Decentralized Social Media Is the Only Alternative to the Tech Oligarchy

Agreed. But we need a solution against bots just as much. There's no way the majority of comments in the near future won't just be LLMs.
- Closed instances with vetted members, there’s no other way.
  
  Too high of a barrier to entry is doomed to fail.
  
  If you could vet members in any meaningful way, they'd be doing it already.
  
  Isn't that basically the same result though...
  Problem with tech oligarchy is it just takes one person to get corrupted and then he blocks out all opinion that attacks his goals.
  So the solution is federation, free speech instances that everyone can say whatever they want no matter how unpopular.
  How do we counteract the bots...
  Well we need the instances to verify who gets in, and make sure the members aren't bots or saying unpopular things. These instances will need to be big, and well funded.
  How do we counter these instance owners getting bought out, corrupted (repeat loop).
  
  How is it going to be as big as reddit if EVERYONE is vetted?
  
  There might be clever ways of doing this: Having volunteers help with the vetting process, allowing a certain number of members per day + a queue and then vetting them along the way...
  
  Can you have an instance that allows viewing other instances, but others can't see in?
  
  Vetted members could still bot though or have ther accounts compromised. Not a realistic solution.
- Instances that don’t vet users sufficiently get defederated for spam. Users then leave for instances that don’t get blocked. If instances are too heavy handed in their moderation then users leave those instances for more open ones and the market of the fediverse will balance itself out to what the users want.
  
  I wish this was the case but the average user is uninformed and can’t be bothered leaving.
  Otherwise the bigger service would be lemmy, not reddit.
  the market of the fediverse will balance itself out to what the users want.
  Just like classical macroeconomics, you make the deadly (false) assumption that users are rational and will make the choice that’s best for them.
- we have to use trust from real life. it's the only thing that centralized entities can't fake
- We could ask for anonymous digital certificates. It works this way.
  Many countries already emit digital certificates for it's citizens. Only one certificate by id. Then anonymous certificates could be made. The anonymous certificate contains enough information to be verificable as valid but not enough to identify the user. Websites could ask for an anonymous certificate for register/login. With the certificate they would validate that it's an human being while keeping that human being anonymous. The only leaked data would probably be the country of origin as these certificates tend to be authentificated by a national AC.
  The only problem I see in this is international adoption outside fully developed countries: many countries not being able to provide this for their citizens, having lower security standards so fraudulent certificates could be made, or a big enough poor population that would gladly sell their certificate for bot farms.
  
  Your last sentence highlights the problem. I can have a bot that posts for me. Also, if an authority is in charge of issuing the certificates then they have an incentive to create some fake ones.
  Bots are vastly more useful as the ratio of bots to humans drops.
- A simple thing that may help a lot is for all new accounts to be flagged as bots, requiring opt out of the status for normal users. It's a small thing, but any barrier is one more step a bot farm has to overcome.
  
  I subscribed to the arch gitlab last week and there was a 12 step identification process that was completely ridiculous. It's clear 99.99% of users will just give up.
- I feel like it's only a matter of time before most people just have AI's write their posts.
  The rest of us with brains, that don't post our status as if the entire world cares, will likely be here, or some place similar... Screaming into the wind.
  
  I feel like it’s only a matter of time before most people just have AI’s write their posts.
  That's going right into /dev/null as soon as I detect it-- both user and content.
- I mentioned this in another comment, but we need to somehow move away from free form text. So here’s a super flawed makes-you-think idea to start the conversation:
  Suppose you had an alternative kind of Lemmy instance where every post has to include both the post like normal and a “Simple English” summary of your own post. (Like, using only the “ten hundred most common words” Simple English) If your summary doesn’t match your text, that’s bannable. (It’s a hypothetical, just go with me on this.)
  Now you have simple text you can search against, use automated moderation tools on, and run scripts against. If there’s a debate, code can follow the conversation and intervene if someone is being dishonest. If lots of users are saying the same thing, their statements can be merged to avoid duplicate effort. If someone is breaking the rules, rule enforcement can be automated.
  Ok so obviously this idea as written can never work. (Though I love the idea of brand new users only being allowed to post in Simple English until they are allow-listed, to avoid spam, but that’s a different thing.) But the essence and meaning of a post can be represented in some way. Analyze things automatically with an LLM, make people diagram their sentences like English class, I don’t know.
  
