I’m hoping it will lead to something more like RSS, but that may be wishful thinking.
Their website! Now get off my lawn! :p
I.e. police.gov should just dashboard this for you using location services.
Getting around that requires some heavy and expensive scraping (compared to a lightweight API to hook into), and as we're seeing right now companies are at each other's necks in real time over scraping.
Back to crushing reality, that's also why I'm a huge RSS fan. your feed should be based on websites you want to follow, not what the website's algorithms want you to follow. RSS puts the control back to the user while giving 95% of the convinience of a centralized platform.
Why not exactly RSS? Is it missing something?
Because there isn't a comments section filled with people tossing nuance aside, taking a very shallow, disingenuous interpretation of someone's comment and then going at them in a sort of "gotcha" moment, rather than asking clarifying questions to better understand someone's thoughts first. ;)
If anything, the transparency of a social media post is much better than, say, private emails that can be buried and ignored.
* A police report is a legal document.
* A tweet can be removed by either its poster or by the platform's operator after it's been posted, while only the police can make a report disappear.
* You can tweet at someone anything you want and they don't have to accept it to receive it, while the police can refuse to accept an unfounded report. An insurance company might require a police report be filed before accepting a claim, but it would not accept a tweet as a substitute.
I have seen plenty of toxic comments on "official" announcements that allow comments that the official entity doesn't actually read. I'm happier with no comment than with toxic comments.
Right now RSS is, for the vast majority of the public, a tree falling in a forest with nobody there to hear it.
Views exceed interactions by orders of magnitude.
Otherwise, there’s absolutely utility to interacting over social media. We’re doing it right now!
We're talking about marketing here. Shouldn't it be conversions or awareness or something?
Also, liking it signal that other people were interested in the post. I don't global likes are useful for likes from people you follow are important.
Finally, replies mean can see interaction from people you follow. If you follow interesting people, you see interesting discussion.
With social media, it isn't possible to read everything, I know I used to try to read my whole Twitter feed. There needs to be some way to filter than just time when you looked. I think the current algorithmic feed is bad because it tries to show other stuff instead of ordering things that want to see.
If you want likes, or views, or reposts, then you will have to "engineer" your post in such a way that it gets more attention. Not sure if that's always beneficial.
The problem is with Twitter and others is that they now have algorithmic feed. That means posts get seen globally and clout metrics are valuable for reach. Comments also get clout so get lots of drive-by ones and less discussion.
If someone has an RSS reader with feeds from some news sources, official channels issuing announcements, etc - that's great, but does anyone consider that "social media"?
(Of course, you can believe that social media is bad and you don't want it, but that's a different question)
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It's goal is not to be "the" hub. It is a middleman that takes you to other websites that implement it. Be it twitter (on shakey ground), Your own website, or a game server (in theory). Anything that implements it and sends out messages can be caught by any number of clients made on top of RSS.
Asking for interactivity from an RSS Feed is like asking for interactivity from an email. The goal is to point you towards other content that may or may not be interactable. The RSS is simply there to consolidate all your feeds into one view.
Regular users don't care if the service is decentralized or distributed. And they don't want the experience of dozens of personal blogs they navigate through by RSS, and needing an account on each one.
And I explained why that response is a bit nonsensical. Rss doesn't take interactivity away from you. It delegates it to Wherre ever you choose to visit.
>they don't want the experience of dozens of personal blogs they navigate through by RSS, and needing an account on each one.
1. Thars overly presumptuous. Social media didn't give them a real choice.
2. You don't need an account for every blog. Not even for interacting. I guess people forgot that anonymous commenting is indeed a thing. If you really want to like stuff sure. But that's not anything different from today.
>Regular users don't care if the service is decentralized or distributed.
Sure, Bluesky shows they don't have to but the service can still be successful. As the article discussed, part of the ATS stack used Rss.
How's thst different from using something like Feedly? It's juet a different app view.
It does take it away. The current status quo has (1) a feed of content and (2) two-way interaction between poster and commenter in the same place. Switching to just RSS inherently takes away (2)
> Social media didn't give them a real choice.
