Decentralized Social Media Is the Only Alternative to the Tech Oligarchy
2 years ago by FundMECFS to c/technology
We have a human vetted application process too and that's why there's rarely any bots or spam accounts originating from our instance. I imagine it's a similar situation for programming.dev. It's just not worth the tradeoff to have completely open signups imo. The last thing lemmy needs is a massive influx of Meta users from threads, facebook or instagram, or from shitter. Slow, organic growth is completely fine when you don't have shareholders and investors to answer to.
The bar is not particularly high with lemmy and that is a focused community.
People aren't (generally) being made aware of the injustice on the other side of the planet while they are asking a question about C#.
It's how most large forums ran back in the day and it worked great. Quality over quantity.
@a1studmuffin @ceenote the only reason these massive Web 2.0 platforms achieved such dominance is because they got huge before governments understood what was happening and then claimed they were too big to follow basic publishing law or properly vet content/posters. So those laws were changed to give them their own special carve-outs. We're not mentally equipped for social networks this huge.
I dunno man. Discord has thousands of closed servers that are doing great.
We're talking about the need for a system to deal with major access of a main facebook/insta/twitter etc... to a majority of people.
IE of the scale that someone can go "Hey I bet my aunt that I haven't talked to in 15 years might be on here, let me check". Not a common occourance in a closed off discord community.
Also, noting that doesn't fully solve the primary problem.. of still being at the whims and controls of a single point of failure. of which if Discord Inc could at any point in time decide to spy on closed rooms, censor any content they dislike etc...
Could do something like discord. Rather than communities, you have "micro instances" existing on top of the larger instance, and communities existing within the micro instances. And of course make it so that making micro instances are easier to create.
It could be cool to get a blue check mark for hosting your own domain (excluding the free domains)
It would be more expensive than bot armies are willing to deal with.
Well, what doesn't work, it seems, is giving (your) access to "anyone".
Maybe a system where people, I know this will be hard, has to look up outlets themselves, instead of being fed a "stream" dictated by commercial incentives (directly or indirectly).
I'm working on a secure decentralised FOSS network where you can share whatever you want, like websites. Maybe that could be a start.
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).
Concept is however that if a new instance is detatched from the old one... then it's basically the same story of leaving myspace for facebook etc... we go through the long vetting process etc... over and over again, userbase fragments reaching critical mass is a challange every time. I mean yeah if we start with a circle of 10 trusted networks. One goes wrong it defederates, people migrate to one of the 9 or a new one gets brought into the circle. but actual vetting is a difficult process to go with, and makes growing very difficult.
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...
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.
The sad truth is that when Reddit blocked 3rd party apps, and the mods revolted, Reddit was able to drive away the most nerdy users and the disloyal moderators. And this made Reddit a more mainstream place that even my sister and her friends know about now.
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.
Also the problem of relying on a nation state to allow these certificates to be issued in the first place. A repressive regime could simply refuse to give its citizens a certificate, which would effectively block them from access to a platform that required them.
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.
What? I post a lot, but the majority?
...oh, you said LLM. I thought you said LMM.
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.
I think I communicated part of this badly. My intent was to address “what is this speech?” classification, to make moderation scale better. I might have misunderstood you but I think you’re talking about a “who is speaking?” problem. That would be solved by something different.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Precisely, and it can stay pseudo-anonymous. A trusted third party (Governments? Banks? A YMCA gym membership?) issuing a hashed certificate or token is all that's needed. You don't need to know my name, age, gender: but if you could confirm that I DO have those attributes, and X, Y, and Z parties confirmed it, then it's likely I'm a human.
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.
I'm talking text only, and there are some fundamental limitations in the way current and near future LLMs handle certain questions. They don't "see" characters in inputs, they see words which get tokenized to their own internal vocabulary, hence any questions along the lines of "How many Ms are in Lemmy" is challenging even for advanced, fine tuned models. It’s honestly way better than image captchas.
They can also be tripped up if you simulate a repetition loop. They will either give a incorrect answer to try and continue the loop, or if their sampling is overturned, give incorrect answers avoiding instances where the loop is the correct answer.
They don’t “see” characters in inputs, they see words which get tokenized to their own internal vocabulary, hence any questions along the lines of “How many Ms are in Lemmy” is challenging even for advanced, fine tuned models.
And that is solved just by keeping a non-processed version of the query (or one passed through a different grammar to preserve character counts and typos). It is not a priority because there are no meaningful queries where that matters other than a "gotcha" but you can be sure that will be bolted on if it becomes a problem.
Again, anything this trivial is just a case of a poor training set or an easily bolted on "fix" for something that didn't have any commercial value outside of getting past simple filters.
