green @ green @feddit.nl

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Joined

5 mo. ago

The problem is engagement - which in turn means building a community.

If someone goes to your forum, hijacks your posts, and them puts them on Reddit; there is no incentive to use your platform, which stifles and dies since no one is communicating on it. This is also part of the tyranny, as people can figuratively walk into your house, eat all your food, and then expect you to restock.

On the old internet, this was not really an issue since there was a better culture. But if all your friends use Reddit, and all the content is reposted there, why use the internet forum?

I agree that we need solid alternatives, but this doesn't really tackle the tyranny of the majority problem. We need people to use the platforms for communication, otherwise it has not solved the problem.

For example, if you use Signal but every single one of your friends use WhatsApp and refuses to switch (which is common), then you are forced to use WhatsApp. This is why it is tyranny.

EU can facilitate thousands of platforms, but if the masses don't use them it's pointless.

Federated-platforms are kind of a step in the right direction, but they're extremely weak to internal bad actors. If lemmy.world gets one million normie users, then cuts off the entire federation - then Lemmy has effectively been hijacked and set back 10 years.

It's frustrating but true.

To use an extreme example, if I saw someone just spamming the hard-R I would want their comment immediately removed. The rhetoric makes the space becomes completely unserious; just not a good environment.

The funniest part is that this mirrors real life. If someone did that IRL, I would just leave.

I am not going to argue in terms of right/wrong because I'm just not equipped to. But in terms of platform result, I do not want to participate on a 4Chan clone - because it always leads to unserious discussion, bad faith, and death.

I think this is an XY problem.

People keep trying to bring back the old internet ; This is an broken and outdated solution.

The root problem (in my opinion) is that we need to share critical information to the masses, but the masses introduce "tyranny of the majority". It's a really tricky problem to figure out, and I really really really want mathematicians working on this.

If you live in the states, the Electoral College exists because they were looking for a practical solution to this problem. Considering the outcomes, it did not work - but there is no shame in this, as I think this is actually a really hard problem to solve.

The only known solution is to not share information to the masses (a.k.a keeping the normies out). In essence, this is what the old internet was - and a large part of what made it great. But this is not correct as it does not meet the criteria of the problem. Nor does it translate well, since your neighbors are apart of the masses.

If anyone has any thoughts on this, please share. If you do math for a living, please gather your friends and make an open-thesis about this.

EDIT

After some discussion in the comments, I have a general hypothesis:

• One platform, one name.

People must be able to distinguish the resource they are accessing - highly recommended this process be easy. This provides consistent "edges".

• Open protocols only.

Looking at "tyranny of the majority" from a different perspective, one answer is to standardize how people communicate. This means no closed ecosystems nor convoluted protocols. This provides "standard weight" while preventing "infinite weight".

• Server-wide censorship cannot be allowed.

This eliminates every platform I know of. Servers should not be given any tools to prevent incoming nor outgoing data. People should handle moderation individually - sane UI can of course be made available (BlueSky block filters could be inspiration?). Blocking should only be handled by the "nodes", this also prevents "infinite weight".

I find it really funny that this conclusion kind of alludes to the early internet in a lot of ways. Maybe it wasn't the internet-forums, but the internet itself that has changed.

freedom means freedom to be able to fail without destroying your life.

Well said.

The unfortunate reality is that part of economic model is combating bad actors. A society that where the people truly believe in this can be built in a lifetime, and it will torn down by the worst among us in a decade. That is simply not a good investment.

Even in Europe, there are significant strides in tearing down what makes the people there happy and succeed (see the AfD in Germany).

This is an incentives problem through-and-through. These types of people should not, and cannot, exist in a functioning society - yet they do. The problem is that we have not figured out a good incentive-model to stop these people from gaining a foothold, so we must individually punish them for attempting to destroy the community.

This is the same exact problem with advertisers. And in the same way, we have not figured out a good way to stop them.

I'll leave the privacy policy here and let people decide for themselves.

They keep two types of logs. An identifiable one which is deleted in 24-48 hours (dns0 and quad9 also do this) and an anonymized one. There is no mention of "business partners"; and it also says explicitly that the information is not used to target ads.

As the privacy policy and service reads, it is not a honeypot. However, Google generally does not act in good faith, so there's no telling if they have 100% adhered to the policy.

No matter, to make calculated and informed decisions, we should have all the facts in order.

I would like to avoid going on a rant, so I'll just say this - capitalism does not work. The phenomena you are describing (... now people have too low standards) is called "tyranny of the majority" and capitalism does not have an answer for this. Hence why we really need to figure something out.

As a side note, I do not think communism nor socialism are the answer either! Despite what many are led to believe, we live in primitive times and have not figured out a sustainable economic model.

Wouldn't you just use AFS, CEPH, NFS, or 9p?

I really don't want to be that guy, but isn't SSHFS (FUSE) actually a terrible option when compared to an actual file-system? MacOS isn't really missing out on much there.

