What's Wrong With Social Media?

A bunch of things. The algorithms are deliberately designed to make us angry, less informed, and antisocial. Our attention is being sold to the highest bidder, regardless of the impact on society. We have basically given the entire digital side of civil society over to a set of half a dozen fiefdoms. If you'd like to know more, this video from Jaron Lanier goes into the problems in more depth.

What Can We Do About It?

Looking more closely, we see a few underlying traits that seem inherently geared to producing social media woes:

1. the profit motive
2. the scale of the problem
3. the alienated user/administrator relation

To solve these problems, we would then need a social media platform that is

1. not for profit
2. at a small, localized scale
3. controlled by the users themselves

Enter Denton.Social, Denton's own social media network. Implementing the open source social media software Mastodon, Denton.Social is confederated with the rest of the "Fediverse," a word for all networks that use the same protocols. That means that users on Denton.Social can interact with users on all other instances, provided that neither server has blocked the other. The experience of Denton.Social, however, is largely up to the community itself. That's the beauty of federation.

Denton.Social is not only smaller, non-profit, and more democratic than Twitter. The underlying software itself is not built in pursuit of addictive, toxic behaviors because it is not drive by the profit motive to maximize eyeball time. That means that cynical, antisocial activities like rage baiting and clout farming simply do not have the same effect here. As a result, many Mastodon users say that they have noticed the difference in their mental health as they have started to use Twitter less.

How Can I Join?

Just go to the Denton.Social website and sign up for an account! Start interacting with content that you like. Boost and follow everything that even remotely appeals to you. You can always unfollow later, but the feed requires your explicit engagement to show you much of anything. Have patience with it for a day or two, and pretty soon you'll have a full feed of stuff that you want to see.

Give it a shot, and be sure to follow us!