Honest question, what are the incentives for instance operators to play nice, so to speak? And not just recreate new oligarch safe havens?
It seems like each instance is a miniature zone of centralization and it’s still incumbent on individuals to create their own circles of influence. For better or worse that’s how we get hivemind echo chambers and I’m not sure it’s even in human nature to seek anything else.
Alternatively we have to rescue our friends and families when they start to fall for BS and educate them aggressively on improving the sourcing of their information.
I haven’t read the full article due to sign up paywall, but…
First, millions of small business owners and influencers who make a living on TikTok were left to beg their followers in TikTok’s last moments to follow them elsewhere in hopes of being able to continue their businesses on other corporate social media platforms. This had the effect of fracturing and destroying people’s audiences overnight, with one act of government.
How is decentralised social media going to help with this if the entire point of decentralisation is the opposite?
I just wish we had a bit more political balance here… I’m not talking about fascists, but more people that don’t blame everything on capitalism would be kind of nice…
Not trying to get into a whole ugly thing, just curious what your pro-capitalism stance is. Because I would definitely fall into this big Lemmy category of seeing 90-905% of modern problems being rooted in capitalism. So I would (civilly!) disagree, no doubt. Doesn’t mean we can’t have a reasonable discussion!
That’s gonna be kind of an issue in a network where civil discourse and disagreement falls between calling people a Nazi/fascist at best and wishing them double death by murder rape at worst
How do we protect ourselves from propagandists and censors? Large, small, popular and individual.
Preaching to the choir!
I’m not so sure. Depends if there’s a solution to the bots. Bluesky is inundated with them already.
I dont want to deal with people gore spamming every single Matrix channel again.
I don’t understand this sentence. The two words I don’t know in this context are “gore” and “matrix”
It might be the only path forward.
I mean humanity survived thousands of years without any social media at all…
Gonna disagree here.
Humans have always had “social media”, but it’s not been directed by a cadre of oligarchs until recently.
I mean shit, humans have been sitting around the campfire telling stories to each other going all the fucking way back to forever. Sure, a campfire story isn’t a tweet, but for our monkey brains it’s essentially the same thing: how we interact with our social groups and learn what’s going on around us.
The problem is that the campfire stories couldn’t be manipulated into making your cavemen neighbors hate the other half, because half of them were totally pro rabbit fur while you’re pro squirrel fur.
You absolutely can do that and worse now, so while we’ve always had social media, we just simply never had anyone with enough control to make an entire society eat each other because of it’s influence.
Lol chimpanzees kill each other in literal wars with torture, kidnapping, extortion, terrorism and more, and you think a caveman never thought of lying about the enemy group?
This is the better path forward… That everyone just gets so sick of it that they drop it - I’ve actually seen a lot of that among my own friends over the last week (and we aren’t from America even). But the right wingers will never drop it because it’s their community and echo chamber, and that’s where the further dangers to democracy come into play when they’re all in the sandbox together without parents…
Guillotines are another option.
More will just spawn and take their place.
More heads require more guillotines.
Can we not design guillotines that cut multiple heads at once, thus reducing the head to guillotine ratio?
You’re onto something here.
I guess we could stack the rich on top of each other. That way we wouldn’t even have to modify the guillotine. We’d just have to make sure the blade is extra sharp.
Make the design 4D, and stack them in multiple dimensions, maybe one 4D guillotine is even sufficient?
And for testing purposes, we could try them on the designers!
What a blast!
But what about places where heads won’t roll? They deserve a space to be able to access.
The heads yearn for the guillotines
My own “we need” list, from a dork who stood up a web server nearly 25 years ago to host weeb crap for friends on IRC:
We need a baseline security architecture recipe people can follow, to cover the huge gap in needs between “I’m running one thing for the general public and I hope it doesn’t get hacked” and “I’m running a hundred things in different VMs and containers and I don’t want to lose everything when just one of them gets hacked.”
(I’m slowly building something like this for mspencer.net but it’s difficult. I’ll happily share what I learn for others to copy, since I have no proprietary interest in it, but I kinda suck at this and someone else succeeding first is far more likely)
We need innovative ways to represent the various ideas, contributions, debates, informative replies, and everything else we share, beyond just free form text with an image. Private communities get drowned in spam and “brain resource exhaustion attacks” without it. Decompose the task of moderation into pieces that can be divided up and audited, where right now they’re all very top down.
