- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@lemmy.ml
- fediverse@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@lemmy.ml
- fediverse@lemmy.world
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Decentralized money as well. We need to move away from the control of government and corporations (they are now one and the same). I’m putting more and more of my money in bitcoin. The dollar will continue to erode while wages stay flat. And Trump and his new oligarch buddies will completely decimate the American economy and stock market while they make out like bandits, leaving everyone else the bag holder. Your 401k isn’t safe anymore.
Trust me bro, if your underground stash of money is robbed or stolen because you refuse to trust a bank to safeguard it, it will be considered your fault
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.
@explodicle @shortwavesurfer as someone that is using it profissionaly, we dont have route for payments more times than I would like to admit…
Electrum or a different wallet?
@explodicle yes, we where using electrum… LN has a routing problem… You neednto open channels with the major players and se of them charge for it
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
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We wouldn’t be having this conversation though.
Forums and communities like these were very important for me growing up in the rural US South
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.
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.
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I’m not so sure. Depends if there’s a solution to the bots. Bluesky is inundated with them already.
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.
Preaching to the choir!
It might be good to reiterate (in part) why we’re all in here.
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…
Sorry this is a platform for people of you’re an ostrich then please go back to sticking your head in the sand
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I’m not Dee Renolds, but you may think of me as such, if it makes the world feel safer for you.
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!
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.
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.
I would also be interested in a defence of capitalism that doesn’t come down to “but the USSR” or similar.
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.
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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
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.
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?
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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 wonder what else is to blame ?
Human nature? Greed? Racism? Biggotry?
There’s an upsetting number of topics… And now I’m depressed. Because life is depressing when you think about it too much, isn’t it?
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.
So, capitalism then.
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.
That’s gonna be kind of an issue in a network where civil discourse and disagreement falls between calling people a Nazi/fascist at best and wishing them double death by murder rape at worst
Just picturing that, as you type this, you have a swastika tattoo on your forehead.
“Why is everyone so judgemental? I’m not one thing! A person contains magnitudes!!!”
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…
Too late, capitalism is the problenz
Yes, it is. But it’s not the only problem… In fact, there are a thousand other problems I wish we could all discuss with at least half the fervor as this topic.
But no. This is the topic.
I’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.
[Entire world on fire] “I just wish everyone wasn’t so fixated on discussing the fire, how it started and who’s responsible…”
You have to realize how mesmerizingly obtuse your comment is?
Lol. Yes, I’m obtuse. You aren’t, but I am. Great argument.
Perhaps it is balanced you just want it to be more in line with your views?
I have never met anybody who said “yes, this community is perfectly balanced.” Everyone always thinks it needs to get more in line with their beliefs and values
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.
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.
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.
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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.
(segregation was a legacy of capital interests pushing race theory to justify slavery)
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.
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.
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.
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.
@NuXCOM_90Percent @brucethemoose would some kind of proof of work help solve this? Ifaik its workingnon tor
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.
we have to use trust from real life. it’s the only thing that centralized entities can’t fake
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.
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.
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.
A simple thing that may help a lot is for all new accounts to be flagged as bots, requiring opt out of the status for normal users. It’s a small thing, but any barrier is one more step a bot farm has to overcome.
I subscribed to the arch gitlab last week and there was a 12 step identification process that was completely ridiculous. It’s clear 99.99% of users will just give up.
Closed instances with vetted members, there’s no other way.
How is it going to be as big as reddit if EVERYONE is vetted?
Why do you want it to be as big as Reddit?
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).
No? The problem of tech oligarchy is that they control the systems. Here anyone can start up a new instance at the press of a button. That is the solution, not allowing unfiltered freeze peach garbage.
Small “local” human sized groups are the only way we ensure the humanity of a group. These groups can vouch for each-other just as we do with Fediseer.
One big gatekeeper is not the answer and is exactly the problem we want to get away from.
You counter them by moving to a different instance.
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.
Vetted members could still bot though or have ther accounts compromised. Not a realistic solution.
Too high of a barrier of entry is doomed to fail.
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…
I question if we really need spaces like that anymore. But I see where you are coming from.
I was definitely only thinking about social places like Lemmy and Discord. Not networking places like Facebook and LinkedIn.
It really feels like there are zero solutions available. I’m at a point where I realize that all social networks have major negative impacts on society. And I can’t imagine anything fixing it that isn’t going back to smaller, local, and private. Maybe we don’t need places where you can expect everyone to be there.
