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.
This is probably why the tech industry has been hardened against that sort of thing, and is, say, famously hard to unionize.
Communication is not for sale.
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.
Karl Marx 2.0 right there
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.
Yea agreed, but not Lemmy or Mastodon. Or, really anything with ActivityPub as these places are an echo chamber filled with trigger happy jannies who will ban you from a community if you have a differing of opinion to their groupthink.
Every person that has ever made a post like this has multiple comments defending Nazis.
Good thing I’m not defending any neo-Nazis
Sorry, I don’t carry on conversations with Nazi sympathizers. I hope you have an awful day.
I’m Jewish so it’s not possible. But cool story bro.
You do know that there are jewish nazis right?
i dont disagree implicitly with activitypub being echo chamber prone but its interesting that your most recent replies are litigating the veracity of a nazi salute caught on national television
Well, as a Jew, I haven’t seen anything else from Elon that’s emblematic of being a Nazi. Sure, he has some right wing beliefs, but those were pretty centrist ideals prior to the past decade. And I have encountered real neo-Nazis who have wished death upon my [k expletive] ass and attempted doxing. I think Elon is just an awkward person in general, but I’m not buying into the stats quo hype that he’s some neo-fascist, Hitler sympathizer. That’s just my opinion. You’re welcome to believe what you want too 👍
He made Twitter into a Nazi bar. This too. There’s plenty more that you can certainly find yourself if you actually look.
Are you suggesting that we shouldn’t be worried about toxically insecure people in power when they are behaving awkwardly? Does an appearance of awkwardness grant automatic innocence?
I have been be intensely awkward with my insecurity in the past, and in my awkwardness i have definitely hurt people. If the victims of my insecurity brushed me off as awkward they would be enabling me to continue to harm others
Let’s call it by it’s name: neofeudalism/technofeudalism
Unfortunately, Lemmy demonstrates pretty clearly that decentralized systems are just as vulnerable to propaganda and brain rot.
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.
You can certainly be censored on Lemmy, depending on your instance. But you can also easily go to another instance and still talk to everybody you used to talk to on the old instance.
Same thing with propaganda. Your instance can remove it from their hosted communities, or allow it. And you can go to an instance that feels good.
Does this lead to echo chambers? Probably.
Yes you can go elsewhere, but you lose your identity, history, relationship and reputation.
None of that is
imperativeimportant* to me on a place like this.You have almost 900 post, 9000 comments and you moderate 16 communities. You are a member of the delegate class whose intrinsic power comes from trapping users into their instances and communities by holding their account, history and relationships hostage.
You can prove me wrong and prove there is no friction to escaping your control by leaving the server sh.itjust.works
Consider yourself called out.
You have almost 900 post, 9000 comments
If I could hide the count I would
and you moderate 16 communities.
Yeah, and like half of them are niche with little to no other posters. Not exactly a powerful position. There’s a couple big ones that no one else was volunteering to help with. But I’m by no means I power mod. I want to help communities grow. Not police people. I wasn’t a mod on reddit if that’s what you’re thinking.
You are a member of the delegate class whose intrinsic power comes from trapping users into their instances and communities by holding their account, history and relationships hostage.
I don’t understand how you think I’m doing this? By being too active? If anything that should make people take me less seriously lol.
You can prove me wrong and prove there is no friction to escaping your control by leaving the server sh.itjust.works
For no reason other than what’s essentially a dare? I like the admins. And as pointed out I am active, it’s not like reddit where I could make a new acct and blend in as a new user. If I had a real reason to move I wouldn’t mind.
Consider yourself called out.
Nah
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.
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! !newcommunities@lemmy.world can help to find communities
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.
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.
Except the propaganda was explicitly grown on reddit.
Its time people learn this everything is run by humans and humans suck
It does? My experience (coming from Reddit) was the opposite. Maybe I was just surrounded by bots.
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.
At least we can easily pack up and move camp in familiar territory (same apps/frontends, etc.)
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.
I don’t think TV is very decentralized at all.
Well it helps, but if you live under an oligarchy they will find ways to stop uncontrolled social media.
You have to address the root of the problem or you will ultimately fail as soon as you get big enough to be a problem.
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.
It might be the only path forward.
I mean humanity survived thousands of years without any social media at all…
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…
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.
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.
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.
Word.
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”
Better you dont
Gore is probably gross medical pictures. Matrix is a chat room program.
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?
On decentralized media (Mastodon at the very least), you can move your account and your subscribers to any other instance whenever you want. You move with your audience, and they’ll barely notice any change, using the same app to keep following the same person automatically.
Oh cool, wasn’t aware of that.
