The Bubble Wrap Conundrum; or, The Balkanization Of Social Media Didn't Solve Social Media
This is probably a very silly thing to write about. When I saw the takes I'm about to describe, I thought it was cartoonish, hardly readable as a real argument that could be made. Yet, I've seen them with my very eyes, I know them to truly be a statement someone said with confidence, with their whole chest. You, dear reader, just have to trust me that it was real.
That trust will be stretched here.
Before I jump into the main focus of this post, I want to make it very clear that I try my best to be reasonable on my blog. This is where I can place my thoughts in a more precise manner than I can on microblogging sites, and the culture of Cohost while it ran truly encouraged me to think hard about what I wanted to say. Of course, sometimes I write some things here that are written in a dazed, dissociative state and I sometimes worry that those posts are poorly articulated and hard to understand, or perhaps inflammatory in a way I don't want them to be. So it's not like ALL of my posts here are truly thought-provoking and clever; I have humility, after all.
All this to say that I don't mean to be a Debbie Downer or a Hater. I merely wish to point out a pattern, an irritation I have with The Fediverse. Specifically, the way it is frequently 'advertised' by people, versus the way it actually functions. So, let's begin.
No AI, generative or otherwise, was used in the writing and/or publication of this post.
The Problems With Social Media
Social media, at its core, is a genre of website that seeks to connect people in some way. Most often, this is accomplished through mixed-media posts that combine static text with images or video. Somebody posts a video, maybe provides text accompaniment to that video for additional context, and it gets shown to other users in some way. Sometimes that video will get remixed or recontextualized, sometimes people who see that video will share it with their friends, and sometimes it just sits there, unseen and unheard.
The problems with these websites seem to arise from the incentives these websites give their users.
Cohost seemed to prove this. While the website wasn't perfect, it seemed to demonstrate to me that a large part of antisocial and/or hostile behavior on social media sites was a result of 'clout,' or what ASSC - the developers of Cohost - described colloquially as 'numbers.' On Cohost, you couldn't see the 'numbers' on your posts or your profile. You couldn't see how many followers you or anyone else had, you couldn't see how many likes or shares your posts or any other posts got, and you couldn't see much else for metrics that other websites easily provide. While hostile behavior still happened on the site, it seemed very rare that I'd ever see it. Maybe it's because I eventually hid any posts tagged as 'cohost meta' to avoid seeing armchair developers getting way too hostile about certain choices ASSC made with their website, but even before that point, a majority of the posts labeled as 'cohost meta' were capable of getting their points across without being venomous.
While I'm not a researcher, and I'm not exactly sure if any researchers have ever studied the sociological ramifications of the 'no more numbers' design choice, I think I can confidently assert after a decade and a half of social media usage that clout is a major incentive for hostile behavior. Being unable to see how many followers somebody has meant you couldn't use your follower count as a stand-in for authority. Being unable to see the number of likes or shares a post had meant you couldn't use that as a stand-in for unilateral democratic agreement - in other words, you couldn't treat the post with more likes as if it was somehow 'victorious' in the so-called free market of ideas. Instead, ideas were allowed to swim with each other, as were the users. It was as close to a horizontal hierarchy I'd ever seen a social media website get.
The point is not to dickride ASSC, here. Instead, the point is to put across the idea that I observed the removal of clout - the absence of some incentives for hostility - have a direct, positive effect on an online community, first-hand. I've had way more positive feelings toward Cohost during and after its operation than I have ever had with Twitter, Tumblr, Bluesky, and yes, even The Fediverse.
This absence of clout will be important later.
The Problem With Clout
Clout is where discourse goes to die. It's a blunt and confident statement, but I doubt I'd find anybody disagreeing with me. As soon as popularity becomes a factor in any discussion, the discussion breaks down into what I'd call a 'slapfight.' I tend to imagine two classily-clothed individuals, complete with top hats, daintily removing their white felt gloves from their hands and slapping each other with them. It looks silly, because it is silly. Slapfights are inconsequential and foolish to the outside observer, but to the individuals partaking in the slapfight, it's as serious as war.
Dogpiles, pedojacketing and Just Making Some Bullshit Up is caused, in part, by clout. Some could argue that microblogging - harshly limiting character limits on any given post - causes this, but it wouldn't explain the same dogpiling, pedojacketing and Just Making Some Bullshit Up that occurs on longform social media websites like Tumblr. Ultimately, the desire to be popular reigns supreme on most social media sites, if not all of them. More popularity means more potential for income: whether through direct support via Patreon, Ko-Fi and the like; through sponsorship deals; or through merchandising and other products for sale. While some might argue that 'social capital' - or, the ability to influence a mass of people - is a separate thing that clout can also generate, I'd argue it fits well within the genre of 'income.' If you can influence a mass of people in general, you can influence them to give you their money.
