I think what brings this back are specialized technologies which are inaccessible to non-techies because of the time or effort required to engage with them. Making it onerous for bots to access these places may also be helpful. I came to terms with the fact that the internet changed post-social media. I think that just means there need to be other places that are more niche, specialized and "homey" to neurodiverse folk. Though I disagree with the author that only someone autistic would be into such places, if they can indeed be recreated. I think the fediverse is attempting this to some degree.
I don't think such places need to be super inaccessible.
I am in a few Discords, and all of them are full of people who are even more aspy and weird than I am lol
They remind me of the PHP forums of yore.
One Discord I am thinking of here is focused on a video game, and the other major one that gives me that vibe is a functional programming Discord (I believe it's the one linked to from the Haskell subreddit).
We all expect the arrival of the great discord newsfeed bot now that investor money has dried up? Can't wait to go back to IRC. Discord is horrible in all the ways I despise. The only reason to go there is the people. And when it comes to people, I have hope, cause even meta can't own them..
I should probably check out the Discourse more. Discord servers for communities like this become very hard to follow, and I feel like a good chunk of the questions people post in the Discord could be easily answered by an LLM.
This article started as a nice reflection on the old internet creativities and communities that we used to have and a lament for its loss at the hands of corporate social media. Then it turned out to just be a lament that one of those social media corporations that swallowed the old internet is now being run by the another wrong person, one who's now fashionable to hate. What a disappointment.
This isn't quite true. People who complain about the new internet and create alternatives, create communities with things like upvoting/downvoting, which is a noticeably different dynamic than the old internet. Moreover, the smartphone is now the default device for even people creating alternatives, and that means that longform text is much rarer today than on the old internet where everyone was posting from a real keyboard.
Indeed, Gemini lacks those things (and also some matters of basic semantic markup and accessibility to the blind). However, the amount of people who took it up is so small, I personally don't feel it meets with the OP's statement that "there are enough people complaining about the new internet..."
How many people actually complain about the modern internet? As far as I can tell, it's mostly a vocal minority of misanthropic web developers. I don't think OP's comment was meant to be taken literally.
All the HTTP-alikes (gemini, etc) are cool but you can achieve the same thing on the actual web just by actually making a website in HTML. There are still plenty of actual websites out there. You just won't ever encounter links to them from within the walled gardens. And in their own more benign way, gemini and the like are walled gardens. Hiding in small niche protocol communities isn't going to "fix" things.
As for finding others: you have to surf. And that's something people don't do anymore generally. Google becoming crap has made it harder but it's still possible. We need a new searchlores for the modern era.
This article decries social media for creating a monoculture, but honestly I find the same thing on Mastodon, which supposedly lacks the distortions of a for-profit network. Spend time there, and one finds that the community of people claiming to represent neurodivergence tends to post heavily on American (or other Western) politics and trans issues. These even function as shibboleths. Consequently, if you are on the spectrum but not particularly interested in those matters, you can get just as much a feeling of "not fitting in" as in any normie-dominated social network.
Can you unpack the feeling of "not fitting in" a bit (re those matters)? I'm curious in which circumstances it arises and what are the core components it rests on.
Consider one of the early internet communities of the 1990s that came to be dominated by, say, Church of the Subgenius fans. Even if the topic of conversation was something else, people would frequently drop Subgenius lore and in-jokes and make Subgenius part of their online presentation, limited as it was in those pre-media days. If you weren’t interested in Subgenius and didn’t represent yourself as a member of that subculture, how much of a connection could you really feel with fellow members? On Mastodon today the particular nerd-culture markers are different, but whatever they are, it remains the case that not every nerd is going to be interested in them.
With regard to Western politics, I already get all that from a range of news sources, I have no interest in reading about it on social media. It is also easy to feel left out when people insist that the politics of the USA or their other, Western country is of paramount importance, but no one would care to discuss the politics that concern you. For my own reasons, I am interested in politics in Senegal right now, but that almost never appears on Mastodon. (In fact, it’s easy to feel that most of Sub-Saharan Africa doesn’t even exist for Mastodon.)
Activists appropriate the voice of some group, then marginalize people who don’t fit into that prescribed worldview — often telling people they’re a “bad X” for not being obedient.
This is part of a broader trend to divide-and-conquer by segregating people into identity based groups, who are permitted only a single view, lest you be denied that identity and ostracized — one that we’ve seen corporations and politicians only too happy to exploit.
Have a look at Discord, and the proliferation of "Alter" bots, which supposedly are designed around Dissociative Identity Disorder, but to my mind have enabled a mockery of it... servers where a huge subset of the users utilize the bot, many claiming numbers of identities that, were they so, would merit study in medical journals (I've seen hundreds of users claiming 50+ identities).
It could be said "oh, it's harmless, they're just RPing", and if that were the case, so be it. But no, on most servers it is generally considered sacrosanct and that merely questioning these numbers, and the preponderance of supposed DID on Discord (orders of magnitude above the general population) is offensive and insulting.