  A bot can do that and do it at scale.
  I think we are going to need to reconceptualize the Internet and why we are on here at all.
  It already is practically impossible to stop bots and I'm a very short time it'll be completely impossible.
  
  It sounds like you're describing doublespeak from 1984.
  Simplifying language removes nuance. If you make moderation decisions based on the simple English vs. what the person is actually saying, then you're policing the simple English more than the nuanced take.
  I've got a knee-jerk reaction against simplifying language past the point of clarity, and especially automated tools trying to understand it.
- What? I post a lot, but the majority?
  ...oh, you said LLM. I thought you said LMM.
- Also is data scraping as much of an issue?
  
  Data scraping is a logical consequence of being an open protocol, and as such I don't think it's worth investing much time in resisting it so long as it's not impacting instance health. At least while the user experience and basic federation issues are still extant.
- We need digital identities, like, yesterday.
  
  Yeah I'm not seeing any way around that sadly. At least for places where you want/need to know the content is from an actual person.
- Decentralized authentication system that support pseudonymous handles. The authentication system would have optional verification levels.
  So I wouldn't know who you are but I would know that you have verified against some form of id.
  The next step would then by attributes one of which is your real name but also country of birth, race, gender, and other non-mutable attributes that can be used but not polled.
  So I could post that I am Bob living in Arizona and I was born in Nepal and those would be tagged as verified, but someone couldn't reverse that and request if I want to post without revealing those bits of data.
- I think it would make sense to channel all bots/propaganda into some concentrated channels. Something like https://lemmygrad.ml/u/yogthos where you can just block all propaganda by blocking one account.
- There are simple tests to out LLMs, mostly things that will trip up the tokenizers or sampling algorithms (with character counting being the most famous example). I know people hate captchas, but it’s a small price to pay.
  Also, while no one really wants to hear this, locally hosted "automod" LLMs could help seek out spam too. Or maybe even a Kobold Hoard type "swarm."
  
  Captchas don't do shit and have actually been training for computer vision for probably over a decade at this point.
  Also: Any "simple test" is fixed in the next version. It is similar to how people still insist "AI can't do feet" (much like rob liefeld). That was fixed pretty quick it is just that much of the freeware out there is using very outdated models.
- Reputation systems. There is tech that solves this but Lemmy won’t like it (blockchain)
  
  You don't need blockchain for reputations systems, lol. Stuff like Gnutella and PGP web-of-trust have been around forever. Admittedly, the blockchain can add barriers for some attacks; mainly sybil attacks, but a friend-of-a-friend/WoT network structure can mitigate that somewhat too,
  
  Do you have a proof of concept that works?
- We also need a solution to fucking despot mods and admins deleting comments and posts left-and-right because it doesn't align with their personal views.
  I've seen it happen to me personally across multiple Lemmy domains (I'm a moron and don't care much to have empathy in my writing, and it sets these limp-wrist morbidly obese mods/admins to delete my shit and ban me), and it happens to many people as well.
  
  Yeah you can go fuck yourself for pinning your flavor of bullshit on ADHD. Take some accountability for your actions.
  
  Don’t go blaming your inability to have empathy on adhd. That is in absolutely no way connected. You’re just a rude person.
  
  You have that tool, it’s called finding or hosting your own instance.
  
  lemm.ee and lemmy.dbzer0.com both seem like very level-headed instances. You can say stuff even if the admins disagree with it, and it's not a crisis.
  Some of the big other ones seem some other way, yes.
  