Sort of like how we saw captchas go from "type the third letter in the word 'poop'" to nigh unreadable color blindness tests to just processing computer vision for "self driving" cars.
They can also be tripped up if you simulate a repetition loop.
If you make someone answer multiple questions just to shitpost they are going to go elsewhere. People are terrified of lemmy because there are different instances for crying out loud.
You are also giving people WAY more credit than they deserve.
Well, that's kind of intuitively true in perpetuity
An effective gate for AI becomes a focus of optimisation
Any effective gate with a motivation to pass will become ineffective after a time, on some level it's ultimately the classic "gotta be right every time Vs gotta be right once" dichotomy—certainty doesn't exist.
@NuXCOM_90Percent @brucethemoose would some kind of proof of work help solve this? Ifaik its workingnon tor
Somehow I didn’t get pinged for this?
Anyway proof of work scales horrendously, and spammers will always beat out legitimate users of that even holds. I think Tor is a different situation, where the financial incentives are aligned differently.
But this is not my area of expertise.
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,
I think a web-of-trust-like network could still work pretty well where everyone keeps their own view of the network and their own view of reputation scores. I.e. don't friend people you don't know; unfriend people who you think are bots, or people who friend bots, or just people you don't like. Just looked it up, and wikipedia calls these kinds of mitigation techniques "Social Trust Graphs" https://en.wikipedia.org/... . Retroshare kinda uses this model (but I think reputation is just a hard binary, and not reputation scores).
Are they just putting everything on layer 1, and committing to low fees? If so, then it won't remain decentralized once the blocks are so big that only businesses can download them.
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.
I'm also rude in real life too! 😄
Freedom of expression does not mean freedom from consequences. As someone who loves to engage on trolling for a laugh online I can tell you that if you get banned for being an asshole you deserve it. I know I have.
I do indeed fuck myself, every day, thanks.
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.
Lemm.ee hasn't booted me yet? Much like OP, I'm not the most empathetic person, and if I'm annoyed then what little filter that I have disappears.
Shockingly, I might offend folks sometimes!
Just create your own comm.
Self Moderated is just fine. Why do I need to doxx myself to be online? I'm not giving away my birth certificate or SSN just to post on social media that idea is crazy lmao.
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.
Peer to peer.
I've spent a bit of time developing some related ideas, but haven't had time to start building it.
It's a bit rough still, but I'd love some feedback! https://freetheinter.net/
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 heads require more guillotines.
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.
The heads yearn for the 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.
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.
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.
We did prioritize non-violent ones, and this is where it got us. The ONLY option is violence.
I’m just talking about how we design the wiki. Gotta be tasteful and present ourselves in the best light.
Oh, absolutely. With quicklinks to any old category the user may want to get to fast.
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)
Republican solutions to republican problems eh?
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.
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.
If there was ANY chance that The 2nd Amendment could pose ANY threat to a tyrannical government, it would have been destroyed decades ago.
Somebody almost killed Trump in July. A couple of inches was the difference between a Republican party in chaos just before the election and a party united behind their fascist hamberdler. The way this is going the 2A is going to be your only real defense against modern Nazism so you'd be better off hitting the range and getting proficient with a firearm than you are posting pics with #resist on Instagram.
In many ways, trump's campaign was bolstered by the image of him standing "defiant" with a fist raised in the air and someone else's blood all over him.
If trump HAD gotten got? Evil deep state assassination attempt by biden and here is your new candidate that the entire party would rally behind. And democrats would be even more reluctant to say or do anything out of "decorum".
Because here is the thing: trump isn't even the problem. He is an evil bastard but he is a symptom of the problem. Project 2025 is what those rapid fire EOs come from. And Project 2025 very much benefits from right wing fascists controlling basically all of social media.
And I will just, once again, ask: What do you think your guns are going to do against a military that is cracking down on you and your buddies as "terrorists"? Because if there was ANY chance of a civilian force posing ANY threat to a government, we would have banned guns back in the late 1700s.
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!!!”
Exactly, the presence of a weapon just gives them a reason to pull the "THEY'RE COMIN RIGHT FOR US" bullshit from South Park Season Fucking One.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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...
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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.
Yes you can go elsewhere, but you lose your identity, history, relationship and reputation.
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.
It does? My experience (coming from Reddit) was the opposite. Maybe I was just surrounded by bots.
Its time people learn this everything is run by humans and humans suck
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...
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 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.
Yeah I agree with this as well. It's not a binary view: either for or against capitalism. You can disapprove of everything happening in the US right now and still be for some form of capitalism.
