Toward Camelot by the service road.

Noodling around friends-of-friends today and seeing within the space of just a few entries two different commentaries about what people want from our fannish social media but aren't getting has got me thinking, because, like these folks, I am dissatisfied with my current social media situation.

No, I'm not sure what to do about it, either.

Preemptively: I am ethically/theoretically more aligned with DW and Ao3 than with most large-corp sites. Not perfectly, as you know from my periodic critiques. I remain committed to the idea that if you're not the customer you're the product, and blah blah free citizen of a small-r republic blah blah you can't take my data from me etc. etc. insert the usual old-school geek rant here.

That said: I spend most of my social media time nowadays at places that don't come anywhere near conforming with my ideals.

Why?

It's been five years and we have no meaningful image hosting capacity at either DW or Ao3. I don't know that we ever will, to be honest, simply because of the scale of the projects. And when you have people trying to communicate about visual media or via visual media, platforms with no visual media integration are going to fall consistently short.

As you know, Bob, I am massively into Homestuck; a not-small fraction of fan commentary about Homestuck happens primarily in visual formats. This is why we don't have much of a Homestuck fan presence here on DW, which makes me sad.

For that matter, when you have me trying in my worklife to communicate about, say, architecture, I'm going to go do that on something like Twitter or FB because I can upload pictures from my phone and caption them and have a conversation with colleagues about what I'm looking at in less time than it would take me to upload pictures and compose a post about them, either here or on something like WordPress (which, yes, I continue to use regularly in worklife; your average self-hosted WP install now has quite good image integration, which is a big change from how things were five or six years ago.)

This is not a minor issue of convenience; this is something that's really changed my web usage habits over the last two-three years. The best camera is the one you have with you, and nowadays almost everyone has little cameras with them. My latest phone has better image-editing software installed on the phone at purchase than my MacBook laptop, which was top-of-the-line in 2007 and is still not too shabby today, had built into it. The phone cost me $49 with a monthly data plan, and the laptop was right around $2K with a monthly cable internet bill.

That's huge. Absolutely huge. It's a sea-change in how we talk to each other. In the last year, the percentage of mobile OSes accessing the work sites I manage is up from about 10% to about 25%, and while it may not keep going up at that rate, it's going to keep going up. I expect that over the next five years we'll get to a point where most of our business is mobile business. Projects which will not or cannot adapt to this new reality...well, I mean, Usenet is still a thing that exists, but it's not a thing most of us engage with daily, now is it?


So: other projects, and why they're not all that satisfying either:

I've spent enough time lurking at Tumblr to think it's all the things I like least about public-performative social media, and my interest in basing my online social life there is nil. I'm not going to rehash the old pro-and-con arguments about it, not least because I suspect it's what we're likely to be stuck with as a communication tool for a while here and sooner or later I'll have to go sign up. Blecch.

(It's like everything I hated about it when we had that comm that aggregated fandom meta stuff over on LJ. I can't even remember it was called but there would suddenly be forty asshole strangers in one's comment section trying to pick fights. Tumblr is, as far as I can tell, like that day in and day out. YUCK. Also the degradation of URLs is terrible over there. Links that are more than a few months old seem to be rotten a lot of the time.)

I have a Twitter account, where due to the character limit I spend nearly as much time avoiding saying things that I think will be misconstrued and get me into arguments as I do having useful conversations (though it's been very good for professional networking). Linkblogging is much easier there.

FB is a great way to learn how damn ignorant various relatives and people I've known since childhood are. The answer is, extremely damn ignorant, and also passive-aggressive; I make good use of that thing where you can unsubscribe to people without de-friending them. It is the most creepy passive-aggressive data-stealing discomfort-inducing profiteering vile social media network in the history of ever, and yet it's apparently where I have to go to see my cousins' baby pictures, which, ugh. At least one can lock down one's stuff there, which makes it more useful for talking about one's children, but again that performative aspect kicks in: writing on FB is like writing a Christmas letter 365 days a year.

Pinterest is fun and very visual but not at all conversational. I use it for work and it's great for that, but it's essentially a curatorial tool, not a social tool.

A Bandcamp page sent me to MySpace last week, and...it side-scrolls, folks. It side-scrolls. I don't even. Maybe there's something great there that I'm missing, but...it side-scrolls.


Once upon a time I dreamed that the solution would involve RSS and distributed networks of people talking to each other using open source tools like WordPress and Drupal, and that someone would write a thing that would handshake between our distributed systems and let us give one another access to private (or less-public) material in a simple and reasonably transparent way.

Sadly, this doesn't seem to be a thing that's going to happen. RSS increasingly sucks balls, and nobody wants us to have fine-grained control over our own data because we're too useful as a content product. Moo. RSS readers are bad and feeds are worse. I get that people want to drive traffic to their own sites rather than permit their content to be aggregated in its entirety, but frankly when all people give their feeds is a single line or a tiny image, I quit subscribing because all that clicking around is annoying. This means I end up at their sites less often than I would otherwise. Lately I am using Twitter instead of RSS aggregation, and that means missing out on a lot of stuff.


What is the solution? I honestly have no idea, and I tend to think that it doesn't make sense to desire or imagine one desirable outcome here.