So, as you can probably tell, having 'clout' can give an individual an immense amount of power. Someone with 25,000 followers is always going to have more power in the dynamic than someone with 200; if only one percent of any user's follower count would dogpile someone on that user's behalf, the user with 25,000 followers will have 250 dogpilers to the smaller user's 2. That is an IMMENSE power imbalance that is tied to social media platforms that track these kinds of metrics. Further, the term "getting ratio'd" describes a phenomenon where a user replies to another user, and the reply receives more likes and shares than the original post. This is treated like a victory, as if the original post had been defeated in combat.
These are the effects of clout. It creates significant power imbalances, and can shift into an active hostile threat to other users in a variety of ways.
The Problem With The Fediverse
Let's talk The Fediverse.
I have been repeatedly told that The Fediverse is 'better than other social media sites.' Unlike bigger social media sites where the administrators and moderators are unilaterally enforcing their rules on the site for all users, the Fediverse is an interconnected web of social media sites where each dot on the web is an 'instance' of a social media site with its own administrators and moderators. Different instances can interact with each other on that web and sever connections to other instances on that web. In a manner of speaking, it's a balkanized social media platform.
Some have stated that this functionality makes the Fediverse less susceptible to the kinds of hostile behaviors often found on other platforms, but I'd argue this couldn't be further from the truth.
In fact, I'd argue this actually makes the hostilities far more harmful.
When people say that the Fediverse is seemingly fortified against hostile behavior, they seem to view its functionality as akin to a forum; if you don't like the instance you're on, you can hit the bricks and find a different instance. However, what these people often neglect to mention is that forums allowed you to slip into a new community with no previous knowledge of who you are and nobody who would recognize you. Because of the Fediverse's built-in interconnectivity, this isn't the case. Some might say that's a good thing; bad actors should be spotted on sight, right?
But what happens when the telephone game of allegations and transgressions is played?
The Problem With Semi-Balkanized Clout
On most social media sites, the potential for a user to be exposed to an unexpected audience is fairly high, and is to be expected. Some users will say a post 'broke containment' when their post goes semi-viral or viral, reaching an audience the post was not intended for. While this often results in hostile interactions between the original poster and the unintended and hostile audience, there is some level of expectation of this behavior that comes with the territory of a widely-used social media platform.
Fediverse instances, by contrast, are sometimes touted as 'safe spaces' on the web. Users let their guards down because those users are expecting to feel safe in a controlled environment. This, unfortunately, can create a truly combustible environment if the space should become perceived as unsafe by any given user. To be fair, I also observed this 'combustibility' on Cohost; it, too, was frequently touted as a safe space by its users. I, myself, am guilty of having said as much. So, when hostility ended up happening on the website, it got explosive. I, too, am guilty of having exploded and having been exploded upon.
Traumatized individuals need safe spaces to be able to relax, unwind and let their guards down. The problem is that those safe spaces need to be guaranteed as safe. Should those spaces at any point feel unsafe while a traumatized individual has dropped their guard, the likelihood of an explosive traumatic response increases.
So, the Fediverse is touted as a contained safe space, but the interconnectivity of each instance doesn't guarantee it. Someone can, just as easily as can happen on any other platform, have their post break containment and become The Villain Of The Day, or at least create inter-instance discourse as a result of the game of telephone from other people within the instance who are posting vaguely about The Villain Of The Day. I have, at times, seen more than five instances discussing an event that happened in one instance, with some posts becoming completely detached from the original post that inspired the discussion in the first place and making criticisms that ultimately amounted to thin fucking air.
My Problem With The Fediverse
Now that I've explained some of the phenomenons I've noticed as a social media power user, I think I can now substantiate my personal gripe with The Fediverse:
It is not a safe space. Stop treating it like one, stop saying it functions like one.
I have seen numerous users on a variety of instances make increasingly hostile demands for other users to label their posts with absurd, unrealistic content warnings, and receive support for it as the user engages in hostilities. To be clear, I am absolutely supportive of liberally labeling your posts with content warnings to accommodate people, but there is such a thing as going too far.