When we can expect everyone on the planet to be present in a network the conflict and vitrol would be perpetual. We are not mature enough and all on the same page enough as a species to not resort to mud slinging
If we’re talking about breaking tech oligarchs hold on social media, no closed server anywhere comes close as a replacement to meta or Twitter.
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’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 disagree, I think we’re built for social networks that huge. The problems happen when money comes into the equation. If we lived in a world without price tags, and resources went where they needed to go instead of to who has the most money, and we were free to experiment with new lifestyles and ideas, we would thrive with a huge and diverse social network. Money is like a religious mind-virus that triggers psycopathy and narcissism in human beings by design, yet we believe in it like it’s a force of nature like God or something. A new enlightenment is happening all thanks to huge social networks allowing us to express our nature, it’s the institutions of control that aren’t equipped to handle such breakdown of social barriers (like the printing press protestant revolution, or the indigenous critiques before the enlightenment period)
Programming.dev does this and is the tenth largest instance.
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#.
Yeah but people ARE (generally) being made aware about Linux while they are asking a question about the injustice on the other side of the planet. You’re welcome Lemmy!
/s, also I do not officially represent the instance in any capacity, lol
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
There isn’t a solution. People don’t want to pay for something that costs huge resources. So their attention becoming the product that’s sold is inevitable. They also want to doomscroll slop; it’s mindless and mildly entertaining. The same way tabloid newspapers were massively popular before the internet and gossip mags exist despite being utter horseshite. It’s what people want. Truly fighting it would requires huge benevolent resources, a group willing to finance a manipulative and compelling experience and then not exploit it for ad dollars, push educational things instead or something. Facebook, twitter etc are enshitified but they still cost huge amounts to run. And for all their faults at least they’re a single point where illegal material can be tackled. There isn’t a proper corollary for this in decentralised solutions once things scale up. It’s better that free, decentralised services stay small so they can stay under the radar of bots and bad actors. When things do get bigger then gated communities probably are the way to go. Perhaps until there’s a social media not-for-profit that’s trusted to manage identity, that people don’t mind contributing costs to. But that’s a huge undertaking. One day hopefully…
They also want to doomscroll slop; it’s mindless and mildly entertaining. The same way tabloid newspapers were massively popular before the internet and gossip mags exist despite being utter horseshite. It’s what people want.
The same analogy is applicable to food.
People want to eat fastfood because it’s tasty, easily available and cheap. Healthy food is hard to come by, needs time to prepare and might not always be tasty. We have the concepts of nutrition taught at school and people still want to eat fast-food. We have to do the same thing about social/internet literacy at school and I’m not sure whether that will be enough.
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.
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?
Yeah that was kinda my point
I started using Twitter in 2009. It was just techy people back then. Things are allowed to take time and grow organically.
There might be clever ways of doing this: Having volunteers help with the vetting process, allowing a certain number of members per day + a queue and then vetting them along the way…
Can you have an instance that allows viewing other instances, but others can’t see in?
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.
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 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.
Reputation systems. There is tech that solves this but Lemmy won’t like it (blockchain)
Do you have a proof of concept that works?
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.
It has adjustable block size and computational cost limits through miner voting, NiPoPoWs enable efficient light clients. Storage Rent cleans up old boxes every four years. Pruned (full) node using a UTXO Set Snapshot is already possible.
Plus you don’t need to bloat the L1, can be done off-chain and authenticated on-chain using highly efficient authenticated data structures.
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,
Space is much more developed. Would need ever improving dynamic proof of personhood tests
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/wiki/Sybil_attack#Social_trust_graphs . Retroshare kinda uses this model (but I think reputation is just a hard binary, and not reputation scores).
I dont see how that stops bots really. We’re post-Turing test. In fact they could even scan previous reputation points allocation there and divise a winning strategy pretty easily.
I mean, don’t friend, or put high trust on people you don’t know is pretty strong. Due to the “six degrees of separation” phenomenon, it scales pretty easily as well. If you have stupid friends that friend bots you can cut them off all, or just lower your trust in them.
“Post-turing” is pretty strong. People who’ve spent much time interacting with LLMs can easily spot them. For whatever reason, they all seem to have similar styles of writing.
I mean, don’t friend, or put high trust on people you don’t know is pretty strong. Due to the “six degrees of separation” phenomenon, it scales pretty easily as well. If you have stupid friends that friend bots you can cut them off all, or just lower your trust in them.
