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A reader wrote in asking why I hate Mastodonâs âexploreâ tab so much.
Iâve been against the explore tab all along but what really broke my heart is how it looks more or less the same across the several different Mastodon instances I looked at.
For me, I feel like the mechanism of social media to emphasize a handful of a-thousand-likes big viral posts over your own friends is dehumanizing.
Fedi already has mechanisms in it like boosts/reblogs that can cause that. People will boost some posts causing them to spread further.
âExploreâ takes something thatâs not great and cranks up the bad parts at the expense of the good parts. Itâs like cranking up the contrast on a picture that already has too much contrast, turning âbass boostâ on a song thatâs already poorly mixed, exacerbating the problem. Pouring gasoline on a fire or dousing a flooded building with more water.
With reblogging/boosting, at least youâre seeing stuff curated by people youâve selected. Thatâs where the original meaning of âgoing viralâ came from; things people spread between each other, send to each other voluntarily. There are some pros and some cons to that, but itâs a bad idea to amplify that effect artificially.
A silver lining of âExploreâ couldâve been that it might break through echo chambers. Youâd be seeing a reflection of mainstream culture instead of just your own liâl bubble and that might be a good thing. But technically that still doesnât work since due to the way Fedi is set up, Explore is still filtered through the normal instance blocks etc. (Which is a good thing because there is a lot of nazi bullshit instances out there. But then the "Explore as a reflection of mainstream culture" is technically not feasible since they won't see those posts anyway.)
One reason Iâve been enjoying Fedi is that it breaks down this monolithic, monocultural, âeveryone sees the same super top ten sponsored megapostsâ bull that corporate faux âsocialâ media has broken down into. Just like real life, every liâl ant sees the ants next to it and have fun with them in a Dunbar-number sane way.
I donât like how YouTube, Twitter, BSky push mega-stars and creates parasocial relationships and fandoms over friendships. Audience over company.
On my âFedi Wishlistâ, I wrote:
Here is a timeline I do not want to head down. One of the worst parts of the post-September internet are these huge celebs. Instead of âHere is the mailing list for Werewolf: the Apocalypse, letâs talk togetherâ itâs âHello adoring fans here are my favorite brands of the dayâ.
Iâm into participatory culture, and this is not that.
This is what Instagram, Twitter, BSky and Threads are set up to be, and YouTube too. âViralâ successes. Do not want.đ°
Hashtags are bad because the technical details behind how they are currently implemented reward big instances and punish small instances. Those problems are then reflected in an even more exaggerated way on the âexploreâ tab.
I get the impression that some of the core Masto devs secretly wish they owned Twitter and that all forms of federation is just a concession to appease us FOSS seals.
The internet I grew up with was one where you found friends and communities through common interests and then you talked to those people and they talked to you. Community. Not billboards. Twitter is âone IRC channel for the entire planetâ and that appealed to a lot of bigmouths and blowhards and people are trying to recreate that with things like BSky and Nostr and Mastoâs âExploreâ tab. But thatâs never what I wanted.
I wanna quit watching YouTube entirely but one thing that Iâve used for the past few years is an extension that turns off all recommendations. The only way I can find videos is by searching for them specifically or following links. So if I wanna watch a review of a particular synth, I can, but I wonât then get flooded with âup next: Jordan Peterson explains why he who knows nothing about climate change should be the only person people listen to about climate changeâ and that kinda bull.
Internet as a library where we can seek out things or get recommendations from the people who are actually in our lives and close to us. Internet as a party where you can talk to the people at your own table instead of being drowned out by the screaming from the big stage. Participatory culture.