I'd argue that making transgender people tag their transition celebrations because they make you jealous is easily considered 'too far.' Yet, I have seen this behavior over, and over, and over and over and over again.
I'd argue that making somebody tag their mutual aid request where they describe why they need the support is 'too far,' especially because hiding a mutual aid request behind a content warning button reduces visibility - and thus, reduces support to those in need. Again, it's repeatedly demonstrated as a supported, accepted behavior to demand a tag with aggression.
I'd argue that pedojacketing should be considered a bannable offense. And yet, it still happens on the Fediverse. Often, because the Fediverse is touted as a safe space, the allegations are believed with a full head of steam and come complete with aggressive dogpiling, even without acceptable evidence to prove such allegations.
This behavior is not unique to the Fediverse, of course, but it feels far more violent in contrast to how the Fediverse is advertised by its users. It used to seem like a perplexing contradiction to me, but lately I've come to find these patterns in a familiar setting.
The Problem With Meatspace Clout
I'm currently watching this behavior happen, in real time, in real life.
IRL spaces - which I like to call 'meatspace' - sometimes function like this. My local queer community seems steeped in this behavior; self-proclaimed 'pillars of the community' who've generated a metric fuckload of social capital are actively cashing in on that capital to smear and blackball a queer woman who spoke up about the unfairness she was witnessing and has witnessed from the community in the past. All of her complaints are, without much observation, obviously justified.
An organization hosting an awards banquet informed award winners of their victory before the banquet, and the winners received free attendance to the banquet.
Nominees were not informed of the victors ahead of the banquet, and were expected to pay full price for attendance. Tickets were nearly $100, a ridiculous ask from the underemployed queer community whose activists are mostly disabled, neurodivergent people.
The awards were voted on by the general public using a Google form, which could easily get vote-bombed with bots.
The chair of the organization hosting the awards banquet was nominated multiple times.
The organization's official chatlogs were leaked, showing the organization's chair talking about the aforementioned queer woman in a way that could be best described as "entirely unprofessional shit-talk."
As she was venting about this situation, cis gay men with social capital in the queer meatspace began antagonizing her, were met with the kind of aggressive response they deserved, and those cis gay men were defended and supported as an explicit result of aforementioned social capital.
When she vented about this situation on the Fediverse in a mutual aid post to receive support that would offset the inevitable blackballing that was about to occur, she was chastized for not tagging her mutual aid post with a content warning.
In its entirety, this situation reminds me of The Fediverse perfectly. This explosion of intra-community violence has reached the eyes and ears of some other interconnected communities and the victim was distorted into the perpetrator, just as many explosions have done on Fedi. Some communities haven't seen the initial blast, but are hearing the discourse about the blast and are making their own disjointed commentary on it, just as many explosions have done on Fedi. Some communities are completely oblivious to the blast, and will continue to treat all parties involved as they always have - which itself is not a desireable outcome anyway, because the agitators in this instance will not receive accountability for their unprofessional behavior from the unknowing communities... which I've also witnessed on Fedi. And I've also watched somebody ask for support after becoming a victim of an explosion, only for the request for help becoming yet another fucking explosion on its own.
What Are You Trying To Say?
Ultimately, the Fediverse isn't a safe space, and never will be. It doesn't matter what instance you drop into, or what users you follow.
The Fediverse, much like real life, can certainly try to implement safe spaces. However, also like real life, it can't guarantee safety to its patrons when the number of people occupying those safe spaces grows beyond the mid-double-digits.
And just like real life, the Fediverse can fucking ruin you over the dumbest shit anybody's ever heard of, but the game of telephone will always find a way to make you out to be the cause of your own very stupid, yet extremely frightening nightmare.
No matter what social media site you choose to use, or what meatspace community you choose to join, it will not be a safe space if clout can be accumulated. Whether it's in the form of follower counts, longevity, experience, popularity or some other shit, clout will reach out and strangle you. It will chase you down and ruin you, your loved ones, the people you hate, and even the people you'll never hear about. It comes for all of us.
Balkanization did not solve social media. It hasn't even solved meatspace communities. Removing clout where it was possible is what solved social media.
Horizontal hierarchies - where one individual is not treated with abstract, unproven authority over another - is the solve for social media. Not in a capitalist framework, god, no. Don't you know that social media without clout-chasing isn't profitable? Hell, social media isn't profitable even if it DOES have clout-chasing!
But in an ethical framework, devoid of profitability and social capital? You bet your ass that's the solve for social media.