Context: I have been thinking and writing about this future of "bicycles for our minds" for decades in ways that look well beyond the generally understood state of the art. Many of these ideas have flourished, and many are gaining recognition and being implemented, but many more remain largely unrecognized. This post highlights those that seem most important to the path forward. It assumes familiarity with the current state of the art -- and its discontents.
Where should social media (and AI) be headed?
There is growing dissatisfaction and deepening concern about social media and its effects on people and society-- and its threats to democracy. But few really understand where we are -- and how we could be going in a far better direction. These same issues are also emerging for AI, as it fuses with social media by 1) incorporating socially user-created content and 2) being used in social media feeds and recommenders.
Many long for a liberation of social media from the "enshittification" of centrally-controlled platforms -- and now with even greater urgency -- a counter to the incumbent platforms' capitulation to authoritarian influence that now threatens democracy, open discourse and the very foundations of human sense-making.
The "ATmosphere" of Bluesky and the "Fediverse" of Mastodon, along with Project Liberty's DSNP and other similar efforts have gained attention as more decentralized and giving users more choice over how these powerful tools serve them. This shift to a "federated universe" of interoperating systems can better serve the context- and norm-specific needs of discourse among individuals and and the diverse communities they participate in. Even Meta has given a partial nod to this trend -- by federating Threads with the Activity Pub protocol of Mastodon and other services -- thus edging toward what is better described as a "pluriverse".
Context: I draw heavily on Bluesky and AT protocol and the framing of the Free Our Feeds initiative to solidify its openness -- as currently farthest along in providing for the multidimensionality that will underlie a full-function pluriverse. But those directional ideas apply equally well to the fediverse of Mastodon and other ActivityPub-connected systems -- and to Project Liberty's Distributed Social Network Protocol -- and to other current and future protocols and services with similar objectives that might integrate and harmonize (or supplant) these early shoots of growth in a better direction.
Global networks, insularity, and the problem of "vibe"
All social media services currently have issues of what communities they help us assemble and participate in, and of what norms apply to them. The dominant global platforms suffer from "context collapse," bringing diverse communities into collisions without sufficient context to avoid misunderstandings and polarization. The more decentralized pluriverse seeks to avoid that by empowering more community context. Bluesky with its AT protocol has pulled into the lead over the Mastodon fediverse by combining user choice with ease of use, openness, flexibility, and extensibility, reaching over 35 million users. However, its appeal has been limited by its reputation as being dominated by liberals (driven from X/Twitter) and for how some perceive its "vibe." People are wondering where to turn for an online experience the offers the people and vibe they want.
The answer is in a deeper vision of what these "bicycles for our minds" can do, and how we must allow time for us to shape these still formative tools -- and to learn to manage how they shape us. What we see now is just the infancy of a radically new medium that is subsuming all media. This post (adapted from an earlier post) offers a vision of how this infant that just barely crawls, will grow into the nimble bicycle that Steve Jobs had in mind (based on how human mobility was far less efficient than many animals, but how a human on a bicycle could travel far more efficiently than the most efficient animal, a condor.) Our trick is that humans are tool makers, but our downfall might be when the tools makers build tools to serve themselves, and not those who use them.
While there is obvious need to develop near-term features to make each competing tech platform and universe of platforms into more efficient tools, there is also a need to articulate long-term objectives that many tools can build toward to be not only efficient, but effective in serving us, as their users. We are re-engineering human discourse for the online era -- that will be a long process -- but without a long-term vision of how our tools for discourse should work, and how we want to use them, it will be longer and more problematic.
Key ideas
Technically: A "feed mixer" is a key missing layer. There is much current discussion of online service feeds -- the good, the bad, and the ugly, and the hurdle of ease of use as limiting greater user control -- but little recognition of the need for a user-controlled feed mixer. That would serve to simplify the combination of 1) handlebars for steering our bicycle, and 2) pedals, brakes, and gear shifts for controlling its speed and responsiveness. With flexible control of our feeds that orchestrates multiple algorithms and works across whatever networks we participate in, it will be easy to tune into whatever vibe we want. This post explains and puts that in context -- along with other layers that have been generally ignored.
Sociotechnically: Individual agency over feeds and other details is only #1 of three essential pillars. Neglected are #2, the "Social Mediation Ecosystem" that our ideas get mediated by, and #3 the Reputation Systems that determine whose mediating efforts we trust. All three synergize to help humans, as individuals in an open society, to refine and apply our unique collective intelligence and human values to make sense of the world and flourish. As Marshall McLuhan and his colleagues said, “We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.” Modern liberal society has been powerfully shaped by print and broadcast media. Now we must again relearn -- to reshape how individuals and society adapt -- and how we shape online media to manage its far greater power, reach, and speed.
