some thoughts on fedi more generally, concise
@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.
I'm old enough to remember Usenet, AOL chat, LiveJournal, WordPress, and other blogging platforms. All of these were forms of social media. It astounds me that people think it starts and ends with Facebook, TikTok, and Twitter.
@AmyPetty @freakazoid I think a lot of folks don't realize just how much especially Facebook has affected the way that we all see social media today.
Despite not being the first of its kind, they almost single-handedly redefined what "social media" means; not just that, they were also the origin of the mass belief that requiring "real names" reduces abuse (and, conversely, that anonymity breeds abuse).
They were not the first to *make* this claim (notably, at least a webcomic beat them to that), but they certainly were the ones who popularized the belief, and who the modern beliefs around this topic can all be traced back to.
And yet most people think of this as "something that everyone knows and has always been true". Even though it's false, and is a very recent mass belief.
@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!)