The communities i follow on mastodon are not talking about politics. Yes, you'll find more trans and out of the closet gay people there, but i only remember reading once about a trans issue that had nothing to do with cybersec.
Trans-haters consider every post by a trans person a 'trans issue'. As if it's the only thing that defines a person. It doesn't matter what they're talking about, just the simple fact that they're trans makes whatever they say a 'controversial political statement' in their eyes.
I don't get why there's so much hate on trans people these days. It's even blown over to Holland. It's very sad to see that a country that was once so progressive in embracing homosexuality is now becoming so backwards. It's very sad to see.
> I don't get why there's so much hate on trans people these days.
Most people were willing to be tolerant when there was a perception of negligible negative impact to others. But now that there are so many well-publicised incidents showing otherwise, such as male inmates attacking women in the female prison estate [1], males invading female-only lesbian events [2], males dominating in women's sports [3], and many, many other transgressions mostly harming women and children, there is an increasingly negative sentiment towards both the trans-identifying and the belief system of gender identity that has enabled all of this.
All of this may seem like a surprising outcome to some, but feminists of the radical school of thought predicted most of it way back in the 1970s, when the concept of a 'male-to-female transsexual' was being popularised, making the astute observation that this was just yet another manifestation of patriarchy, a way for men to dominate women.
These are not "trans issues" though. They are misbehaving people that happen to be trans.
There is no reason to be opposed to transsexuality because of this. It's not ok to hate a whole group of people due to the transgressions of some of them. This is true for religous people, people of colour, heritage, and of different gender identities. Though for some reason people find it harder to see this for the latter group.
What we do with speed dating here is we simply match people by their interest. Trans people can come but other participants can indicate whether they are open to dating trans people. So we simply don't match those who don't want to. This is a simple and effective solution. In the same way they don't match me as a cis male with other men (or lesbian women for that matter). I guess there previously were Lesbian speed dating events where no such matching was necessary but it's not as if it's a huge deal to ask each participant their preferences. By the way, in general most trans people overwhelmingly end up dating other trans people anyway.
For the sports thing society simply has to figure that one out. I don't have the answers either and I don't care about sports. But people being trans is not the problem.
No, the problem is deeper than just individual misbehaviour. To accommodate those men who call themselves women and demand that everyone else see them as women too, what has happened is practically every female-only space has been co-opted for this purpose, typically without the consent of the women who use those spaces.
Women shouldn't have to put up with this violation of boundaries that has been forced upon them. There's no reason why males have to be incarcerated in women's prisons, compete in women's sports, or indeed be in any space for women. Your proposal for speed dating is part of the problem too, as you again ignore the impact upon women and consider only the male perspective. Lesbian women should be well within their rights to draw a boundary that says no males allowed, and not be punished for it.
> But people being trans is not the problem.
Technically, you are correct. But as I'm sure you know, it is very, very rare that you'll find a so-called 'trans women' who doesn't use female spaces and has no intention of ever doing so. For the rest: each and every one of those males who use or demand to use female-only spaces is a problem.
Follow the communities that actually develop Mastodon software, run instances, and oversee the federation. There is such an overlap between them and trans-as-subculture that, as Mastodon has grown and brought in wider society, there have even been concerns voiced that the “original trans vibe” of Mastodon is going to get diluted. If you don’t care about trans issues and are interested instead in a nerd culture where identity, fashion, personal grooming, the body, etc. are irrelevant and the focus is solely on computing or other obsessive hobbies, then it’s easy to feel like you don’t fit in on Mastodon.
As for politics on Mastodon, if you follow the daily top posts, a good half of them will be on political issues in a small handful of countries. It is no different from any for-profit social network.
What is "the Internet"? You are free to create communities that serve your needs and I am sure more exist now than ever did in the history of Internet, just because of sheer user base. Should everyone else be forced into your style of communities? Seems unfair, live and let live.
Mentions Wang computers. I watched the Simpsons episode tonight were Martin is wearing a Wang computers t shirt on the school bus. I assumed it was a fictitious company but I Googled it tonight , no it's real. Then 20 mins later read this on hacker news.
I'm sure there's a proper name for these types of coincidences.
This is the nature of reality that increases with the more dots you connect over the years or more complexity you adopt within your neural networks. Take care to weed out cognitive dissonance from good heuristics. Your life may have been mostly dedicated to observing existential meaning in all things. You may notice every step forward is accompanied by these synchonocities. You may realize everything was just a different expression of the one thing afterall.
“In short, Baader-Meinhof phenomenon is a frequency bias. You notice something new, at least it’s new to you. It could be a word, a breed of dog, a particular style of house, or just about anything. Suddenly, you’re aware of that thing all over the place.
In reality, there’s no increase in occurrence. It’s just that you’ve started to notice it.”
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 91.4 ms ] threadI am in a few Discords, and all of them are full of people who are even more aspy and weird than I am lol
They remind me of the PHP forums of yore.
