Maybe we should not have connected

Ghost announced beta start for the social web. I have thoughts about it, the product that it is, in its current state.

Kojima announced release date for DS2. I mentioned that in last week’s NordLetter.

During my walk yesterday I was thinking about the social web, the Mastodon model of things, about how by design Mastodon is supposed to have a federation of smaller instances. About how any one Mastodon instance can never match up against the size of a Twitter or X or Facebook or Instagram, whatever.

I was thinking about this, and remembered the tagline that was there in the DS2 release trailer.

We should not have connected

Death Stranding was about connecting different population centres in the United States after a disaster. DS2 will be about the effects of that connection.

I thought about the parallels between the two. Between, how we might think that maybe smaller, federated, instances is the solution instead of having one huge instance.

The big instances have these tendencies, these inevitabilities built into them. Your voices get multiplied, you get massive reach and you get influencers.

Fediverse could be the solution to this. You could have smaller instances, in your communities, universities, for example. You just talk to your colleagues, friends, whoever. You know mostly the people that are there. You can be civil about it. It can be a nice place. You can have your own rules.

Just because something is dominant, does not mean it is right. There are usually always better alternatives.

Maybe, we should never have connected.