I've never really got social media in any of its forms. I use messaging apps to stay in contact with people I like, but that's about it.
I skimmed this article, I still don't get it. I think group chats cover most of what the author is taking about, public and private ones. But this might be my lack of imagination. I feel there article, and by extension, the talk could have been a lot shorter.
> The days of people posting their weekend on Facebook are long gone.
All of my friends do this on instagram or snap.
Group chats are lowercase S social media but they still benefit from being open.
> By open do you mean not centralised? I don't get the significance of big S social media. Functionally how would big S improve on group chats?
Social media has two functions: chat (within groups/topics/...) and discovery (of groups/topics/...). So unless we rely only on IRL discovery, we need a way to do discovery online.
> skimmed this article, I still don't get it.
But you're posting here, in socisl media, no? So you sought out something here that a group chat wouldn't give.
Most of the article here is focused more on making sure any social media (be it chats, a public forum, or email) isn't hijacked by vested powers who want to spread propaganda or drown the user in ads. One approach to that focused in this article is decentralization, which gives a user the ability to take their ball and go home.
Of course, it's futile if the user doesn't care about wielding that power.