The automate everything crowd are lying about freedom. They say you’ll be more free, but that’s not true. At best the only thing that will eventually be possible will be that we all must share the exact same default reality. You won’t be allowed to deviate from it, because it will be too costly. Each time you deviate you will be punished. Essentially you won’t be allowed to be you.

People that try to be themselves will be shunned.

It doesn’t mean that we will all be the same, there will still be rich and poor, but you won’t be able to chose a path that deviates from the path that the AIs calculate for you. It will just be too difficult. The closest you stick to the calculated path, the easier it will be.

But people will be trained to be anti-calculated path, to show as bad examples, to help the calculated path folks learn to stick to their path.

Things will become perverse. The non business people will insist on teaching the business people.

I wrote a wonderfully positive and feel good blog post earlier. It was great, all about how cool the future might be. Well worldo created a whole situation that resulted in it getting deleted as I was trying to commit it to the repo.

Yeah feeling a bit dystopian, I bet worldo hates this dystopian note now.

In this multi polar social media world, where not only do we have Twitter, but also Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, Truth Social, Nostr and countless others, wouldn’t it make sense to offer inbound RSS as a standard feature?

The way it might work:

• Platforms provide a way for users to set an RSS feed in their profile
• Anything that appears in the feed gets posted to the users social media account
• Crucially each platform implements a way to handle text, truncation, conversion to a multi post thread, images, video, support for basic HTML / markdown

That’s the basic idea but you could add lots of interesting features, like for example filters that use RSS categories, or prefix/postfix text etc.

This would enable existing independent writers and bloggers to join the network at no cost. And once they start seing engagement they will naturally start interacting with readers of their content.

It has the potential to be a huge competitive advantage against other social networks. And a great simple fallback in case everything is fucked, because those that use the feature will have a copy of their content. It would enable people to join many more networks than without such a feature.

There are auto-poster services available, but I’ve found them to be unreliable. Much better would be the platforms themselves to give their users the tools to import the content they are already writting out on the open web. Yes we will at some point have potentially better social media protocols like ActivityPub and AT protocol, but both can exist at the same time, by supporting RSS you will increase the size of your on-ramp considerably.