The False Promise of Digital Public Squares Was Always a Scam
joanwestenberg.com
joanwestenberg.com
Maybe email, it's not easy to connect with people. But it's not easy to strike up random conversation in a plaza either. Email + html web, which is privates making data public, but close enough
(Twitter is a failure too, now)
I'm seeing a lot of email surviving right now. Especially plain text emails. Refuses to die, one of the most neutral protocols after IP and DNS
>like a library with steep rules
is entirely correct. That doesn't make it bad, not at all! You're right: There are very few equivalents of a public square, digitally. I consider HN to be one, even more so than email. Email chains get awkward with multiple people, and email addresses are (of necessity, due to spam, like others already said) non-public.
The thing with social media of that type is that it is often filled with foss devs who are a very narrow point demographics.
The chans and reddit have some public properties. I hear the bluesky and mastodon things (the latter especially) have very public infrastructures, not sure about the people, it feels like it will be left leaning democrats on the first hand and FOSS devs on the latter.
No, you cannot. Especially not if the person treating you badly in a public space is either twice your size or has a group of people with them.
Unless we are going to dive into the concealed carry fantasies (which don’t even apply to most countries in the first place), imo that whole line of reasoning about physical vs digital public spaces is a dead-end.
"The more things change, the more they stay the same" -- not Socrates
>The social media billionaires want us to believe their putrid platforms are the “new town squares.” That their half-baked social videos and for-you feeds have replaced the agora... Instead of humans talking and interacting with each other in the open air, we’re corralled like cattle by engagement metrics...
Someone has to pay for IRL town squares: Pay for security to keep the square safe at night, encourage entertainers on the periphery, arrange for someone to clean up litter every day, etc. Digital public spaces are a distant second to those in real life. Paying to use the digital ones with our personal data and original "content" isn't as good a deal as it seemed initially...