Finding the spaces again
Regaining what's lost in corporate social media
A primary concern nowadays for me in terms of using social media is the abundance of AI content. It's getting so crazy good that the other day, I was unable to deduce the nature of a video I saw on X until it got community noted. I shouldn't be using the notorious platform to begin with, which is discourse for another day; but how can I as a GenZ fail to differentiate this slop lol.
And not just X, same rhetoric goes on in YouTube, Instagram, Reddit and Twitch. God knows how screwed other platforms are. Giant corpos seems to be happy with the development – the so called enshittification. Dead internet theory all over again.
What alternative should I be aware of and more importantly, how soon can I let me guard down knowing they won't get the same doom? I reckon I won't be forever looking for an ideal place – those hard days are behind me. So a whack a mole solution won't be ideal here. I am all for moving to open source platforms. I remember when ActivityPub was booming some years ago and I sought refuge in such communities. What followed was power trippy mods, censoring, and hastened evolution into an echo chamber.
I believe pockets of small communities where good, healthy, constructive convos happen are the way to go. Like good discord/matrix servers for instance. To get a balanced and “dynamic” feed a bit of curation might be needed, which sounds exciting.
I've seen creator based communities behind paywalls such as patreon and substack, a development towards which my jury's still out. If this is to be the next stage of connecting, I just sincerely wish for decentralised model with a end user respecting standard.
- 𝒶