#onlinecommunities — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #onlinecommunities, aggregated by home.social.
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Show Me Where It Hurts
I have been building and moderating conversation on the internet since the internet had conversation worth moderating, and one quarrel from those years has never let me put it down. It happened on Reddit, in one of the medical-advice communities, the ask-a-doctor kind, and the room's name has dissolved from memory while its images have refused to leave. People arrived with photographs of their own fresh cuts and posted them for assessment, and the moderators split over what they were looking at. One camp called the pictures fine in a medical setting: a patient presenting an injury to doctors, the oldest transaction in medicine arriving through a new door. The other camp read performance, attention pursued through injury, and wanted every image gone. I stood with the second camp's verdict while distrusting its reasoning, because the deletion seemed right to me for a reason neither camp was saying: whatever any single poster intended, the gallery was awe-inspiring to the wrong eyes. I could not have defended that instinct with numbers then, and now I can, so here is the argument laid out in full, the folk theory measured, the audience counted, the room itself put on the scale. […] -
Why Are Communities Becoming More Valuable Than Audiences?
For many years, building an audience was considered one of the most important goals in business.The logic was simple.More followers meant more visibility.More visibility meant more opportunities.More opportunities meant more growth.This approach helped countless creators, entrepreneurs, and businesses build successful brands online.Today, however, another trend is emerging.Communities are becoming increasingly valuable.Many business owners are discovering that a smaller, highly engaged […] -
Why Are Communities Becoming More Valuable Than Audiences?
For many years, building an audience was considered one of the most important goals in business.The logic was simple.More followers meant more visibility.More visibility meant more opportunities.More opportunities meant more growth.This approach helped countless creators, entrepreneurs, and businesses build successful brands online.Today, however, another trend is emerging.Communities are becoming increasingly valuable.Many business owners are discovering that a smaller, highly engaged […] -
Why Are Communities Becoming More Valuable Than Audiences?
For many years, building an audience was considered one of the most important goals in business.The logic was simple.More followers meant more visibility.More visibility meant more opportunities.More opportunities meant more growth.This approach helped countless creators, entrepreneurs, and businesses build successful brands online.Today, however, another trend is emerging.Communities are becoming increasingly valuable.Many business owners are discovering that a smaller, highly engaged […] -
Why Are Communities Becoming More Valuable Than Audiences?
For many years, building an audience was considered one of the most important goals in business.The logic was simple.More followers meant more visibility.More visibility meant more opportunities.More opportunities meant more growth.This approach helped countless creators, entrepreneurs, and businesses build successful brands online.Today, however, another trend is emerging.Communities are becoming increasingly valuable.Many business owners are discovering that a smaller, highly engaged […] -
Why Are Communities Becoming More Valuable Than Audiences?
For many years, building an audience was considered one of the most important goals in business.The logic was simple.More followers meant more visibility.More visibility meant more opportunities.More opportunities meant more growth.This approach helped countless creators, entrepreneurs, and businesses build successful brands online.Today, however, another trend is emerging.Communities are becoming increasingly valuable.Many business owners are discovering that a smaller, highly engaged […] -
So, I am a Computational Biologist. Keep that in mind. I’m an actual scientist who works with ecological concepts, specifically the microbiome. One of the most insufferable reactions to the cyberpunk era we inhabit is the emergence of anti-science ideas from the left in response to techno-fascism. The strange part is that many people on the left do not even recognize them as anti-science, because they assume the left is aligned with science and the right opposed to it; ergo, if the left says it, it must be scientific. It is insane: washing your hands is technology. Medicine is technology.
I think, because the Internet has hijacked people’s brains, many conflate technology with electronics or machines. Anthropologically, technology consists of material objects, techniques, and organized practices through which humans intentionally intervene in their environments. Technology is culture, and human culture is technology. When someone learns a skill or a discipline from someone else, that is an extension of technology.
Technology encompasses craft traditions (blacksmithing), agriculture, and institutionalized processes of teaching and learning. Agriculture is one of the oldest forms of technology. Yes, farmers are tech workers. I write code, but I also spent a large amount of time on a farm, and I can tell you that many tech workers who pride themselves on writing code would not know what to do with farm equipment.
So, from that broad perspective, we can sum technology up in one word: education. A basic heuristic for determining if something is cultural or not is: can it be taught and learned? These words? I was taught English, and I am using an invented language to transmit knowledge to you; ergo, I am using technology to transmit cultural knowledge to you. Reading a book is thus using a piece of human technology. So, being anti-tech connotes being anti-education.
What got me thinking about this is a toot I read on Mastodon:
The truth is that society needs to develop ethically and ecologically more than it does technologically. That’s not to say that we should shun technology, but our development along other lines lags far behind our technological capacity.
Sounds valid, right? That is the distinct smell of bull shit.This is a clear example of what is called a platitude. Platitudes are memetically hijacking people’s brains. Memetics actually hijack your brain—they change it. It’s similar to how a retrovirus can alter the genome of its host. So, trying to have conversations with these people is pointless, which is why I avoid the chronically online Internet scene and arguing with them.
