So, If I think about it "like alcohol", it would mean "what is the root cause of not being able to keep contact with people". It might be that common social mixing places are probably much fewer than hundred of years ago - be it the local bar, gathering after a day of work in the field, public bathhouse, etc. Many of activities in the modern world seem very individual - maybe that is the problem, and people being social try to replace it and get tricked into worse things.
Masto specifically is also a Twitter not Facebook replacement, with everyone soliloquizing past each other rather than holding a genuine conversation.
For the actual "good" Facebook use cases such as keeping in contact with school/uni veterans or other closed group, there's friendica, but it's nowhere near Fb in terms of volume.
There is a lot of that, and somehow it is acceptable online, while when you project it to face to face situations it would be really rude behavior. Like in a chat room when you ask someone something with an explicit mention of their handle, only to see the presence indicator pass it by without any response. Not even taking time to give a Yes, No, or Too busy now.
Or how in a private group someone who was invited suddenly leaves the group membership, hops off the channel. Comparative to walking out of a meeting without saying a word and provide a reason. A simple "I enjoyed it here, but I have to spend my time elsewhere" is just simply a polite thing to do, and costs only 2 seconds of time.
Social media has strong parasocial tendencies.
Asking someone a question online does not obligate them to take time to answer it, or even explain why they don’t feel like doing so.
You’re not in a conversation with everyone who is online, so the comparison to in person conversations doesn’t hold.
> Not even taking time to give a Yes, No, or Too busy now.
People are doing other things while using their computers and you should not expect to be able to commandeer their attention on demand by tagging them. Again the comparison to in-person social norms doesn’t hold because you can’t see if this person is busy with something else.
I find this sense of entitlement to other people’s instant time and attention to be very negative for any digital dynamic. Whenever someone with this attitude joins a group chat it leads to people turning their statuses to Do Not Disturb all of the time or even leaving the group because they don’t want to feel obligated to drop what they’re doing and respond to that one person every time that person drops a tag in chat.
I am too.
A chat room is not equivalent to a face to face conversation. You’re not in an always-on social engagement with those people.
If you need to switch to having face to face conversational norms, you need to request a time for that.
It’s not reasonable to expect that someone’s online indicator means you are entitled to request that they drop what they’re doing and respond to you. Online does not mean not busy.
The difference is that in person you as the asker are more polite about it also. You don't burst into an unrelated meeting just to ask someone a question. Or elbow your way through a group of friends having a conversation just to ask something unrelated.
But in chat rooms (and emails) you do. Easy for folks to get in a situation where dozens of people every day demand their attention and expect a response.
I do think projects like Bonfire is onto something. I will set up an instance to explore the details sometime this year, when time permits it.
But converting online chance encounters into actual meet-ups, social gatherings and dates is where we should be heading. It would be really nice to have this in a space without ads and the influence of the large corporations!
The problem isn't whether the meeting is digital or not, it's whether the platform (a physical space or an app) facilitates high-fidelity person-to-person and small group communication consistently over time (the norm for healthy human community), or if it's set up to encourage unnatural para-social relationships and dysfunctional, anti-social communication styles.
Don't start drinking or smoking, because with this logic you'll have a really hard time quitting
The synchronous nature of multiplayer games leaves most of this expression implicit rather than explicit, though, so for some people it doesn't fit the same need. It's a kind of role-play.
I think most people are, for lack of a better metaphor, blood-sucking vampires for honest, explicit, and carefully-crafted communication. People are pleased when I offer it, but they struggle to offer it back, so I learn to not bother. Most relationships degenerate into expressing things better left unsaid, or being entirely superficial.
Real world connection and a strong foundation of core friends, perhaps?
I don’t think you can do it without pushing people away somehow. It wouldn’t have to be regulatory, but I don’t know how else. Social shame might work if you could convince people it’s dorky and cringe to be on it too much, but the insidious nature of it is that the social media itself starts to comprise a big chunk of people’s social universe so it’s self-reinforcing.
I wonder if there is anything to learn from other additive things? like a niccotine gum mode. a social network that starts you off in addictive mode and tapers you down to something better?