Fediverse and parasocial relationships

  • Shouldn’t the fediverse discourage patterns that create parasocial relationships?

  • Wouldn’t it be better if the standard was a symmetrical relationship between users instead of the asymmetrical follow model?

  • Most big social medias thrive on parasocial-relations, is it necessary to emulate that model for success?

  • Shouldn’t we focus on community building and mutual friendship instead of forcing everyone to be a mini-celebrity?

  • Aren’t communities/groups better for discoverability than the public feeds of mastodon, pleroma,etc

  • LunaticHackerOP
    4·
    3 years ago

    This consumer-creator relationship is created by traditional social media to help monetize their platform.

    In my opinion, social media should be about making friends and being in communities,making space for content creators shouldn’t come at the expense of these things.

    • Liwott
      3·
      3 years ago

      I don’t think the “mutual connection” model helps so much in that respect. When the number of interested people becomes too much for the creator to keep up with, I see two outcomes :

      • they keep accepting people forever and get a subscribed feed they cannot keep up with, just answer some random people from time to time, and that becomes a parasocial relationship. In fact it probably just means they manually (privately) encode a list of people they actually follow, and for the others the mutual connection creates an illusion of friendship stronger than the ones in the follow model.

      • they stop accepting requests, or start deleting some other connections. That’s a shame for both the user who wanted to follow them, and from the artist themself who will never be able to really take off on the fediverse. They may end up leaving it (taking some followers with them), and that’s also a shame of the fediverse.

      • LunaticHackerOP
        4·
        3 years ago

        You’re seeing creators as an inalienable part of fediverse.I’m suggesting eliminating these ‘creators’ completely or separating them to a minority portion of fediverse(like peertube).

        Instead of fostering personal brands (which is just a consequence of corporate social media trying to incorporate brands into their platform for ads) and creating stans, We should focus on community building and making friends. So that every user is not compelled to write poetry and pose like supermodels in their feeds but to actually have real conversations

        • Liwott
          3·
          3 years ago

          I’m suggesting eliminating these ‘creators’ completely or separating them to a minority portion of fediverse(like peertube).

          Are you suggesting that every form of art disappear so that people have more time to talk about weather and politics? Or that art should not be shared through the internet?

          • LunaticHackerOP
            2·
            3 years ago

            No, I’m saying that instead creating a cult following around the artist, the art should be shared in dedicated communities, (like Lemmy) and mutual friendships should be created from discussions and conversations within the community.Thus the ‘influencer’ culture will be eliminated and people can focus more on the content of art without getting trapped in the parasocial relationships with the artist itself.

            • Liwott
              3·
              3 years ago

              I think you are dramatizing quite a bit, and overstating the role of following. Following someone’s updates doesn’t make you a stan or a cultist. I think a parasocial relationship can be quite harmless as long as you stay aware that it is one.

              On the other hand one can also overestimate how close they are to an acquaitance, thus having a kind of parafriendship, yet still compatible with mutual connection. In addition to that, a creator could just create a group that people can follow instead of their profile, and have a similar effect.

              In conclusion I don’t understand how one would get rid of the parasocial relationship. In fact, I don’t understand too much the why either.