I personally have mixed emotions about people who are only now waking up to the fact that on commercial social media we were never the customer we were the product. Seeing blog posts etc. from people discovering this after I've been talking about it for a few years now.

This is a tweet from 2021:

"It's typical the new media *have always* used subtle propaganda to hit emotionally. In the old days "It sold papers" nowadays it sells our information to advertisers. "

It was really obvious after reading Walter Lippmann, Jacques Ellull, Popper, John Dewey and Chomsky himself. The trick is going to be in proving Lippmann wrong.

dianoralatetotheparty.wordpres…

#Philosophy #Propaganda #SocialMedia #Mastodon #TwitterMigration

Mastodon the great leveler? Could Mastodon end up bringing democracy to the masses by finally giving us a social media platform for the people?

The role of Propaganda in social media I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. Remembering quotes like these: “It is no longer possible to hold the simple faith of the Enlightenment tha…

^{Yet another atheist late to the party}

I've spent the last 30 days diversifying my #socialmedia presence because the hellsite Bird App is going to implode at any minute.

Here are my observations so far: nataniabarron.com/2022/12/01/m…

My Post-Twitter Social Media Landscape: One Month In

With Twitter crashing and burning, I thought I’d share a bit about rebuilding on other platforms and share some of my experiences.

^{Natania Barron}

This post by @nolan, the developer of the Pinafore web client, on Mastodon is excellent. His warnings about Mastodon and our social habits are important for us to consider. I agree that we should truly consider its future.

nolanlawson.com/2022/11/22/tho…

#Mastodon #SocialMedia #habits

Thoughts on Mastodon

Five years ago, I was all-in on Mastodon. I deleted my Twitter account, set up a Mastodon instance, and encouraged my friends to join. A year later, I wrote my own Mastodon client in an attempt to …

^{Read the Tea Leaves}

Would love thoughts on how to improve the #SVG social media icons here (aside from deleting the Twitter link) codepen.io/mgifford-the-typesc…

We really need to make it easier for people to control social media icons and style them to meet their site. This really should be easy, accessible and susainable.

#SustyWeb #a11y #SocialMedia

Interesting to see government challenges trying to get involved in a community that they don't understand. #Discord & #Mastodon are obviously very different, but wondering what "Gotchas" there might be for #government sites exploring alternative #SocialMedia accounts.

As people flock from #Twitter, there will be new things watch for.

amp.theguardian.com/media/2022…

Tune in to our new episode! @katherined, @dsearls, @shawnp0wers, and @kyle discuss the ups, downs, and how-tos of using Mastodon amid Twitter's recent instability.
Visit the following link for full episode - reality2cast.com/132

#Mastodon #socialMedia #Technology #Privacy #Podcast #newEpisode

Something that has bothered me for a while... A lot of people use LinkTree for creating a profile with all their #socialmedia #links... The problem is #LinkTree is a data harvesting / tracker site.

Thankfully @eposvox pointed out another service to me (via his profile) today: bio.link/ - it's a free to use alternative, that doesn't track personal info beyond click throughs (no IP, no cookie, etc.)

It's from the Buy-Me-A-Coffee folks and looks really really good.

Bio Link: Fastest "Link In Bio" for your Instagram and TikTok

Bio Link is a free and elegant link in bio for your Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and other socials. Claim your name in seconds!

^bio.link

It looks like a lot of organizations are going to need to update their #SocialMedia icons, so I decided to put up a few which include #mastodon.

My goal is to produce #SVG images that respect dark mode, can be easily styled with CSS, and also allow either circle, square or no background.

I want to embed best practices of accessibility, and web sustainability in this.

So what can I do to improve these?

codepen.io/mgifford-the-typesc…

#a11y #SustyWeb #DarkMode

And here we have someone calling for kids to give up (the sense of) #privacy for global age verification... Look, kids are curious and need social status, hence they will get on #socialmedia sooner or later, so will age requirements make them understand what they're getting into? But I do agree on building a platform better suited for kids... Maybe have supervised clubs at schools running #ActivityPub instances in closed federations (connecting nearby schools)?

nytimes.com/2022/08/05/opinion…

Opinion | It Was a Mistake to Let Kids Onto Social Media Sites. Here’s What to Do Now.

Changing a law to raise the age requirement for social media use could empower parents.

^{Yuval Levin (The New York Times)}

🤔 ICYMI from April, a good (long-form!) essay about how #addiction to #tech (in general, but also #smartphones and #socialMedia in particular) is affecting human #attention spans in a negative way.

💡 Raises an interesting idea about it causing or reinforcing cultural "learned helplessness" that crosses over into many other areas of modern tech-facilitated life. (Something @lightweight has long discussed.)

🔖 Take a read this weekend and tell us what you think?

idratherbewriting.com/blog/awa…

"... take today’s social media, add a splash of sophisticated 3D, fold in a plethora of options for entertainment and gaming, garnish it all with data-driven personalization, and you are all set to take away your order of a supersized social media network, the Metaverse."

- #PreetiKotamarthi

thedecisionlab.com/insights/te…

#MetaVerse #SocialMedia #DataFarming

Brave New World: How the Metaverse May Shape Our Psychology - The Decision Lab

The Metaverse is the hottest topic in tech and beyond. But if we don’t plan for the dawn of this new world, we risk repeating past mistakes

^{The Decision Lab}

👴 OK kids...

Before #Mastodon, before #socialMedia, before the #Web, we had the #BBS.

If you wanna learn from those who came before, here's a comprehensive 5-hour #documentary about bulletin board systems. 🤓

(Of course, given the world back then it's mostly 5 hours of old white guys. So it goes!)

invidious.snopyta.org/watch?v=…

BBS the Documentary [Full HD]

The BBS (bulletin board system) scene of the 80s and 90s was a magical time. Long before the Internet escaped from the lab, connected the planet and redefined what it meant to use a computer there was a brave and pioneering band of computer users who…

^Invidious