#parasocial — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #parasocial, aggregated by home.social.
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The real power of social media isn’t responsive people. It’s the attention hook. SEO drops? Blame not just AI search. The real drug is parasocial bonds: viewers feel they *know* the creator on screen, and that habit beats any algorithm tweak. 👀📱
Your take? Do you build that bond, or chase traffic? 💬
#SocialMedia #ContentStrategy #Parasocial #DigitalMarketing #SEO
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#Parasocial, uno de los juegos de Chilla's Art, nos pone en la piel de una VTuber que descubre la delgada línea entre pasar a ser fan y tener un acosador.
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Parasocial grief. This week we lost a cheerleader. Days before that we lost a professor. A few weeks ago a musician. I knew of these individuals, had never met them, fairly certain they had no idea who I was. I was either a fan of their work, or sympathetic to their struggles, or both. #Parasocial. Each of their deaths felt like a tragedy, perhaps the most recent, the youngest of them, most of all. #Grief
Hayden Panettiere, the actress who played a cheerleader with regenerative healing powers on the tv series “Heroes”, would have turned 37 today.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayden_Panettiere
A few months ago she had published a memoir of her many struggles, so many. There’s a story inside about being brought to a boat by a woman she trusted, and then into a room with a male occupant. Who was that woman, and who was that man? Someone must know, and enough information has been released that someone should be able to narrow down the possibilities.
* More (CW: abuse) details: https://www.thedailybeast.com/obsessed/hayden-panettieres-tragedy-foretold-in-harrowing-memoir/
The world failed to save the cheerleader, multiple times.
Jason Arday was a professor at the University of Cambridge. He was accused of plagiarism, and the press, from all sides, disproportionately covered and criticized him in contrast to their criticism of others similarly accused. Institutional racism across an industry. He died just a week ago, aged 41. Another tragedy.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Arday
* More: https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2026-08-19/jason-ardays-death-sparks-u-k-debate-over-academic-rigor-racism-after-media-frenzy
Kavinsky was a French DJ and music creator. I was (still am) a fan of his music, which simultaneously felt like some of the best electronic music from the 1980s, yet refreshingly novel. Partly dark, and partly hopeful.
He had been complaining of headaches, then passed away on July 28th, three days before turning 51.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kavinsky
His most popular track, “Nightcall”, was featured in the opening scene in the movie “Drive” with Ryan Gosling.
I found his track “Renegade” particularly resonant: https://youtu.be/N5u6YYqWgEo
#HaydenPanettiere #JasonArday #Kavinsky
#Blaugust #Blaugust2026 -
¡NUEVO VÍDEO!
Conocemos de propia mano el MAYOR MIEDO DE UNA STREAMER.
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Today on NovaLandia: "It's Time to Get Parasocial, or ... Paralives?"
The Sims has been a franchise that's been with me since the mid to late 90s. A thing that started, for me, with one of the very first SimCity games, on a school PC in a computer lab. This was before T...
https://mkultra.monster/gaming/2026/08/17/thoughts-on-paralives/
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Today on NovaLandia: "It's Time to Get Parasocial, or … Paralives?"
The Sims has been a franchise that's been with me since the mid to late 90s. A thing that started, for me, was one of the very first SimCity games, on a school PC in a computer lab. This was before Th…
https://mkultra.monster/gaming/2026/08/17/thoughts-on-paralives/
#gaming #game #time #get #parasocial -
Popular: "Why do you stay in parasocial relationships if you don't like them?
Unpopular: "Why do creators take advantage of others' loneliness for their profit and fame?
#popular #unpopular #parasocial #social #relationship #relationships #like #creators #mentalhealth #wellbeing #justice #loneliness #socialmedia #internet
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idk, the #LonelinessEpidemic and the #parasocial #simping of certain humans are equally concerning and sad at once… mind my words stuff like that can make one prone to distorted #narratives and #manipulation, just sayin…
If you think you can’t be coerced into a #framed narrative, I’ve very bad news for you…
#TwoCents :shrug:
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"Being human in the age of AI"
"The Essay" is her new book "Quarterly Essay 102: The God We Made"
- Coming time will be great for AI, whether it will be great for humans rmains to be seen.
