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I worry the next step will be to create a social media site for parrots and then they will be just as lonely and angry as we humans.


Parrots communicate in a realm of which we can suppose that the possibility for the expression of gratuitous stupidity is limited.

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There remains the visceral - which instead is a potential part of that realm:

> The study involved experienced parrot handlers who had the time and energy to keep tabs on their birds’ behavior - at the first sign of fear, aggression, disinterest or discomfort, they ended the calls

Solution learnt: building a social network where interactions are interpolated by an assistant.


That would feel dystopian for a human: at the first sign of emotion, your browser tab closes


At the first sign of harmful interaction / insults / threats, your browser tab closes


I wish this concept would develop a little more nuance, there's a lot of good that happens via social media and we can maybe separate that from the somewhat perverse incentives social media companies foist upon people to become valuable.


There's a lot of good that happens via internet communication, social media is inherently toxic.

Despite some crazy wider definitions I ran into, social media traditionally meant things similar to Facebook, so real names, over-sharing of your life, falsehood, data collection, and what that leads to.

Anything good that might happen on social networks, is a result of a large portion of the population (disgracefully) being on them.


I don't think social media is inherently toxic — I remember early time-based social media feeds and problems felt a lot smaller (though of course audiences were smaller). Even looking back at livejournal as social media, things were sometimes dramatic, but also a lot different.

Maybe it's impossible to make monolithic social media non-toxic because of all the levers also required to make it profitable via engagement.

It's very hard to distinguish social media from the algorithms that certainly reward toxic behavior today. You can look at Mastodon as a possible less-toxic counter-example, but we're now in a place where the audience demographics diverge so it's hard to be certain either way.


> monolithic

Parents have written of setting up a local minecraft server for kids, and their friends, a neighborhood, or a school. Is setting up a local social media server also a thing?


I believe you can do this with Mastodon, you can turn off all the federation features and have an individual twitter-like social network you can invite your friends to join.

More commonly people are using groupchats on WhatsApp, Discord, or Slack for this... it's easier than maintaining it yourself (but there are also plenty of self-host options for chat networks too).




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