this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2025
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It is time to move to darknets like: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veilid

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[–] RageAgainstTheRich@lemmy.world 92 points 1 week ago (3 children)

I cant even think of any legit reason to do this. To protect children? The government does not care about children. Its why so many suffer in poverty. Watching tits online is the least of their problems.

The only reasons i can think of is control. Forcing people to give up more information about themselves. Because knowledge is power.

[–] WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world 51 points 1 week ago

The reason is that we all live in capitalist dictatorships masquerading as "democracy", and are rapidly approaching a time when climate change, wealth inequality, and automation will see widespread revolt of the proles, so the ruling class is tightening its grip, and going all in on fascism.

[–] FreedomAdvocate@lemmy.net.au 37 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

If a government says they’re doing something “for the children” or “to fight terrorism”, it’s neither of those things - it’s for control. Those are just the go-to reasons they use to push them through because they can push the narrative that anyone against it supports terrorism/child abuse.

[–] FauxLiving@lemmy.world 21 points 1 week ago (4 children)

It's really simple.

The western democracies want to create a universal digital ID wallet and have that be required to access any site.

There are a lot of reasons they could want this. For example, there are probably tens of millions of fake accounts controlled by adversarial nations which are used to sow extremism and disinformation online. It is impossible for counterintelligence to detect these at scale. We can see the corrosive effects that social media is having on society, there are countries actively working to make the problem worse but we have no tools to stop them.

This is also why there is a big push to limit children from accessing social media. They're often the targets for these campaigns because they're easily manipulated and have a lot of free time to spread the misinformation once they're indoctrinated.

I don't think a digital ID is the way to solve this problem. But, we're not being asked or informed about why it is happening. They're, instead, trying to ram these measures through using moral panic about children so anybody opposing them is easily dismissed as "not caring about The Children" or "supporting sex trafficking/pedophiles/predators".

I understand the situation, but they're trying to go around the democratic process by not talking about the problems.

[–] vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org 0 points 5 days ago

It's really inconsequential why they want this. Their success means endgame.

The actions have consequences, and whether I'm breaking a window with a hammer to check how fragile it is or to go outside, it will have both those consequences.

We can see the corrosive effects that social media is having on society, there are countries actively working to make the problem worse but we have no tools to stop them.

You can have "disinformation and extremism" campaigns with only presenting truth or things posted by real people. Just like with political representation. Representatives are a subset of citizenry. The visible posts are a subset of all things posted. Except you can pick any subset you want, if you, say, classify posts by emotion and people by political alignment and what not.

One can have so much more believable bots today, that they won't be distinguishable from people, but those are beneficial as pressure, making the situation clear for normies, - with transparent identities of people, signing and globally addressing posts, you wouldn't fear bots and you wouldn't need a digital ID to access a website. And additionally you would have a way to double check the "color" of recommendations you get.

Thus the solutions they are picking are stabilizing the "disinformation and extremism" environment. With today's bots it will soon be utterly visibly useless to communicate over social media without what I've described. Which means, superficially paradoxically but really not, an end to such campaigns' efficiency.

So the claim of this helping fight such campaigns I have disproved.

I understand the situation, but they’re trying to go around the democratic process by not talking about the problems.

There's no "situation". "Situations" develop much faster. Such a "situation" didn't transpire in the early 00s Internet, despite plenty of people in it and no identities and regulation.

What "situation" would really look like, I have described - herds of LLM bots infesting social media, which would be beneficial for propaganda of a small amount of interested powerful parties, but will just make social media sour when everyone uses such. Which is fine, there is a technical solution, they just don't like it. They want the "situation" they describe, but in their favor. It's very convenient, a weapon evil useless jerks didn't have for a long time.

OK, I'm in Russia and don't affect anything. You protest, I'll cheer.

[–] Tryenjer@lemmy.world 0 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

Bullshit. Our leaders want more power over the masses, they want to become autocrats, that's it. Fuck them.

[–] jnod4@lemmy.ca 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)

So they're trying to censor any influence from adversarial nations to keep people from voting on politicians that would undermine the countries integrity?

[–] FauxLiving@lemmy.world 9 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

The problem of social manipulation via bots isn't limited to intelligence operations, though I would argue that this is the most immediate danger.

We're also seeing a huge spike in advertising bots pretending to be normal users just to push goods and services.

Because of these motives social media has become less about bringing people together and more about extracting information from people in order to more efficiently manipulate them.

