the definition of insanity
Something I try to be mindful of is how easy the steps towards recreating social media sadly are, despite not wanting to outright do that.
I don’t always get the impression on this side of the web that there’s awareness of this development, which makes sense: Not everyone chose to leave social media services because they were fed up with the concept; many were just displaced or are still there. They see no issues with the social media platform design itself, just the owner or userbase; so having a replica with nicer people and a better owner works well for them.
That’s where I disagree, because I absolutely think some design choices that are fine in a vacuum are absolutely terrible together, encouraging toxic behavior and addiction - which is also why I beg the IndieWeb not to reinvent the torment nexus wheel in their own flavor.
It’s so easy to have a solid space on the web away from it all and slowly creep your way back into the mess just like the social media platforms did. Like hey, what if we added a way to discover writing in a feed? Fine. What if we added likes? Teetering on the line, but fine. Adding comments? That’s now an early version of Facebook. Ability to reblog? That’s a Tumblr clone. Then comes creator income and subscriber benefits. And possibly ads. Obviously almost all those features are great on their own and in theory sound amazing together, but here we are, knowing they’re a slippery slope to weird engagement farming, user manipulation, toxicity and platform enshittification.
I really value that things are different, slower, and some features are intentionally missing or optional. Also reminds me of Far Cry 3’s “definition of insanity” dialogue - we can’t do the same thing over and over, expecting it to turn out differently. There were and are enough clones promising to be X but better, and it’s really not. We have tried adding this or that feature and it was shit.
I’m glad when there are projects and spaces who remain different and purposefully don’t seek to implement most social media features. You really have to draw a line and remember how the switch from forums to social media and Reddit also felt like a good idea with lots of comfort and amazing community opportunities until it wasn’t. Now we have customer support and docs on Discord.
Not here to demonize specific features on their own - it would be silly to imply that one thing alone will ruin a space, but it does affect it. You have to judge if it will replicate known issues in the context it’s imbedded in and what it will encourage the userbase to do. It’s easy to put on the rose-colored glasses about it all, just like personalized feed algorithms can be described as great because it shows more of what the user wants to see. This doesn’t address the issues around manipulating algorithms, echo chambers and radicalization pipelines, though.
All of that is why I keep being skeptical about implementing “nice to have” features we are used to from other spaces online. It’s desirable not to flatten everything into another version of something - I don’t want X for bloggers or whatever. I’m content as it is.
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Published 20 Jun, 2025