And this is why I’m still on .ml there’s not a way to move on Lemmy. Yet
Luckily, there’s normally little cost to switching Lemmy instances anyway. You can even probably take the same username and register on another instance, quickly rebuild your feed and that’s mostly it.
As everything is connected and there’s not much reason accumulating account age/karma/you name it, the loss is pretty minor.
Tech Broligarchy*
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.
Federation provides some answers. While it is entirely possible to defederate everyone you as an admin disagree with or don’t want to promote, most commonly instances pick the option to not defederate all at will, as the majority of people actually prefers to be connected for the most part.
Although I realize something like this might not be possible, i’d love (in a theoretical perfect world) a delegative/liquid federation. where you can “delegate” your blocklist be an aggregate of other people’s blocklist, which would allow a community of users independent of any admin to create a decentralized blocklist based upon mutual trust. To word it with an example, if I trust user A, who in turn trusts user B and C’s idea of who(/what communities) to block, i’ll then be blocking the same people as user B and C.
It could work in reverse too, if I trust user A who allows anime communities and user B who allows game communities, then I can see anime and game communities. If people trust me, they can see the same thing i’m seeing. Imo that would spur user interaction and make a decentralized way to not put any one person in power. If user B suddenly decides to only trust fascists, I don’t have to trust them anymore and those changes would be propagated.
I don’t know if that made sense, so sorry if that explanation is wack! It is loosely based on this concept that I read from awhile ago, for which I haven’t thought of the possible downsides.
Will not happen on lemmy, structurally the power flows from instance owners and their delegates. Their power to shape discourse and association and to steer thoughts of the lemmy user will not be relinquished. The first fundamental block to this, like on mastodon, is their power to silence and eliminate users from lemmy history without recourse and with transparency at their discretion.
I don’t believe the transitive principle of trust that you cite is all that workable, unless it can be done at a finer granularity.
In my own case, I (A) trust B and C. But B doesn’t trust C, for reasons that have conditioned my relationships with both B and C so that I can still trust them. The reason for that is that trust is multifactorial: A can trust B for some things, not others. So what we’re trying to model is an ontological relation, not just a directed acyclic graph.
Based on that, the best we can probably achieve is being able to set the degrees of separation of delegated trust (maybe 2 hops and that’s all in my case), and add the ability to subclass or otherwise tweak someone else’s blocklist (say, B’s a fine person but habitually forwards Joe Rogan crap that I find to be nothing but vexatious noise), or C despises my favorite band but is otherwise quite sound, etc.
That’s a cool concept, but there are indeed some caveats to address, especially with the propagation part. For example, if you rely on user A to filter you gaming posts, and they suddenly decide they’re not into gaming anymore, you and everyone who relies on you will not get gaming feeds anymore. Or if he is a sudden Nazi, not only you but people who trust you will get that content until you react (and until then, some others will unsubscribe you).
With a complicated enough network of trusted people, this will trigger a chaotic chain reaction that will make your feed less stable than a chair with one leg.
Also, conflicts should be resolved somehow. If a person A whitelists some content and person B blacklists it, and you follow both, what should be done?
One way to go about it is to create a limited list of authorities, but that obviously comes with the danger of someone having too much power. You can make groups of people vote for inclusion or exclusion of topics, but it’s not feasible to vote for every single filter because there are simply too many. You can elect someone to do this, but we know what may happen to elected officials.
and they suddenly decide they’re not into gaming anymore, you and everyone who relies on you will not get gaming feeds anymore
I was thinking along the same lines for different reasons. For multi-hop trust delegations, I’d really want a way to see what I’m seeing through the composition of all those blocklists. And once I’ve seen that, a “flatten into my own blocklist” command might be interesting: I want a snapshot of how A through B through C would look, and I’d like to mash it down into my own list so I can manage it there.
If a person A whitelists some content and person B blacklists it, and you follow both, what should be done?
Merge conflict alerts, just like version-control systems use? Allowing an order of precedence would be another way, but I think it’d get messy fast.
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.
There it is, in every shoddy analysis someone has to mix up the thing we have with “the only thing possible”.
Echo chambers aren’t part of “human nature”, they’re designed into the algorithms by the broligarchs to rachet up engagement – giving them $$$ – while making it impossible to build consensus and community in a way that threatens them.
Up until a couple of decades ago, there weren’t widespread echo chambers on the Internet. The first version of websites (even social ones) were simple chronological feeds. Nowadays, thanks to the assmasters in charge you don’t even know what you aren’t seeing online on most of these sites. Comments look completely different based upon even simple things like gender.
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.
The heads yearn for the guillotines
But what about places where heads won’t roll? They deserve a space to be able to access.
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!
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.
Removed by mod