One Discord I am thinking of here is focused on a video game, and the other major one that gives me that vibe is a functional programming Discord (I believe it's the one linked to from the Haskell subreddit).
I was talking about a Discord (https://discord.com/) server.
I should probably check out the Discourse more. Discord servers for communities like this become very hard to follow, and I feel like a good chunk of the questions people post in the Discord could be easily answered by an LLM.
[0]https://gemini.circumlunar.space/clients.html
All the HTTP-alikes (gemini, etc) are cool but you can achieve the same thing on the actual web just by actually making a website in HTML. There are still plenty of actual websites out there. You just won't ever encounter links to them from within the walled gardens. And in their own more benign way, gemini and the like are walled gardens. Hiding in small niche protocol communities isn't going to "fix" things.
As for finding others: you have to surf. And that's something people don't do anymore generally. Google becoming crap has made it harder but it's still possible. We need a new searchlores for the modern era.
It's just fundamentally a different scale of enterprise than social media.
With regard to Western politics, I already get all that from a range of news sources, I have no interest in reading about it on social media. It is also easy to feel left out when people insist that the politics of the USA or their other, Western country is of paramount importance, but no one would care to discuss the politics that concern you. For my own reasons, I am interested in politics in Senegal right now, but that almost never appears on Mastodon. (In fact, it’s easy to feel that most of Sub-Saharan Africa doesn’t even exist for Mastodon.)
Activists appropriate the voice of some group, then marginalize people who don’t fit into that prescribed worldview — often telling people they’re a “bad X” for not being obedient.
This is part of a broader trend to divide-and-conquer by segregating people into identity based groups, who are permitted only a single view, lest you be denied that identity and ostracized — one that we’ve seen corporations and politicians only too happy to exploit.
It could be said "oh, it's harmless, they're just RPing", and if that were the case, so be it. But no, on most servers it is generally considered sacrosanct and that merely questioning these numbers, and the preponderance of supposed DID on Discord (orders of magnitude above the general population) is offensive and insulting.
I don't get why there's so much hate on trans people these days. It's even blown over to Holland. It's very sad to see that a country that was once so progressive in embracing homosexuality is now becoming so backwards. It's very sad to see.
Most people were willing to be tolerant when there was a perception of negligible negative impact to others. But now that there are so many well-publicised incidents showing otherwise, such as male inmates attacking women in the female prison estate [1], males invading female-only lesbian events [2], males dominating in women's sports [3], and many, many other transgressions mostly harming women and children, there is an increasingly negative sentiment towards both the trans-identifying and the belief system of gender identity that has enabled all of this.
All of this may seem like a surprising outcome to some, but feminists of the radical school of thought predicted most of it way back in the 1970s, when the concept of a 'male-to-female transsexual' was being popularised, making the astute observation that this was just yet another manifestation of patriarchy, a way for men to dominate women.
[1] https://womensliberationfront.org/womens-prisons
[2] https://www.lipstickalley.com/threads/lesbian-speed-dating-e...
[3] https://reduxx.info/male-cyclists-take-home-first-second-pla...
There is no reason to be opposed to transsexuality because of this. It's not ok to hate a whole group of people due to the transgressions of some of them. This is true for religous people, people of colour, heritage, and of different gender identities. Though for some reason people find it harder to see this for the latter group.
What we do with speed dating here is we simply match people by their interest. Trans people can come but other participants can indicate whether they are open to dating trans people. So we simply don't match those who don't want to. This is a simple and effective solution. In the same way they don't match me as a cis male with other men (or lesbian women for that matter). I guess there previously were Lesbian speed dating events where no such matching was necessary but it's not as if it's a huge deal to ask each participant their preferences. By the way, in general most trans people overwhelmingly end up dating other trans people anyway.
For the sports thing society simply has to figure that one out. I don't have the answers either and I don't care about sports. But people being trans is not the problem.
Women shouldn't have to put up with this violation of boundaries that has been forced upon them. There's no reason why males have to be incarcerated in women's prisons, compete in women's sports, or indeed be in any space for women. Your proposal for speed dating is part of the problem too, as you again ignore the impact upon women and consider only the male perspective. Lesbian women should be well within their rights to draw a boundary that says no males allowed, and not be punished for it.
> But people being trans is not the problem.
Technically, you are correct. But as I'm sure you know, it is very, very rare that you'll find a so-called 'trans women' who doesn't use female spaces and has no intention of ever doing so. For the rest: each and every one of those males who use or demand to use female-only spaces is a problem.
As for politics on Mastodon, if you follow the daily top posts, a good half of them will be on political issues in a small handful of countries. It is no different from any for-profit social network.
I'm sure there's a proper name for these types of coincidences.
“In short, Baader-Meinhof phenomenon is a frequency bias. You notice something new, at least it’s new to you. It could be a word, a breed of dog, a particular style of house, or just about anything. Suddenly, you’re aware of that thing all over the place.
In reality, there’s no increase in occurrence. It’s just that you’ve started to notice it.”