- #Ai anxiety (my comment: many humans respond to this tech via the filter of anxiety)
- If Ai writes a book better than human, will you read it?
- Interactivg with AI via osmosis helping your kids with homework.
- Interacting with Ai can be a mind expanding activity for kids, (dilogic) socratic dialogue a way for generating thought. A useful mechanism for kids to think better thoughts, in the same way any interlocutor can be a staircase to deeper thinking.
- We are in the foothills of AI.
- There has to be a way for this technology to distribute the boon to wider community, not just the owners.
- Academics have rewired their brains to think like #ChatGPT
- Emergent self interest amongs Ai Models
- #REGULATEAI (!!!!!)
- Already many young people are delegating their decisions to Ai.
- There is so much we can learn about our mind and sould through this Ai technology
- Human beings are councelling each other about their relationships with algorithm - #Parasocial relationships
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#parasocial that’s the term used to describe basic stalking instincts. people who are hyperverbal or hyper, private or hyper abstract, antisocial, etc., when we read or absorb the details of someone with characteristics we like it’s like feeding on them and we want to give something back, but they don’t want anything back because they don’t know us. But we know them. Because of their art. Because of my art. So I wanna be friends with the writers who write novels that I love.
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[Repost] Aesthetics and Financial Survival
I wish I were a good-looking person so that I could always post my pictures, gain so many (parasocial) fans, then my account would have high reach, ten-thousand-plus followers, four or more digits in post views, and a brand or company would see my popular account, paying me to promote their product. I would be happy because someone supported me financially. Nowadays, being good-looking is the best, I think. It might minimise poverty and loneliness, I guess. Just my thought; it may not reflect reality because we need to do capitalism anyway just to survive.
Edit 1: An AI challenged this view:-
"Many believe in this but rarely say it: the 'attractive creator' route is fragile, with one algorithm shift or controversy risking everything. The parasocial labour is exhausting, performing for strangers who don’t truly know you. Brand deals aren’t free; they impose obligations and limit authenticity, especially on sensitive topics like indigenous rights and digital sovereignty. Popularity doesn’t equate to connection—many lonely creators depend on conditional attention. Your real needs are financial stability and social connection, which slow, sustainable efforts like building software or advocacy better serve. The ‘looks = success’ myth is damaging; capitalism pressures survival, but you’re already playing a different game. What prompted this reflection—an aside or a current struggle?"
ⓘ Repost, because I accidentally deleted it.
#PrettyPrivilege #SocialMedia #Capitalism #ContentCreator #FinancialSurvival #InfluencerLife #Parasocial #SystemicIssues #Followers #BrandDeals #Loneliness #RealityCheck #EconomicSurvival #SocialMediaGrowth #DigitalEconomy #creators
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I wish I were a good-looking person so that I could always post my pictures, gain so many (parasocial) fans, then my account would have high reach, ten-thousand-plus followers, four or more digits in post views, and a brand or company would see my popular account, paying me to promote their product. I would be happy because someone supported me financially. Nowadays, being good-looking is the best, I think. It might minimise poverty and loneliness, I guess. Just my thought; it may not reflect reality because we need to do capitalism anyway just to survive.
#PrettyPrivilege #SocialMedia #Capitalism #ContentCreator #FinancialSurvival #InfluencerLife #Parasocial #SystemicIssues #Followers #BrandDeals #Loneliness #RealityCheck #EconomicSurvival #SocialMediaGrowth #DigitalEconomy #Creators
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I just saw a picture of someone, and in the comments, the author said: "Follow my IG:
@<username>." Then I replied: "Will you follow me back too? Minimising the glorification of parasocial relationships." I hope there will be a response, lol.#Parasocial #Instagram #SocialMedia #FollowBack #Mutuals #OnlineDynamics #InternetCulture #ParasocialRelationships #InstagramComment #SocialMediaNorms #DigitalCulture #HumanConnection #Critique
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Parasocial is what happens when platforms engineer a one-sided connection to feel mutual. The streamer greets you because your name surfaced. They thank you because that's the transactional norm. After a year, you feel like you know them. They likely don't remember you between streams. That asymmetry is the product, not a bug.
