Social Media Bookmarks

Software for social media.

​#Bookmarks ​#Social Media

On Tiktok, but also Amazon, Facebook, Twitter…

This is enshittification: surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they’re locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they’re locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit. From mobile app stores to Steam, from Facebook to Twitter, this is the enshittification lifecycle. – Tiktok's enshittification

Woe betide a platform that enshittifies prematurely, before its users or business customers are too locked in to simply say, “fuck this, I’m out of here.” That’s an expensive mistake, one that can cost a company all the consumer and supplier subsidies it bought with its shareholders’ cash. It’s a mistake that Spotify just made, when it pursued its podcast exclusivity strategy, blowing more than a billion dollars buying up podcasts and then locking them up inside Spotify’s walled garden, unreachable unless you use Spotify’s client – other podcatchers need not apply. – Podcasts are hearteningly enshittification resistant

Don’t ever stop talking to each other. It’s what the internet is really and truly for. Talk to each other and listen to each other. But don’t ever stop connecting. Be a prodigy of the new world. […] Don’t give up, don’t let them have this world. Love things. Love people. Love the small and the weird and the new. Because that’s what fascists can’t do. – Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media

NoNonsense Forum is a free, open source, PHP-based simple discussion forum. … It is ideal if you want a discussion platform you can throw up in seconds, is quick and easy to administer, simple to use and works great as a private forum for a team working together. ¹

=> Tiktok's enshittification | Podcasts are hearteningly enshittification resistant | Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media | ¹

A write-only email archive: you send mail to an account, it fetches those every so often and puts the mail in an archive that you can read on the web (and subscribe to using a feed) but it doesn’t send out any mail. So many problems solved in an instant!

Crabmail is a static mailing list archive. – Crabmail

bubger(1) is a mailing list archive generator for mail stored in IMAP. It produces static files of HTML, Atom and mboxrd, making its output easy to serve from a host without IMAP access. It requires the IMAP THREAD extension. – bubger

public-inbox implements the sharing of an email inbox via git to complement or replace traditional mailing lists. Readers may read via NNTP, IMAP, Atom feeds or HTML archives. – public-inbox - an "archives first" approach to mailing lists

=> Crabmail | bubger | public-inbox - an "archives first" approach to mailing lists

Managing it

NetzwerkeffektNetzwerke können falsch sein und dich bedrücken, daher musst du sie verlassen – Gutes Leben mit dem Netzwerkeffekt

=> Gutes Leben mit dem Netzwerkeffekt

@ploum@mamot.fr writes about success:

If you live in the same occidental bubble as me, you might have never heard of WeChat, QQ or VK. Those are immensely popular social networks. In China and Russia. WeChat alone is more or less the size of Instagram in terms of active users. The war in Ukraine also demonstrated that the most popular social network in that part of the world is Telegram. Which is twice as big as Twitter but, for whatever reason, is barely mentioned in my own circles. The lesson here is simple: you are living in a small niche. We all do. Your experience is not representative of anything but your own. And it’s fine. – Stop Trying to Make Social Networks Succeed

=> Stop Trying to Make Social Networks Succeed

Also this:

In 2013, Google realised that most XMPP interactions were between Google Talk users anyway. They didn’t care about respecting a protocol they were not 100% in control. So they pulled the plug and announced they would not be federated anymore. … As expected, no Google user bated an eye. In fact, none of them realised. At worst, some of their contacts became offline. That was all. But for the XMPP federation, it was like the majority of users suddenly disappeared. Even XMPP die hard fanatics, like your servitor, had to create Google accounts to keep contact with friends. Remember: for them, we were simply offline. It was our fault. – How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse)

=> How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse)

@tomasino@tilde.zone wrote back in 2017 that public comments can be replaced by email:

When you read something noteworthy online, what drives you to interact with it? I have identified a few triggers that are related to the original content and not to another comment: I want to show my appreciation for the post. I want to show my disagreement with the post. I want to add my own opinion on the topic in the post. I want to correct something in the post. I want to make a joke. … When a comment isn’t for the author this is where things fall apart. – comments

=> comments

Offline first:

It reminds us to root our relationships in deep connection, to build affinity offline. If we are successful in fostering nourishing communities, other people will want to share these with us, as alienation and isolation have become widespread. There is life after social media. – Canary in the Coal Mine: Twitter and the End of Social Media, CrimethInc. 2022

=> Canary in the Coal Mine: Twitter and the End of Social Media

If you run a site with user contributed content, you might need Terms of Service.

The first step to protecting yourself and your community is a functional Terms of Service document, a contract between your users and you. Below I’ve written up a sample Terms of Service that could work for most smaller sites with social media elements. It’s meant for informational purposes, and makes various assumptions and generalizations about the kind of website that might use it, so it’s not good fit for everyone and of course isn’t legal advice, but I’ve written it as clearly as I can and avoided much of the legal language that can make sample contracts confusing. – Terms of Service for Everyone

=> Terms of Service for Everyone

What server to join?

Content discovery in the fediverse certainly still needs to improve in order to make it easier for newcomers and those that want to leave centralized networks, but keeping this focus on “topic-specific” instances is a recipe to keep a great idea forever tainted as something for fringe groups. Outside of these cases where the identity of the individual is tied to membership of the group, people’s main focus when selecting an instance should have nothing to do with the group: is the service reliable? Is the moderation fair and consistent? Is user privacy being respected? Do they follow good security practices when running the service? – Federations and Identity

=> Federations and Identity

Teenagers.

In short, “Does social media harm teenagers?” is not the same question as “Can social media be risky for teenagers?” – Risks vs. Harms: Youth & Social Media, by danah boyd

=> Risks vs. Harms: Youth & Social Media

Warum es sich nicht lohnt, auf X zu bleiben:

Manche sagen: Sollte man nicht auf X bleiben, um dort menschenfeindliche Ansichten zu widersprechen? Klares Nein! Das wäre, als würde man sich in das Bierzelt einer rechtsextremen Partei setzen, in der Hoffnung, deren Überzeugungen durch Diskussion zu ändern – ein aussichtsloses Unterfangen, das eher deren Bühne stärkt als echte Veränderung bewirkt. – Fünf Vergleiche, die zeigen, warum es besser ist, X endlich zu verlassen

=> Fünf Vergleiche, die zeigen, warum es besser ist, X endlich zu verlassen

Forum:

This piece of software was created after a long time of pining for a new wave of forums hangs. The reason it exists are many. To harbor longer form discussions, and for crawling through threads and topics. For habitually visiting the site to see if anything new happened, as opposed to being obtrusively notified when in the middle of something else. – cerca

=> cerca

Governance:

From Facebook Groups to group chats, social-media software assumes that there should be an all-powerful admin or moderator; the primary tools for problem-solving are digital censorship or exile. By and large, that is, online platforms are not well designed for communities to self-govern. The usual methods for group governance offline—explicit bylaws, boards of directors, Robert’s Rules of Order, and so forth—are almost nowhere to be found online. Our online spaces still have yet to catch up to the lessons learned from offline ones. If we want to build governable spaces for our communities, we need to be intentional about it. The software won’t do it for us. -- How to Build Governable Spaces for Online Communities, by @ntnsndr@social.coop, for the Media Economies Design Lab

=> governable spaces | How to Build Governable Spaces for Online Communities