  Just create your own comm.
  
  Communities should be self moderated. Once we have that we can really push things forward.

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.
- 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.
- honestly, i'll donate money to whomever can design this and make it scalable.
- 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.
- check out https://sandstorm.org/ , the project is pretty dead but they had the right idea

Guillotines are another option.
- More will just spawn and take their place.
  
  More heads require more guillotines.
  
  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.

Hey, that's us!

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.
- 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
- 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.

Guns are the only alternative to the tech oligarchy.
You think they can't buy, manipulate, or just crush decentralized social media? If anything they can do it easily, divide and conquer. FOSS ain't gonna free you, esp. when the largest contributors to FOSS projects are big corps.
- That's absurd. Large sharp dropped blades, poison, starvation, spears, looped ropes, fire... There are many alternatives available.
  
  We could make a wiki filled with all the options.
  But let’s prioritize the non-violent ones first.
- so we just all buy guns and fend for ourselves? we need communities in order to fight fascism, we need to be able to organize and share valuable information with people. is technology the answer to the problem? no its not, but it is part of the answer, and to ignore that is shortsighted.
  
  As to an answers beyond simply getting-armed-and-fostering-healthy-gun-culture-and-education-among-us:
  "Practicing mutual aid is the surest means for giving each other and to all the greatest safety, the best guarantee of existence and progress, bodily, intellectually and morally."
  That's Kropotkin
  And then Modern Libs even observe, more verbosely:
  "The structures of our state economies are going to matter in terms of protecting democracies, and by that I mean if you look at economies that were based in the kind of small producer economies like New England was vs states like the South and the American West that were always built on the idea of very high capital using extractive methods to get resources out of the land either cotton or mining or oil or water or agri business, those economies always depend on a few people with a lot of money, and then a whole bunch of people who are poor and doing the work for those Rich guys -- and that I'm not sure is compatible in terms of governance without addressing the reality that you know if people have more of a foothold in their own communities, they are then more likely to support the kinds of legislation that Community [Education, Healthcare, ..] and that may be the future of democracy, if not a national democracy"
  Heather Cox Richardson, professor of American history On The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart on Trump’s Win and What’s Next https://youtu.be/D7cKOaBdFWo?t=2139 (time-stamped)
  If a Conservative wants me dead, they’re going to have to work and sweat for it. I’m not doing the heavy lifting for them (A Quote I agree with)
  Our resulting interactions may seem chaotic and illegible to authority, but it is through that seeming chaos that vastly complex, horizontal, and resilient practices of learning, cooperation, and reciprocity have historically arisen.
  By Andrewism https://youtu.be/qkN_nQPpeSU
  MASKING REALLY HELPS; Covid, RSV, Flu is a greater threat to marginalized communities. Can't do organizing without prioritizing precautions.
  Show up for your neighbors. The rest will come.
  
  No, we buy guns AND we organize our coalitions, just like the Black Panthers did.
  We can't intellectualize our way out of Proud Boys lynchings anymore, guys.
  (Also all the stuff VerticaGG said)
- 2a is there in case 1a don't work
- Guns work better when you can coordinate Resistance movements news to be coordinated. Running out with a gun like a mad man isn't going to work.
- Republican solutions to republican problems eh?
- The only solution guns provide are dead people. You have fallen for the pathetic lie of the right.
  