Most people I know think that the US has gone way too far with their strand of capitalism, and yet they almost range from the complete left-to-right in terms of Dutch politics. Only the very right wing people here think that the US is doing something good right now. The rest, from center-right (or even proper neoliberal) all the way to the commies see a system that is failing in some way.
Yet on Lemmy this nuance seems completely lost sometimes. You're either a part of the capitalists/liberals and therefore approve of the oligarchy and dystopian capitalism in the US, or you join the radical "destroy capitalism" views. It's gotten better after the insane people from Hexbear left tho
Yeah, because I consider myself a pretty reasonable person. People have a big problem these days of never engaging with nuance, no matter how much you try to bring any conversation back to it. Things are definitely not as binary as people seem to only be able to conceive of them. The entire world and even the most seemingly clear cut issues have loads of grey area that people just can’t discuss because as soon as you say, “yes, I agree we need to ____! But we need to discuss the trickier parts” it turns into a witch hunt for anyone pointing out anything that might be considered a tricky part because it goes against the “I’m 100% on this side and it’s the only right opinion.”
It’s frustrating.
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.
I mean, I mostly agree with this. You can boil any problem down to existence. And existence down to molecular processes.
But two things: discussing modern problems, it’s all built on systems. And the system we deal with is capitalism.
Human fallibility is the problem, ultimately. But there is no overcoming human fallibility. So building systems that place peoples well being above all else is an actionable solution. Whereas solving human fallibility isn’t.
And secondly, hierarchy in all its forms. Which I would argue is the problem boiled down past the system to look at its problematic parts. Does a system rely on or serve needs in a hierarchical manner? Then that’s the problem.
That’s as far as I think is logical to go. Digging down further to human nature is a problem for a utopian society to deal with, and that we are nowhere near to achieving. So, my point is we need to deal with the first layer of problems. And that would be capitalism. Abolishing hierarchy in all its forms comes second.
The first because the system rewards the worst parts of our nature. The second because it’s almost uniformly led to corruption. Those are the root problems, from my point of view. Human fallibility is, I’m afraid, baked into the cookie. But removing systems that reward those errors instead of eradicating them should be job one.
Then the problem lies with democracy not with capitalism.
Capitalism is an economic system, the "first layer of problems" as you call them would be the systems we use every day and those systems have been built by the government.
What is the difference between US and Germany? Both are capitalist nations, but one is socialdemocracy and the other isn't.
But I would argue a country with two parties isn't really a democracy.
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.
The public healthcare and pension fund that Spain used today were created during the fascist dictatorship, as many other things that just made sense.
As I said in another post, the main issue is greed. Why does the US don't have a public healthcare system? Because of greed. It's so obvious humanity has classified greed was a problem for centuries.
Proving your point…about what? I was just curious to hear someone’s thoughts who went against the idea that most modern problems can be traced back to the roots of capitalism. But fuck me, right?
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.
Be the change, make some posts!
I'm sorry bud, but that's how the rumour mill worked since humans could talk. The message your trying to bring is good, don't get me wrong. You are trying to currently change human nature somewhat.
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?
It sure is. It's important to touch grass on a daily basis to stay sane. I personally go outside take a stroll and caress some leaves.
Regarding your initial point : I see "capitalism" as the family of systems that enable that kind of IT monopoly. Sure, human traits such as greed and bigotry are probably the source of evil but it seems to me they have to be tapped, and enabled. The fact that the conversation often ultimately turns back to capitalism is legitimate imho.
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)
I mean I understand the 1950s and 1960s werent some utopia either, but before we just let capital run everything some aspects were better.
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.
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.
Except the entire capitalist system works against us striving to be better. It's not like the American health care system sucks because the people in power suck. It sucks because to fix it you'd have to take capitalism out of the health care system because capitalism drives the profit motive within the health care system which makes it suck.
Same with transitioning from oil to renewables. Fucking Exxon knew half a century ago that climate change is a thing and will lead to catastrophic results. They were in prime position to shift from oil to renewables and reinvent the global energy system, but it was more profitable to run disinformation campaigns and actively work against the transition so they did that instead. Even now some of the oil CEO-s are like "we're already so fucked there's no reason to go for renewables so let us keep making that money".
Same is now going on with electric vehicles. It's much more profitable to sell ICE cars and fight the change instead of actually changing. I don't remember if it was Mercedes or WV or some other manufacturer, anyway one of the big german car CEOs pretty much went "we can't change to electric vehicles in time for the regulations. But you shouldn't punish us with fines because we're too big to fail."
