Is the Future Federated?

Your phone can ding, and you’ll be latched onto it a split second. Before you know it, you’re stuck in a blue light void. Once we snap out of it, we wonder where all our time went but that doesn’t stop us from doing it again in an hour. Many of us are so use to this reality, we expect and accept it. Have we already given up?

In my last blog Attention Tension, I explored the concept of our attention being monetized. Here, I am going to talk more about the rights that consumers should have and introduce potential solutions. As consumers, we have virtually no control over the content we are see. The consumers should have more say in what they’re consuming. Yeah, we follow people and like things, but we only see about a small portion of that. The content we consume is based off the information algorithms analyze to be in our interests. Big tech companies analyze what we are interested in and just give us more of the same thing to ensure that we are engaging with the content.

Remember when we were surprised and honestly a little creeped out when things you’d talk about with your friends would show up in Ads. Now, it’s just a part of the game, it hardly phases us. Come to find out, we “accepted” these conditions in that 15-page legal mumble jumble Terms and Conditions by clicking the box. But did we really have a choice? The Terms and Conditions system is very black and white. It’s either, you click the box to gain access to the app or you don’t click the box and you don’t get access to the app. There are no alternatives. And we don’t even have the choice to red line a digital Terms and Condition.

Designer's Oath

Rather than subscribing to these frustrating Terms and Conditions, consumers should have more control over their attention and privacy. In Stand Out of Our Light, James William’s proposes the idea of social media designers pledging to a “Designer’s Oath”. William’s “Designers Oath” would look something like this:

As someone who shapes the lives of others, I promise to:

·       Care genuinely about their success;

·       Understand their intentions, goals, and values as completely as possible;

·       Align my projects and actions with their intentions, goals, and values;

·       Respect their dignity, attention, and freedom, and never use their own weaknesses against them;

·       Measure the full effect of my projects on their lives, and not just those effects that are important to me;

·       Communicate clearly, honestly, and frequently my intentions and methods; and

·       Promote their ability to direct their own lives by encouraging reflection on their own values, goals, and intentions.

Essentially, this would protect user’s privacy and attention. It would encourage a transparent relationship between the users and the developers. These boundaries are quite simple. Doesn’t it make you question why these rights aren’t being protected already?

This got me thinking… all social media can’t be like this? Someone must have come up with an alternative.  So, I started to dig.

Mastodon

It’s like Twitter but with more freedom. Rather than one overarching, large corporation servers controlling the curation and spreadablity of content, this power is handed over to the consumers. Cool, right?

Mastadon is an open soured network or federated network. This means that there is no one entity controlling the content. You can think of it like we do emails. Users can connect with people inside and outside of their instance. If you use Google, you can still email a friend that uses Yahoo. Imagine Google and Yahoo were privately operated by ordinary people. We can think of them as site admins. Now, imagine they didn’t push Ads or analyze your media traces to come up with a formula that psychologically kept you online for hours. That’s Mastodon.

The developer of Mastadon, Eugen Rochko writes “It means that users are spread throughout different, independent communities, yet remain unified in their ability to interact with each other.” 

Mastadon is made up of several separate servers called “instances”. Users can sign up to create their own instance with their own rules. Each instance is owned, operated and moderated by the community. Users can be private or public. Instead of ‘tweet’, you ‘toot’ up to 500 characters. They also offer anti abuse tools to help users moderate bullies. When you toot, you have the options to make a content warning. There are no manipulative algorithms. The feed is listed in a chronological order. If a toot is worthy, your friends can ‘boost’ it to get more views.

It’s nice to know that alternatives social media platforms exist. However, I am afraid we are too far deep into our non-federated social media platforms that many could care less to switch over to a platform like Mastadon. While all these features sound great, I don’t think people have enough incentives to switch over. Many people have built an online identity on their regular platforms. It would just be more work to start over. The easy route is to simply flip the cognitive miser switch on and turn a blind eye to problems that exist in traditional social media platforms.

Maybe federated social media networks are the future of social media or maybe they’ll only exist in the shadows of corporate entities. Maybe we’ll switch to a federated sourced network or implement a “Designers Oath”. Whichever the future may hold, I hope it is something that gives more power to the people.