Social media.

[asher553]

Reminder: I'm also on Gab, MeWe, and Parler.

https://gab.com/asherabrams

https://mewe.com/i/asherabrams

https://parler.com/profile/asherabrams/posts

Comments

[lxe]

I indeed wonder why so few people are moving to Dreamwidth, given its 100% 1A speech policy. Is is that the Twitter/FB kind of UI is so addictive? Comfort zone?

[cellio]

For some reason I can't reply to the comment about DW, so I'll post it at the top level (or try to).

Feeds? Phone apps? Follow/retweet for amplification with a couple taps?

Social media operates on a different pace than DW. I much prefer long-form, thoughtful writing, which DW lends itself to much more than Twitter, but Twitter makes it easy for me to see random bits throughout the day, while I sit down to read DW at times when I can spend time and be thoughtful.

An aspect of DW that I value, and that social media mostly doesn't have, is that I can see everything, in order, intermingled via my reading list. I can read back to when I recognize something and know I've seen everything. It would be impossible to read everything on Twitter even given comparable numbers of people being followed, because the sheer number of utterances is much higher and Twitter is only going to show me a subset. (I gather that Facebook is the same, but I'm on Twitter so that's the one I can compare to. Google+ had the same flaw when it existed. It at least supported longer posts, but because it jumbled them up with tweets, that didn't help and sometimes hurt.)

[asher553]

The previous commenter isn't on my contact list, so the rules for replying may be different for "guest commenters" vs. friends.

I entirely agree about the pace of the newer generation of short-form social media. It's why I am still active on DW (and LJ); this platform is a nice hybrid that combines aspects of social media with old-school, long-form blogging.

The greater volume of posts is certainly the rationale that twitter and facebook give for showing you their algorithm-generated subset of the content; and no doubt there's some merit to that argument. But the process is by nature selective, and where there's selectivity there's the potential for manipulation.

For those of us on the conservative end of the spectrum, the relentless censorship by facebook and twitter created a market for "censorship-free" alternatives such as those in my post. (The social media giants, in addition to overt forms of censorship such as deleting posts or "facebook jail", are also suspected of more subtle practices such as "shadow-banning" in order to minimize objectionable content without being noticed.)

I've tried from time to time to get my social media connections interested in DW / LJ, and even managed to get a friend from the local conservative community to set up an account on LJ; but alas, she never posted to it. I'm afraid most people are just going to gravitate to the short-attention-span model.

[cellio]

Agreed -- I don't want the platform, through either an algorithm or humans, to decide what I should see. I want to see what the people I'm interested in write, period. On those platforms, everyone knows that most stuff won't be seen but hey, we'll post/tweet/etc more, and it'll all work out in the end, right? No, not really. I mean, I'm on Twitter, so obviously I'm following some stuff, and I tweet stuff, but I know that the actual connections that form from extended interactions are much harder there. A lot of it is fleeting and inconsequential.

I like Dreamwidth, and I wish more people were active here.