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.
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.
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.
Closed instances with vetted members, there’s no other way.
Too high of a barrier to entry is doomed to fail.
Programming.dev does this and is the tenth largest instance.
Techy people are a lot more likely to jump through a couple of hoops for something better, compared to your average Joe who isn’t even aware of the problem
Techy people are a lot more likely to jump through hoops because that knowledge/experience makes it easier for them, they understand it’s worthwhile or because it’s fun. If software can be made easier for non-techy people and there’s no downsides then of course that aught to be done.
Yeah that was kinda my point
Ok, now tell the linux people this.
It’s not always obvious or easy to make what non-techies will find easy. Changes could unintentionally make the experience worse for long-time users.
I know people don’t want to hear it but can we expect non-techies to meet techies half way by leveling their tech skill tree a bit?
10th largest instance being like 10k users… we’re talking about the need for a solution to help pull the literal billions of users from mainstream social media
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.
I do indeed fuck myself, every day, thanks.
Don’t go blaming your inability to have empathy on adhd. That is in absolutely no way connected. You’re just a rude person.
I’m also rude in real life too! 😄
Guillotines are another option.
More will just spawn and take their place.
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.
Make the design 4D, and stack them in multiple dimensions, maybe one 4D guillotine is even sufficient?
And for testing purposes, we could try them on the designers!
What a blast!
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.
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?
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…
Hey, that’s us!
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.
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.
Isn’t it possible to just move the site under a different domain name, or have mirrored secondary servers in an entirely different location in case the primary one gets taken down?
Changing domains is essentially like starting a whole new instance. It can be done but communities and accounts start from scratch.
The lack of frictionless secure user level migration is the achille’s heel of lemmy.
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)
Yeah I finally decided to actually commit to getting off reddit would be unfortunate.
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.
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.
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.
Where else would we go? Perhaps it’s my non-American privilege but I think in a time like that I couldn’t be silent.
that’s kinda where i am. I’m in the mindset to be as gay as possible and as loud as possible about my dissent on what’s happening here.
me and my partner are both also trans. our lives are probably worthless anyway, why would i cower now?? I’ve worked too hard to become my own person to let the fuckin GOVERNMENT take it away from me. they can strip my rights and even kill me, but they can’t make me not be queer.
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.
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.
Oh, absolutely. With quicklinks to any old category the user may want to get to fast.
I want not just decentralized
but peer to peer
like Briar, but Lemmy-style
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.
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.
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….
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 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 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…
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
Tildes (a closed garden Reddit alternative) frequently love to reminisce about the days of small forum communities. Maybe we need to bring them back.
what does closed garden mean in this context? as in contrast to the fediverse?
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
Tildes is invite only similar to lobste.rs
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.
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 agree. I don’t use it for these reasons. But technologically speaking, it’s an open source alternative.
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.
