Defying Idiocracy: Connecting The Fediverse: Open Social Media

If you've followed my musings on Idiocracy (the inevitable 'dumbing down' of content quality when any media platform reaches a certain scale), then you too may be worrying about how to defy it. 

I joined the Fediverse (via Mastodon) two years ago. From the beginning I noticed the tendency among users on my 'mastodon.world' instance to worry about the rate of adoption versus other Mastodon instances, like 'mastodon.social', or instances running other fediverse protocols, like BlueSky. These were then contrasted with the early adoption of, say, X/Twitter or Threads, as if a failure to mimic the growth rates of proprietary platforms was somehow a shortcoming, rather than a strength. 

In other words, even as all these X/Twitter refugees emigrated to the brave new world of decentralised open platforms, their instinctive FOMO was driving them to hope they'd landed on the 'best one' which, rationally, they should have therefore concluded was actually the worst in terms of its likelihood to end up exactly like X/Twitter...

So, how do we protect ourselves from human nature? How can we ensure that humans communicate about their 'wildly different refined, aesthetic and noble interests' and avoid voting for an even worse version of Donald Trump? 

The answer may lie in being able to interact with many small scale networks without exclusively joining them or their communities. As with tools, like TweetDeck, which enabled you to communicate across multiple X/Twitter accounts on one interface, there are new federated tools, like OpenVibe that enable you to communicate with users across the Fediverse of decentralised platforms. 

Of course, I hear you wonder whether this will still deliver Idiocracy, once the aggregation platform itself reaches the critical mass of X/Twitter. But my sense is that there should always be new decentralised platforms joining the Fediverse, enriching the content.  

Hell, it's worth a shot, right? 

Acts Are Not Law

Acts are not law, which is why they are called "Acts". They are optional. If you want them to be law, you can agree to them, which makes a contract.  But you don't have to. And even if you do agree (because you made a mistake about your rights, for example) you can get out of that contract by making a complaint. 

So, your local council can give you a parking ticket under an Act, and if you don't agree to it you can just post it back to them with a note saying, "I don't agree," so there is no contract.  If you paid in the past because you didn't know this, you can make a complaint and get your money back.

Same with council tax, and other taxes like income tax. They are just optional requests to pay, and if you've paid by mistake or because you didn't know about this, you can just make a complaint.

This is why Theresa May can take Britain out of the EU any time she likes, because the British parliament only joined under its own Act. There was no contract, because only people in Britain can agree to Acts and the EU is based in Brussels. She says she wants Britain out by March, but really she is just delaying because she's a Remainer and didn't like the vote. She hopes people will change their minds, so we should just have an election to get a government that will take us out.

If you've read this far, then I hope you've felt the same rising sense of panic that I did when some bloke told me the first three paragraphs worth of this horseshit last night (at the end of which he said, "Education is a fine thing, eh?"). The rest I extrapolated based on his special world view, and that of a van driver who told Channel 4 news that Britain could have already left the EU and absolutely must do so by March, "no Article 50, no ifs, no buts". 

It seems most people believe that everything in their head is true. They then look for validation among their family and friends. Their more appealing ideas spread like a virus and are eventually fed back to them in the tabloids and the social media and by politicians who will do anything for more votes, even if it means ignoring the constitution, court rulings they don't like and the rule of law.

We live in an idiocracy.