial social media platforms see good moderation as _hostile_ to their business models (as recent revelations about #Meta have shown). Thus, fear of failure should not stop us from making the attempt.
Furthermore, while the (algorithm-boosted) fascists might be the loudest people on commercial social media right now, I believe that the majority of people using social media in the modern world are _not_ assholes, and we want to encourage these not-assholes to come to the Fediverse in large number. Or do you really think that the (predominantly white and European/North American) Fediverse bubble represents the only not-asshole group left on the planet?
And consider the stakes. Not only will the fascists become increasingly violent towards marginalized groups of people, they are actively hostile to any efforts to fight threats to Earth as a whole - #GlobalWarming first among them. We need to wrestle the microphone from them before they doom us all, and that means wrestling social media away from them - but we cannot do that without replacing commercial social media with non-commercial social media.
At least, that's what I think. If you have any better plans to fight the social media power of fascists, feel free to share them!
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