That’s a fun set of features, but I don’t see the connection with the community. You can browse their mastodon feed and it’s just a bunch of vaguely liberal vaguely tech posts? I’d like to see which accounts are using the services for a better community
That's the shortcoming of every alternative protocol and "indie web" community I've come across. They only attract existing techies and have a weird sheen of forced kindness about them. If you're just chatting with other programmers under American HR communication standards, then how is it any different to work?
The true magic of the early web was somebody genius but decidedly untechnical like David Bowie shitposting at his own fans. There's no special line of code that's going to foster that. You have to ruthlessly curate a community to avoid a critical mass of sensitive nerds, but guess who the early colonizers of these alt platforms are. None of these communities will attract today or tomorrow's David Bowies.
> The true magic of the early web was somebody genius but decidedly untechnical like David Bowie shitposting at his own fans.
No, the magic of the early web was that people treated their online identities as a secret alternative life, rather than a resume for recruiters, friends, potential partners, and other real-world acquaintances to look at.
The Internet of today is little more than a (distorted) mirror of people's offline lives. That's why the problems of today's Internet are the same as the problems of the real world. By contrast, the Internet of the 90s was an exciting world of its own, with rules that were dramatically different from those of everyday life.
This, but also because it was something genuinely new that had never been seen before. Doubly so if you were young then and old now. Everything was novel, and therefore interesting - even the bad things. I’ve seen people expressing nostalgia for blink tags.
> attract existing techies and have a weird sheen of forced kindness about them.
> If you're just chatting with other programmers under American HR communication standards, then how is it any different to work?
> There's no special line of code that's going to foster that.
> you have to ruthlessly curate a community to avoid a critical mass of sensitive nerds, but guess who the early colonizers of these alt platforms are
Great comment. Aligns with my own observations. On the note of "American HR Communication standards & work" I think most of us don't have experience participating in, let alone, organizing real communities[1]. Since most internet communities are awful, imaginary, transient etc, we default to the only actual experience we have semi-happily working with strangers: our jobs. Adding on top how internet comments are forever, cancelations is right around the corner, and careers hang in the balance, and you get a Bay Area photocopied dialogue.
guess who the early colonizers of these alt platforms are
The early web was mostly nerds, but not just tech nerds. I made my first site in 1997 and I linked to all sorts of things about TV shows, music and games that had been made by fans of things. If someone loved the X-Files and wanted to contribute to a site about it the only option was to get a book about HTML from the library and learn to use FTP. It thrived because it was just a group of people enthusiastic about things. Few people wanted to criticise because the only response you'd get was "well you make a better website then!". And when that happened people did. There were rivalries that worked like a feedback loop to improve things. That's missing today. People just criticise and don't try to do better. I blame the rise of guestbooks.
My first experience with "social media" was in the late 90s with a website dedicated to the Wheel of Time, www.wota.com. We had enormous fun in the forums and web chat, and I loved the design and flow. It was mostly hacked together in Perl. Rand Al'Thor, if you are reading this, where are youuu? It's me, TrueSource! ＼(≧▽≦)／
> None of these communities will attract today or tomorrow's David Bowies.
I kind of get what you're saying but I'm tired of people who act like "shitposting skills" are a useful quality trait. Similarly people who just can't not let something be.
I kind of dislike "forced kindness" as a community philosophy (I've met way too many people IRL who have a net persona of "super kind" and turn out to be, glibly, sociopaths), but "please don't be insufferable" is a nice rule of thumb for communities. Plenty of cool stuff made by people who are merely a little annoying. Meanwhile too many places have "those people" who just won't let something go. Let people keep their honor!
Shitposting wasn't the best choice of words, sorry. I think you know what I'm getting at though. There are cheeky artists and those to whom cheekiness is the art. The latter cohort are just annoying trolls, but the former group can animate communities. You just don't tend to find them among the small souled and dogmatic bitdiddlers that haunt every upstart platform.
