Homepage | Jon Tillman

Leaving the Walled Garden, Again

Jon Tillman | Filed Under: | Tagged: walled garden,digital enclosure First Published: 2022-05-20 | Last Updated: 2024-12-05 Status: finished(?) | Audience: anti-digital enclosure activists | Confidence: aficionado Word Count: 531 | Reading Time: 2 minutes

Like , I have been watching the Enclosures of the internet over the last couple of decades.I am old enough to have seen the internet in its infancy. BBS’s, Gopher Space, FidoNet - all that stuff. Nowhere has the walled garden model been more ruthlessly enacted than in the social media space. The recent acquisition of Twitter by serial usurper and far-right dog-whistle enthusiast Elon Musk is but the latest in a series of consolidations in the space.

I had a recent personal run-in with the walled garden mentality of Meta. One that resulted in the permanent deletion of the Eating Asturias Instagram account without recourse or explanation. The best I can tell is that because I dared to post images to their service from this website in a semi-automated way, I ran afoul of their Not Invented Here unwritten rule. I have also been deeply ambivalent about Facebook. To be honest, I haven’t looked at it except to post articles from here in more than a year.

And then there are the algorithms. The ones driving political polarization.Kjerstin Thorson, Kelley Cotter, Mel Medeiros & Chankyung Pak (2021) Algorithmic inference, political interest, and exposure to news and politics on Facebook, Information, Communication & Society, 24:2, 183-200, DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2019.1642934 You know, the ones making the global right wing surge look a lot bigger than it actually is.Peters, U. Algorithmic Political Bias in Artificial Intelligence Systems. Philos. Technol. 35, 25 (2022). DOI: 10.1007/s13347-022-00512-8 The ones radicalizing people over literally insane conspiracy theories.H. Innes & M. Innes (2021) De-platforming disinformation: conspiracy theories and their control, Information, Communication & Society, DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2021.1994631 None of those things are reasonable, and reasonable people should probably not be participating in them, even tacitly.

Escaping the Walled Garden

So, I am making my own little move away from the algorithmically curated rage-web. I am shuttering my traditional social media accounts and moving forward towards the open web. The aforementioned Instagram snafu caused me to investigate pixelfed. I found a very stripped down instagram-esque experience. Stripped down in a good way. Chronological. Photo-first. Hashtagged, but without algorithm guessing.

Pixelfed led me to Mastodon, a replacement for Twitter. This federated network of sites provides a nice antidote to the twitter-verse, and like pixelfed works on hashtags, not full-text searching and algorithm feeding.

Having spent a few days exploring both of these networks, and deciding that I wanted to go further, I integrated some of the technology behind them into Eating Asturias directly, allowing content here to be found across the fediverse.

So down there at the bottom of the page there is a bit of a shake up. Gone are the big social media networks, and in their place are a couple of new links to smaller, more human-scale alternatives. I’ll be there from now on, in a place where I have a little more direct control over how my data is used and who I interact with.