Post #4480354

2026-08-10 06:26 UTC

importantly: social media is *broken*, and that brokenness has deeply harmed humanity. we have been conditioned to view every single issue as transactional & tribal: you're with us, or you're against us. reality, of course, does not actually work this way. there are many examples in the current cultural zeitgeist where we can see the effects of this conditioning first-hand. this is because social media rewards content that can produce tight feedback loops: the ding of every interaction gives a dopamine hit. that's fine if those interactions are actually meaningfully constructive, but usually they aren't. this leads to a cycle of antisocial behavior designed to drive more interactions.

Replies (1)

@ariadne@social.treehouse.systems 2026-08-10 06:35

anyway. because of this, we have an authenticity gap in social media. when i grew up on the 'net, we were fucking around in IRC. people on windows were using apps like trillian to talk to each other. people made customized websites & profiles that reflected their own aesthetic. now, everything is homogenized. when you compare to something like myspace, for example, we've lost so much potential for expression. in a way, one of the reasons i became very interested in pleroma, to the point of contributing heavily to it, was because pleroma brought back the notion of a customizable profile page. so i want to build something that allows people to express themselves, through customizing every facet of the application. that's the goal, anyway.

Open ##4480352