Post B9G3IzKtVahdG3iBma by valpackett@social.treehouse.systems
 (DIR) More posts by valpackett@social.treehouse.systems
 (DIR) Post #B9Dl0sG8tTIybfmYGe by ariadne@social.treehouse.systems
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       anyway, there is a vision to #thicket, which is to create a more human-centric version of social mediawhat do i mean by human-centric?  well, you can probably ascertain that by what i've written over the years, but it basically comes down to building systems that are friendly and forgiving to humanssystems that lift humans up & amplify them when they make cool shitsystems that don't throw humans under the bus in moments of panicsystems that are honest and transparent to humans about what is and is not possible and what that means in basic and direct unambiguous language
       
 (DIR) Post #B9DletnEbuwUwlLVnU by ariadne@social.treehouse.systems
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       importantly: social media is *broken*, and that brokenness has deeply harmed humanity.we have been conditioned to view every single issue as transactional & tribal: you're with us, or you're against us.  reality, of course, does not actually work this way.there are many examples in the current cultural zeitgeist where we can see the effects of this conditioning first-hand.this is because social media rewards content that can produce tight feedback loops: the ding of every interaction gives a dopamine hit.  that's fine if those interactions are actually meaningfully constructive, but usually they aren't.this leads to a cycle of antisocial behavior designed to drive more interactions.
       
 (DIR) Post #B9DmQ2frPOq66LNOcK by ariadne@social.treehouse.systems
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       anyway.  because of this, we have an authenticity gap in social media.when i grew up on the 'net, we were fucking around in IRC.  people on windows were using apps like trillian to talk to each other.people made customized websites & profiles that reflected their own aesthetic.now, everything is homogenized.  when you compare to something like myspace, for example, we've lost so much potential for expression.in a way, one of the reasons i became very interested in pleroma, to the point of contributing heavily to it, was because pleroma brought back the notion of a customizable profile page.so i want to build something that allows people to express themselves, through customizing every facet of the application.  that's the goal, anyway.
       
 (DIR) Post #B9Dmamjn07hvrOKwCm by Rycaut@mastodon.social
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       @ariadne a challenge is how to let and get people to connect over the stuff that isn’t their “main” thing - so much of the web is built assuming that folks share the same jargon, the same focus, that everyone on a given board somewhere is equally invested in that topic as their identity. Which makes many such spaces (and many social networks) hard to engage with when a topic isn’t your everything - just something you might want to try or are curious about or you do but aren’t highly invested
       
 (DIR) Post #B9DmqTUWKGdKnnfyzY by ariadne@social.treehouse.systems
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       sidebar: myspace is actually a kinda bad example here because the functionality that was abused to allow people to theme their myspace pages was a bug in myspace's sanitizer
       
 (DIR) Post #B9DnfG5vtT2w1ROJMG by ariadne@social.treehouse.systems
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       to be clear, i am *not* saying that social media is the root cause of society's problems.  but rather that the antipatterns of social platforms have enabled & amplified streams of emotional sewage.because sewage is cheap, while making cool shit is not.
       
 (DIR) Post #B9DnqRoCgJE9XQQx4i by ariadne@social.treehouse.systems
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       anyway it is basically midnight and i need to catch an amtrak train back to the US in 6 hours which means i need to take a nap
       
 (DIR) Post #B9DoFEvRiZHMoydwFk by ariadne@social.treehouse.systems
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       one last thing, i think cohost got a number of things right, which is why i am drawing heavy inspiration from what they built when thinking about how #thicket should be designed.where cohost failed, IMO, was that it was yet another walled garden.  i think people are tired of walled gardens, even if they don't know why they are tired of them.but when you look at -- bluntly -- how homogeneous the fediverse development scene really is, i can see why it wasn't attractive
       
 (DIR) Post #B9DpNTAClU9hFb2CkC by ariadne@social.treehouse.systems
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       @Elizafox that's my point.  i think the web should be for fun too.
       
 (DIR) Post #B9DpflLlt1D6rrASDA by ariadne@social.treehouse.systems
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       anyway if there is only one thing you want to take away from this thread, the vision behind #thicket is that the web should be *fun* and *interactive*
       
 (DIR) Post #B9DplT64fEzjzgXutM by ariadne@social.treehouse.systems
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       (actually, i think computers should be fun and interactive, and you can see that belief reflected in a lot of the things i've built in alpine too)
       
 (DIR) Post #B9G3IzKtVahdG3iBma by valpackett@social.treehouse.systems
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       @ariadne the worst part is that the sewage contains a lot of highly addictive drugs. well you did mention the loop already… yeah the question of the century is how to make the more human-centric things compelling and interesting enough to more than a niche group of nerds