Distributed identity management (original 90s PGP web of trust type stuff) can allow moderating users without mass-judging entire instances or network services. Users have keys and sign stuff, and those cryptographic signatures can be used to prove “you said you would honor rule X, but you broke that rule here, as attested to by these signing users.” So people or communities that care about rule X know to maybe not trust that user to follow that rule.
honestly, i’ll donate money to whomever can design this and make it scalable.
I think the key is building a social information system based on connections we have in real life. Key exchange parties, etc
It’s the only way to introduce a prohibitively high cost to centralized broadcast and reduce the power of these mega-entities
Could you clarify? A sneaker net? Peer to peer?
I think the good news is, regardless of what gets done, people are hungry for real connections and the old internet.
Decentralized money as well. We need to move away from the control of government and corporations (they are now one and the same). I’m putting more and more of my money in bitcoin. The dollar will continue to erode while wages stay flat. And Trump and his new oligarch buddies will completely decimate the American economy and stock market while they make out like bandits, leaving everyone else the bag holder. Your 401k isn’t safe anymore.
Same but with Monero. I don’t need my friends, neighbors, $5 wrench attackers, and governments knowing how much money I have. And neither should you.
Trust me bro, if your underground stash of money is robbed or stolen because you refuse to trust a bank to safeguard it, it will be considered your fault
Unfortunately, Lemmy demonstrates pretty clearly that decentralized systems are just as vulnerable to propaganda and brain rot.
Except the propaganda was explicitly grown on reddit.
That’s the nature of the beast. You can’t have human users on a network without at least some slop.
But the decentralized network ensures that a “techno-baron” has no more say than you or I, which is exactly what the internet is supposed to do.
That’s decidedly better than a centralized system, especially now.
I think we have to build systems that use real-life interpersonal trust networks so that centralized entities cannot just outspend and bot their way to prominence.
Its time people learn this everything is run by humans and humans suck
At least we can easily pack up and move camp in familiar territory (same apps/frontends, etc.)
Humans are vulnerable to propaganda. Lemmy’s architecture is against censorship. This helps to push back against propaganda, but only so much. But at least not being censored is a big win IMO.
So long as it is humans posting this will be a problem. The benefit of a federated system is that you can’t compromise the person at the top and then everything collapses.
I just jumped on here today (from seeing this article on Reddit) but my understanding is that the advantage is that the CEO can’t decide he wants to suck authoritarian cock and destroy our ability to discuss and/or organize.
(Admittedly I joined the biggest server I could find so I kind of violated that idea as well).
Welcome! Some people have gripes with dot world for being the biggest, etc. but generally you’ll be fine.
You can always search for communities here as well. .
There’s many apps and frontends and too. Some are preincluded into lemmy.world. If you like old reddit try old lemmy for example.
Welcome! !newcommunities@lemmy.world can help to find communities
Really? Just as? There are rogue groups and certainly rogue mods and individuals with axes to grind, but I’ve never dealt that there was anything on a system wide basis or anything that was driven by profit here. There’s some really wild hive-mind attitudes here too but, I don’t see how it could possibly be as attractive as centralized platforms for manipulation, profit, or thought control. Feel free to shine some light on my naivety if there’s something I’m missing here.
Decentralized is too complicated. Worker owned is a better path forward and is centralized so it’s easier to support and be understood by its users. Moderators are workers and should have equity.
Karl Marx 2.0 right there
Communication is not for sale.
I think if we had co-ops running some of these systems it would definitely alleviate some issues
I can imagine better and safer infrastructure, along with better funding alternatives than “please donate to your instance”. If people can make a living from maintaining an instance, service can be hugely improved. Think most people are running instances on their own spare time and resources.
This is early days; I have a feeling in a few short years there will be ownership and simplicity of distributed services and whatever evolves from them.
I want to believe, but decentralizing is what got us into this mess. The Fox people lived in their own world long enough that it created this whole alternate reality that spawned Trump.
If we keep our heads in the sand 2028 is going to end up exactly the same and we will all be scratching our heads when the Undertaker becomes president.
Correct
