BUT YOU’RE READING THIS ON AN ALTERNATIVE MEDIA PLATFORM RIGHT NOW. Speaking of: Especially after reading the crazy, simply crazy, story about YouTube deleting an expert panel that included comments about how children don’t need to wear masks (as they never have in much of Europe) because the experts were supposedly sharing “misinformation”, as determined by some anonymous YouTube staff person whom we will never know and who will never be accountable for his actions or made to actually debate the subject with said experts… I thought it would be worthwhile to make mention of some technological solutions that are less susceptible to the censorship and control of an increasingly hostile Big Corporate. (Of course you may also opt for the Full Amish solution to Big Tech censorship, and I wouldn’t begrudge you that at all.) But if you desire to stay connected, what do you want in alternative tech? A few related things, I’d say:
It's possible to fix some fraction of the technical side of the damage inflicted by Big Tech's domination of the market, but there's really no way to undo the sociological consequences of polarization. That is, every new platform is tainted on some level by the ideological sorting of its user base, to the point where my odds of getting any other member of my family (all ideologically dissimilar to me and quite happy on Facebook) to migrate to a new platform is low -- especially to one with an explicitly partisan identity (Parler et al, and probably including NotTheBee).
Without the ability to reconstruct an ideologically diverse group of users of the sort that existed in the Facebook-vs-Myspace era, social media is being unwound by irreversible entropy. Solving that problem requires a different toolkit, a social rather than technological one.
I don't know if I would describe NotTheBee as having an explicitly partisan identity... maybe, but most of the posts are lighthearted so it doesn't really feel that way. But to your larger point about people being sorted into groups, any sort of truly *public* commons online being harder to create anew today, I agree completely.
I think there was a sort of turning point around the election, when the Bee went from being a generic evangelical project to being viewed as "conservative evangelical satire" -- roughly around the time of this article:
Whether or not that's fair is a matter of dispute, I suppose, but reposting Bee stuff is now perceived as a culture war boundary marker in a way it wasn't back in 2017.
American Thinker uses MeWe for comments. I don't see MeWe on your list, is it a questionable forum? American Thinker disabled comments shortly after Jan 6 and apologized to Dominion so I am leery of them.
It's possible to fix some fraction of the technical side of the damage inflicted by Big Tech's domination of the market, but there's really no way to undo the sociological consequences of polarization. That is, every new platform is tainted on some level by the ideological sorting of its user base, to the point where my odds of getting any other member of my family (all ideologically dissimilar to me and quite happy on Facebook) to migrate to a new platform is low -- especially to one with an explicitly partisan identity (Parler et al, and probably including NotTheBee).
Without the ability to reconstruct an ideologically diverse group of users of the sort that existed in the Facebook-vs-Myspace era, social media is being unwound by irreversible entropy. Solving that problem requires a different toolkit, a social rather than technological one.
I don't know if I would describe NotTheBee as having an explicitly partisan identity... maybe, but most of the posts are lighthearted so it doesn't really feel that way. But to your larger point about people being sorted into groups, any sort of truly *public* commons online being harder to create anew today, I agree completely.
I think there was a sort of turning point around the election, when the Bee went from being a generic evangelical project to being viewed as "conservative evangelical satire" -- roughly around the time of this article:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/11/us/politics/babylon-bee-conservative-satire.html
Whether or not that's fair is a matter of dispute, I suppose, but reposting Bee stuff is now perceived as a culture war boundary marker in a way it wasn't back in 2017.
American Thinker uses MeWe for comments. I don't see MeWe on your list, is it a questionable forum? American Thinker disabled comments shortly after Jan 6 and apologized to Dominion so I am leery of them.
I know people who like MeWe, including some of libertarian leanings. I just don't use it much myself, so can't say much by way of personal comment.