  Oh. Guns are even better for that.
  On the right? They are a lightning rod for criticism and complaints. "All the jobs in our state were taken away and my daughter is dying of an easily curable disease. BUT THOSE FUCKING LIBERALS ARE TRYING TO TAKE AWAY MY SECOND AMENDMENT RIGHTS!!!!"
  On the left? they are a way to "meet in the middle" on a lot of legislature while also being a great way to villify and target groups. For example, anyone with even a passing understanding of history knows that the Civl Rights Movement was not MLK Jr giving one speech and fist bumping Rosa Parks on the bus. The threat of violence was definitely a factor (beyond that it gets murkier). And people LOVE to argue that Blacks picking up guns is how that was "won".
  You know what else came of that? "That kid is a gangbanger and has a gun. SHOOT HIM. Oh shit, uhm. Fuck it, we'll just say the toy train looked like a gun".
  And we'll see that continue. LGBTQ folk will decide they need a gun and you can bet the cops and the chuds will be glad to open fire at protestors because "THEY HAVE A GUN!!!"
  And the absolute best part? "Both sides" are fucking delusional if they think their guns are going to accomplish anything against an oppressive government. Cops won't go near a pistol if a kid's life is on the line. But they'll open fire like mel gibson if they think a business is in trouble. Let alone the military with tanks and drones and there will be a lot more "combat footage" to watch online.
  If there was ANY chance that The 2nd Amendment could pose ANY threat to a tyrannical government, it would have been destroyed decades ago.

It might be the only path forward.
- I mean humanity survived thousands of years without any social media at all...
  
  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 was not a 8 billion people supply chain back then.
  
  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'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?
- Same here. Forums (about science fiction, aeromodelism, electric vehicles) have been important to me, and continue to be important in some fields.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
  
  when you stick your hand on a hot stove and feel pain, it's so you know to do something about it. you don't want to shut that off.
- My mom asked what she should replace FB/Insta with and I reminded her we lived decades without them so we just go back to that.

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.
- I'm currently reading The Expanse, and at one point a character mentions checking in on the family aggregator his cousin set up to help everyone keep track of who's living where.
  Dude spun up a private Lemmy instance for his family. The future is now!
- Like NNTP?

- When I saw this article I was like oh damn if I post it here I’ll get loads of upvotes lmao.
  
  You were apparently correct haha

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.
  
  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.
  
  You're mixing multiple subjects here, one being the logistics of blocking a federated system like Lemmy, the other being whether the wrong person finds the content of such a system objectionable and labels it a "national security issue."
  I'm being a tad pedantic here, but my reason for pointing this out is that I think #2 is not far fetched at all, but I'm unsure of how feasible #1 might be and would love if somebody who knows more than I do would chime in.
  EDIT: Looks like some have already discussed #2 in the other comment thread started by Teknikal.
- I hope not. I just arrived!
  
  Dont worry, lemmings worry about some shutdown every other week. Been here since the API closures, and its quite nice (if you block the news communities)
  
  Welcome! Any questions so far?
- then we will all get on WordPress or something and go back to rss feeds. they can't ban everything, the Internet is too big. people will find a way
  
  they can’t ban everything, the Internet is too big. people will find a way
  they don't really have to ban everything. for example, the persistent chinese internet-goer has the ability to view things he's not supposed to see even though China bans large swathes of the internet.
  but by making it as difficult as possible for most people and creating strict punishments for breaking the rules, you can effectively ban most things you want for majority of people
  if posting on lemmy makes you an enemy of the state and the state is becoming increasingly harsh with its punishments... would you still be going on and posting regularly? i would certainly think twice.

1000% agree. There is no freedom but the freedom that we build together.
- if 100% is completely agreeing, what's 1000%?
  
  completely agreeing, 10 times

I want not just decentralized
but peer to peer
like Briar, but Lemmy-style

Preaching to the choir!
- It might be good to reiterate (in part) why we're all in here.

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.
- Your mother - she's older than you!
- Well, we need to remember that the longer ago someone registered the more likely they are to hold some strong views. For many of us it was just a strong feeling that corporate ownership is awful, but not for everyone.
  
  Fair

Unfortunately, Lemmy demonstrates pretty clearly that decentralized systems are just as vulnerable to propaganda and brain rot.
- 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.
- 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! 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.
  
