Goldkin @Goldkin@awoo.space

I kind of need to be around people again. Most of my darker moods have been sourced in spending too much time in my own head, which I need to crawl out of for awhile.

Are people still meeting up in places and, if so, are they reasonably receptive to someone that is socially timid and just wanting company?

I spent my off-hours this past week reading innumerable volumes of case law, legal explainers, historic texts, and listening to legal podcasts to try to make sense of what’s happening in the world right now. I also donated and called electeds, too.

It’s been a bit too much for me emotionally, even though it’s left me hopeful.

For my sanity, I’m going to try to draw for a week or two to recover my emotional spoons. Pardon that my toots have been kind of weird as I worked through all of that.

I guess that sourcing for that lesson is also kind of silly, not dissimilar to how one of the most profound quotes I know came out of a localization decision for Metroid Fusion. But, so it goes, and it did stick with me regardless.

It’s difficult to have a real sense of forward progress, when all seems to be chaos and when oppressors seem to have the upper hand. But all is not lost, and hope and community continues to grow in the spaces that chaos forgot.

So too does it seem to be the case now. And I guess that’s part of why I’m still hopeful for the future.

One of the enduring messages I got out of that tiny epiphany back then was, even through the pit of despair, it’s possible to press on, rebuild, grow, and eventually overcome. Even in the shadow of oppression. And I guess that stuck with me.

It’s been helpful these past few years, when things have seemed particularly bleak. And each revision, after I’ve gotten kicked down by injury or circumstance, has slowly gotten better.

I guess that’s especially useful now.

Final Fantasy VI: Dark World just queued up on web radio. I didn’t expect that to pair well with today.

When Kefka defeated the party at the midpoint of the game, and I found myself stranded on the tiny island with Cid, I thought that was the bad ending for the game. So it was a very powerful for me when it wasn’t, and when you finally rebuild the party after everyone was separated during the final-battle-that-wasn’t.

I guess that’s worth reflecting on.

This image probably bears more explanation now that I’m back home and safe. We tried for Camp Muir today (a little past midway up on Rainier), with varying stages of completion on the entire (strenuous, exhausting, rock-and-snow-covered) climb up. A good time was had by all, and more importantly, good hiking preparedness by all involved resulted in no losses to life or limb.

Also, that side of Rainier apparently now gets 3 bars of LTE, which is how this was posted from the mountainside. Neat.

I guess I have longer thoughts on this that I need to spend more time studying, and I need step away to do something unexpectedly, so I'll leave it there for now.

But I suspect there are lessons to learn here from earlier social diasporas and migrations of people, in how this cycle to and from larger platforms will play out, and what it means for trying to establish a home and presence online.

Building on kind of the longish thread from a few days ago: larger social media sites, in the absence of scalable moderation practices, have created an ecosystem in which filters stabilize on the loudest and most persistent voices in the room. Which is why "clickbait populism" and associated tribes thrive over on birdsite, Facebook, Reddit, YouTube, etc etc etc.

Better moderation, and moderation of smaller federated instances, solves much of this problem.

I've been spending a lot more time off of the main social media sites, and it's really been helpful.

I've been thinking a lot about this observation as I rethink how I interact online (full thread: https://twitter.com/AstroKatie/status/984606232408461313):

Also, the author of the book is definitely not a nice person, and there are multiple cases when I wanted to fling the book across the room.

So, be prepared for that. But, I do not doubt his credentials or experience on this topic.

So, in that context, it may be worth reading by anyone experiencing general weariness towards larger social media sites, while not being able to put a finger on exactly what causes them to be so caustic.

I suspect there is much more to be written on this topic, particularly as folks pull away from Twitter and rebuild primary sourcing methods and good practices in moderation.

Which, in a way, makes me feel good about Mastodon and its forks' future, as these needs are rediscovered.

In total: if not a _good_ summary read on this topic, it is a book to pick up to obtain general familiarity with what is happening to Twitter and Facebook. It is also a good postmortem on what to not do with the direction of Mastodon or the administration of particular sites.

It's also a scathing rebuke of algorithmic moderation techniques and the "wisdom of crowds" as a source of knowledge, when a site lacks an amalgamation of experts and firsthand experience.

So, what is to be done?

Here, the author provides a few cursory suggestions, including policy changes, general preparedness for smear campaigns, and stepping away from sites like Twitter and Facebook entirely and to "rebuild civil society on the ground, not online." I'm inclined to agree, though I think this argument is somewhat extreme, and it ignores the notion of rebuilding these platforms without making them amenable to marketing campaigns and legions of online trolls and bots.

I shy away from calling this a "fake news" problem, because the problem isn't sources of disinformation, but rather the structure of the platforms themselves. And here, the author launches into how adversarial actors -- including incubator fora like 4chan, terrorist organizations, and nation states -- use these ecosystems to push their preferred narratives. Unmoored from other sources of truth, these actors cultivate or create opinion leaders that can weaponize preferred narratives.

The narrative trips over and self-congratulates itself in several places, detracting from what is otherwise an astute observation. Early adopters of online discussion fora and media still had centralized sources of truth to turn to, be they news sites (ie, via RSS readers) or blogs concentrating expertise. This is not true for the current social media environment, with sites like Reddit, 4chan, Facebook, and Twitter instead choosing to elevate the loudest voices in the room.

Specifically, it lays out the premise that, in the context of pervasive attempts to create filter bubbles -- both by social media companies trying to divide marketable segments of a population, and by populist opinion leaders and state-sponsored actors trying to push particular narratives -- social media has come unmoored from the sources of truth that normally bind societies together. Instead, these sites are now creating irreconcilable tribes of self-enforcing confirmation bias.