A reader wrote in asking why I hate Mastodon’s “explore” tab so much.
I’ve been against the explore tab all along but what really broke my heart is how it looks more or less the same across the several different Mastodon instances I looked at.
For me, I feel like the mechanism of social media to emphasize a handful of a-thousand-likes big viral posts over your own friends is dehumanizing.
Fedi already has mechanisms in it like boosts/reblogs that can cause that. People will boost some posts causing them to spread further.
“Explore” takes something that’s not great and cranks up the bad parts at the expense of the good parts. It’s like cranking up the contrast on a picture that already has too much contrast, turning “bass boost” on a song that’s already poorly mixed, exacerbating the problem. Pouring gasoline on a fire or dousing a flooded building with more water.
With reblogging/boosting, at least you’re seeing stuff curated by people you’ve selected. That’s where the original meaning of “going viral” came from; things people spread between each other, send to each other voluntarily. There are some pros and some cons to that, but it’s a bad idea to amplify that effect artificially.
A silver lining of “Explore” could’ve been that it might break through echo chambers. You’d be seeing a reflection of mainstream culture instead of just your own li’l bubble and that might be a good thing. But technically that still doesn’t work since due to the way Fedi is set up, Explore is still filtered through the normal instance blocks etc. (Which is a good thing because there is a lot of nazi bullshit instances out there. But then the “Explore as a reflection of mainstream culture” is technically not feasible since they won’t see those posts anyway.)
One reason I’ve been enjoying Fedi is that it breaks down this monolithic, monocultural, “everyone sees the same super top ten sponsored megaposts” bull that corporate faux “social” media has broken down into. Just like real life, every li’l ant sees the ants next to it and have fun with them in a Dunbar-number sane way.
I don’t like how YouTube, Twitter, BSky push mega-stars and creates parasocial relationships and fandoms over friendships. Audience over company.
On my “Fedi Wishlist”, I wrote:
Here is a timeline I do not want to head down. One of the worst parts of the post-September internet are these huge celebs. Instead of “Here is the mailing list for Werewolf: the Apocalypse, let’s talk together” it’s “Hello adoring fans here are my favorite brands of the day”.
I’m into participatory culture, and this is not that.
This is what Instagram, Twitter, BSky and Threads are set up to be, and YouTube too. “Viral” successes. Do not want.😰
Hashtags are bad because the technical details behind how they are currently implemented reward big instances and punish small instances. Those problems are then reflected in an even more exaggerated way on the “explore” tab.
I get the impression that some of the core Masto devs secretly wish they owned Twitter and that all forms of federation is just a concession to appease us FOSS seals.
The internet I grew up with was one where you found friends and communities through common interests and then you talked to those people and they talked to you. Community. Not billboards. Twitter is “one IRC channel for the entire planet” and that appealed to a lot of bigmouths and blowhards and people are trying to recreate that with things like BSky and Nostr and Masto’s “Explore” tab. But that’s never what I wanted.
I wanna quit watching YouTube entirely but one thing that I’ve used for the past few years is an extension that turns off all recommendations. The only way I can find videos is by searching for them specifically or following links. So if I wanna watch a review of a particular synth, I can, but I won’t then get flooded with “up next: Jordan Peterson explains why he who knows nothing about climate change should be the only person people listen to about climate change” and that kinda bull.
Internet as a library where we can seek out things or get recommendations from the people who are actually in our lives and close to us. Internet as a party where you can talk to the people at your own table instead of being drowned out by the screaming from the big stage. Participatory culture.