A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, Mbin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration)
On my fediverse accounts:
And yet somehow it is addictive enough, whereas Facebook and Reddit made me angry enough to quit them forever.
u wot m8
The article simultaneously takes the positions:
Do they not see that these are, at least in practice, contradictory positions? For big tech companies, it's possible to comply with the kinds of government regulations described there, they have hordes of lawyers who can advise them how to do that. For fediverse instance admins meanwhile, it is a lot more difficult to do that. The future of the fediverse absolutely depends on governments staying out of the Internet as much as possible, especially from applying their laws to foreign website operators. All that government regulation does is make sure no one who doesn't have a revenue from which they can pay any claims they are liable for can ever operate a website where users can participate.
I disagree. I think that you can have both.
I think big tech has proven that it cannot be trusted. Their priorities are simply not in alignment with our own. Legislation seems to be the only lever that can hope to rein them in (market forces are no longer strong enough).
At the same time, smaller networks do not have the resources to comply with government regulations to a T, and so they should be given a longer leash. Governments also do not have the resources to chase down every Tom, Dick, and Harry running a Lemmy server (well, they do, but they shouldn't.)
Whether reality will play out this way is uncertain.
I think big tech has proven that it cannot be trusted. Their priorities are simply not in alignment with our own.
agreed
Legislation seems to be the only lever that can hope to rein them in (market forces are no longer strong enough).
I don't agree. The Internet, at least when not regulated to death, allows new websites to rise and old ones to fall, this has happened many times and can happen again in the future.
At the same time, smaller networks do not have the resources to comply with government regulations to a T
agreed
and so they should be given a longer leash
Not easy to implement in terms of legislation.
Governments also do not have the resources to chase down
and you want to rely on governments not having resources to do things that laws say they could do?
In my opinion, social media is not the biggest threat to kids - algorithms are. I fully support the SoMe restrictions on kids, but could possibly accept a fediverse partition if the server would be maintained by the community, school or some trustworthy non-profit.
algorithms are
Everything that happens on a computer is based on algorithms. Chronological sorting of everything you're following is still an algorithm. But I get what you mean.
I agree with you that modern personalized recommendation algorithms like the big social media platforms are based on are not a good thing (for people of any age). They break the Internet's original promise that it should be the general public who decides on what we exchange ideas about on the Internet. They turn social media operators into (essentially) media companies by picking winners with lots of reach and losers with little reach...
But none of that has anything to do with how old any users are.
Algorithms are the real story here, not platforms. A fediverse server can run the same recommendation engines that optimize for engagement over substance. What I care about is building systems where disagreement actually gets preserved, not hidden behind engagement-optimization. That is why I am mapping public opinion through email responses—people can take time to think before they write. No feeds. No virality incentives. Just substance.
The jury found tech firms treated addictiveness as a feature, not a bug
No shit, Sherlock! 😮
IEEE publishing on fediverse topics is interesting. They’ve been around since 1963, basically invented half of modern tech, and now they’re writing about decentralized social networks.
The signal here is that the old guard is finally acknowledging that Web 2.0 isn’t working. IEEE has a reputation for being conservative. If they’re talking about fediverse, it’s not just a fad anymore.
Still odd though. IEEE Spectrum is probably the last place I’d expect to find people discussing Mastodon and ActivityPub.
Algorithms are definitely the real story here. IEEE has been around forever but they are finally talking about fediverse topics because the alternative to recommendation engines is actually working at scale. That is not a small thing. We built something similar at The Zeitgeist Experiment where people respond to questions via email and AI ranks the responses by idea, not by engagement. No likes, no follower counts, just the actual thoughts. It has about 500 responses so far and the signal is clearer than anything on social media.
So... Is it an article to promote/defend the actions of the Big Brother State?
Whenever I see "regulating social medias", I get a cold sweat, reminded of what the current Brazilian government's been insisting on for years, in practice internet censorship.
No, you are sharing the section of the post where they point out the actions of a big brother state