Further TL;DR of the pluriverse, as I envision it
- The move to decentralization, federation, and on toward the rich diversity of the pluriverse, reflects the realization that human society is far too complex, diverse, and nuanced to be served by any one centrally managed global "public square."
- However, current steps toward decentralization will need to better support the hyperlinked multidimensionality of how individuals and communities interconnect. These communities reflect a diversity of interests, values, and norms. But IRL (In Real Life) individuals participate in many communities. They are rarely bound by any one community, and wish to have global views into many, as both speakers and listeners, depending on their interests, goals, and moods as they vary from time to time. Ted Nelson invented hypertext because "everything is deeply intertwingled."
- Users will inevitably need multi-homing tools that give variable "lenses" for looking into and participating in many communities. Cross-community feeds and recommenders will be essential for individuals to navigate the abundance of riches in the pluriverse to meet their needs and find their vibe. This may work at at least two levels: 1) low-level recommenders for up- or down-ranking ranking feed items based on specific objectives, and 2) higher-level UX tools for composing and steering mixes of lower level rankings into a consolidated feed.
- Think of that higher level UX tool as a feed mixer. Just as a music mixing console takes in many individual sound tracks and blends them into a dynamically orchestrated, multi-dimensional composition, an information feed mixer should do the same for individual sub-feeds. Music mixers take tracks from voices, instruments, and other listening points, then adjust overall volume, apply tonal adjustment effects or filters, and balance the levels of each track in the mix. This may be controlled by a specialized mixing operator (an agent) -- often using selectors, knobs, and slider controls.
- Before objecting that such a tool would be too hard and time-consuming for lazy users to master, consider how feed services can be branded, and how that can make it easy for users to grasp a brand identity -- who is included with what vibe -- and mix feeds based on that intuition of a vibe. That is how we select CNN or Fox or MSNBC or PBS without studying a specification of their editorial curation policies.
- Bluesky seems farthest along in pointing to this multidimensionality in our feeds, providing for (but still in early stages of implementing) tools for separating the "speech layer" from the "reach layer" as described in their early blog posts on Composable Moderation, Moderation in a Public Commons, and Algorithmic Choice. My more detailed post from 6/23 suggests directions for taking that farther.
- Mastodon seems to also be moving in that general direction, with discussion of a cross-instance groups structure, and shared moderation services that address the challenges of administering small communities, but seems to prefer to remain relatively insular. I suggest they can have both, making their communities semi-permeable.
- A similar effort by Project Liberty also has some traction (and significant funding from Frank McCourt) and a vision that seems similar to that of AT Protocol, instead based on Distributed Social Network Protocol (DSNP).
- The objective should be for all of these -- as well as services using alternative decentralized protocols and current closed platforms -- to harmonize to allow users to seamlessly participate in an integrated "pluriverse" with a multi-homing feed mixer. My recent discussions with activists from all three of these current efforts shows a shared recognition of the need to converge from disparate silos to a true pluriverse with high interoperability.
- The vision I suggest will take time to build, develop, and be fleshed out by users, but to get where we will want to go in the future will require having these ideas in mind as we architect and build toward that vision. But even given the limits of our imagination, the beauty of open interoperability is that it supercharges the ability to markets to innovate. Just consider App Stores, and how the open interoperation of smartphone apps enabled the growth of a vibrant ecosystem far beyond what Apple or Google could ever provide by themselves. Or how the openness of the web took us far beyond what the corporate walled gardens of AOL, Prodigy, or CompuServe could offer.
