🧑🏼🚀Greetings people from space!
A few reminders before we jump in…
The opinions below are my lived space experience and therefore should not be taken seriously, as truth, or shared with meaningful conviction
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📰 Newsstand
Democrats have a strong night resulting in more of a ‘pink tinkle’ for GOP
New Yorkers vote ‘Yes’ on approving more than $4 billion for climate spending
Abortion rights won in states like California and Kentucky on amendments
Georgia is on our minds, again, as it prepares for a runoff election in the Senate
Mark Zuckerberg admits to ‘getting it wrong’ before laying off 11k employees
Elon Musk sold off an $3.5 billion of TSLA stock to cover Twitter expenses
California man is the lucky winner of the $2.04 billion Powerball lottery ticket
🎙FIRESIDE CHAT
From Athens to the App Store
In March of 2006, I was turning 18 and preparing for my final weeks of high school while a group of Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs were figuring out a way to pivot their recently made obsolete podcasting business into a viable venture. Then CEO & Founder @jack Dorsey tweeted these five words that would forever change society.
The town square is a human phenomenon that utilizes open space to attract citizens to participate in society. The ancient Greeks referred to it as the ‘Plateia’—a central space to gather for celebrations, commerce, and for philosophers and politicians to debate and share ideas. If you were to go back and drop yourself into the center of one of these square you would find yourself peering into the cultural zeitgeist of the time.
Over the course of history nations and governments have ebbed and flowed but the concept of a town square has remained. Earlier this year it was said by billionaire Elon Musk that “Twitter serves as the de facto public town square.” After making a $44 billion bid to buy the company then reneging on the deal, Musk was ultimately legally pressured into purchasing the social media company.
Put aside his megalomania, punching down on the rest of the world, and next to no tact on most topics… There are a few things that Elon Musk did get right. Twitter is filled with bots and its ad-based algorithm is an issue, pushing toxic discourse and trolls to the top, slowly detonating our society.
Ironically, of course, Elon is the king troll.
But he was certainly right about Twitter being the town square for the information age. I can think of no better place to go to discuss sports, politics, the economy or technology with folks across the globe.
Sure, you have Facebook with its nearly 3 billion users, but at the end of the day it’s primarily a place to view photos from the gender reveal party of your high school classmate or the recent trip to the Bahamas from your second cousin once removed. And as all of us learned, discussing politics or the economy with these characters on your Facebook Timeline usually doesn’t end well.
Then there’s Reddit, which despite never being invited into the cool kids’ club is made up of a strong community of users discussing topics ranging from the best coffee maker to betting your savings on a hot new Meme stock. Despite having a wide array of content and users, its design lends itself for siloed groups who are far less likely to experience cross-group discussion. Also, similar to Twitter it inadvertently invites hate speech from folks hiding behind pseudonymous avatars who feel obliged to say whatever comes to mind.
And then of course you have the “free speech” warriors of the MAGA right who fled (or were escorted) to Parler or @realdonaltrump’s very own Truth Social. We’ll place that subject on the shelf for a moment.
#MAGA Twitter
The world first got its taste of MAGA Twitter when @realdonaldtrump made his way onto Twitter as a vocal critic of President Obama during his second term. Much of the times his tweets were writted with not so subtle racist language questioning the President’s birthplace.
Plus, there were his tweets calling the “Electoral College a travesty” and calling on his followers to start a “revolution” in reaction to Mitt Romney winning the popular vote while losing the election. In many ways these early tweets set the tone and foundation for his 2016 presidency bid and beyond.
During his years in office conspiracy theories and toxic behavior on the platform became more commonplace. Goons like right-wing conspiracy theorist and radio host @AlexJones and his @InfoWars began to spread hateful and abusive commentary, which ultimately led to his permanent ban in 2018. Which prompted the “censorship over conservative voices” rhetoric we hear today.
Thing really heated up during the pandemic and leading up to the 2020 election, when baseless conspiracy theories around the #Plandemic and “RIGGED” voting spread like wildfire.
Between November 4, 2020 and January 6, 2021 @realdonaldtrump tweeted content that undermined the election 60% of the time, which of course we all know what happened next.
After banning @realdonaldtrump from the platform there was a 73% decrease in misinformation in just one week.
That is, until @elonmusk came along with his ambitions to “free the bird” (read: invite violence and misinformation back to the platform) emboldening his "free-speech bros.
