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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • I look at it from the standpoint of federated social media dethroning the reigning social media “monopolies”. Companies like Facebook, Twitter, and now Reddit have shown that they want engagement at all costs and will prioritize profit over people. The faster they die, the better.

    From this perspective, numbers and growth are important (although of course they’re not everything): People won’t jump ship to a new platform unless there is a critical mass of users, because a platform needs a sufficient number of users to provide the same variety of user generated content and communities that people have come to expect.

    More people using federated social media also means more developers, better apps, and a better user experience for everyone using it.

    There’s a snowball effect, and maybe one day we’ll get out from under our rich social media overlords.


  • I look at it from the standpoint of federated social media dethroning the reigning social media “monopolies”. Companies like Facebook, Twitter, and now Reddit have shown that they want engagement at all costs and will prioritize profit over people. The faster they die, the better.

    From this perspective, numbers and growth are important (although of course they’re not everything): People won’t jump ship to a new platform unless there is a critical mass of users, because a platform needs a sufficient number of users to provide the same variety of user generated content and communities that people have come to expect.

    More people using federated social media also means more developers, better apps, and a better user experience for everyone using it.

    There’s a snowball effect, and maybe one day we’ll get it from under our rich social media overlords.



  • What is interesting or helpful is entirely subjective

    Nothing is entirely subjective, at least not in the sense that you mean.

    There are different degrees of shared opinion (“inter-subjectivity”) among people, depending on the group. One of the advantages of the “communities” (or “subreddit” / “magazines”) model is that you can find people with whom you share opinions, and if that community doesn’t already exist, you can create it.

    By joining a community that shares your interests, and customizing your feed to show those communities, content that gets upvoted will tend to reflect your interests, and upvotes will be a signal of quality.

    People have limited time. By having an algorithm that can sort by likes / dislikes, everyone saves time by delegating some of the time-consuming task of discovering relevant content to the algorithm.