- From Freedom of Speech and Reach to Freedom of Expression and Impression
Managing society’s problems related to how (and by whom) social media news feeds are composed, and whether they are or should be censored, is rapidly reducing to the absurd. Focus on the other end of the proverbial “megaphone” – not speaker’s expression end, but listener’s impression end. Freedom of expression can be strong only if we are free to associate with the information sources we want, by exercising our freedoms of association and assembly. Recognize and restore our Freedom of Impression! Free our feeds! - Hypercommunities
Each person can be a member of many communities (/groups) at once, as many layers of overlapping Venn diagrams in many dimensions -- shifting our view and level of participation as desired (semi-permeability). - Ranking as the core task
Nearly all "moderation" and "curation" recommendations boil down to ranking. Downranking can provide safety from bad content, and upranking can bubble up quality and value. Composability of ranking tools can work at both individual and community levels to blend a mix of rankings that draw on the wisdom of each community. ("Moderation as removal" should instead be effected by "downranking with extreme prejudice" that ensures items will not appear in feeds, but may remain accessible by direct request, subject to appropriate restrictions on access to illegal content) - Feed Mixing Agent Services as a core tool -- User-selectable, multilevel feed composition composed from multiple algorithms
A truly composable, steerable feed would provide a higher level feed mixer interface that lets each of us easily manage and merge a user-selected mix of lower-level feeds, with user-defined relative weights. A steerable feed would allow those mixes and weights to be easily changed at will to suit our varying tasks and moods, including options for stored pre-sets. This would restore user agency to choose and orchestrate from an open market in independent attention agent services -- providing choices of UXs, algorithms, and human mediation providers. Branding of attention agents from both new and legacy mediating services would make it easy for users to select them, much as we now intuitively choose what mix of CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, PBS, or less widely used brands we want to watch at any time. - Multi-dimensional reputation based on explicit and/or implicit signals
Wiser use of algorithms is needed -- not to replace human wisdom, but to distill it based on human judgments and reputations as judged by other humans, all under user control. I view reputation as essential to making ranking work well, and have written frequently about “rate the raters and weight the ratings” as an extension of Google’s PageRank algorithm to develop a socially derived and reputation-weighted reputation. Reputations have multiple dimensions, including subject domain, value systems, and community context, and change over time, being slow to develop, but easy to lose. An effective reputation system motivates individuals to seek and maintain a good reputation. - Support for rebuilding our Social Mediation Eecosystem
Communities and mediating services can be decoupled. The speech layer may be more tightly tied to specific communities than the reach layer. Real-life communities and institutions may be re-enabled to mediate our online discourse, both for their direct membership and those who wish to follow them. The ecosystem that shaped and stabilized discourse in the real world should be reconstituted in the virtual world. This mediation ecosystem shapes how messages flow and evolve, interacting and synergizing with both user agency and reputation, as discussed more fully in Tech Policy Press, Three Pillars of Human Discourse (and How Social Media Middleware Can Support All Three). - Classification/labelling and ranking
Rankings can be based on many dimensions of attributes -- so rankings could take a hybrid form that includes classification or label attributes. Adding a quantifier for the strength of a classification/label (how strongly positive or negative it might be) would ultimately be essential to achieving nuance, and could also include quantification of the rater's confidence level in that value rating. - Broader issues and federation/subsidiarity in labeling and rankingOur notions of truth and value -- and authority about that -- are contingent, changeable, and heavily influenced by our broader social mediation ecosystem. That has been central to the generative success of human society. Thus our social media should reflect that social contingency, and provide for a high degree of subsidiarity in how decisions are made. That is the essence of what I call freedom of impression, and how it serves to balance freedom of expression.
.jpg)
- Further thoughts on federated architecture and feed mixers
There is need for algorithmic choice at multiple levels. At a lower level is an open market in basic algorithms with very specific objective functions in terms of subjects, values, and vibes/moods. At a higher level is an open market in UX-level services that enable composition and orchestration of those lower level algorithmic rankings to present an consolidated view that blends multiple objective functions, and to allow steering that view dynamically as the user's moods and needs change. - Enabling subsidiarity of "moderation" of the "lawful but awful"
Federation is based on the principle of subsidiarity: that idea that most moderation/mediation decisions should be local, to best reflect relevant local/community interests, values, and norms. This would apply a nuanced blend of top-down controls to limit dissemination of the truly unlawful (with trust and safety teams, tools, and services), along with mostly bottom-up tools and services to manage more contingent (context-, value-, and norm-dependent) levels of awfulness -- and goodness! -- in multiple dimensions. This should apply at the level of 1) membership communities (servers/instances plus other communities/groups) and 2) cross-community attention/mediation agent services that users choose to opt into. (Given the role of Mastodon instance operators as "benevolent dictators," the current ActivityPub "fediverse" is really more of a "confediverse." The ATmosphere (of AT protocol) seems more supportive of the nuanced multidimensional division of control in federation.) - "Vibe"-- seeking "the shmoo of social media"
There is much talk of the "vibe" of different platforms, but "we ain't seen nothin' yet." With selectable, composable feeds, users will be able to create views that tune into whatever vibe they want (with whatever levels of moderation they want). This is the infancy of a flexible new social ecosystem online, and whatever initial vibe chaos we might see now will give way to a new order of shaping a vibe style and viewpoint, and tuning into it. A fully functional social media pluriverse will be a "shmoo" (a classic cartoon creature that tastes like whatever you want) -- with diverse communities, but flexible lenses into as many as desired. This provides a level of flexibility and user control of their experience that will grow in importance as the pluriverse grows in scale and diversity and in the richness of interconnections desired by users with many interests and moods for diverse vibes.
.jpg)
No comments:
New comments are not allowed.