Of course the attention economy is threatened by the Fediverse | Hacker News Reader

Of course the attention economy is threatened by the Fediverse

blog.jonudell.net

70 pointsmpweiher13 comments

The psychology of those heavily vested in the platforms is a constant curiosity of mine. Some complain repeatedly about all the problems with the platform that the fediverse solves but are seemingly trapped and hoping desperately that things will improve. Deep down they know they will not improve and struggle to face reality. The mentioned opinion piece in WAPO uses other distortions to justify maintaining the status quo. I can only suspect it is a combination of her personal situation and her employment.

There's a bit of an Eternal September going on with Twitter 'refugees' pooring in, who loudly proclaim all the things they are missing from Twitter on Mastodon. I general all the discussion about the Fediverse and Social Media are full of generalizations. Fediverse before the rise in popularity had a couple million user accounts, and yes very very small when comparing to billion people platforms. But still like the population of a small country. Not everyone is complaining, or in culture wars, or alt-right, or extreme left, etc. The place is diverse and you can have a good time there, build your friend network. It takes a bit more effort to do so without the algorithms, but that can be a good thing.

Except it's not, as the article goes on to explain: he does not want attention, he's not part of the attention economy (any more, as he assures us), he just wants to hang out with people like him, of which there are "thousands, not millions".

And the attention economy is "threatened" because "thousands" want to do something else?

With these kinds of posts I always get the feeling that the people leaving Twitter (leaving, you hear me, I'M LEAVING) and swearing how they never wanted any of that attention economy thing and being the center of attention is the least of all things they'd ever want ... spend a lot of time being offended when someone suggests that their new favorite community will not replace Twitter. Twitter is no longer part of their identity, now Mastodon is, and therefore Twitter is old and terrible and people who don't think Mastodon is the greatest thing are doing it for bad reasons, and they must explain to everyone why that is. Because they must reassure themselves that they are right?

> Twitter is no longer part of their identity, now Mastodon is

And this is why so many people are put off. The Mastodon die-hards are ready to defend Mastodon from any perceived insults. So that when people have genuine questions or issues, it's like you're insulting the users themselves.

It doesn't help that Mastodon fans heavily evangelise the tech, as if anyone other than tech bros care.

"What do you mean there's no good content on Mastodon? You blah blah blah decentralised blah blah blah fediverse..."

So back to Twitter/Reddit/Facebook people go, where you can get your dopamine fix within about 2 seconds.

Fediverse articles read exactly like Crypto articles used to. It'll solve all your problems, all the time, the problem is the users are wrong.

It's not gonna happen guys.

Was thinking the exact same thing. Most users of social media (or currency) don't care how it works, just that other people are using it.

Crypto and fediverse are solving problems almost nobody gives a shit about. The only way either get traction is if they're better in some way most people care for.

nostr is missing from the list.

While Mastodon is much more well known, programming clients / servers based on nostr protocol is a lot of fun. I see people having different crazy ideas being implemented in a day, it's an addictive protocol to code against.

In case anyone else hadn’t heard of this: https://github.com/aljazceru/awesome-nostr

From only a few minutes of reading (so I might be off), it looks like if multicast packets were saved by routers and you could ask for tcp-style retries later.

That's jolly neat. Kind of like email, but public and a clean-slate design.

I'm having a great time with my little Fediverse experiment.

A home-brew activityPub and then I'm routing all the other "noise" (Twitter, fB, Reddit, etc) into my "feed" - along with my old RSS stuff.

It's federated, but I have a nice single view (and no ads, limited tracking)

How do you do this? I've long wanted a universal queue of: email, chat apps, RSS feeds, Facebook, Instagram, etc.

I wrote it. It's a little webapp I call Rivus.

I think Friendica has some of these features built-in.

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