  Welcome! !newcommunities@lemmy.world can help to find communities
- 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.
- Except the propaganda was explicitly grown on reddit.
- 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.
- 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.
- At least we can easily pack up and move camp in familiar territory (same apps/frontends, etc.)
- 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.

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.

I just wish we had a bit more political balance here... I'm not talking about fascists, but more people that don't blame everything on capitalism would be kind of nice...
- [Entire world on fire] "I just wish everyone wasn't so fixated on discussing the fire, how it started and who's responsible..."
  You have to realize how mesmerizingly obtuse your comment is?
  
  Lol. Yes, I'm obtuse. You aren't, but I am. Great argument.
- Not trying to get into a whole ugly thing, just curious what your pro-capitalism stance is. Because I would definitely fall into this big Lemmy category of seeing 90-905% of modern problems being rooted in capitalism. So I would (civilly!) disagree, no doubt. Doesn’t mean we can’t have a reasonable discussion!
  
  I would also be interested in a defence of capitalism that doesn't come down to "but the USSR" or similar.
  
  I don't have much time and energy for long discussions, but I just wanna share my feelings.
  I feel like people here see capitalism as a very black and white thing. Either it's there and corrupting everything or it's gone and everything is awesome. Personally I don't think that's the case. In my opinion there are some cases where the market can solve things more efficiently than a government institution, granted that this market is regulated and controlled by the government. I'm against unbounded capitalism like we see way too often nowadays.
  But here in western Europe, while certainly not perfect, the situation is way better than in the US. The government controls companies, gives them a slap on the wrist if they get too greedy. And while it still poisons a lot that it touches, the competitive aspect of it also makes sure that many inefficiencies are cut. In my opinion even we are not regulating it enough, and I do consider myself left-wing. But completely abolishing capitalism doesn't make sense to me either.
  I think some things are better left to the government, stuff like healthcare, public transport, utilities like water or maybe even energy. Other things are better left private (but regulated): restaurants, barbers, supermarkets, most product development like phones, cameras, cars, computers, etc. There's a huge grey area there that I don't really have an opinion on.
  But I don't see how a society without capitalism can provide stuff like decent smartphones, game consoles, restaurants, festivals, etc. These more "luxury" goods rely on competition to innovate and provide decent experiences, and here capitalism works better in my view.
  
  Human greed is not because of capitalism. Humans have been greedy from the very beginning.
  The issue is greed, it's the core problem in all these human systems, even democracy main issue is how greedy the politicians get.
  You don't solve greed by getting rid of capitalism, there seems not to be a solution for greed.
  
  LOL. I'm not pro-capitalism, but thank you for proving my point.
  I actually think, as one example, the US's healthcare system should 100% be socialized.
- Too late, capitalism is the problenz
  
  Yes, it is. But it's not the only problem... In fact, there are a thousand other problems I wish we could all discuss with at least half the fervor as this topic.
  But no. This is the topic.
- I wonder what else is to blame ?
  
  Human nature? Greed? Racism? Biggotry?
  There's an upsetting number of topics... And now I'm depressed. Because life is depressing when you think about it too much, isn't it?
- There are a few misconceptions in your comment:
  While I do agree that there are other problems like racism and bigotry which existed before capitalism (based on an answer you gave in another comment) and while I do agree these also need to be addressed, I do disagree that capitalism isn't a major source of problems of modernity.
  Why?
  Because the cornerstone of capitalism is to use money to generate more money in a feedback loop towards (nonexistent) "infinite money" (which is different from feudalism, roman empire or ancient Egypt which all had some sort of market without being capitalist economies).
  SInce it is impossible to make infinity money, an inherent part of capitalism are the crises cycles of boom and bust.
  It also makes the creation of services as an afterthought (because making money is more important) and it is also tied to the enshitfication we're seeing today.
   