Social media did give them a choice. RSS and blogging is older than social media and people chose to stop visiting individual blogs in favour of social media.
> I guess people forgot that anonymous commenting is indeed a thing.
People didn't but I doubt most people running blogs want to deal with anonymous comments. You already get so much spam and unhinged content when you require a signup.
> As the article discussed, part of the ATS stack used Rss.
Part of it sure, but it also involved other layers to compensate for the parts that are lacking in RSS that users have come to expect.
Can we say that people choose to get addicted to addictive stuff?
And using other non RSS parts is fine again, RSS isn't a social media. It's a way to help aggregate content. You keep claiming to know how RSS works but demonstrate that you feel it's some competitor instead of a commodity.
And yes, the powers that be "won" becsuse they were at war with the idea of people not having all their time dedicated to their feed. Users "chose". to be manipulated becsuse their choices were taken down, weakened, or taken hostage. Similar to how users "chose" to use the official reddit app when they removed 90% of third party ones.
Both of those have thriving comment sections and would be completely irreverent without them. Further, it's a known problem for both of those sites that people will not read the article and instead riff of the title. I'd wager the final 50% of every article could be removed and it wouldn't significantly change the comment sections here.
> Similar to how users "chose" to use the official reddit app when they removed 90% of third party ones.
Yes they did, they chose to use those apps and chose to continue using Reddit in general despite its shitty behaviour. The alternatives just aren't good enough.
Yes. And you can use RSS feed to do the same thing, either liking to a reddit comment section or actually reading the article and not bothering. Same structure except you're not limited to Reddit's servers.
>they chose to use those apps and chose to continue using Reddit in general despite its shitty behaviour
They lost choice and decided using the worst choice was better than moving off of Reddit. I guess if enshiftification is "choice", They did indeed choose. I chose to walk away.
And it's why I hate centralizafion. Because it reduces you down to two choices per owner. Their way or the highway. If you instead managed an RSS feed of a dozen websites and Reddit removed its API, your daily feed may be smaller but your browsing habits would not change. I can still interact with the other 11 sites as much as I want and not need extra time trying to figure out what's out there.
My point is that (a) many people have not despite the cess pit Reddit and other sites have become, and (b) RSS is inherently incapable of replacing the experience because it’s a pull only mechanism.
Mastadon based itself on ActivityPub, not RSS.
We’ll see if the long term forces that consolidated and entities Twitter and it’s ilk will do the same to Mastadon instances. Cause I’m still not convinced that the general public is willing to or ready to run their own servers
The users. You can put your news on RSS and approximately nobody will read them. Or you can put them on twitter and it will reach people.
This is true even now when the management of the bird app is seemingly hellbent on destroying the site. It was even more true when the decision was made.
I guess we can hope (or work) on an RSS based future, but the key thing to achieve is users, and then the rest will follow.
Issue is that the bird app doesn't want this middleman between them. They want all the users' attention.
Picking a reader means making one or more choices (for your phone, laptop, tablet whatever), adding a feed is several steps, and it is easy to get overloaded with too many boring items (and too few interesting ones) because curation is left to the end user.
Centralized social networks require no choosing of readers, let you add an info source in one click, and ensure you have neither too few nor too many interesting items -- for some value of "interesting" -- regardless of how many entities you follow.
I love RSS and decentralization but creating a smooth, user friendly experience with such tools is a major unsolved challenge.
But after that, it is at worst pasting a link into your client, or clicking a button if the site gives proper attention to it. Not that much more friction than following someone on any centralized platform.
Already, we talking about some other service that accumulates the history and provides search, history, etc. That and many other things (likes, replies, quotes, etc) are all things users expect (rightfully, IMHO).
While orgs/people simply issuing announcements should ideally provide an RSS feed, that type of content is a tiny part of "social media".
If Bluesky did ActivityPub, that will federate Mastodon, Threads, and Bluesky. There are tools for posting to old social media, we will probably see tools for the new ones. Should be easier since protocols are more open.
I would have assumed this one. What's the downside?