Is this the future of social media? It certainly is better than Silicon Valley/commercial-surveillance disinformation platforms by orders of magnitude, yes...
...but personally, I have a different view.
I recommend reading the "Public Service Internet" manifesto. It was a privilege to read it. This is one of my greater research interests as well.
Tl;dr: an internet infrastructure of the people, by the people, and for the people — including democratic governance, user representation (suffrage), and citizen co-ownership of resources. NOT government-owned.
Of course there are some bits I disagree with too.
One could argue Mastodon/Fediverse is like that... but not truly (I like the place though). Here's why →
Above all, they should not be imitations of commercial media platforms.
The reason why things like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Vine, TikTok, and others succeeded (initially) was because they were unique at the time (well, Vine and TikTok are the same, FB and MySpace, MSN and Skype, etc., but you get me).
Pixelfed, PeerTube, Mastodon — these are all just their commercial media peers, except decentralised, distributed, and surveillance free (varies instance to instance).
I’ve been here for a while now. Don’t lose heart, though, if you’ve found your place in the Fediverse:
There are two ways you can take this.
That means this whole thing was a waste of time and amounted to nothing!
All our time spent here + time we will spend here can lay technological/social foundations for what can become a “public service internet” — initiatives like ActivityPub and the Fediverse are things we can build on.
I prefer the latter.
My time here is temporary — but I won’t move “back” to SV media like threads, new commercial media, or stuff like Bluesky.
I’ll wait until public service internet is a thing. Remember, this is a social element that requires social efforts/ideas rather than technological ones. We can’t tech our way out of social problems.
Interoperability. The ability of such a platform to talk to other platforms as well as an opt-out function. To eliminate switching costs so that users will never be trapped on a platform or by code again.
@pluralistic explains this in better words than I do in his book, The Internet Con (also a recommended read).
Like a lot of people, I discovered this novel after the scandal at the Frankfurt Bookfair this year, but it's so good that it's a shame to reduce its appeal to "read this to piss off racist Germans"
The prose is incandescent, and the novel's structure, divided into two parts where the second functions as a commentary on the first, is very much my jam. It's so good on a literary level that it can't simply be reduced to mere protest literature, but also depoliticizing it from its condition as a tale of the Nakba and its status as an open wound and a continuing process would be equally unjust, but so it goes with the art made by oppressed peoples
It's very short and can be read in a day or two, although sometimes its intensity makes it hard to read too much of it at once. The only weakness I'd say is the ending, which I feel resolves it too neatly, but can't really say much there without providing spoilers
@abolitionbb@bookstodon yeah, I think in particular the officer's obsession with the insects in his tent versus his just utter lack of interest in the fate of the Palestinian woman was just devastating
@julieofthespirits@bookstodon yea, that definitely struck a nerve. Same with the smell being a primary concern. Basically anything other that the person in front of him. It was devastating all around
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️/5 Stuart Turton has another winner on his hands! Turton did such a fantastic job of blending both mystery and sci-fi in this exciting new suspenseful mystery that will have you engrossed from beginning to end.
Like his others, it's a book I can't stop thinking about, and after you read it, you won't either.
You will have to wait a while for this book because it comes out in May 2024 but trust me, it's worth the wait!
@tabbyjones@bookstodon that sounds great, I'm going to add this to my list! FYI I can't read your post on my phone, the font is too small and very light. I'll read it later on my laptop.
It is a rare bravery to face the factors of our lives that have fallen down, fallen short, and fallen apart. It's being present with unflinching resolve. It's grieving without giving up or giving in. That's what gives us a chance. A chance to be new and renewed. A chance to be deeper and different. A chance to begin and, more importantly, to begin again.
@bookstodon I thought this was a good idea: mystery gift bags of books with proceeds going to the library. I'm thinking of buying one just to see how many books each bag includes.
Hey. It's ok if you're behind on your yearly reading goal. That number was arbitrarily chosen in a January fog of optimism & champagne anyway, and you don't need to turn something you love & brings you comfort into a stressor. Read good books. Enjoy them. Be gentle with yourself.
For a book group I've just re-read (for the 4th time?) Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep (1939/1970) (and watched the 1946 film version, one of my favourites). You can see how influential Chandler has been, but this time watching movie & reading the book at the same time, I was struck by the differences in the plotting, with the film somehow a little more satisfying than the book, but the book remains a classic of 'hard-boiled' fiction!
@Likewise@bookstodon
I used to collect Folio Society editions of books cause they were so pretty. Then I filled all my shelves and moved on to easier to store collecting.
This one left me in a state of palpable depression.
Though it's only the end if you don't count Eoin Colfer's authorized continuation, And Another Thing..., which I thought did a decent job capturing the feel of Adams's works (and rectified a few things I thought went wonky toward the end).
@tbweber@bookstodon@bookstadon I will be starting on And Another Thing if only just because this ending is so sad... I remember vaguely (it's been a while) that I had found the book to be not bad, but I did miss Adam's writing. At least reading that book would probably at least make me feel better than I felt while finishing Mostly Harmless. I wish there were more Hitchhiker's books by Douglas Adams.
All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque. You are a teenage German boy who signs up to fight in WWI with your classmates, and you never find anything worth fighting for, just mud and death in the trenches, as any sense of yourself or any recognizable future fades. 4 of 5 library cats 🐈 🐈 🐈 🐈.
Old book find! Was flicking through this one (a collection of writings bij Leibniz, German language, published 1906), when I found that nobody ever bothered to cut open the folia in the back. How cool is that! @philosophy@bookstodon
@philosophy@bookstodon this book just keeps on giving... Found the old response card (bookstores would put these in books so that you could order other books from them through the mail). This one looks very old! Given that the book I found it in was published 1906, there's a good chance this is pre-WW2
I got a 1 star #review on my latest book yesterday. I’m trying to figure out how this happen, purely on a technical aspect. I’ve never sent an ARC to anyone named “Alexander.” Also, this person only has 15 total books read on their #GoodReads profile. The other 14 a different genre, then there’s my book. Best theory I can come up with is this person didn’t want to ruin their pristine account by giving a 1 star so used another account to do the dirty work. #writingcommunity#author@bookstodon
@dickrubin716@bookstodon interesting that it references plot points, which suggests they did in fact read the book.
It does read like they tried really hard to sound like actual critique, but it's also cleary a hit piece. No actual review is this exclusively negative.
@knoawyls@bookstodon
Whoof. I'd tend to think this idea of a paradox of secularism is more a paradox of our language than specific to whatever secularism is, given I've never heard the term till right now.
Like they said in the article, there's an equal paradox about what constitutes a member of any religion, or what a gender is... insofar as who gets to define the identity of a potential member.
There's all the philosophy built up in even defining a religion, but I find that the more encompassing a definition you use, the less meaningful it actually is. Does it help to think of about any group that may have community and rituals as a religion? What about the company I work for? The knitting group? This bookstodon group?
As soon as you define the terms more narrowly, a lot of the paradox disappears I think.
So, to me, the article is a slightly offensive language game that basically tries to say "you can't be non-religious".