For the Bluesky/ATProto-curious, here's a meaty thread of an actual censorship failure mode being mitigated by booting up an entire parallel appview separate from the official one by the Blacksky team. https://bsky.app/profile/rude1.blacksky.team/post/3m2n62lo6v22p
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who was the ~400 BCE version of Mr Beast?
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❌ Social Network ❌ Social Media ✔️ Social Venue A social venue is about people. It is a place to make new friends, have abundant opportunities to deepen our friendships, and ultimately spend more time together in-person. A social venue can be a pub, a poker club, a chat group, a subreddit, or a feed of writing and images from people you follow. Social networks and social media have become terms burdened by their business models. They are about consumption and status. A chat group on Signal is not a social network or social media. An infinite feed of 60-second clips by random people is social media but it is not a social venue. In 2009, Twitter was an amazing social venue. I met many friends there, and enriched my existing friendships by having daily interactions I otherwise would not (even if it was just about sharing a pic of a sandwich). It hasn't felt the same for a long time--on the best days it is about consumption and on the worst days it is a battlefield. In 2024, Farcaster was a great social venue. I started going to local meetups hosted by @links, I competed in club @ted's poker games, I bought @samantha's incredible candles. I met many mutuals and some of them I still see in-person regularly! Making friends on Farcaster is a rare and extremely valuable thing to me, something that was a stark contrast with my friends who fled to Bluesky or Mastodon. I'd ask them "when was the last time you met people you follow irl?" and they'd look at me weird because that's what was conditioned out of us for the past decade. Online social venues is a big part of The Internet We Lost. Partly because of sheer scale of the internet (loss of cozy corners), and partly because our power structures have converged our norms into the present we live in. I want to talk less about social networks and social media, and more about social venues. How do we create healthy online social venues that can persist and thrive?
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