Blog post by Christine Lemmer-Webber, co-editor of ActivityPub: https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/
The likely answer to this is that there will always have to be a large corporation at the heart of Bluesky/ATProto, and the network will have to rely on that corporation to do the work of abuse mitigation, particularly in terms of illegal content and spam. This may be a good enough solution for Bluesky’s purposes, but on the economics alone it’s going to be a centralized system that relies on trusting centralized authorities.
Bit of a wall of text, there and skimming the technooptimist take is dead on arrival with me there, so I’m not particularly interested in disecting it.
I’ll say that comparing social media to food is maybe the most depressing thing I’ve seen all week, and there is quite a bit of competition.
You can also just compare it to communication in general. Maybe you can go your whole life never asking what other people think, but I can’t, nor do I want to.
And I can not only find out what the person next to me is thinking, I can essentially sample people any place on earth on their thoughts and feelings. I think that is beautiful beyond words.
But I’m hardly an optimist. I am fully aware that we have utterly missed the train on climate change. Food production will crash. Millions will starve.
If you take the time to actually read what I’m saying, I’m not discounting the issues social media has, but I simply do not agree with your assessment that social media and its problems are one and the same.
Now, if you want to discuss whether we’ll actually pull off solving them in time to not go extinct, that is a coinflip I wouldnt bet on.
But do you honestly believe that your comment, and mine, being possible, is a bad thing? Are the groups organizing relief efforts through social media after the LA fires, a bad thing?
I’m not sure how you define “social media” but to me it’s an extremely wide term. To say it’s all bad, is mad. You might say the good things can be done in other ways, but what are those other ways, that don’t fit the definition of social media?
We are a species of sentient social individuals, currently transitioning from national scale thinking into planetary scale thinking.
If the internet and social media can’t be molded into the tools we need to boot-strap pseudo-hivemind-thinking onto humanity, I don’t know what can.
Say what you will, but for us to take care of this planet, the individuals most in need, and overall just make better decisions on a global scale, we need that, badly.