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.
this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2025
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check out “the gentleman’s guide to forum sliding”….
as long as teams of people sit in a row of computers using dozens of sock puppets, no place is safe once it gets kinda popular….
Assuming you're talking about this? https://cryptome.org/2012/07/gent-forum-spies.htm
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This is why I don't agree with the "lemmy is cozy, it doesn't need to grow" point of view. There's always specific, largely defederated instances that provide that cozy feeling, but I really want decentralized platforms to replace the corporate ones. If that's ever going to happen, the fediverse needs to grow.
I think it doesn't need to rapidly grow. The trickle of new users we get each time the main players fuck up is good enough for me.
Hey, that's us!
Let's call it by it's name: neofeudalism/technofeudalism
When I saw this article I was like oh damn if I post it here I’ll get loads of upvotes lmao.
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I'm thinking of starting a friendica node for my city. I feel that a big problem with federated apps is that the audience isn't local enough; it's usually mostly tech-oriented people and doesn't have enough local services.
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.
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I am so happy I have an account on here, even if some people can be quite abrasive
We tend to have strong opinions here that's for sure. Most people are good about giving space for honest discussion, which is nice.
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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?
Forums and communities like these were very important for me growing up in the rural US South
Same here. Forums (about science fiction, aeromodelism, electric vehicles) have been important to me, and continue to be important in some fields.
I'm actually going to suggest; Yes, possibly. But for a very specific reason.
While much of social media isn't ultra necessary, federated social media could be quite essential to collectivising and resisting state and corporate manipulation and propaganda. All other forms of media and news are corporate or state controlled, and thus can construct and project false narritives that are beneficial to their aims, much to our collective detriment.
Social media has become the dominant way that many, possibly most people, see the news, discuss such news with eachother from people around the globe, and build a picture of what's going on outside of their isolated part of the world. I think Noam Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent gives a pretty fantastic argument on the importance of citizen controlled media, and federated social media is about as citizen controlled as it can possibly get. It's non-corporate self-hosted open source software as far as the eye can see! It's not perfect, but holy shit this is as powerful as a tool to diseminate ideas and information on a grassroots level that we've ever had, and we should not underestimate its usefulness in the coming decade.
I could live without all the news and stuff, and I do just ignore it when it gets too much. The ability to communicate with other people across the entire world however is something I really appreciate.
We wouldn't be having this conversation though.
I do love to crank ma hog with my bröthers, arooooo
Sounds great, but completely unrealistic. People have almost universally embraced social media because we're social animals. How would it disappear, short of an outright global ban?
Sometimes when it gets overwhelming I don't do any news or social media at all for a few weeks. It seems to help my mental health, particularly when every bit of news suggests that everything is going to shit.
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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.
Not saying you are wrong if anything though I think Reddit is probably the next obvious victim after TikTok they'll simply point to the Chinese Tencent who own shares and the next thing you know Musk will be part owner.
Fediverse I think will probably be the last hit simply because it's small and because of the design can't be hit easily, wouldn't surprise me if they just targeted the biggest servers though.
A decent amount of the larger servers are hosted outside the US, which might complicates matters. However, many also use Cloudflare (US based) as a proxy, which might make targeting the Fediverse easier.
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Realistically if it is hit it'll be through some sweeping "social media safety" bill that makes the cost of administrating a social media site as a hobby prohibitively expensive and/or time consuming, maybe even as on the nose as requiring the software to receive a specific certification before it's allowed to open registration.
We've already seen the UK's online safety bill cause many admins of small forums and communities to shutter their communities as a result, and who knows how Australia's recent social media bill will affect Australian Fediverse servers & users
Isn’t decentralization a thing that makes that much harder? There isn’t the same “national security” concern. I’m not saying it won’t happen just that the mechanism is much more difficult to make work.
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All we need is people at this point. Still way too many people on Reddit and they've gone downhill significantly since the push for monetization
Reddit became an outrage factory for me in ways that other social media doesn't. Facebook et al would push political news at me that was meant to piss me off, but Reddit suggests me nothing but videos of people being assholes in public, cutting each other off in traffic, getting into fights, etc. It's like clockwork orange or some shit. I like that here, I can set my default algorithm to only subs (are they called subs?) that I subscribe to, in chronological order only.
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More people will bring a lot of interesting problems we don't have right now. First and probably most important is money. High intensity traffic and storage is exponentially more expensive with increased load, and I don't know if it's possible to afford it without some kind of monetization
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Tech Broligarchy*
Distributed (and zero configuration needed), but with centralized development. Federated is not good enough - separate instances may lag behind in versions, or their admins do something wrong, and user identities and posts are tied to them.
Ideally when an instance goes down, all its posts and comments and users are replicated in the network and possible to get.
A distributed Usenet with rich text, hyperlinks, file attachments, cryptographic identities, pluggable naming\spam-checking\hatespeech-checking services (themselves part of that system).
It was a good system for its time, first large global thing for asynchronous electronic communication.
OK, if you are, you don't pretend, and if you pretend, you aren't. And if you talk about someone somewhere probably designing something, then you are not making that something closer. I'm tired of typing things in the interwebs people either already know and agree with, or won't take seriously.
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Word.
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