The most painful part of MacOS (which makes it downright unbearable for me) is that system configuration files are XML. It's an absolute nightmare.

People moved from Facebook to Reddit in the past because it was seen as the more community-centric platform.

This has taken a wild shift over the last 5 years; no one who moved over was hoping for Reddit becoming an ad-centric platform.

Decentralization is not a silver bullet. If lemmy.world hits 1 million users, and then a large corporation buys it, lemmy will be set back 10 years. This is an incentive problem, and no amount of workarounds is going to fix it.

We agree here, but this will not necessarily stop the rot. Companies will just approach these communities and offer the leaders massive buyouts, and then flood it with ads (see Twitch).

Communities themselves need mechanisms to punish or vandalize advertisements.

Like I said prior, there is nuance to be had here.

We agree that Google products are generally a honeypot (good products that lure you in), but which products are honeypots are important.

You very likely want to avoid Chrome, Gemini, and Google Search - but 8.8.8.8 is not a honeypot, it is a loss-leader. You will be lured in from 8.8.8.8 if you say "huh. this is a great service. is there anymore?", but 8.8.8.8 itself is not a malignant service.

This is a discussion to have with professionals in a professional setting. No one here is responsibly equipped to answer this in a chat forum. This obviously includes me.

That being said, I do not think about the future - live your life second-by-second.

Despite what people say, life is not meant to be enjoyed. We live in a time of lawlessness and over-abundance, so people often equate life with enjoying things. At your core, you are a biological package of electrical circuits and tools. When you do something your body deems beneficial, you enjoy it (as in signals reward your brain).

If you want to enjoy, then a general tip is to return to the fundamentals. Eat healthy food, exercise, explore, learn, and talk to people in real life. If this doesn't work, then you need to speak with a professional (probably a therapist) to find what does.

Hating humans is not viable, you simply need to stop that. This is not to say let yourself be abused and runover, but you need to form bonds with people - this is our inescapable nature.

Google does not automatically mean bad. It is dangerous precedent to blanket ban and remove nuance.

8.8.8.8 is an excellent service, and provides genuine privacy gains. The largest downside being that it is such a massive target for bad-faith and ignorant actors - like the Italian government.

Tor itself has a pretty good routing scheme that seems like it could replace DNS entirely. There are obvious (but surmountable) UX issues and there may be scalability issues - but it is 100% worth investigating.

Until the community supported platform becomes an advertiser supported one. Remember they said this same exact thing when moving from Facebook to Reddit.

Running is not going to save the online community. People have been running for the last 30 years, and it led us to some of the darkest times we've seen in 100 years. Instead we need to fight back and strategically retreat. Change the incentive structure - make advertisers absolutely miserable, and those who leech from advertisers should be similarly flogged.

Acceleration-ism does not work.

If the USA has not taught you this, after this reckless takeover, nothing will save you.

The more likely outcome is for Chrome to become a North Korea RedStar equivalent, where you cannot freely access the internet without Chrome. And if you visit a resource with wrongspeak, the resource will have all its finances taken away (see the legislation surrounding section 230); with you being sent to El Salvador.

Too many people overestimate the actual capabilities of these companies.

I really do not like saying this because it lacks a lot of nuance, but 90% of programmers are not skilled in their profession. This is not to say they are stupid (though they likely are, see cat-v/harmful) but they do not care about efficiency nor gracefulness - as long as the job gets done.

You assume they are using source control (which is unironically unlikely), you assume they know that they can run a server locally (which I pray they do), and you assume their deadlines allow them to think about actual solutions to problems (which they probably don't)

Yes, they get paid a lot of money. But this does not say much about skill in an age of apathy and lawlessness

Thanks for hosting your instances. I use them often and they're really well maintained

I am a dev. The example I gave was meant to be a POV, but in hindsight this was not clear. Because of this, I cannot meaningfully answer your question.

This topic still deserves genuine and transparent research. I have no doubt there are people already working on this, but I have not seen any notable results.

[OFF-TOPIC] To be completely frank with you, I've think that our communities (federation and open-source) are too splintered. Not in the sense of head count (this is good) but in terms of duplicating and abandoning work (this is bad). We really need a way to get a community-pulse on what is generally needed/wanted. I am not sure what the solution for this is, but I know there is one.

This is true, but only for now.

The point of decentralized social platforms is to eventually include everyone. This is not to say this is Lemmy's goal, but it is certainly the goal of its users. The tech-illiterate will show up en-masse (they always do) and what will be our answer for it? From what I see, we have none - this is no different than living on borrowed time.

We have to remember that "enshittification", before all else, is a cultural issue. When the people that have this culture arrive, the whole platform will suffer for it (hence what I said earlier). Humans are just better with dealing with this in real-life, but the internet poses a lot more challenges that I just do not think we are ready for.