I just read Cory Doctorow’s article “Let the Platform Burn”. It reminded me of something I’ve been thinking about for some time. Instead of joining yet another social network and recreating yourself, why not create your personal social network object and link it to others via a federation of the personal social network objects?
I call this object the Earthling object with all due respect to our extraterrestrial readers. The object would be maintained by its owner and contain whatever information the owner choses to add such as a bio, pictures, blogs, posts, or documents. The object could contain links to your friends, family, and coworker objects.
Once set up, you could serve it yourself or use an Earthling Service Provider (yet to be invented). It would be a lot like running your own Lemmy instance or joining an existing one. The essential feature of this approach is that all the data within the object and access to it is completely under your control. Should you decide to ‘go dark’, you can delete or disconnect the object and disappear from the social networking community. Right up there in importance is that you can move this object around to any location you like without having to rebuild it. Communication would be along the lines of ActivityPub.
There are most certainly many issues with the concept and some of the features already exist. As Cory mentioned in his article, Mastodon allows you to export all your data from one instance and move it to another. Kbin seems to already provide at lot of these features with it’s magazines, microblog, and people sections.
While the Earthling object would have extensive controls on who sees what in your object, people might prefer not to keep all their eggs in one basket, joining different networks for different purposes and only providing personal data for the specific purpose. Did I mention that the Earthling object would have an avatar feature so you could take on multiple personalities?
This post is part entertainment and part ‘wouldn’t it be nice’. Maybe there are others out there that have already thought through this and are a lot further along. I believe there are similar efforts in the Web 3.0 arena. Anyone else interested in having their own Earthling object?
What bothers me about the tech illiterate (and I do consider it a kind of literacy) is that I wasn’t taught it by anyone. Unlike reading, which is skill which requires explicit education, tech literacy insofar as UI navigation to me indicates a fundamental lack of curiosity or inquisitiveness. Half the time when customers call, I don’t know where to find the thing in the UI - I just remote in and menu what sounds right until it’s there. We’re immersed in technology, it’s no longer possible to function adequately without it, yet somehow a very large portion of the population is so disinterested in the near literal magic in front of them that they can’t be assed to learn the first thing about how to use it.
I don’t make anyone feel bad for not knowing something. I try my hardest to be supportive and teach them how it works. But 99% of the time they don’t care and just want the thing to start working. So yes, I will judge people for lacking the bare minimum of curiosity which would ordinarily drive them to already know how this works in the first place.
And ironically, I seem to have avoided making my sisters be this. I was the “tech” guy in my family, and they’d ask me to do everything for them until eventually I told them I would give them tips and nothing else. They learned how to do everything themselves really quick lmao.
But did you have access to a computer to teach yourself on? A lot of people don’t.
This is so true. I’m often shocked by how intellectually incurious people can be when it comes to navigating technology. So many people can’t even do basic troubleshooting without being slowly walked through it step by step.