It made me want to scream. As I mentioned earlier, technology is basically a set of things you learn from other humans—typically within a culture—that helps you do or make something. You know what else is learned within human society? A normative set of cultural values about how we ought to behave. So, both technology and culture emerge from the same thing simultaneously and mutually. You cannot have humans intervening in things to achieve ecological development, because that is technology, and you cannot educate humans on ethics without an invented language. It is literally an anti-education argument.
Ethics and technology arise together from the same human conditions and social processes. It makes little sense to claim that technology is “outpacing” ethics. The two do not develop independently. We form ethical norms in response to new capacities and circumstances. There would be no cultural norms about how to use the Internet if the Internet did not exist. And, there would be no ethical debates about AI if AI did not exist. Ethical reflection emerges alongside technological change because both are products of human culture.
As new problems create new technologies that create new problems, societies respond by negotiating norms, rules, and expectations appropriate to those contexts. The same pattern appears in politics. Politics concerns who gets what, when, and how—it is the negotiation of power, rights, and resources. Without resources or competing claims, there would be nothing to negotiate. Ethics and politics are not trailing behind technology because they are co-emergent responses to the same underlying realities.
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Your BlueSky Feed Is Porn You Didn’t Ask For Because Your Friends Are Gooners With a Severe Porn Addiction
A common complaint I see people make on Bluesky is: why am I being served so much porn or things I am not interested in? They will incorrectly believe that the algorithm is broken. It’s not broken. You didn’t know the people you knew as well as you thought you did. Porn addiction is a thing, and porn addiction is especially common with weebs. You’re seeing deranged shit because people you follow have porn addictions and are into deranged shit. So, though you may not be consuming porn, people in your network are. That activity kicks into your feeds.
The issue I have with that is that it essentially normalizes being sex pests in a space on the Internet. That sets the expectation that it is good—attractive, even—to act like that elsewhere. That expectation alienates relationships. Bluesky creates a cultural space that offers an unrealistic, bizarre representation of social relationships, which isolates and alienates the users who stay on there consuming erotica and porn like they do.
So, user repos in Bluesky have a property for likes. Bluesky’s underlying AT Protocol stores likes as first-class structured records in each user’s AT Protocol repository. In the AT Protocol lexicon, a like is an app.bsky.feed.like record type. Unlike a simple boolean flag on a post, it is its own record with a creation timestamp and a subject field that holds a strong reference to the liked record.
That strong reference is composed of an AT-URI and a CID. The AT-URI identifies the exact record in the network by DID, collection, and record key. The CID is a cryptographic content identifier that uniquely identifies the exact content of that liked record.
These like records exist under the app.bsky.feed.like namespace in the user’s repo. Bluesky’s repo model is built so that these repos are hosted on a user’s Personal Data Server and are publicly readable through the AT Protocol APIs. Because of that, the like record and its fields can be fetched, indexed, and used by any client or service that can query the protocol.
The protocol exposes operations like getLikes. This returns all of the like records tied to a particular subject’s AT-URI and CID. It also exposes getActorLikes. This returns all of the subject references a given actor has liked. Those API calls return structured like objects with timestamps and subject references directly from the public repository data.
Various feeds hosted by different PDSs use the likes property to construct the feeds that you see. Since the likes of people you follow are included in your social graph, along with your own likes, you’re going to get served the porn they are consuming. Because likes are public and anyone can write an algorithm to see everyone’s likes, you can clearly see just how much porn people are consuming.
Honestly, what started to turn my stomach about the people on Bluesky is how they behave across different contexts. If you look through the records of the posts they interact with, you’ll see them engaging with political posts in the replies like a normal person. Then, when you look through their AT Protocol records, you see hours and hours of them interacting with every kind of porn imaginable. I am not exaggerating. Hours of likes for porn posts within 1–10 minutes of each other. Am I sex-negative? A prude? No, this site is filled with furry, gay bara porn, lol. You can have a drink without being an alcoholic. The problem with these people is like people who can’t have one drink without drinking the whole fucking day; they can’t consume porn in healthy ways.
I think people assume that their feed is customized for them and based on their likes. No—feeds are generalized based on what everyone likes and then served to your subgraph. It’s not just about who you follow; it’s about who they follow. So if you follow someone who follows a lot of people with porn addictions, you will see porn. Bluesky isn’t weighting the algorithm to do this. Basically, it’s the people in your social network with furry, hentai, or trans porn addictions who are driving it.
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Is Reddit a safe space for mental health?
Maria Grub @unijena explores how #Reddit users seek emotional support in forums on depression, anxiety, and mental health.
The study highlights how online communities offer both information and emotional connection, reducing isolation and providing alternative support.
➡️ https://doi.org/10.34669/wi.wjds/5.3.3
#MentalHealth #OnlineCommunities #DigitalHealth #Research #Anxiety #Depression #SocialScience #HealthCommunication #Forschung #UniJena #Psychology