Something I think about a lot is how the "hipster" movement in the early 2000s was extremely anti- consumer culture. They were building easy to repair "fixie" bikes instead of driving cars, they were brewing their own beer and buying/mending clothes they bought second hand. They were moving to abandoned factory loft apartments in similarly abandoned urban areas.

Then, the artists living in lofts, making zines and and knitting sweaters got priced out. And now in pop culture the term "hipster" has largely replaced "yuppie" to mean an elitist, snobby, and extremely pro consumer culture sort of person, which is basically the opposite of what the young people in the early 2000s were doing. I'm not a conspiracy theorist but I have to imagine that the big corps saw the movement as a threat, and did an classic rebrand on them, like car companies did with the minivan to sell more SUVs.

My first reaction was that this excerpt reminds me of a piece I wrote two years ago called "The Airbnb-ification of the arts", about how artists looking to make a career out of art are forced to cater to an algorithm that favors comfortable predictability over depth or uniqueness. My essay was heavily inspired by Kyle Chayka's famous 2016 essay "Welcome to Airspace".

Jokes on me for not reading the byline because it turns out Kyle wrote the book this excerpt is from! lol good for him. Looking forward to reading it.

I'm curious to know if he has a presence on Mastodon or any other Social Web apps, he's a really great writer I'd like to follow.

Wow, I've never heard music with such a stunning lack of soul before! 10/10 I bought every album.

It's literally in the article lol

Yeah. People should have a right to speak their mind, but on the Fediverse nobody is forced to listen and therein lies the difference, IMO.

The success metric is a vibrant, happy community, not MAUs or engagement numbers, so they make decisions accordingly.

YES well said. An instance is measured by it's quality, not it's profitability.

Any civility rule that is enforced with greater priority than (or in the absence of) a “no bigotry” rule serves only to protect bigots from decent people.

There's a saying I think about a lot that goes "The problem with rules is that good people don't need 'em, and bad people will find a way around 'em".

The best thing about human volunteer mods vs automated tools or paid "trust and safety" teams, IMO, is that volunteer humans can better identify when someone is participating in the spirit of a community, because the mods themselves are usually members of the community too.

If a Fediverse instance grew so big that it couldn't moderate itself and had a lot of spam/Nazis, presumably other instances would just defederate, yeah? Unless an instance is ad-supported, what's the incentive to grow beyond one's ability to stay under control?

No, it does. Sign up is extremely straightforward now. All things involving federation are essentially optional on the official app.

In this "idiot-proof" guide I recommend the app because it smooths over anything to do with Federation which is where people get confused. Choosing an instance and following people in the app is as easy as any other app.

Yep. "Slowly, then all at once".

Personally, I think once the journalists and news orgs (finally) get on board, that will inspire government agencies to make the change, and that will be the true tipping point away from 𝕏.