Of course the attention economy is threatened by the Fediverse (Why DU wins.)

[usonian]

19 JAN 2023 ~ JON UDELL
https://blog.jonudell.net/2023/01/19/of-course-the-attention-

emphasis mine

When my own audience was at its peak — at BYTE during the dawn of the Internet, then at InfoWorld in the early years of the blogosphere — I could press the Publish button on my blog and watch in realtime as the responses rolled in on waves of dopamine. It’s addictive, there’s never enough, you’re always looking for the next hit.

When Twitter started, that momentum carried forward for a while. I never racked up a huge follower count — it maxed out just shy of 6K — but most of those people followed me early on, thanks to the the ad-supported publications that had brought me to their attention. My Twitter following reached a plateau years ago. Did I wish for 100K followers? Sure, I’d be lying to pretend otherwise. But gradually I came to see that there was a sweet spot, somewhere between (let’s say) 200 and 15,000 followers, where it was possible to enjoy the kinds of pleasant and stimulating interaction that I’d first experienced in web forums and the blogosophere.

Until it wasn’t. Like a frog in slowly boiling water, I failed to notice how the Twitter experience degraded over time. Fewer and fewer of my 6K followers corresponded regularly, and my social graph there became stagnant. For me the Mastodon reboot has been a delightful replay of the early blogosphere: new acquaintances, collegial discussion, positive energy.

If you occupy a privileged position in the attention economy, as Megan McArdle does now, and as I once did in a more limited way, then no, you won’t see Mastodon as a viable replacement for Twitter. If I were still a quasi-famous columnist I probably wouldn’t either. But I’m no longer employed in the attention economy. I just want to hang out online with people whose words and pictures and ideas intrigue and inspire and delight me, and who might feel similarly about my words and pictures and ideas. There are thousands of such people in the world, not millions. We want to congregate in different online spaces for different reasons. Now we can and I couldn’t be happier. When people say it can’t work, consider why, and who benefits from it not working.

In short, unless you're a BIG DEAL, isn't it better to be among a few good and sympathetic friends than lots and lots of mostly disinterested friends and a whole lot of very dangerous people?

And the DU admins can't remotely shut down your E.V. .... yet


Strategies for Internet Citizens by Jon Udell is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

[dweller]

1. Bless this Space

🙏 🌎



✌🏻

[Hekate]

2. There's no place like home

(sound of ruby slippers clicking)

[Silent3]

3. A DU-branded electric vehicle!

With a Grovelbot AI interface!

Yes!

[muriel_volestrangler]

4. Bit of a shame he doesn't explain what the "Fediverse" is

Which seems to be a buzzword that's passed me by. He doesn't say how it "threatens" "the attention economy", either - just that he'd rather be using tools like Mastodon with engaged people than Twitter with higher numbers but lower quality.

[blogslug]

5. "Fediverse" means that no one company or person owns the means of communication

It is a federation of individual websites running Open Source software that shares stuff.

[scarletlib]

6. I agree.

DU is the one internet site I must come to everyday. I may not post much but I have been here many years. I get tremendous satisfaction feeling I am a part of a community that is all of the above cited in his article.

I did love Twitter for the short time I was there. Again, not posting much, mostly just reading and following people who seemed to share my ideals. Plus cat and animal pictures.

[brooklynite]

10. The one flaw with depending on DU for social media input....

...is that its content is curated by people who largely agree with you on any pivotal issue. I try to make sure I'm regularly in touch with a number of opinions I disagree with.

[scarletlib]

11. Honestly, I have gotten plenty of that over the years. Media is saturated with the opposing

Viewpoints. For a long time, I felt I was alone in the wilderness.

[Captain Zero]

7. Thank you. But I don't even know what my E.V. is

So, what gives on the E.V. ?

[usonian]

8. Electric Vehicle.

You can have an electric vehicle that's not internet-connected. There were ones before the internet, but since current models are so massively software-driven, you gotta have updates. And so it goes.

I usually wait until an abbreviation is in common use before using it generally.

[brooklynite]

9. " isn't it better to be among a few good and sympathetic friends"

That's what FACEBOOK is for (which people also complain about). TWITTER still has a lot of authoritative voices that are worth following.