We got used to talking to the internet itself instead of people on the internet

This is my ideal DM experience. The 8.0 indicates so much care. (To be clear, entirely on Beef’s part.)

(This is part two of We Really Like Personal Sites But the Internet Has Been Turning into Poisonous Garbage At An Alarming Rate)

I have a rule on my phone, and it has always been this way. Only humans are allowed to make my phone ask for my attention. And only recently have I appreciated what horrors it has saved me from. The notifications I currently get are:

• texts from humans (incl signal and whatsapp)
• direct mentions or messages on slack or mastodon
• …uhh that’s it

I don’t even get notifications from the private discord I host for my friends (I would but it seems broken and who am I to argue with it). I certainly don’t get notifications from Instagram, even for DMs, for the same reason that if a friend wants to talk to me in a crowded bus station I will suggest we go outside first.

Notifications should come from People Not Apps

People, not apps, deserve my spontaneous attention. I’m not going to explain why. I don’t think I’m smart or special for doing it this way. I’m still waiting for someone to explain why it should be any other way. When I see a push notification for ᴄʜɪᴘᴏᴛʟᴇ x ᴊᴏᴊᴏ ꜱɪᴡᴀ ɪꜱ ᴄᴜʀʀᴇɴᴛʟʏ ʟɪᴠᴇ ᴀᴛ ᴛʜᴇ ᴡᴀʟʟɢʀᴇᴇɴꜱ ᴇxᴘᴇʀɪᴇɴᴄᴇ appear on a friend’s phone, I feel the same concern and desire to throw away their personal property that I would as if I found a tupperware labeled “Fentanyl for later” in their fridge. This comes from the same feral sense that makes us occasionally want to throw our phones in a lake.

I’m not alone in trying to unpack what that feral sense needs. I think it’s one of our few guideposts in the era of talking to the internet. Unlike my list of how the internet used to be, we don’t really have a primordial era of notifications. We had email, chat rooms, text, and then smartphones and Facebook threw the sluice gates open. It’s harder to parse which expectations for the social internet are sustainable and which are toxic, because they developed – and are still developing – largely in tandem with the ideas of the huge corporations that shoved social media into existence.

But also we want this

The biggest thing missing from my “back in my day” list was socializing. As in socializing on the internet, as opposed to “because I got invited to something through the internet.” One could argue that this was better, but one would be arguing with a rising sea. And of course the line between our online and irl social lives has been blurred beyond notice for years now. And we all have had real, treasured, human experiences that were only possible because of the internet. My late friend Corby had chronic health issues which often limited his mobility, and when he was stuck inside one of the things he’d do was post long, branching stories to a forum his friends ran. I treasure those stories now that he’s gone. (There was also a webcomic.)

I try to remember that the social internet is still relatively new, weird, and unfinished, because that means we’re still deciding what it can be. And regular people have as much of a share in that “we” as the massive corporations do. Hashtags on Twitter happened because users started using them before official adoption. A03 basically made tags a turing complete language.

I admire when people can do that, just say “idk what you want me to do, but i’mgonna do this instead.” It’s a foundational principle of the internet. Without realizing it, I think I left that audacity in the land of websites, and fell in line with the social internet more than I wanted to.

There were two moments I can actually identify that woke me up to the idea that I could have expectations of social media and take some agency in how I use it. It reminded me that what we think of as social media is really just some ways of doing things on top of the basic fact that people can talk to each other through the internet. Basically that it doesn’t have to be this way.

Awakening #1: Darius Kazemi’s Run Your Own Social

Reading just the headlines of this excellent guide is enough to crack the shackles of Big Social from your mind. There is a direct line between me reading You get to make the social rules and policies if you make your own social network and me starting up a private forum called Paddleboat for my friends at the beginning of the pandemic that became a loved and comfortable online space for some of us during those scary early days. When interest flagged below the $30-a-month-feels-ok-to-me level, we moved to Discord instead, called it Rollerblade, and now it’s still going strong. It even got a shoutout in my friend Ezra’s newsletter.

