Re Meta/X: I firmly believe that the world is ripe for what I call "public service social media" - platforms that provide the undeniable benefits of FB and X in terms of information distribution and social connection, but which are run on a BBC or NPR type of model. Relatively easy to start in one country (NZ?) or region (EU?), but should be extensible so that various systems can interlink and provide the international connections important to FB-type networks. All posts to be "legal, decent, honest and truthful", which is what ads in the UK are supposed to be.
All we need to find is a billionaire who wants to back us, and doesn't want to make more money... ;-)
"Public service social media" (a la NPR / PBS / BBC / ABC / RNZ) is an intriguing proposition, but I wonder if social media as we know it is now largely dead on arrival now after X - and now Meta - have effectively removed moderation. Mastodon (etc) and open source Fediverse technology has been around forever but never achieved critical mass vs. the large US networks - and Bluesky's user base is still only around 26 million globally - so I'm not sure a bunch of philanthropic money would enable critical mass for a "TradeMe"-type national enclave.
Instead what I think the Meta announcement highlights is the cognitive security risk of letting unfiltered algorithmic media get direct access to your brain *at all*. I am expecting a rapidly growing marketplace for "Feed editor" services to address this - open-source, transparent algorithms curating the items in your feed according to your own objectives rather than commercial social networks' opaque advertising / political influence / psyop goals. (Not a million miles away from what Memia provides, tbh...)
(If there's a way to fund this philanthopically let's do it...! I've been doing some consulting work in the media industry recently and the legacy media model is on life support... like you say the "public service" mission needs to be extracted from the "public funding" means - but finding the "right" philanthropist billionaires who would put their money in and then walk away may be the biggest challenge...)
Re Meta/X: I firmly believe that the world is ripe for what I call "public service social media" - platforms that provide the undeniable benefits of FB and X in terms of information distribution and social connection, but which are run on a BBC or NPR type of model. Relatively easy to start in one country (NZ?) or region (EU?), but should be extensible so that various systems can interlink and provide the international connections important to FB-type networks. All posts to be "legal, decent, honest and truthful", which is what ads in the UK are supposed to be.
All we need to find is a billionaire who wants to back us, and doesn't want to make more money... ;-)
"Public service social media" (a la NPR / PBS / BBC / ABC / RNZ) is an intriguing proposition, but I wonder if social media as we know it is now largely dead on arrival now after X - and now Meta - have effectively removed moderation. Mastodon (etc) and open source Fediverse technology has been around forever but never achieved critical mass vs. the large US networks - and Bluesky's user base is still only around 26 million globally - so I'm not sure a bunch of philanthropic money would enable critical mass for a "TradeMe"-type national enclave.
Instead what I think the Meta announcement highlights is the cognitive security risk of letting unfiltered algorithmic media get direct access to your brain *at all*. I am expecting a rapidly growing marketplace for "Feed editor" services to address this - open-source, transparent algorithms curating the items in your feed according to your own objectives rather than commercial social networks' opaque advertising / political influence / psyop goals. (Not a million miles away from what Memia provides, tbh...)
(If there's a way to fund this philanthopically let's do it...! I've been doing some consulting work in the media industry recently and the legacy media model is on life support... like you say the "public service" mission needs to be extracted from the "public funding" means - but finding the "right" philanthropist billionaires who would put their money in and then walk away may be the biggest challenge...)