  I think you're calling as "capitalism" a thing that is actually "technological innovation (under capitalism)"
  We're all aware of free/open source softwares
  We're all aware that it is possible to develop technological innovation outside of capitalist framework (and again: Capitalism = Using money to make more (infinite) money)
  almost all of scientific researches advances are because of passion of the researches instead of the greed of capitalism.
  Yes... Everyone "needs" money to survive. But I hope you do agree that nobody in the world needs billions of dollars to simply survive.
  for God's sake, a lot of people living in "third world" dream of earning 300 dollars a month to survive and consider that making 1000 dollars a month is a small luxury (I'm from brasil and 1000 dollars is around R$ 4000 or R$ 5000 while most people lives with R$3000 or less)
  What I'm saying is that, past the required money for surviving and for having a few "luxuries", there is no need for anyone having millions or billions of dollars every month and that it would be possible to keep scientific and technological grow under such conditions because curiosity and desire for changes are part of human nature.
  if it was entirely impossible for humans to develop things without being paid before, then nothing around open/free software would exist.
- If nearly everything currently wrong with the country weren't due to capitalism run amok I could sympathize. But unfortunately it's not the 1960s anymore.
  
  (segregation was a legacy of capital interests pushing race theory to justify slavery)
  
  Okay, buddy. It's all capitalism. Good luck with your pamphlets! I actually like the idea of making Western nations question capitalism... This said, no. It's not "nearly everything" wrong with the world.
  Wake up, my friend. It's 2025. Just because people in power are getting worse, doesn't mean we can't strive to be better.
- For real. I once had the misfortune to admit to having some Centrist ideas, and the down votes were immediate and generous. No discussion, just personal attacks.
  And we wonder how things got to where they are.
- Sorry this is a platform for people if you're an ostrich then please go back to sticking your head in the sand
  
  Even ostriches aren't actually stupid enough to do that.
  
  I'm not Dee Renolds, but you may think of me as such, if it makes the world feel safer for you.
- That's gonna be kind of an issue in a network where civil discourse and disagreement falls between calling people a Nazi/fascist at best and wishing them double death by murder rape at worst
  
  Just picturing that, as you type this, you have a swastika tattoo on your forehead.
  "Why is everyone so judgemental? I'm not one thing! A person contains multitudes!!!"
  
  Uhh... What?
  If you're a Trump supporter, I respect that you may be confused... But Elon Seig Heiled yesterday, so...

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.
- That is a great idea, but friendica may be too clunky for most people. Diaspora is good but doesn't use activitypub.
  
  I agree.
  Of course, today Friendica is the most suitable software for managing local communities, thanks to the support of Activitypub groups and event calendars, in addition to the possibility of managing accounts shared between multiple users.
  However, it must be recognized that it is a cumbersome and counterintuitive interface. If you want to create a project of this kind based on Friends, you must plan for continuous support from the administrators.
  At the moment I would not exclude Friendica, but I would also evaluate other solutions:
  Lemmy
  It is not a social network and users cannot follow other users but can only follow communities. However, it is probably the easiest software in the Fediverse and is made specifically for creating communities.
  Mbin
  The interface is still dramatically confusing, but users can also follow other users. If it were possible to modify the interface and make it more pleasant, it could be a great option.

Tech Broligarchy*

How is Lemmy (or whatever) ever gonna scale up to the size of Reddit though? If they can’t deal with trolls and bots and spam then what the hell are we gonna do?
- What do you do in real life? You tell them to fuck off.
- on reddit majority of heavy lifting is done by community mods. hosting, however, is a pain, lemmy is centralized as fuck.

Word.

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.
- 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.
- 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.
- This is probably why the tech industry has been hardened against that sort of thing, and is, say, famously hard to unionize.
- Karl Marx 2.0 right there

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.
  
  Yeah suggestions have never been implemented well but I relied on just viewing what I subscribed to for content. That plus suggestions from others that turned out pretty well. Post monetization and the removal of 3rd party apps made reddit unbearable so I'm glad to move on
  
  They're called communities, but they're still your subscriptions, so in this context it works.
  
