Breaking Tweets: A Web0 Manifesto

OK, look.

I'm pretty young. The Web I grew up with was the web of the mid-to-late 2000s and early 2010s. Web2 was already alive and kicking, Youtube, Twitter, and Facebook were all around with massive userbases, and social media was slowly rising.

But it wasn't like this.

Youtube didn't have two ads in a row at the start and end of every video. Nobody was tracking you across sites, generating massive amounts of surveilled user data to sell targeted ads. The Internet wasn't, like, six websites, and you didn't have to go by your real name everywhere. The Web was still around; you could still find forums and moderated discourse built around communities, run by webmasters with genuine passion for the sites they maintained.

Not anymore. Massive tech monopolies have consolidated and corporatized the Web and made consumers out of users, reshaping discourse into the form that best facilitates corporate profit, not robust human connection. For example, a tweet just isn't long enough to make thoughtful statements, and tweet threads are extremely easy to take out of context. Social media websites are effectively unmoderated, and it's basically impossible to have a discussion on them without risking being brigaded by fascists, racists, TERFs, and other bastards who would get banned in an instant in a moderated space. Not to mention, they're inundated with ads that are disguised to look like regular posts, all targeted with mass data surveillance just to squeeze one more dollar out of you.

This corporate design has infected the Web, changing how we move through the space of it. Even creators - artists, musicians, writers - have been browbeaten into creating in ways that return profit to the corporations, while chasing fleeting, ephemeral clout in the form of likes and retweets. But I've done the content creator dance. And it is exhausting. Wannabe creators are forcibly turned into wannabe entrepeneurs and influencers, selling not just what they create but their very selves, trying to market personality and humanity like a fucking commodity. And I'm guilty of this, too! Even though I know that Twitch is exploiting streamers with promises of stardom while reaping half of any profits they manage to make and giving them peanuts for ad revenue; even though I know that Youtube only cares about the algorithm and keeping clicks on the site, burying and demonetizing any video that isn't palatable to advertising companies; I still try to "make it" on these goddamn hellsites. If I didn't, I wouldn't have all those links on the homepage. And, I get it, part of that's just creating under capitalism. But that's because Web2 is a beast of capitalism's making. It was created in capitalism's image, and as long as capitalism exists, it will uphold the corporate Internet; or worse, it'll try to foist Web3 on us.

And no, Web3 will NOT save us. It's based on artificial scarcity and is even more capitalist than Web2, just right-libertarian-flavour capitalism, with even fewer regulations, even more scams, and even worse environmental outcomes. The blockchain recreates a problem that predates the Web, NFTs are a pump-and-dump scheme, cryptocurrency is a Ponzi scheme, and the whole thing is predicated on electricity waste futures that demand more and more electricity be wasted to keep the price up. That's not a solution, that's doubling down.

So how do we fix this? The obvious solution is to get rid of capitalism, but that's like saying the solution to a leaky faucet is to build a new house. Given that we live in capitalism, what can we do to reclaim our creativity and passion? For a long time, I didn't think we could fix it. I'd accepted that social media was here to stay, and that the best I could do was make a Carrd, use the limited amount of customization most social media provides, and stick to AO3 and Discord for my non-algorithmic Web interactions. But when link.tree announced their NFT integration, and I found out that Carrd and beacons.ai were also bending over backwards to support Web3, just like every other Silicon Valley capitalist eager to make a quick buck off a rug-pull Ponzi, I started digging, and what I found was Yesterweb and the Web0 project.

Let me explain.

One of the big "perks" of Web3 is that it claims to be decentralized, but its model of decentralization is incredibly stupid, and is more aligned with neoliberal laissez-faire deregulation than actual decentralization. So Web0 asks...

"What if we just decentralized the Web?"

What if we brought back the Old Web, with personal websites, moderated forums and chatrooms, and webmasters coding sites with good old-fashioned HTML and CSS? Anyone can host their own site, so there's no big monopolistic corporation sitting in the center tracking everyone's data, and everyone can make their site look and feel however they want; HTML and CSS are far more powerful than the measly offerings of link-in-bio services like Carrd or link.tree. And hey, if people want to keep the corporate Internet, it'll still be there.

But it doesn't have to be like this. We can break our Tweets and write webpages. We can break our parasocial followings and create real communities. We can break influencer culture, break corporate surveillance, and break Web2, Web3, and all the other bullshit that's poisoned the Web and alienated us from our humanity.

A better Web is possible.

All we have to do is make it.

