Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

@internetsdairy I think that's sort of the case, and especially at first this would have seemed alluring and felt powerful, but I feel that by this point the downsides of that are understood widely enough that it's probably not as strong of a selling point as it used to be.

Lots of people talk about 'social media detox' now and that suggests that people now have a more well-rounded understanding of the tradeoffs of this model, than they used to.

@rune @nthia In the context of NL, I was referring to the thing where in a conflict between two road users, the 'stronger' road user (car > bike > pedestrian) is automatically assumed to be at fault unless there's clear evidence otherwise.

Don't know if that's what @Tak was also referring to :)

@AmyPetty @freakazoid (The latter appears credible to people because something that looks a lot like it *does* seem to be true; which is that a *lack of accountability* breeds abuse. But that isn't the same thing unless you make it so!)

@Ember I guess a more concise summary would be "egocentric social platforms make every conversation a peanut gallery" and that's what makes the problem unmanageable

@Ember That's... sort of true, but not in the same way I'm describing.

On here, it's very common for people to genuinely not be fully aware of the situation, but believe that they are. This causes things to escalate even when they *could* have been hashed out. And I've seen this same problem replicated in basically every egocentric social platform.

In defined communities, *those* folks can converge on a shared understanding. Likewise, it is possible to convene meetings, and whatever other community-wide actions are needed to resolve a conflict. That's just not really possible here, because "who is involved" isn't even really defined very well.

I've spent a lot of time on forums when I was younger, and conflict certainly happened there too. But there was always a path to resolution, as long as the operators of the community gave a damn about it, and things could be talked out, compromises suggested, and so on. There was a wealth of things that were possible, that simply are not possible here.

People who deliberately disrupt things and aren't seeking to resolve conflicts cannot be solved by a choice of technology. But design choices can certainly affect *how many* of them there can be in a given community or conflict, and also extend the problem to those genuinely unaware, because "does not know the details" and "is stoking the fire" become externally almost indistinguishable.

@polotek I've definitely seen folks on a variety of instances complain about certain demographics joining fedi, though crucially it seems that the folks on m.s express the "why" in a very different way.

In particular, I've noticed that folks on smaller instances often provide a specific rationale as to why it's a problem, whereas from folks on m.s it often feels more like they're repeating whatever they think the cultural norm is, without necessarily understanding why.

This is of course a generalization and there are exceptions, and not all of the rationales provided are *good* rationales, but the difference in patterns definitely stood out to me.

@nthia Funnily, this is *almost* how it is legally defined in the Netherlands

@freakazoid In NL, there was Clubs.nl. I'm terrible at names so I forgot the rest, but over the years several people have mentioned similar platforms to me in other countries, especially European ones.

@freakazoid Crucially, social media *didn't* originate as "a Facebook-like thing"! That's just how Silicon Valley rewrote history, basically.

I'm old enough to remember the pre-MySpace spate of social media, and they absolutely were not egocentric, even if you just count centralized platforms and not BBSes and forums and such. They were digital implementations of clubs and member organizations.

This only got supplanted by MySpace and Facebook (and the various regional me-too platforms) much later.