Other Social Media - Tech Matters

[Irrev-Black]

Mastodon derivatives will most likely have full text search option soon.

Renaud Chaput
@renchap@oisaur.com

Full text search has been merged in #Mastodon `main` branch, and will be in the next (and final?) 4.2.0 beta

It is opt-in, so it will take some time to be filled with people content as they enable their profile to be indexed, but this was one of the most wanted Mastodon features for some time.

We plan to deploy it to mastodon.social and mastodon.online in the coming days to have a bit more feedback on it and see how it behaves in the wild.

[Irrev-Black]

As a fairly heavy RSS user, I was glad to learn of this particular feature:

Fedi.Tips
@feditips@mstdn.social

Today, a very niche tip for RSS fans :rss:

As well as Mastodon's built-in hashtag following system, you can also follow hashtags through RSS instead:

1. Search for a hashtag on a Mastodon server's website
2. Add .rss to the end of the URL
3. Use this URL as the feed address for that tag

For example to subscribe to #Dogs on mstdn.social you would use this address in your feed reader:

https://mstdn.social/tags/dogs.rss

#RSS #FediTips #Mastodon #MastoTips

[stylofone]

All the commercial social media platforms nauseate me. They are disgusting engines of degradation and abuse and I don't understand how anyone can use them and contain the contents of of their stomach. On a less personal level, I think there should have been laws in place to stop the evolution of surveillance capitalism, and in an alternative universe, Zuckerberg, Brin and Page, Musk and all the rest would all be in jail, or be fugitives from international justice. So I think this article is a bit understated.

[Irrev-Black]

@stylofone - That article above didn't show up for me., and I had to start a quote reply to see the link.

[stylofone]

@stylofone - That article above didn't show up for me., and I had to start a quote reply to see the link.

Wow, that's weird, I pasted the link and the forum software replaced it with the OG image only, but no link.

[stylofone]

The ban on social media for under 16s is bouncing along a bumpy road, despite bipartisan support. My opinion on surveillance capitalism is that it is a toxic vehicle for a particular flavour of fascism called techno-authoritarianism, and it should be banned at the level of the billionaire multinational freaks who control it. Keeping it away from kids would be a good start, doing more good than harm.

I posted something like this on the non-surveillance, non-commercial platform Mastodon and I was a bit taken aback by the response: social media is actually very good for kids and this ban is a way for government surveillance to take over. It turned into a nasty twitter-style pile-on which has completely soured my experience of Mastodon, and I deleted all the posts.

Maybe it's just my mood, but I am disheartened by the ignorance and tolerance of the techno-authoritarian takeover. Musk was happy to set xitter on fire in pursuit of his goals, and guess what... he won. Trump won. Vance is obviously from the techno villain team. It's worse than ever. Then it was extra galling for me to cop ablesplaining about how good facebook is for people isolated by disability, or told that it's nothing more than a communication tool. The prominence of this sort of thing, even on Mastodon - the alleged refuge from big tech - has shown just how much the new tech lords are winning. It's a bit like climate change really, we're doomed!

To cheer myself up I read a couple of articles about a technological refusenik who goes a lot further than me, but his actions are in keeping with my favourite aphorism: "Smart people used to have lots of technology because they knew how to use it. But nowadays, smart people have LESS technology because they know how it uses them!!.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... technology

[pipbarber]

I absolutely get where you're coming from stylo, but banning social media for kids is just a form prohibition that like the vast majority of prohibitions, won't work. 'Kids are digital natives, the ones that can't work out a way around it will just end up on an Andrew Tate adjacent platform while gov.au plays a losing game of whack a mole. And then the coalition or one nation or 'freedom' candidate will go big on unbanning everything and they'll win the youth vote.

In any case, the most insipid, sly and nasty social media platform isn't even included in the proposed bans. Youtube gets a free pass.

Social media is clearly terrible but i think murdoch is worse, and how do you ban him? This is a losing election issue for them, the coalition needs only to be slightly more liberal with the policy and they'll win lots of votes.

