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.

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.

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.

Guillotines are another option.

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.

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?

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...

It might be the only path forward.

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.

Unfortunately, Lemmy demonstrates pretty clearly that decentralized systems are just as vulnerable to propaganda and brain rot.

Preaching to the choir!

I want not just decentralized

but peer to peer

like Briar, but Lemmy-style

1000% agree. There is no freedom but the freedom that we build together.

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.

I am so happy I have an account on here, even if some people can be quite abrasive

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.

Tech Broligarchy*

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.

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.

Word.

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?

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

google hasn't done much with YouTube yet

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

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/

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.

I dont want to deal with people gore spamming every single Matrix channel again.

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

Tildes (a closed garden Reddit alternative) frequently love to reminisce about the days of small forum communities. Maybe we need to bring them back.

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.

Correct

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.