The list goes on. The reason people here are so anti-capitalist is because most of us see that even if we want to strive to be better we can't because capitalism keeps dragging us down. It's like that scene in "Don't look up" where the world comes together to save itself and just as the crisis is about to be averted the capitalist tech bro fucks it all up because who cares if we're risking our entire planet, there's money to be made. Capitalism will try its best to undermine any effort that prevents maximizing profits.
Do you really think we'll get to the 15 hour work week in 2030, like Keynes predicted? Definitely not under the capitalist system. We have empirical evidence that 32 hour work week improves productivity and we can't even get that because the capital owners refuse to accept it. Literally something that could easily improve all our lives and we can't get it done because of capitalism.
Nobody is against striving to be better but wanting to get rid of capitalism is striving to be better because capitalism is like a steel ball attached to your ankle. It's just weighing down all your efforts to be better.
Just because people in power are getting worse, doesn’t mean we can’t strive to be better.
Yep, let's rake our forests and rinse our recycling to handle climate change!
If your house burns to the ground, no worries, you can just collect floatsom from the beach and build a new one!
Dude, some things cannot be solved via positive vibes and being a good neighbor, and if you want my honest opinion on it, I think pushing everyday people to be accountable for everything while the broligarchs are accountable for nothing is a big part of the problem.
In other words, you should strive to be better than an apologist for the system.
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.
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
It's a Windows logo!11! /s
Uhh... What?
If you're a Trump supporter, I respect that you may be confused... But Elon Seig Heiled yesterday, so...
Tech Broligarchy*
What do you do in real life? You tell them to fuck off.
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.
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.
Karl Marx 2.0 right there
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/...
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/...
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.
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.
Yep it has no content at all I would ever want to watch and I tried to give it a fair shake. That said I recognise YouTube is pretty much the Monopoly of all Monopolys and don't know how to fix that.
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.
"This centralized website sucks, let's fix it with the same thing!" Last time I used Odysee it was full of tinfoil hat flat earthers. Rumble is youtube for people that got banned from youtube, and Odysee is youtube with the block chain pointlessly added to it. If either site ever hits youtube's size they'll just become the same issue youtube is, enshitification is bound to happen. I know having options is better than a monopoly, and Peertube admittedly is rough, but I think as it's decentralized and self hosted it is the better option.
Rumble is youtube for people that got banned from youtube
I thought that was BitChute? Or is Rumble BitChute but not banned from all posts on Reddit (Reddit did a global block of all BitChute links as part of the attempt to black hole the video of the Christchurch shooting and the video the shooter's manifesto suggests was what pushed him over the edge into action).
im subscribed to many privacy creators on odysee like mental outlaw
I hate to break it to you, but even as an open source advocate, open source alone, doesn't mean it's better automatically; Atleast not for the uses you (the consumer) need to fulfill. Though the argument about privacy holds very much up here, and it's simply better in all aspects in regards to that.
Also many open source programs and apps, and everything in between, that I've come across, lacks basic features, which, atleast for my sake, turns my off almost instantly.
Without the paywall: https://archive.is/TJzyt
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.
Setup an account and start using it. Learn the ins and outs of it, then offer to teach your friends and family who might be interested. Someone has to be the first, then that person has to find their 'first follower'. It isn't easy, but with persistence it will pay off
I set up an account and have absolutely no way of finding a single friend.
How do you think Twitter/Facebook started? If you can talk enough people into losing trust in those mainstream platforms, they'll eventually catch up.
I'll give it the old college try. That works on 2 levels.
Honestly Mastodon is the closest thing atm unless you can get more people to join Friendica
I dont want to deal with people gore spamming every single Matrix channel again.
Better you dont
I'm not so sure. Depends if there's a solution to the bots. Bluesky is inundated with them already.
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.
How do we protect ourselves from propagandists and censors? Large, small, popular and individual.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Oh cool, wasn't aware of that.
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.
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.
Yes, but it does not work well. You constantly get failing payments due to inadequate channel liquidity unless you're using a large centralized wallet provider and using a large centralized wallet provider defeats the purpose of peer to peer digital cash that's uncensorable.
I've been using the Electrum wallet for years now with no issues.
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.
404media paywalled? It's free to create an account
Not this article. It's free. Paid subscribers can read it without ads, is that what you meant?
Some of their posts they do reserve for paid subscribers, but those are usually behind-the-scenes type things, not the journalism.
I wish I could subscribe but I'm not $100+ dollars a year rich. Still impressive that they are doing DIY tech journalism.
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.
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
Every person that has ever made a post like this has multiple comments defending Nazis.
Sorry, I don't carry on conversations with Nazi sympathizers. I hope you have an awful day.
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.
@lemmy.world
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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@lemmy.world
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
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Approved Bots
go to feed...
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.
save