Rather than trying to block right wing radicalisation via social media, the ALP might spend their energy better by coming up with an actual idea for change.

[stylofone]

I absolutely get where you're coming from stylo, but banning social media for kids is just a form prohibition that like the vast majority of prohibitions, won't work. 'Kids are digital natives, the ones that can't work out a way around it will just end up on an Andrew Tate adjacent platform while gov.au plays a losing game of whack a mole. And then the coalition or one nation or 'freedom' candidate will go big on unbanning everything and they'll win the youth vote.

In any case, the most insipid, sly and nasty social media platform isn't even included in the proposed bans. Youtube gets a free pass.

Social media is clearly terrible but i think murdoch is worse, and how do you ban him? This is a losing election issue for them, the coalition needs only to be slightly more liberal with the policy and they'll win lots of votes.

Rather than trying to block right wing radicalisation via social media, the ALP might spend their energy better by coming up with an actual idea for change.

Sigh, I wish I had a better argument against your prohibition point. I guess the best I've got is that a ban would work on some kids, it would be a start. It would also signal that there is actually something damaging or dangerous or exploitative about social media in principle. The restrictions on nicotine and alcohol for children are a comparison.

Another thought I have on this is that it would be better if the prohibition was targeted at the platforms rather than the users.

Van Badham, to my surprise, was a morale boost for me. The thing I note about her article is that she admits she can't give up her addiction. Well I fucking well have. All my accounts are deleted, including my long-standing google account, so no youtube comments from me! I use 100% non-commercial fediverse platforms as methadone. The thing which depresses me is that Mastodon was supposed to be this refuge from the dreaded xitter. I've long been annoyed at the way users there speak with a "twitter accent", but every migration surge seems to make it worse. It's OK, I can be clean without the aid of methadone, it will be my pleasure.

I won't be cheering if your very plausible scenario comes to pass, of pathologically cynical Dutton doing a U-turn on a policy which he came up with first because the algorithms will be with him if he wants them.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... s-under-16

[pipbarber]

Marshal McLuhan is never far from the scene. Maybe it's the medium that is toxic, it don't matter about the content, they'll all end up at some fascist club room eventually. Who knows why.

Despite its useful features, on the whole, the internet is a civilisational disaster, as far as i'm concerned. A god awful drug responsible for attention deficit disorders, neo-fascism and science denial. But great for free movies...so, like, totally worth it.

[stylofone]

Marshal McLuhan is never far from the scene. Maybe it's the medium that is toxic, it don't matter about the content, they'll all end up at some fascist club room eventually. Who knows why.

Despite its useful features, on the whole, the internet is a civilisational disaster, as far as i'm concerned. A god awful drug responsible for attention deficit disorders, neo-fascism and science denial. But great for free movies...so, like, totally worth it.

One of my half-arsed ideas is based on the concept of the personal timeline or news feed, which is common to most platforms. It puts every person at the centre of the universe, turns you into an egomaniac, vastly inflates your self-importance, supercharges the foundation of hyper-individualism. No-one is ever part of the group any more, they are all masters of their own domain, and everything is relative to me me ME, there is no other perspective. Your old favourite Descartes was probably the seed for this. Other expansions of the hyper-self included the invention of modern marketing by Edward Bernays, then Ayn Rand and her neo-liberal acolytes who worshipped self-interest. But the curated, algorithmically spiked social media feed is a new Self on Steroids.

There's a great book called "The Gutenberg Elegies" which examines the differences between deep long-form reading and the shallow, jittery world of interactive media, where distractions are the best thing, rather than the most annoying thing, and ever shrinking attention spans ensue. It's like a historical work by now, a luddite writing in 1996, but he was a good prophet of doom.

The social media masterwork is "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" by Shoshana Zuboff, also getting on in years now, but well-lodged in my mind. I was reminded this week of her chapter about adolescent development, how having a refuge, a place of privacy is a vital part of the formation of personality and individual identity. The smartphone means that space no longer exists. If you grew up with facebook you run the risk of never actually growing up.