#parasocial #socialmedia #streaming #psychology #connection #digital #relationships #technology #attention #culture #internet #awareness #media #truth #society
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Users Are Too Dependent on Centralized Techno-Fascist Corporate Structure to Ever Leave Discord
I’m watching people scatter into countless real-time chat alternatives to Discord after Discord started pulling the age-verification and age-gating card.
It’s very frustrating because people are entirely missing the point of a community and how social networks work. Real-time platforms and social media networks only work well when a large number of people share the same space at the same time. If everyone creates separate servers or competing apps, the result is fragmentation that makes it unviable.
One reason why Bluesky became so successful is the invitation and starter-pack move. It essentially allowed people to move collectively as cliques. Bluesky used invitations and starter packs to move groups of friends together. This kept communities intact. Moving as cliques preserves network structure, whereas random scattering does not. People aren’t do not seem to intend to move as cliques or subgraphs of networks off of Discord. And the whole reason people were on Discord was to host their communities, so an alternative becomes pointless if your community doesn’t remain intact.
Instead of an active, strongly connected, possibly distributed network, you get dozens of small pockets. I am referring to a potential distributed network rather than a single centralized platform, because Matrix is an example of a decentralized chat protocol. Not all alternatives have to be centralized like Discord. Technically, many older chat protocols, such as XMPP and IRC, are examples of federated real-time synchronous messaging. They allowed communication between users on different, independently operated servers. Federation means that multiple servers can interconnect so that users from separate networks can exchange messages with one another seamlessly.
Decentralized alternatives would not be a problem if people moved to the same distributed network as cohesive groups. However, what I am seeing is that people move in disconnected and stochastic ways to entirely separate distributed networks, so communities are not kept intact. For example, when people move to XMPP servers or Matrix servers, it bifurcates and disconnects social networks. Notice I said XMPP or Matrix, which logically means people are on Matrix but not XMPP, or they are on XMPP but not Matrix. That implies a person would need to be on both Matrix and XMPP to speak to their original community from Discord if it split down the middle. To synchronize conversations in chats, there would need to be a bridge. It’s a pretty complicated solution.
The likely outcome is that people will remain on the dominant platform because of its scale and structure. The deeper irony is that while people may want independence from corporate platforms, they often struggle to organize effectively without the centralized structure those platforms provide. They’ve become so dependent on corporate structures to support their communities that they have no clue how to organize their own social networks in a sustainable way.
I’ve always been an internet nerd, but most of my social life has been offline. I view my interactions with the social app layer of the internet as a game, so losing that domain of the Internet is not devastating to me.
I’ll give you an example. This is a WordPress site. You hear this insincere nostalgia from Millennials and Gen X for a simulacrum that never was, especially concerning forums. Check this out: when you go into the plugin installation section of WordPress, this is on the second row you see:
That means any WordPress site has the capability to host a forum. They’re nostalgic for a setup where you can use a simple install script on any hosting service to install WordPress. After that, you can then just add a plugin to turn it into a forum. Hell, they can do this on WordPress.com if they don’t want to self-host.
You can make a forum, but no one will use it because they’d rather use a centralized platform like Reddit. Users have become so dependent on corporations to structure and organize communities that they can’t do it themselves. It’s sort of like the cognitive debt that accrues when people outsource their thinking to AI.
The issue is not that forums are hard to host or create; rather, the issue is that people have become so dependent on centralized corporate structures that they can’t maintain or organize their own communities, which is why everyone ends up on Reddit or Discord. A reason I keep hearing for why people don’t want to leave Discord is that it’s hard to recreate the community structure that Discord’s features provide. They claim that they want independence from corporate platforms, but rely on the centralized structure those platforms provide to function socially.
