Daniel's Blog

Well, hello world. Over the years I've made numerous short-lived attempts at blogs, perhaps because I just wanted to have a blog without actually having much to say nor the dedication to make a habit of just writing something on a regular basis.

Lately, though, I've been developing the feeling that “important” things are happening around us. Particularly, there are multiple parties and a lot of money moving towards the idea of “decentralized” technology, ostensibly to wrest some of the power Big Tech has accumulated and put it back into... other hands. And that's where I see the brewing struggle, on multiple fronts. Right now I see four parties in play along two axes:

1. individual vs corporate
2. federation vs blockchain

I should clarify when I say “corporate” I don't necessarily mean a company, but some sort of group with top-down governance.

So we have these four groups (with apologies for the names):

1. The individualist federalists: this group believes in autonomous nodes that informally manage their networks. Small nodes and networks are a feature for this group, not a problem to be solved. You'll particularly meet this sort of person in the tildeverse
2. The individualist chain gang: they believe blockchain technology can improve their lives with new features like the ability to move money across national borders with minimal friction.
3. The corporate federalists: this group wants to see a more unified fediverse, especially in response to what they may see as the threat of corporate (talking about companies this time) influence, such as from Threads. This unification necessarily requires tighter cooperation than the fediverse currently sees.
4. The corporate chain gang: This is probably the most publicly visible group since they're the ones making the money and will probably continue to be in that position for the foreseeable future or until legislation neuters cryptocurrency trading in a similar fashion to how it made hawala the most illegal form of moving value there is (because it's just that good at putting the exchange of value into the hands of individuals that it became popular among international terrorists).

What has finally stirred me to try blogging again is that I identify with the “individualist federalist” group and I think discussing why may make for an interesting topic, as it can be counterintuitive at times. Why is it better to have a smaller social network? What are the pros and cons of more unified governance of the fediverse? I plan to wax eloquent on these points and more as the muse strikes. For now, though, I'd just like to see how this blog platform works so I'll see you next time!

A commonly perceived problem in the social media world is that of “bubbles” or “echo chambers”. That is, you (dear user) wind up in a space where your preconceived notions are reinforced by all the input you're receiving, leading to increased polarization and lack of balanced perspectives.

One criticism leveled against small social media, or what I've labelled “individualist federalism”, is that it's basically a pre-built echo chamber. You have folks like me running a single node and I choose peers who produce the content I want to see which has a certain slant to it (in my case, some combination of technical geekery and anarchism). If you (dear user) join my node, you get a dose of technical geekery and anarchism but you don't get much gardening advice because I don't peer with nodes that produce gardening advice (not by choice, though – send me your nodes that discuss gardening!). That's a bubble of sorts.

Where I dispute this perspective, however, is that you can easily have accounts on different nodes and even different networks. If you're dissatisfied with the lack of gardening advice in my federated network and you find a network with the gardening advice you crave, you can just go sign up over there and get your gardening advice fix. The fact that no single node owns the network (unlike, e.g. Facebook owning the entire Facebook graph or same for Twitter, Instagram, etc) means you can engage with diverse networks with a single technology to craft the experience to your taste.

This is very unlike specifically Facebook and YouTube which are transparently making decisions about what content to push to you, which is transparently motivated by ad spend by people with an agenda to get you to think a certain way (even if their agenda is no more nefarious than just getting you to consider buying more Oreos, but Cambridge Analytica proved this same idea applies to political thought-shaping as well).

So to summarize, I suppose I'm not disputing that small federated social networks produce bubbles. Ultimately you are always going to be subject to a limited set of information. The key distinction for me is that you, the user, get to shape the bubble to your tastes rather than having it shaped for you by ad-fueled algorithms.