Celebrity Ruined the Internet

This weekend I made some drastic choices and have started to begin evaluating what I actually want out of social media. Saturday afternoon while listening to an extremely great synth rendition of the Gabriel Knight Sins of the Fathers soundtrack, I started removing follows. I went through my list a single person at a time and asked myself… “is this someone I actually remember interacting with at some point”. That seems simple enough, but over the years I have been very liberal with who I followed in a search for more friends out there in the void. Roughly an hour later I had paired down my list and nuked about 500 follows. I am certain that I made some mistakes in this process and there are some folks I accidentally removed that I will regret. However, it was the first step in a process to try and return to the roots of why I originally started using the internet.

The internet for me at least started out fairly simple. There was a certain novelty in being able to communicate on my computer with people from all corners of the globe. It was this communication that was front and center and I hungrily gobbled up as much information about other peoples and other cultures as I could. I grew up in a fairly sheltered environment, in a very small town, in the middle of nowhere, and due to all of this, my world was pretty small. The internet cracked open a window that I never wanted to close. In those early days, we were just bits of text on a screen, and as a result, our value was in our ideas not necessarily the metrics associated with them.

Even the “realest” folks that I know adopt a carefully curated person when they present themselves online. That persona may be very close to reality, but it still exists both as a safety net to keep things from getting “too real” and to filter our thoughts through. In the early days of the internet, there was less need for this pretense. If you saw someone out on the broader internet, it was guaranteed that they too were a geek or a dork because the sheer act of getting there required a lot out of the user. AOL existed as a walled garden, a sort of uber BBS that gave folks some measure of taste of the “information super highway”. However, if you made your way to IRC, it meant you had shaken off the shackles of that garden, found your way to a full-service ISP, and begun your journey into a much larger world.

There is a time I remember fondly when every piece of content you consumed from gopher to wais, to even the fledgling world wide web was “user created”. The creation was a labor of love and there were countless web farms devoted to all manner of nonsense. It was a time when there was very little corporate presence online, and the majority of infrastructure was run out of academia. The bright hubs of commerce were places like WUSTL.edu or WISC.edu where their public FTP sites served as a clearing house for all of the content that mattered from the latest doom wad file to the latest release of mIRC. All of this infrastructure and content was run and created by the denizens of this fledgling internet.

As time passed the internet was tamed by corporations and bent to their whims, all for the purpose of converting our free time and hobbies into currency. Social networks consolidated what was once a series of disconnected GeoCities and self-hosted websites, into an easy-to-use structure that allowed you to communicate with your friends. I remember clearly a time when I was using Blogger and others were using Xanga or Live Journal… but we had connected up a ragtag cluster of websites via links or connections to web rings. Each person in that “community” had complete freedom over the content that they were presenting to the world even though they were functionally operating on someone else’s network.

I think MySpace was the beginning of the modern era of social media, and with it introduced metrics like “friend” counts and the introduction of the aspirational “top 8” list. Attributing numerical success to your internet efforts only got worse with the introduction of Facebook, and subsequently Twitter. Entire infrastructure like Social Blade shown above was erected to prove numerically who was “winning” the internet. I remember when we were dabbling in Google Plus, playing with a tool called Klout and being fascinated by how it boiled a user down to a value. I hate that I cared even for a moment about the supposedly “value” something like that was providing. If I had known how much of the internet has become about chasing clout and popularity, I would have hissed and slowly backed away from it.

I hate everything about the influencer culture that has spawned around internet content creation. My friends jokingly refer to me as an influencer, partially because I have always been way more socially engaged than they are, and partially because they know it pisses me off. In the art world, there is a concept called “Outsider Art” and I like to think I am that, but for internet media. I’ve been plugging away at this blog for almost fourteen years, and the podcast for almost nine years… and while I try and share both freely the popularity or lack thereof doesn’t make me any less interested in the act of creation. I will likely be over here in my corner continuing to do whatever I want to do and continue to be absolutely allergic to trying to monetize it.

As far as modern social media goes though, Twitter was my home. I originally launched my Twitter account as a way of interacting with other bloggers in the Blog Azeroth community, and as a way of promoting my posts. Over the years I have met some of my best friends through this medium, but year after year it seemed to get harder and harder to make any real and lasting connections. Gamergate was a wake-up call and threw a cold glass of water in the face of online social interactions. Getting DDOS’d as a result of my random comments on Twitter, made me way more guarded about what I said there and fear of malicious attacks did the same to others. The Muskrat coming in and threatening to dismantle what little safety net there was there… has made me deeply contemplate what presence I still want to have on that network.

I’ve dabbled with Mastodon/Fediverse since 2018, but I can’t say I have really ever set up permanent residence there. This weekend I attempted to change that, and the pairing down of Twitter was the first step in that evolution. I have to say the interactions that I am having on this alternate social media platform continue to be refreshing. Using the Fediverse feels like stepping back in time to my IRC days when people seemed to just genuinely want to make friends on the internet and share their ideas and dreams. Having conversations on my local feed feels like popping into random IRC channels and getting to know the regulars. Ultimately making friends is the only thing I ever really wanted from the internet, and over time it became one of the hardest tasks to accomplish.

I’ve also been dabbling a bit with a platform called MeWe, where a handful of friends have erected a bastion in honor of the glory days of Google Plus. It has been delightful so far, but the platform as a whole seems to have way fewer guardrails than I might like. The madness of the alt-right seems to have infected some corners of the platform, and there are some questions about just how open everything is. For me though my interaction circles around a handful of individuals and as a result, it is working as intended.

I’ve also spent at least a summary amount of time exploring something called Cohost, which appears to be a Live Journal clone. I am not certain if I will keep using it, because it doesn’t seem to be a great discovery engine. That is the challenge with branching out into new networks is that you ultimately have to carve a place out for yourself and figure out if and how it is going to add value to your life. Having a good discovery engine helps to make finding new people out in the void a bit easier, which is admittedly one of the key complaints that I see leveraged against the Fediverse, and being so fragmented. That said I also feel like no one seems to have a memory of how obtuse Twitter was in 2009 when I started trying to figure out how to find friends to follow.

I wrote this over the weekend and I still believe it. Something feels different this time. In the past folks would start using the Fediverse and then within hours/days/weeks run straight back to the platforms they originally came from. Sure a handful of people would stick around, but the end result created this cycle of “vacationers” and “townies”. I think social media has reached this breaking point where the cycle of chasing clout is unsustainable. The Muskrat making some broad sweeping changes to the platform he now “owns” is merely the trigger of something larger that has been sitting below the surface. I think there is a broad sense of dissatisfaction with the way things have been and the way online human interactions have functioned for the last decade. That said it could just be me projecting my own general sense of dissatisfaction on the whole ordeal.

I have no control over the broader internet, but I do have control over my small corner of it. Going forward I am shifting how I consume social media. It is about human interactions and less as a broadcast medium. I will still shout into the void about the things that are making me happy or excited, but I am going to care far less about whether or not the void answers back. I have this feeling that the Twitter pair-down was only the beginning, and there will likely be more waves of that in the future. For now, I am enjoying yet another honeymoon period with the Fediverse or more particularly Mstdn.social that I migrated to last April. If you too have a general sense of dissatisfaction with the way things have been and the direction they have been going, then you are more than welcome to join me in any of my nonsense.

I’ve written about the Fediverse a number of times, but the two most cogent tomes are my general primer and how to migrate instances. As always I will still be here, on the only platform I have any real control over… my blog, and my podcast.