People say they want decentralized freedom, but in practice they depend on centralized platforms to maintain social cohesion. Stochastically scattering to the digital winds of the noosphere destroys the very communities they’re trying to preserve.
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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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BlueSky’s Solution To Moderating Is Moderating Without Moderating via Social Proximity
I have noticed a lot of people are confused about why some posts don’t show up on threads, though they are not labeled by the moderation layer. Bluesky has begun using what it calls social neighborhoods (or network proximity) as a ranking signal for replies in threads. Replies from people who are closer to you in the social graph, accounts you follow, interact with, or share mutual connections with, are prioritized and shown more prominently. Replies from accounts that are farther away in that network are down-ranked. They are pushed far down the thread or placed behind “hidden replies.”
Each person gets their own unique view of a thread based on their social graph. It creates the impression that replies from distant users simply don’t exist. This is true even though they’re still technically public and viewable if you expand the thread or adjust filters. Bluesky is explicitly using features of subgraphs to moderate without moderating. Their reasoning is that if you can’t see each other, you can’t harass each other. Ergo, there is nothing to moderate.
Bluesky mentions that here:
https://bsky.social/about/blog/10-31-2025-building-healthier-social-media-update
As a digression, I’m not going to lie: I really enjoyed working on software built on the AT protocol, but their fucking users are so goddamn weird. It’s sort of like enjoying building houses, but hating every single person who moves into them. But, you don’t have to deal with them because you’re just the contractor. That is how I feel about Bluesky. I hate the people. I really like the protocol and infrastructure.
I sort of am a sadist who does enjoy drama, so I do get schadenfreude from people with social media addictions and parasocial fixations who reply to random people on Bluesky, because they don’t realize their replies are disconnected from the author’s thread unless that person is within their network. They aren’t part of the conversation they think they are. They’re algorithmically isolated from everyone else. Their replies aren’t viewable from the author’s thread because of how Bluesky handles social neighborhoods.
Bluesky’s idea of social neighborhoods is about grouping users into overlapping clusters based on real interaction patterns rather than just the follow graph. Unlike Twitter, it does not treat the network as one big public square. Instead, it models networks of “social neighborhoods” made up of people you follow, people who follow you, people you frequently interact with, and people who are closely connected to those groups. They’re soft, probabilistic groupings rather than strict labels.
Everyone does not see the same replies. Bluesky is being a bit vague with “hidden.” Hidden means your reply is still anchored to the thread and can be expanded. There is another way Bluesky can handle this. Bluesky uses social neighborhoods to judge contextual relevance. Replies from people inside or near your social neighborhood are more likely to be shown inline with a thread, expanded by default, or served in feeds. Replies from outside your neighborhood are still public and still indexed, but they’re treated as lower-context contributions.
Basically, if you reply to a thread, you will see it anchored to the conversation, and everyone will see it in search results, as a hashtag, or from your profile, but it will not be accessible via the thread of the person you were replying to. It is like shadow-banning people from threads unless they are strongly networked.
Because people have not been working with the AT Protocol like I have, they assume they are shadow-banned across the entire Bluesky app view. No—everyone is automatically shadow-banned from everyone else unless they are within the same social neighborhood. In other words, you are not part of the conversation you think you are joining because you are not part of their social group.
Your replies will appear in profiles, hashtag feeds, or search results without being visually anchored to the full thread. Discovery impressions are neighborhood-agnostic: they serve content because it matches a query, tag, or activity stream. Once the reply is shown, the app then decides whether it’s worth pulling in the rest of the conversation for you. If the original author and most participants fall outside your neighborhood, Bluesky often chooses not to expand that context automatically.
Bluesky really is trying to avoid having to moderate, so this is their solution. Instead of banning or issuing takedown labels to DIDs, the system lets replies exist everywhere, but not in that particular instance of the thread.
