I have a feeling this place and other decentralized social medias will be banned in the near future. Look at what’s happening to TIktok. You either bend the knee or you get axed. It’s why the other social media giants bent the knee. They understand the writing on the wall. There’s more going on behind the scenes that they don’t share with us. I think we’re sort of watching a quiet coup.
If social media becomes decentralized we might even gain traction reversing some of the brainwashing on the masses. The current giants are just propaganda machines. Always have been, but it’s now blatant and obvious. They don’t even care to hide it.
Let’s call it by it’s name: neofeudalism/technofeudalism
In the same way that email has been decentralized from the get go, social media could have been equally decentralized, and I don’t mean in the older php forums, but in a different way that would allow people to reconnect with others and maintain contacts.
Tech Broligarchy*
Hey, that’s us!
There’s another alternative, which is no social media at all. There is no particular problem that it solved. If it disappeared, would your quality of life be worse in any way?
Removed by mod
Word.
google hasn’t done much with YouTube yet
Preaching to the choir!
It might be good to reiterate (in part) why we’re all in here.
Guillotines are another option.
More will just spawn and take their place.
actually, if we could remove the sociopaths from power, it would allow academics to over. it’s not that hard to engineer a society where people aren’t like they are now. we’re learned behavior creatures. it’s possible to unlearn what we know now and teach our children to never be this way again.
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.
What really matters is the back-to-nose distance, this gives you the head-per-chop ratio but also drives the max-head-per-chop value which itself depends on the blade weight and max blade height which limited by the ceiling height if inside or the max free standing of the pillars if outside.
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!
The heads yearn for the guillotines
But what about places where heads won’t roll? They deserve a space to be able to access.
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.
Plus we can have AI read a post history for us and either make a reputational decision, or highlight in the interface how reputable or disreputable tye user is. You could have it collapse but not delete a user’s comment and you could also lower and raise the bar of acceptibility at anytime. We need better tools than a polished BBS descendant.
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.
Peer to peer.
I’ve spent a bit of time developing some related ideas, but haven’t had time to start building it.
It’s a bit rough still, but I’d love some feedback! https://freetheinter.net/
honestly, i’ll donate money to whomever can design this and make it scalable.
It might be the only path forward.
I mean humanity survived thousands of years without any social media at all…
There was not a 8 billion people supply chain back then.
Yeah, which actually underlines my point even. We weren’t “designed” for connecting with everyone around the world. Evolutionary there were smaller groups, sometimes having contact with other groups.
Today we can just connect with our bubbles (like here on lemmy) and get validated and reinforce our beliefs independently if they are right or wrong (mostly factually). As we see this doesn’t seems to be healthy for most people. In smaller circles (like scientific community) this helps, but in general… Well I don’t think I have to explain the situation on the world (and especially currently in the USA) currently…
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.
There’s a big difference between sitting around a fire telling stories. And sending pseudonymous click-baity messages (I’m slightly exaggerating) across the globe.
As it’s not guaranteed anymore: Have you sit around a fire with friends? IME it’s so much more fulfilling and less prone to hate. Healthier (apart of the smoke). There’s so much more to communication than text messages.
There’s a big difference between sitting around a fire telling stories. And sending pseudonymous click-baity messages (I’m slightly exaggerating) across the globe.
Totally agree, except that regardless of how smart a person is…all our brains are pretty dumb and easy to fool. If reading stupid click-bait messages on the internet triggers the same connections as having a talk around the fire, then to our brains it’s literally the same. And it has all the same things, just more so. Is someone more likely to lie to you for their own ends on the internet? Probably, but your best friend would like to your face if their mental maths figured that lying would benefit them more than telling the truth. Not saying that society is doomed because we’re all inherently selfish and don’t care about the welfare of anyone past ourselves. But to say that social media doesn’t fill the same function as village gatherings, the town crier exclaiming news where you might not get word, or gathering around the fire with Oogtug and Feffaguh to tell eachother about your day…in the current era, when people are more socially isolated than ever? Nah. Doesn’t track for me.
all our brains are pretty dumb and easy to fool.
Absolutely, but I think that when we’re talking to actually smart people in person we at least subconsciously more likely believe the person that actually has to say something (i.e. really knows something we don’t). With social media a lot of these communication factors are missing, so if the text sounds smart, we may believe it. Sure you can fake and lie, etc. but I think (going back in time) we have a good instinct for people that may help us in any way i.e. through knowledge where to find food, find secure shelter etc. stuff that helps our survival, which in the end for humans is basically good factual knowledge that helps the survival of the species as a whole.
Today our attention spans are reduced to basically nothing to a large part because of social media promoting emotional (unfortunately mostly negative/anxiety/anger) short messages (and ads of course) that reinforce whatever we believe which likely strengthens bad connections in the brain.
Also the sheer mass of information is very likely not good for us. I.e. mostly nonfactual information, because well, there’s way more people that “have heard about something” than actually researched and gone down to the ground to get the truth (or at least a good model of it).
This all mixed, well doesn’t give me a positive outlook unfortunately…
You certainly could tell cavemen stories to manipulate them, back then.
The difference was you could only reach one campfire at a time. Nowadays the whole Internet is one campfire, metaphorically.
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?
The previous post didn’t talk about inter-campfire relations. It talked about relations between people in one campfire. Relations with outsiders have always been fucky. It’s a miracle how the EU even came to be in the first place with how different everything/everyone is.
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…
