The centralization of social media is a problem, but I think maybe we’re dealing with an even deeper problem. I joined Mastodon, the potential is clear, and there is already an early adopter audience sharing content I find more interesting than Twitter/FB.
But it only took me a few days to realize that I wasn’t thrilled with Mastodon’s content either, and I realized why: it’s all still short-form.
The best and most enlightening discussions I’ve had are usually slow, drawn-out exchanges of a few hundreds of words per message.
And the Internet has had a thing for this very early on, it’s mailing lists. Well-curated mailing lists and newsgroups (almost the same thing) were long a mainstay of the Internet’s best communities. Unfortunately they are not webby and they have declined in popularity over time.
I think there is another reason the discourse is all short-form these days. Short-form is easier on a phone. No one writes a couple hundred words of their best thoughts from their phone. Almost universally if you look at the content we post from our phones, most of it is lightweight, low intellectual value, not a product of critical thinking. It is either a straight up bad idea (Elon Musk style career-ending pedo and stock tweets) or it is low value stuff (share a news article, food photo #120,315,838,284,942).
It’s very bad for our public discourse to be so heavily influenced by throwaway content.
Marshall McLuhan said that the medium is the message. Maybe we are all producing crap because we spend so much time on devices that are crappy at authoring. (On the other hand, radio, a medium where you can’t reply at all, produced Hitler — by moving to a medium where you can make shitty replies, have we moved forward or backward?)
I don’t know of many social media platforms which promote thought-provoking discourse (and I’m not really talking about 3,000 word Medium-style longreads which no one can possibly respond to in full). I always go back to Hacker News as my favorite one and I think they are successful in large part due to having a narrow focus and strict, pro-intellectual moderation.