I don’t mean to sound like an old codger when I start saying things that start with “back in my day,” yet here we are.
Back in my day, when the web was young, the “social” part of the Internet was very decentralized: there were newsgroups, forums, and eventually blogs, none of which were controlled by any one single entity.
Eventually though, Facebook came onto the scene and micro-blogging took off in popularity, which morphed into the social web we know (or knew) today. Centralization had its benefits: everyone was in one place, so it was easy to find people, hear people, and talk with people. It was like a big party, with everyone in the same giant room.
But just like parties, the era of centralized social media has to eventually end – and in many ways, that end has happened (or is happening). This is probably for the best – like a party that has gone on too long, centralized social media has over-stayed its welcome.
This is why, although I’m sure Bluesky is a nice platform, I advocate so strongly for Mastodon (and for the Fediverse in general) and why I still post here on my own blog. It is dangerous for so much of our socialization to be controlled by so few people – but it does not help to have our metaphorical party split up into people in separate houses, no longer able to communicate… instead, the ideal is for our metaphorical party to split into different rooms, with doors between them that can be opened and closed as needed. You can still hear what is happening, but if the discussion becomes heated or unpleasant, you can just… close the door, and if people around you start hassling you, you can walk into a different room.
This is the ideal, anyway, but we’re not there yet – though I’d like to think we’re heading there. In my mind, every college/university should start its own Mastodon instance and give every student and faculty member an account, in the same way that back in my day (there’s that phrase again) every student and faculty member got an email account. Likewise, organizations and governments should set up their own Mastodon instances as well – there’s no need for a blue check mark to verify an account when the account is literally hosted under the domain name of the organization/government, after all!
If you haven’t given Mastodon a try, I strongly encourage you to – especially in this day and age. If you provide tech policy for an organization, university, or government agency, I strongly encourage you to advocate for setting up a Mastodon instance – at least for official communication.
(This way, I can stop using the phrase “back in my day” when talking about social media!)
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