  That's exactly what I did on Reddit, I'd only look at subreddits that I subscribed to. The only reason I'm here is because Reddit 180d on their API support and killed third party apps.
- 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
  
  Yeah but it's tough to get some communities going, like the equivalent of r/NFL on reddit here is basically dead. More people also doesn't necessarily bring more interesting content, but it's tough finding similar communities that I had subbed to on other social media
  
  This is why some of us are so focused on spreading the load.

Checked the rules and I think this is allowed? But if you've still got reddit and don't mind being a fediverse evangelist please go consider hitting this thread: https://reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1i6rp3o/decentralized_social_media_is_the_only/
- Could you maybe edit your comment to something like
  "Lemmy has 42k monthly active users
  https://discuss.online/ if you want a server located in the USA (content is still accessible from any server, the most difference latency)
  https://sopuli.xyz/ if you want a server located in the EU
  https://vger.app/ if you want an app
  Feel free if you have any questions"
  join-lemmy isn't the best for user onboarding: https://lemmy.world/post/24220536?scrollToComments=true
  
  Lol I don't know if you saw but I tried and they deleted the top comment.
- I would recommend an actual cafe with actual humans in it face to face over this
  
  I agree but let's be honest. That may be how it worked in revolutionary France but that wasn't how it worked in the US in the 20th century. The "3rd Places" that most people were involved in were union halls, civic organizations, and social societies. We've largely forgotten that history, but it's not something we can get back without organizing online first.

Without the paywall: https://archive.is/TJzyt

google hasn't done much with YouTube yet
- There's Peertube as an alternative. It lacks some content, but the platform is on par. It is developed by a French association called Framasoft. Thus said, you're right, Youtube is still okay, even thus there are some fake videos and scam, but they are easy to avoid.
  
  It lacks some content
  Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, if this isn't the understatement of the century.
  
  Peertube sucks ass, so much content simply not even there, most videos don't work or they're in either mostly french or russian, and this is on the biggest instances.
  Now I might be stupid, but I really don't see how peertube is an alternative. Odysee or rumble are my personal best bets, but in case of youtube it's hard to find a real alternative in my opinion. Especially as a creator.

I'm trying to find one right now that doesn't suck. I want one where I can microblog, share pics, and videos to my friends and family. Essentially Facebook. Friendica is EMPTY. I deleted Meta products. I'm not on X. There is no alternative.
- Isn't Mastodon a good alternative? It's a microblogging service like Twitter. You can post statuses, pictures, videos, etc.
  You can also make it private and set it to approve your followers.
  
  I guess, but I don't want the job of trying to talk people into using a platform. No one I know has even heard of it. The platform is good for what I want, but no one I know locally is there and getting them on it seems unlikely.
- I've been sending links to content on Mastodon to my friends and family on SMS/RCS

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”
  
  Gore is probably gross medical pictures. Matrix is a chat room program.
  
  Better you dont

Tildes (a closed garden Reddit alternative) frequently love to reminisce about the days of small forum communities. Maybe we need to bring them back.
- They still exist. I’m active in one, love it.
  I sometimes fantasise about a lemmy like decentralised protocol that works for old school forums.
  
  NodeBB has added ActivityPub federation today. So that should work
  
  Tildes as in https://tilde.club/ or something else?
- what does closed garden mean in this context? as in contrast to the fediverse?
  
  Tildes is invite only similar to lobste.rs
  
  you must be accepted after filling out an application, then you'll get your ssh key validated and only then can you tunnel in and join properly

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.
- Ideally when an instance goes down, all its posts and comments and users are replicated in the network and possible to get.
  Federation allows this, no? Provided your instance is old enough to have federated with the content in the first place.
  
