Two Incompatible Universes

There were people like me, often above 40, who like sending emails and browsing old-fashioned websites. We think of ActivityPub as a “communication protocol” between humans. As such, anything that implies losing messages without feedback is the worst thing that could happen. Not losing messages is the top priority of a communication protocol.

And then there are people like Dansup, who believe that ActivityPub is a content consumption protocol. It’s there for entertainment. You create as many accounts as the kinds of media you want to consume. Dansup himself is communicating through a Mastodon account, not a Pixelfed one. Many Pixelfed users also have a Mastodon account, and they never questioned that. They actually want multiple accounts for different use cases.

There must be at least three universes, because I’m not a part of either one of those.

I’m well above 40, and have certainly been online longer than Ploum. And I hate email and always have. To me, it’s too invasive - too demanding. An email says “You must take note of me and deal with me in some way.” I don’t like that being done to me and I don’t like doing it to other people.

A forum on the other hand - I get to write out my thoughts however seems best to me, then I just toss them out into the void. If others read them, great. If not, I still got to write them out, which is the part I enjoy most anyway.

My first experience with online forums was usenet, on which old posts are constantly falling off of the board as new ones are added. My first experiences with internet forums were the same. It wasn’t until later - years after I first went online - that I found myself on a forum that didn’t delete older posts. I found that to be intriguing and novel and relatively welcome, but I still dont see it as a necessity.

I’ve always created as many accounts as possible on as many different sites as possible. Entirely contrary to Ploum’s inexplicable assessment, I’ve never seen that as something I was locked into by monopolistic sites, and in fact, always saw it exactly the opposite To me, a single account is an artifact of monopolistic social media (and of the posters who are trying to create a brand). From the very beginning, in my experience, accounts were things I just created under whatever name tickled my fancy at the moment, so that I could post on whatever particular forum had just caught my attention. I might never use that account again, and that’s fine.

So when I went from my one and only account on Reddit to a couple of dozen accounts scattered hither and yon on the Fediverse, I saw that as reclaiming a freedom I had had to give up for monopolistic social media.

And while I certainly do my share of doomscrolling, I also post regularly. So basically, at least in my case, the entire passage:

…who believe that ActivityPub is a content consumption protocol. It’s there for entertainment. You create as many accounts as the kinds of media you want to consume

is wrong, and not just in part, but entirely, from start to finish.

My own interpretation is that social media users don’t mind losing messages because they were raised on algorithmic platforms that did that all the time.

In my own case, I don’t mind losing messages because I was here when messages, pages and even entire sites could fall through any of the myriad cracks in the wilderness of the internet at any moment, and that was just the way it was, so we didn’t let it bother us.

It wasn’t until later, when the summer children and the profiteers who were drawn to them invaded, that structure and permanence and identity and brand became important.

The main problem with reliable communication protocols? It is a mostly solved problem. Build simple websites, read RSS feeds, write emails. (emphasis mine)

Ah… yes.

The mention of RSS does more to ckarify exactly what type of netizen Ploum is than pretty much anything that came before.

I’ve never been the least bit interested in RSS.

To me, it’s something for the sort of people who get in their totally enclosed car in their totally enclosed garage, drive their fixed route to their totally enclosed parking garage, then ride a totally enclosed elevator to their totally enclosed office.

I’d rather get out and walk.