I made an account and can’t seem to figure out where this magical community actually is? It seems like I can just link other open services? And for some reason I can receive email?
Not a single other person(‘s content) in sight though.
> I’d like to see which accounts are using the services for a better community
It’s more like after you use it for a little while you look up and suddenly realize you’re in a new but familiar feeling community. It definitely skews developer/blogger/liberal, is openly inclusive and mindful of accessibility (not perfect, but always trying), there's a lot of overlap with various micro.blog/IndieWeb/fediverse communities, a lot of folks with active GitHub accounts doing interesting stuff, a strong photographer contingent, an overarching “positive vibe” as the kids say, and a clear sense that you don’t have to remind the kind of folks who enjoy using omg.lol that there’s a person on the other side of the keyboard.
Maybe that still doesn’t make much sense to you, but while I’m happy to pay for cool stuff people make on the internet, I’m paid up with omg.lol through 2030, which just isn’t something I would do anywhere else.
I on the other hand would happily pay through 2030 to avoid the people you describe on omg.lol. I dislike pretentious tech positivity and HR catladies policing my online life.
Oof. I don’t think I e come across any of those people at omg but then again maybe I’ve been catpilled so I just didn’t notice.
It's a nice place to hang out because there aren’t many folks… misusing words like pretentious and claiming literally anyone is policing their life except, you know, the police.
These alternative networks are mostly lefty Twitter refugees whom indeed carry on their joyless identity politics and everything that comes with it. Everything is political, there's lots of dunking, excessive safety-ism and universal ideological agreement on everything.
Toxic positivity, it's incredibly tiring and alienating. I think the whole world is done with it.
This is the exact reason I refuse to touch Mastodon - the people who are Really Mad about Elon's purchase of Twitter are the exact people who made Twitter so toxic that I avoided it like the plague. I guess I'm happy that they are self sorting onto their own platform, but I'm going to stay far away from it.
Dude old Twitter was conservative west-coast brand libertarians and it's silly that people keep confusing them with liberals for seemingly no other reason than the NAP "as long as you're not hurting anyone I don't give a shit" means they're tolerant on social issues when they have basically nothing else in common with liberals.
If you're looking for an oasis of 'gloves off' discourse, 4chan and its ilk already fits that niche. omg.lol harks back to a time on the internet where people were at worst just 'silly' to each other, and people would talk to random strangers on AOL or ICQ and the like with genuine curiosity and hope for the future of the internet.
Where I grew up, that was called being polite and it didn’t automatically rule out anything other that liberalism. There’s a ton of room between disagreement and harassment.
Mind you, he said liberalism and not liberal. Modern day conservatives tend to be very pro-capitalism, which liberalism loved.
Not sure when things got all turned around in America. Liberalism = smaller government and a free market. Yet in the US a "liberal" dislikes capitalism and wants more government? It's odd.
> Yet in the US a "liberal" dislikes capitalism and wants more government?
American liberals love capitalism; its one of the key things that differentiates the liberal (center-right) faction of the Democratic Party from the progressive (center-left) faction, which is (largely, quite mildly) critical of capitalism, and, in turn, from the actual left.
The thing is, what counts as "abuse" has considerably changed.
There seems to be a shift towards, how someone perceives something, not how something actually is.
That can mean, that it is no longer possible to speak about something unpleasant, as someone might consider that an insult - and that is then the opposite of freedom of speech.
In other words, I don't enjoy the assholeness of 4chan - but I also do not enjoy overly polite spaces, avoiding all controversy. I am not clear yet, what this Oasis seems to aim for, but it might be the latter.
Exactly this. It's worth pointing out how many comedians* have argued the dangers of today's "getting offended" culture. Not because they are 4chaners or far-right extremists, they certainly aren't, but because they appreciate the negative consequences it has for society.
* Rowan Atkinson, Stephen Fry, Ricky Gervais to mention some of the most outspoken.