  Instance A goes down, you can't post as your user registered on instance A.
  With cryptographic identities it's possible that instance A should be up only when you are registering your user. It's even possible with some delegated rights to another A user that only that user should be up when you are registering your user, the instance itself - not required.
  I'm against the whole idea of federation like in XMPP or like in ActivityPub. It's stone age. It requires people to set up servers. It ties users to those servers. And communities are unnecessarily ties to servers. And their moderators.
  Ideologically Retroshare looks nicer, for example.
  You need to have messages, containing all the data I've described (who messages whom or who messages which communities and time of a message should be used to reduce the amount of data, ahem, stored and transferred by nodes, and also messages should list their dependencies, like - if you are giving some user some mod rights and taking them away a few times in a row, you need to know what the previous message was and the one before it), and shared storage. Shared storage here kinda breaks the beauty, because storage is finite and in fact probably those machines contributing it would function a lot like instances, replicating only communities they want.
  Above that messages layer there'd be the imagined social network itself. I suppose it comes down to CRUD signed by user, user signed by an instance root or better a user delegated that right by an instance root. So everyone can send CRUD messages on anything, but what of all this the client considers depends on what they trust and the logic of processing rights. DoS protection and space conservation here are a case of dependency management, kinda similar to garbage collection.
  Then entity types - I guess it's instance (people like that crap), community (I think this can be many-to-many with instances, instances are used for moderating users, communities for moderating posts), user (probably a derived user, from what I've heard but not understood about blind keys), public post (rich text with hyperlinks to entities by hash, everything is addressable by hash), blob (obvious), personal message (like public post, but probably encrypted and all that).
  OK, dreams again

I'm not so sure. Depends if there's a solution to the bots. Bluesky is inundated with them already.

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.
- 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.

- Yeah not sure who's gonna click this sketchy looking thing without any context.

How do we protect ourselves from propagandists and censors? Large, small, popular and individual.
- You do your research :)
  
  I did my research at the heritage foundation.
  
  Yes of course.
  But by what method or algorithm does this DECENTRALIZED SOCIAL MEDIA system protect us from propagandists and censors?
  What is a method in THAT?
  Distributed tagging and voting? The grace of our benevolent moderators? Something else?
  I mean, combatting propaganda and censorship is the #1 issue here.

Correct

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.
  
  And this is why I'm still on .ml there's not a way to move on Lemmy. Yet
  
  Oh cool, wasn't aware of that.

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.

Decentralized money as well. We need to move away from the control of government and corporations (they are now one and the same). I'm putting more and more of my money in bitcoin. The dollar will continue to erode while wages stay flat. And Trump and his new oligarch buddies will completely decimate the American economy and stock market while they make out like bandits, leaving everyone else the bag holder. Your 401k isn't safe anymore.
- Trust me bro, if your underground stash of money is robbed or stolen because you refuse to trust a bank to safeguard it, it will be considered your fault
  
  You should have backups with a passphrase, in different locations. So if the underground stash is stolen/corroded, or if the bank opens up your safe deposit box, then your money is still safe.
  Is this easier? No. Is this what we've come to? Yes. Now that we've got a choice, it's our own fault no matter which system fails us.
- Same but with Monero. I don't need my friends, neighbors, $5 wrench attackers, and governments knowing how much money I have. And neither should you.
  
  There's an add-on for Bitcoin called the "Lightning Network" that adds onion routing like Tor.

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.
- 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 👍
- Every person that has ever made a post like this has multiple comments defending Nazis.
  
  Good thing I'm not defending any neo-Nazis

From the article:
literally
Look; if you're a journalist, pretend you know other words. I'm so fucking done.
- Elon Musk, who had already turned X into a cesspool of hate and an overt tool to get President Trump elected, is now formally part of the Trump administration, meaning the platform is literally owned by a member of the Trump White House.
  The word is literally being used correctly.
- Weird flex here...
  404 at least does some investigative journalism beyond fake news headlines where person a "slams" person b

Lemmy

Mbin