Awakening #2: Ezra’s favorite social network

Speaking of Ezra, five or six years ago, I was probably griping about Facebook, and Ezra said, offhand, that his favorite social network is just group texts. And that he had multiple ongoing ones with different themes. Shortly after that we started one with our friend Clare named, for obscure reasons, Chubswombat which uses the Tubthumper album art as an avatar, for obvious reasons. It is still going.

I have always admired how remarkably good Ezra is at connecting with people online and with talking to people about his ideas in general. (He’s recently been using his powers to push forward Long Covid action, despite Long Covid’s efforts to stop him, and you should subscribe to his newsletter and call your local representatives.)

The wisdom of this statement helped get and keep me off Facebook at the start of lockdown and reminded me how effortless and fun it can be to “post” with friends. We paid for our phones and service, why do we need to see ads to talk to each other? Since then I have enjoyed group threads including but not limited to:

• A yearslong round of The RV Game
• The Castle of Friendship
• All logistics for the DnD group I run, grouptext having defeated every other platform we attempted to use
• Weird chips
• Catsitting in my building
• My niece’s “youtube channel” which is just her making videos on her mom’s phone and then her mom sending it to me and my wife and us “liking” and “subscribing”
• Photos of the Kaiser Permanente building in Portland
• Emoji notifications when one of two of my friends is peeing. (This started because one walked in on the other in the bathroom like a decade ago. Not sure how I got added.)
• Videos a friend has been making with a wig she drags on a string like a pet

My favorite part of getting a smartphone was sending and getting pictures of works in progress with fellow painters. My favorite part of Instagram is seeing other painters’ paintings and three group DMs I am in. Maybe we don’t actually need the rest of Instagram. (Maybe the non-linkable, non-zoomable, non-text-copy-able automatically disappearing portion of a closed surveillence advertising platform is not the ideal place to share logistical information about local grassroots cultural events but what do I know.)

What this means to me

I think the values laid out in Run Your Own Social get pretty far towards a set of values for a social internet. And I think we’re still pretty far from a world where it’s easy to find platforms that embody them. I also think…we won’t because… maybe… not? platforms? at all?

Maybe the meta-value for whatever comes next is just this:

Social Networks Should Meet You Where You Already Are

If you try to make a new social network, the biggest obstacle is getting people to stop using the one where all their friends already are and use yours. So it can feel like TikTok or Instagram or Facebook are where people already are. This is true in a way. But the number of other people we can really connect with and keep track of is too small for big platforms to make money off our activity. So they have to train individuals to act like businesses or famous people. They teach us to talk like we’re broadcasting while being told we’re among friends. When we flee that pressure, we make themed chats, local groups, events, memes. That’s where we actually are as people instead of users.

The platforms are the biggest, stinkiest bus stations imaginable. The scale of activity is thrilling, the access they provide has become important infrastructure, but the people that try to talk to the whole bus station at once are either hucksters, potentially violent, shills, or otherwise sketchy. We avoid those conversations and find small spaces where we can talk to each other. We are sharing a booth with some friends, or sitting on a bench with a few strangers, waiting to go to the same place. We want to talk to people, not platforms.

Our part in this

I’ve never really articulated it to this level of detail, but some feral sense beneath the discomfort of having to go to the world’s biggest stinkiest bus station just to share a booth with some friends and talk about paintings is how I got thinking about free-floating hashtags on a 15 mile day in Canyonlands (and possibly to distract from our inadequate water supply). My initial spec was very document-based, because documents were where I already was. (If you ever work with nonprofits or the government, you’ll know that’s where a lot of people still are.) I want a little Nim_and_Nik_Chat 8.0 magically integrated with this markdown document, and I want it to be easy for other people to have their version of that too. I love that as soon as I put this online and octothorpe it, Nik will get an email. I love that it will automatically show up in my list of essays on a blog post I made on another website.. I love that I don’t know where else it will show up in the future.

But in the end it doesn’t matter where you start – the idea is that, wherever you already are, if you can’t connect to your friends and have a good conversation, we’d like to make something that makes that possible. This is crucially different than “wherever you are, you should be able to shout at the whole bus station at once.” I also hope it will be crucially different than “we just made another bus station with fewer people and weird rules.” That will depend on how good Octothorpes is at letting people say “idk what you want me to do, but i’mgonna do this instead.”