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Is the fediverse social media?
Or is it an alternative to social media?
Here's Charlotte Fry's winning video essay in this year's Better Public Media's Geoff Lealand Student Challenge. The topic?
"Social Media: Love it or leave it"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0GGycDw2Ug
The subtext of Charlotte's analysis is that "social media" is designed around advertising, and thus attention-hacking. The fediverse isn't, so arguably it's not "social media" as it's now used.
The runner-up in the BPM competition, Amya Sharma, captured the sentiment perfectly;
"Imagine a social media platform that wasn’t run by corporations chasing profit. No ads. No algorithms pushing toxic content. A platform that’s transparent, user-driven, and values well-being over engagement. What if we were in control — not the tech giants? What if we measured value not in likes or followers, but in actual connection and creativity?
That’s the future I’d like to see."
That's the fediverse Amya! That future you envision is already here, just unevenly distributed.
Ironic yet appropriate that the video essay is hosted on YouTub, and the text essay on Goggle Drive.
Students seem to have no idea that there are replacements for the DataFarms that they can use right now! They can even build their own, using off-the-shelf components. How do we let them know what's already possible and help them make use of it?
In theory, having a presence on the DataFarms is a way to reach the people who aren't yet aware of the fediverse. But what's the odds any account used to do that gets shadowbanned? I suspect local, in-person outreach is the way to go.
But how to organise that?
I'm imagining student-run fediverse services at every school. But maybe the way to get started would be to organise training for student moderators? So they can learn to be better facilitators of whatever platforms they currently use.
Then progress to training student admins in how to run their own online services, using off-the-shelf Free Code (or "Open Source") software. Moderated by students who've already done the first round of training.
(1/2)
Once they've been prepared to deal with the spammers and griefers who infest any open network, they're ready to run their own social media. Ideally on a computer at their school, that they control, or at least one in a locally-owned datacentre in Aotearoa.
(2/2)
"... basically, the rapid corporatisation of social media companies was driven by industry's fear of the ... early, freeform internet ... that they were just like;
'... we have lost control of the story. If there's just this giant, open public messaging machine, where people are just sharing stories and ideas willy-nilly, we don't get to control it!'.
I mean, that is the origin story of the social media industry as we know it."
#AmyWestervelt, 2021
https://www.volts.wtf/p/volts-podcast-amy-westervelt-on-disinformation
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