Tag: social media

Chronological social interaction

Posted on August 21, 2022August 29, 2022 by Doug Belshaw

A couple of months ago, over at Thought Shrapnel, I posted something I entitled Losing followers, gaining friends, which linked to an article by Steve Lord about how the web, and in particular social media, foregrounds ‘System 1’ type thinking. The fast, reactive-style thinking which makes judgements based on incomplete information. This is opposed to ‘System 2’ thinking which is slower and more high-level, involving data analysis.

I’ve been thinking about this I continue to interact with people primarily through Mastodon, Slack, and email. I’ve given up on other things like Twitter at this point, and haven’t been near social stuff owned by Facebook for well over a decade. But even these spaces are arranged chronologically. Steve Lord references Amy Hoy as saying how problematic this chronology has been for the social web:

When you produce your whole site by hand, from HEAD to /BODY, you begin in a world of infinite possibility. You can tailor your content exactly how you like it, and organize it in any way you please. Every design decision you make represents roughly equal work because, heck, you’ve gotta do it by hand either way. Whether it’s reverse chronological entries or a tidy table of contents. You might as well do what you want.

But once you are given a tool that operates effortlessly — but only in a certain way — every choice that deviates from the standard represents a major cost.

[…]

And the damn reverse chronology bias — once called into creation, it hungers eternally — sought its next victim. Myspace. Facebook. Twitter. Instagram. Pinterest, of all things. Today these social publishing tools are beginning to buck reverse chronological sort; they’re introducing algorithm sort, to surface content not by time posted but by popularity, or expected interactions, based on individual and group history. There is even less control than ever before.

What would a social network look like that wasn’t chronological? What would a workplace chat app look like that didn’t just put one damn thing after another? What about an inbox that didn’t just stack messages up by the order in which they were received? 🧐

Bonfire’s latest trick shows Google+ circles came a decade early

Posted on July 30, 2022July 30, 2022 by Doug Belshaw

One of the best things about Google+ was the idea of sharing things using circles that you could define. Unfortunately, like Google Wave, it was a decade early.

For those who can’t remember, or who never experienced Google+, here’s a screenshot from Tojosan dated July 2011:

Screenshot of Google+ showing circles such as 'Friends', 'Family', and 'Acquaintances'

While the idea was a great one, the implementation wasn’t the best. Also, because it was launched at about the same time as mass adoption of social networks such as Twitter and Instagram, people didn’t really have the mental model of what was going on.

The important thing with Google+ circles (which I’ll now refer to just as ‘Circles’) was not that you put people in exclusive groups or categories. As the diagram below by Carrotkit demonstrates, there are things you want to share with one group (e.g. family), and things you want to share with another group (e.g. friends). However, members of these groups are not always mutually-exclusive:

Venn diagram showing 'Friends' and 'Family' with 'brother' in the overlap

Thankfully, this approach is being resurrected by the Bonfire team under the less-snappily-named ‘granular boundaries’. However, the aim is much more ambitious.

As the announcement states:

Within bonfire, you now have the possibility to define circles and boundaries: a way to privately group some of your contacts and then grant them permissions to interact with you and each piece of content you share at the most granular level.
Boundaries go beyond the typical permissions on social media (i.e. who can see your content) and include a long list of verbs in order to represent all kinds of meaningful interactions and collaboration that should be possible on a real social network.
People don’t fit in binary boxes labeled “follower” or “friend”. Circles and boundaries are a way to empower us to come up with our own groupings and sets of permissions.

As Bonfire is a federated app toolkit, extensions will be able to make use of this functionality, for example going beyond simple roles such as ‘admin’ or ‘moderator’ of an instance. I’ve had a tinker with the Playground instance of Bonfire while it was enabled, and although initially a bit confusing, it works well.

Screenshot showing different 'boundaries' over and above the usual (e.g. 'Memes & lols', 'Summer '22 trip' and 'It takes a village')

What I’m hoping is that this bridges the gap between social networking as we know it (e.g. Mastodon, Twitter) and group chats (e.g. Signal, Telegram). If so, it could be useful for everything from professional purposes through to organising kids sport activities. Because, let’s face it, group conversations on the internet are a mess.

Screenshot of circle with defined permissions

In the above example I’ve taken a screenshot of a circle I’ve created called ‘Bloggers’. This includes five people and I’ve explicitly given some permissions and blocked one person (sorry Mayel!) from liking or mentioning posts I share with that circle. This could be an absolute gamechanger in terms of how democratically-organised groups with a flat structure can be organised.

The list, for those interested, of what you can allow others to do is currently:

See
Read
Mention
Like
Request
Follow
Boost
Message
Delete
Tag
Edit
Create
Flag
Reply

Ivan and Mayel, the core team behind Bonfire are putting in an application for more NLnet funding to work on this functionality. I’ve just applied to NLnet too for a simple badge-issuer that I think could eventually be turned into a useful Bonfire extension. If and when that happens, this level of granularity will be extremely useful to build upon!

Unauditible algorithms are the enemy of social media users

Posted on April 19, 2022April 19, 2022 by Doug Belshaw

Writing about Elon Musk trying to buy Twitter, Dorian Taylor reflects that:

What Twitter does really well is put you on equal footing with people you would otherwise never think to reach out to, and in other contexts, probably wouldn’t give you the time of day. These people put themselves out there to be interacted with, so you have implicit permission to interact with them.

I would say Twitter perhaps used to do this, at least for me. I find these kinds of interaction these days on the Fediverse, where people aren’t trying to please algorithms.

Chris Trottier, someone I have recently started following, wrote a post explaining the difference between interacting in a centralised, algorithm-controlled space, and setting up shop in a decentralised one.

I have managed to attract 35 followers. This is for a fresh new instance barely two weeks old. The network effect is low. There’s no social algorithm pushing my posts because the Fediverse has no algorithms like that.
Likewise, I am nobody particularly notable – just a guy having fun on social media. All anyone sees is pictures of computer games, cassette tapes, food, and stuff from nature walks. In effect, just stuff a typical person would share.

People respond to incentives: if algorithms are set up to reward users who interact in a certain way, then this is what (most) users end up doing. Proof of this comes through behaviours such as like-farming declarative statements on centralised social media, designed to maximise ‘engagement’ with a post.

It’s not so radical to wonder whether, when users of a system are posting things with the intention of ‘going viral’, perhaps authenticity suffers? Are algorithms used by centralised social media serving the needs of the humans using it?

Algorithms that cannot be audited are a feature, not a bug, of centralised social media. They are what provide ‘shareholder value” by allowing advertising content to grab the attention of users, whether they like it or not. These systems are focused on behaviour modification and are not going to change.

Capital, which is what centralised social media serves, loves hierarchy and social stratification. People knowing their place. People having a different experience based on their ability to pay, and, of course, monetising the ‘follower’ dynamic.

The Fediverse is a messy, weird, human place. It reminds me of Twitter in the early days. Everyone on a truly equal footing, being themselves — whatever that happens to be today. The experience isn’t sanitised, or corporate, or algorithmic. And, for me that’s perfect.