Susam Pal’s commentary on "attention media" displacing #social-networks, including in the designs of things like #ActivityPub (the #Mastodon protocol). “...when I log into the ruins of those older platforms now, all I see are random videos presented to me for reasons I can neither infer nor care about. Mastodon, by contrast, still feels like social networking in the original sense. I follow a small number of people I genuinely find interesting and I receive their updates and only their updates. What I see is the result of my own choices rather than a system trying to capture and monetise my attention.”
on 02026-03-04“How we lost communication to entertainment” claims #ActivityPub is designed for “consuming content” rather than communication. A thought-provoking distinction.
on 02026-01-06