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

@serapath (Also, "unbanked" is a bit of a misnomer because these metrics often include people who *do* have access to eg. mobile payment systems that functionally act as a bank for them, but just aren't recognized as such by eg. the ECB or Federal Reserve)

@serapath My question is very specifically about it 'catching on', though. Sure, it would have probably *existed*, but the early broad adoption was primarily driven by frustrations with the US banking system, and the then-promises of lower transaction fees.

I'm not sure it would have ever reached that point of mass interest if it weren't for the terrible banking structures in the US inviting people to look for alternatives. Only very few people ever cared about the *philosophical* underpinnings really.

@cy @Ember I feel like you're making a lot of assumptions here that aren't quite right. What I'm talking about is cohesive communities; interactions don't center *around* individuals, but that doesn't mean that people are not known on a personal level within a community (like how communities have worked for thousands of years already).

@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.