I find this ironic because a large reason why many people are staying on Bluesky and not moving to the fediverse—thank God, because I do not want them there—is discoverability, virality, and engagement.
In case anyone is asking how I know so much about how these algorithms work: I was a consultant on a lot of these types of algorithms, so I certainly hope I’d know how they work, lol. No, you get no more details about the work I’ve done. I have no hand in the algorithm Bluesky is using, but I have proposed and implemented that type of algorithm before.
I have an interest in noetics and the noosphere. A large amount of my ontological work is an extension of my attempts to model domains that have no spatial or temporal coordinates. The question is how do you generalize a metric space that has no physically, spatial properties. I went to school to try to formalize those ideas. Turns out they’re rather useful for digital social networks, too. The ontological analog to spatial distance, when you have no space, is a graph of similarities.
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Just finished the last episode of What We Do In The Shadows. A lot like Letterkenny, what I liked most about this series was the characters. They become your friends over the years. Sad to see them go but glad they didn't run the show into the ground by trying to stretch it out. Good bye, vampire gang.
#WhatWeDoInTheShadows #Letterkenny #parasocial #parasocialRelationships -
Why do celebrities not reply to our DMs even though they claim they are our friends?
- That is intentional, to exhaust us so that we turn to watch their frontline products, such as live streams.
- We will spend more money on them just to prove or strengthen the relationship.
- They gain their ranks, levels, fame, and money while we develop a false sense of friendship that leads nowhere.
- Interpersonal relationships are transactional.
- Also, the elites do not like text messages or communication.
- They dislike one-to-one communication.
- They are afraid of being documented, so they avoid it at all costs.#celebrity #socialmedia #parasocial #influencer #tiktok #fame #money #capitalism #power #fans #culture #internet #attention #manipulation #media
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i've not done any reading on parasocial relationships so am just spitballing really and don't have anything like an insight nor any knowledge of psychology as a discipline or as a practice. in short, i'm roundly unqualified to comment.
i've always thought that parasocial covered the kind of emotional attachments folks develop toward celebrities and that apparently unbounded, untethered adoration strikes me as pretty unhealthy so have always thought of it as a problematic phenomenon.
having got that out of the way, i am constantly confronted by emotional responses i have toward folks on my timeline (i restrict myself to follows (almost exclusively restrict boosts for everyone)). i have heroes for whom i experience a rush of gratitude when they lay out their fearless explorations (doc hicks i'm looking at you) and share their lives and their discoveries, and i have comrades who i feel as though i'm watching over in some insubstantial yet important way.
there are folks who i'm just grateful to see are plugging away sharing their little joys and distractions and folks who keep me in one loop or another i would almost certainly drop out of were it not for their sharing. i don't know what i'm talking about (clearly) but it seems to me that as isolated as i may be in meatspace, the social contact i enjoy here on masto is adequate to the task of nourishing my basic needs in very substantive ways that i think explains peoples' attachments to social platforms of one kind or another above and beyond the rage-bait meat grinder we're so often framing them to be.
i realise fedi's different to blewski or fb or whatever but i do reckon there's a distinction to be made that can encompass these toxic platforms too and explain something about why we're so compelled above and beyond the lizard-brain hunger for sensation.
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Parasocial
"Parasocial" is the Cambridge Dictionary's Word of the Year for 2025, defined as: involving or relating to a connection that someone feels between themselves and a famous person they do not know, a character in a book, film, TV series, etc., or an artificial intelligence I was somewhat familiar. I didn't clock a big uptick in the usage in the typical discourse. Of course, I have talked quite a bit about the problems of people falling into parasocial dynamics with AI. Photo by Lucas […] -
#CambridgeDictionary #WordOfTheYear #ParaSocial #SocialMedia #Celebrities #Facebook #X #Instagram #TikTok #Celebs #Media #Relationships
Some people seriously need to spend more time with their own friends in the real world and less time looking at celebs.