#chaiaswriting

Okay smut out of my system for now, time to be serious for a moment.

One thing that's so important about this...movement? Moment? I don't know what to call it. This overall desire for a web of old, going back to Web 1 or Web 0 or even just early 2000s. The movement to go back to an era before everything was advertisements and algorithms and apps and everyone using the same 6 sites. I'm going to call it the Pushback, for lack of a better term, because that's what it is - pushing back against the constant invasion of Web 3 and Advertisements and everything the internet has become.

It only works if we interact with each other.

Shares/Reposts/Repeats are a vital tool. Follow people who post things you like. Share the things they do so those that follow you can see it too. As @birze put it, #boostearlyboostoften and #followearlyfollowoften because if we don't, this just doesn't work.

Forget the algorithm and the numbers. Think of the human, or person, or creature, or entity. Imagine - or remember, depending on what you've been through - being in a crowd of people and saying something - and no one responds.

It sucks.

"Likes" and "Favorites" help avoid that to a degree, the digital equivalent of someone nodding their head in agreement when you talk. You know you're not being ignored, and it helps.

But those head nods mean so much more when they come from someone you know. And the only way to do that is to actually get to know people. Talk to them. Comment on their stuff. Share their stuff. And trust that people will do the same for you.

I'm personally trying to be better about this, too. Trying to resist the urge to just like and move on, trying to comment or at least share because sharing means if I don't have the energy to comment, I've upped the chances someone else might see it and comment.

Trying to make it so this - and anywhere I go - is a place where I'm doing my part to be an entity that interacts with other entities. A person that talks to other people. A creature who is not wandering the woods alone at night.

The algorithm faked this for us before. It pushed posts that served the interests of the corporate overlords of the 6 Sites, so the machine got us a simulacrum of human contact so we'd be rewarded for Doing The Thing that made us easier to be targeted with advertisements.

We don't have that here. There is no algorithm. Which is good! But it means we are the ones who drive the interactions here. No machines, no advertisers. Just people.

That's all. Just...make sure you're letting others know they're seen and heard, and make sure you're talking with them so they can see and hear you in return.

Built an internet of people talking.

It's the only way we thrive.

service monitoring has its ups and downs

swear to god google drive if you're processing half a million items just to dump them in my main folder i'm going to mr google and eating him with a knife and fork

Heyyy setting up here. I'm pretty sure #heycohost is completely redundant here.

Gonna try and find as many people as I can here.

OH NO I HAVE MADE A MISTAKE AND MY CAPS LOCK IS STUCK ON. I DO NOT KNOW WHERE THE CAPS LOCK KEY IS ON MY GLOVE80 KEYBOARD BECAUSE I CONFIGURED IT TO BE HIDDEN IN A LAYER, BECAUSE I DO NOT USE CAPS LOCK USUALLY.

IN FACT I DO NOT USE CAPS LOCK USUALLY SO MUCH THAT I BOUND THE PHYSICAL CAPS LOCK KEY ON MY LAPTOP'S KEYBOARD TO INSTEAD FUNCTION AS AN ESC KEY. NORMALLY IT'S GREAT UNTIL SITUATIONS LIKE THIS HAPPEN

I WAS THINKING ABOUT REBOOTING ANYWAY BUT BEING UNABLE TO STOP SHOUTING HAS FORCED MY HAND

well, fortune decided to give me something very relevant to the current Situation

guy on the tram with an enormous longsword makes me realize that the urge to lunge for an officer's service weapon must have existed in the middle ages

okay, so. i’m not gonna click this, and i really don’t think anyone should go about banning their own accounts

but i really, really wonder what would happen if i did. would it say “c’mon, you can’t ban yourself”. or would it go “…well, you’re the boss, chief” and just do it. will it try to protect me or will it be like linux going “hm, you said you wanted to delete your entire root directory? and you’re sure? well, who am i to tell you no”

i might just try it on one of my test akkoma instances for shits and giggles

well, turns out that turning on the media proxy without setting a base URL causes a bunch of shit, including users and login, to break on akkoma-fe. don’t do that.

please enjoy: photos of my cat

her name is Rey which is short for Sweet Baby Ray’s BBQ Sauce

"i gotta get sleep before tomorrow becomes a problem" is a good line and i gotta hold on to it for more use.

anyways.

MIX_ENV=prod mix pleroma.emoji get-packs -m https://git.tenna.zip/Tenna/emoji-packs/raw/branch/main/index.json eggbug

I should add a bunch of emojis to this

upload test

IT'S ALIIIIIVE