Autonomy, Agency, and social apps

i was recently listening to Rich Bartlett's Microsolidarity "podcast" and a conversation with Silvia Bastos where he asserts that "Twitter is a dating app for making friends".

Twitter is for making friends

It got me thinking yet again about the various differing ideas about what "social media" *is*. I saw last week someone opining about the way "Web3" spruikers have mischaracterised what "Web 2.0" was. And I think it's correct to say "was", as the author of that Mastodon post did, because whilst "Web 2.0" was just as much a marketing terms as "Web3" is, it also describes a moment that has long passed into something altogether different. The general gist was that Web3 shills want to re-write the history of the Web such that we moved directly from a situation similar to the Gemini world at the moment – lots of static sites published individually – to the current situation of, as they say, "Three website containing screenshots of the other two". This skips over the whole "Web 2.0" era, which in rhetoric at least referred to newly *interactive* web experiences.

So it was kind of interesting to then read the latest email from Real Life Magazine, which happens to describe how Big Social Media has gradually up-ended the entire premise of Web 2.0 to turn it back into Web 1.0, or perhaps even further back to a world before the Web.

> the goal is to make sure you think of yourself primarily as an audience for professionally made content when you open the app.

Busy signals

Thinking these things through has helped clarify for me the conundrum that Web3 crypto-bros simultaneously have embraced ActivityPub and claimed a stake for it as part of a crypto-friendly distributed internet ("D-Web"), whilst also embracing Twitter for everything from pump-and-dump schemes, general propaganda, and even purchasing the entire thing in the case of Elon Musk.

The problem is not so much that crypto bros don't understand what ActivityPub and it's flagship app Mastodon are all about, but rather that I didn't understand how their motivations align with it. Naturally, Darius Kazemi has already had useful things to say in this domain. Unfortunately I can't find a link now but I heard him on a podcast I don't subscribe to about 6 months ago talking about how "decentralisation" means many things to many people. Much like "freedom", we're using a single word for several different concepts. No wonder there's confusion, even without people needing to deliberately cause it.

Crypto people talk about "decentralisation" and generally - if we're generous - mean they want *autonomy*. But the people fleeing Twitter because it's the hellsite, often seek something related but different. We want *agency*. In the sense I mean, autonomy can be thought of in terms of Anatole France's oft-quoted line that the law allows both rich and poor the freedom to sleep under bridges. Of course, in many places the law doesn't even allow that, which probably just reinforces why so many embraced crypto as a possible escape hatch. What I'm geting at here though, is that one can't actually have agency if one is merely autonomous.

Real agency is a product of sociality. We are social animals. One cannot reach one's full potential in splendid isolation. Those who flee corporate social media and its relentless drive to turn us into mere consumers want the agency to *interact*. They want their social media to be *social*, not merely public – to be something "for making friends".

The web3 crowd on the other hand want to be relieved of the burden of society and other people. They want to be autonomous. This explains the obsession with encrypted messaging – their worldview is that one should trust nobody, and that trustless social interactions are actually a good thing. I don't care much about whether my DMs are encrypted because I would prefer to trust the sysadmins.

Many of my closest friends I met on Twitter, so it's true that Twitter has been an app for making friends for me in the past. But I think it's changed a lot, and I just can't stand to use it any more. Twitter wants to be "the world's town square", a total nonsense of a concept, but also deeply antithetical to making and nurturing close communities and friendships. I know that what Rich really means is Twitter is for *finding potential friends and then developing a friendship via other communication channels including meeting in physical space*, but I guess that's not as pithy.

On sites like TikTok and Twitter we perform, encouraged to be "interesting". But Real Life's editor is suggesting that already this is becoming an old model. Soon we will no longer even be encouraged to perform, but merely to consume. This is a profoundly depressing thought, and most people instinctively recoil from it, even if our lizard brains still crave the dopamine hit of the next video meme, like a poker machine.

I thought about this over the weekend as I felt the urge to share what I'd been doing. Not becuase I thought it would make me look interesting, but simply because I wanted to share my joy in small pleasures. When the focus is on building community and sharing our lives, we post more banal things. We share things not to seem interesting but because we are excited to share our lives with others. I celebrate when Mastodon connections toot about cooking a really great pie, or taking their kid to a soccer game, or going on a bushwalk.

It's like the reverse image of an Instagram "influencer", who spends hours creating fake experiences to share with people to vicariously experience (and also buy the earings, or shampoo, or whatever).

Mastodon, then, is perhaps for *supporting* friends. I want to build and support and be part of spaces that foster people's agency, support dignity, and scale appropriately. My social world has nothing in common with hypercapitalist ponzi schemes, and it hopefully never will.