It's causing social media to become actively dangerous to society in general. Ensuring that everyone is a human is an essential first step for having ethical online social interactions.

Just look at the difference in conversations on Lemmy vs Reddit. Sure, there are some assholes here and there but it's largely a calm place where you can have an actual conversation.

This is how online discourse used to be from the early BBS days right up until Facebook and algorithmically curated feeds discovered that fear, outrage and anger are the best drivers of engagement.

Now, in addition to the platform's manipulation (which is largely commercially motivated) we have LLMs which let anybody with funding create massive armies of fake people who can dynamically insert themselves into conversations in order to push any messaging you can imagine.

It's a bad situation that needs an immediate solution.

I just don't like that the solution has been decided on, in secret, by western democracies and is being forcefully implemented in a manner that also allows intelligence/law enforcement a backdoor into everything. (A digital ID also makes it very easy to view every users complete Internet history because that data is tagged with the users actual identity).

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[–] shneancy@lemmy.world 56 points 1 week ago (12 children)

the brits really need to learn from the french how to protest. it's been nearly a month and i haven't heard of even a measly car being set on fire, just one petition that got a reply akin to "lol, nah". the french would've set a car on fire for less is all i'm saying

[–] then_three_more@lemmy.world 33 points 1 week ago (1 children)

With regards to this most people are just ignoring the law. VPN use has gone through the roof.

[–] shneancy@lemmy.world 9 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

yeah and their government is planning on restricting VPN use because of that, they're not going to stop being dickheads, brits need to get their voices heard sooner rather than later

[–] then_three_more@lemmy.world 12 points 1 week ago (3 children)

They've said nothing of the sort.

[–] shneancy@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

i will admit, i do not remember where i got that info from, i thought it was part of the reply to the petition that was making rounds a week or so ago but i'm not sure now

[–] then_three_more@lemmy.world 2 points 6 days ago

I think there was a lot of speculation and jokes about that's what would happen next from people on here and other places.

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[–] themachinestops@lemmy.dbzer0.com 25 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)
[–] ladfrombrad 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Southport was a tinderbox, but the current trends if you're actually from the UK shows that there's a bonfire incoming.

You only have to watch a couple of YouTube live streams.....wait. Tomorrow I wait for age gating to see if Google is that.....nefarious in stopping me watching YTP vids without a passport.

Ima gonna giggle

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[–] mysticmartz@lemmy.world 51 points 1 week ago (3 children)

We need to build a decentralised internet quickly using I2P or something similar and scale and decentralise quickly. VPN’s will be the first to go then TOR after they attempt to control the exit nodes .

We need to show the governments that we are allowed to use encryption and Wikipedia and not be treated as criminals for wanting privacy .

[–] vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Something similar when using an operating system from Google and Apple, known for their attachment to privacy and noble behavior?

In any case, you can't have a mesh with ends reachable at all times or even addressed. Delay-tolerant applications are sort of better. With nodes synchronizing when in contact. Except for, say, threaded discussions to make sense, this would almost require some sort of dependency management, to synchronize objects by priority.

But honestly all of today's computing seems authoritarian and imperial. Which leads to the way it shapes the world. Richard Stallman is known for being worried about this (not many other people), but GNU + Hurd is honestly still in the same paradigm.

I wonder if it's possible to devise something like BTRON, except with program objects being similar to Java assemblies, but at the same time more like Common Lisp. For the commonly used software to be generally easily hackable\changeable. BTRON in its concept is nicer than Unix, it's a consistent idea for modernity of computing, one can say. It seems even nicer than Plan 9. Unfortunately I don't know Japanese to play with it.

Something that could be used on weak and cheap enough hardware to have some separate niche of personal\PDA computing based on it. Like Briar, but.

Things like CJDNS and Yggdrasil surely look nice, but those just change one layer. For a real totalitarian world they won't help. It's not even a matter of technology, it's a matter of links' capability when you can't use the Internet because, ahem, you'll be detected and police will come knocking.

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[–] themurphy@lemmy.ml 25 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Scotland might finally leave the UK because of this. It has been close before, but this must do it by now.

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[–] blinfabian@feddit.nl 13 points 1 week ago (3 children)

and stay out of the EU, england

[–] manualoverride@lemmy.world 10 points 1 week ago (11 children)

We don’t want this dystopian nightmare either, and just like Brexit we weren’t told what it was before it was too late. Hopefully you will welcome us back when all the liars are voted out and ignored.

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