Upon the announcement of his legally enforced takeover of the business there was a 500% spike in the use of the N-word. Days after becoming CEO, Musk himself spread a baseless conspiracy theory about the attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul Pelosi, which became a mainstream talking point on the Right.
It has not only been the decay of the platform’s content, the flailing San Francisco company has lost a reported 1 million users and saw the layoff of 3,700 employees.
Let that sink in.
All empires fall, eventually
In the days before the radio, television, and the Internet, the town square was the place where the public learned from others and shared ideas. It has been a constant for humanity to evolve together since the beginning of civilizations.
They have seen peaceful and violent protest, religious celebration and persecution, public health and disease. When town squares thrive, societies are at their best, a form of public eudaemonia, filled with flourishing commerce, culture, and entertainment.
And when they decay they are at their worst, filled with crime, poverty and disease.
Civilians respond through peace or force to rebuild town squares in their own eyes, sometimes successful while other times tragic. No platform has quite lived up to reinventing the town square like Twitter, until now.
Time to rebuild
Over the past few years there has been much scrutiny on the propensity of social media platforms to create toxic behavior and echo chambers. Is it even possible to build a digital town square that promotes innovation, common decency, and progress?
Elon correctly pointed out, the Twitter ad-dependent business model is flawed. But a gated and paid membership to access the town square seems imperfect as well, and possibly even worse. It has yet to be seen whether Musk can pivot the business model to get users to fork over the a fee to flaunt a “blue tick” on their profile.
But the time has come for us to rebuild the town square that meets the needs of an increasingly global and digital-first society. Twitter has sadly become a shadow of a diseased and divisive society under leadership by a would-be tyrant.
A new town square demands architecture, open space, and vibrant participants from journalists, artists, politicians and activists.
In recent weeks thousands including myself have fled to Mastodon, the web3 version of Twitter. It is an app built on top of a network of servers, which are operated by many different individuals or groups.
The founder Eugene Rochko, began building this decentralized social network in 2016 after becoming disillusioned with Twitter. Since then it has acquired over a million users from web3 enthusiasts to journalists, celebrities and everyday civilians eager to be part of this new town square.
The app certainly feels like it is in its infancy, reminiscent of those early days when the Facebook and Twitter community was still figuring out how to interact with one another and navigate the site.
And it’s exciting as hell.
Creating an account is as simple as visiting the Mastodon website and choosing "Create account.” From there you are asked to join a server. Though, it doesn’t really matter which server you join since you are able to discover and engage with people from across the entire Mastodon network.
The server you join is displayed, however, in your account name but even that can be changed by migrating to a different server. I joined the main server with an account ending in @mas.to while others might have an account ending in @mastodon.social.
New Mastodon users daily in 2022 | @estebanmoro@mastodon.social
It’s really not that complicated but with any new form of technology it’s more difficult to explain than start using on one’s own. Think about trying to explain creating an email address back in 1992!
I am sure you are asking yourself ‘what makes this so different from Twitter?’
Well, it all comes back to that idea of decentralization. Since the network is not owned by a single entity anyone can set up an independently-run and self-funded server that connects to the same app. As a user your experience is virtually the same. Each of those servers get to write their own rules and guidelines allowing for communities to create safer digital spaces.
And here’s the real kicker, if one server becomes filled with toxic or hateful content, spam, or bad actors, the other servers can gang up and block that server from accessing the rest of the network.
When @realdonaldtrump could no longer access his Twitter account and left to build his Truth Social, the new app’s “proprietary” software was built using the Mastodon open-source code.
But don’t expect to see Truth accounts to start surfacing on the app anytime soon. When other far-right social network Gab also launched using Mastodon code Rochko made this statement:
“Mastodon is completely opposed to Gab’s project and philosophy, which seeks to monetize and platform racist content while hiding behind the banner of free speech. Mastodon remains committed to standing up against hate speech; for example, our new server covenant means we only list servers on joinmastodon.org that are committed to active moderation against racism, sexism and transphobia.”
For those of you who think I’m being fantastical, or even utopian I implore you to give it a try. This is an opportunity to be a pioneer in redesigning a new and improved digital town square.
The moat has dried up. The public is ready to congregate in a healthier, innovative, and more democratic space. Find me @adamwrightstuff@mas.to
“Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is just opinion.”
—DEMOCRITUS