Know IRL? Seems it would inherently limit discoverability and openness. New users or those outside the immediate social graph would face significant barriers to entry and still vulnerable to manipulation, such as bots infiltrating through unsuspecting friends or malicious actors leveraging connections to gain credibility.
“Post-turing” is pretty strong. People who’ve spent much time interacting with LLMs can easily spot them. For whatever reason, they all seem to have similar styles of writing.
Not the good ones, many conversations online are fleeting. Those tell-tale signs can be removed with the right prompt and context. We’re post turing in the sense that in most interactions online people wouldn’t be able to tell they were speaking to a bot, especially if they weren’t looking - which most aren’t.
Slashdot had this 20 years ago. So you’re right this is not new.or needing some new technology.
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 ADHD 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.
Just create your own comm.
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I do indeed fuck myself, every day, thanks.
So much irony in this one
Good job chief 🤡
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.
- Dude says he is regarded BC reasons in civil manner
- Another dude proceeds to aggressively insult him… I would say not civil.
Who is the asshole here?
limp- wrist morbidly obese
That tells me all I need to know
Yes
You have that tool, it’s called finding or hosting your own instance.
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! 😄
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!
Communities should be self moderated. Once we have that we can really push things forward.
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.
What? I post a lot, but the majority?
…oh, you said LLM. I thought you said LMM.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
2a is there in case 1a don’t work
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.
That’s fair, it’s important in some ways to conceal the hand a bit. We have to make to make the rich as uncomfortable as we are though.
Oh, absolutely. With quicklinks to any old category the user may want to get to fast.
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.
The only solution guns provide are dead people. You have fallen for the pathetic lie of the right.
Oh. Guns are even better for that.
On the right? They are a lightning rod for criticism and complaints. “All the jobs in our state were taken away and my daughter is dying of an easily curable disease. BUT THOSE FUCKING LIBERALS ARE TRYING TO TAKE AWAY MY SECOND AMENDMENT RIGHTS!!!”
On the left? they are a way to “meet in the middle” on a lot of legislature while also being a great way to villify and target groups. For example, anyone with even a passing understanding of history knows that the Civl Rights Movement was not MLK Jr giving one speech and fist bumping Rosa Parks on the bus. The threat of violence was definitely a factor (beyond that it gets murkier). And people LOVE to argue that Blacks picking up guns is how that was “won”.
You know what else came of that? “That kid is a gangbanger and has a gun. SHOOT HIM. Oh shit, uhm. Fuck it, we’ll just say the toy train looked like a gun”.
And we’ll see that continue. LGBTQ folk will decide they need a gun and you can bet the cops and the chuds will be glad to open fire at protestors because “THEY HAVE A GUN!!!”
And the absolute best part? “Both sides” are fucking delusional if they think their guns are going to accomplish anything against an oppressive government. Cops won’t go near a pistol if a kid’s life is on the line. But they’ll open fire like mel gibson if they think a business is in trouble. Let alone the military with tanks and drones and there will be a lot more “combat footage” to watch online.
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.
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.
You’re making a lot of unfounded assumptions about what would have happened if Trump were assassinated. No one else has been able to harness MAGA energy the way he has. It’s entirely possible the movement would splinter without its figurehead. We won’t know that until he’s gone. Although it seems less likely now that he presumably has 4 years to enact policy changes and put people in place to keep his agenda moving after his term is up.
There’s plenty of debate to be had on the topic of the effectiveness of guns in civil resistance. All of which can be found in more detail elsewhere than we’re going to be able to cover here. However, suffice it to say that your understanding of resistance in general and guerilla tactics specifically is severely lacking if you’re assuming that this situation would play out as an open confrontation between the US military and some sort of militia. Despite the fact that such a conflict would provide more room for maneuvering than you are giving it credit, that would not be the preferred method of engagement. Generals and other senior officers have to buy groceries and go to the DMV just like everyone else. You pick your targets when and where you can get them. More than anything else, it’s important to acknowledge that in the situation where it becomes necessary to think about these kinds of things in more detail, my guns afford me many more options than your knives (or whatever else you prefer to rely on) would. Unless, of course, you plan on giving up without a fight, in which case we clearly have such different outlooks that additional discussion will not help us find common ground.
Yeah…
Your mass assassinations plan doesn’t work when there is a camera on every corner and traffic light. L Dog was always going to get caught if he hadn’t fled the country within hours of blapping that exec. You are also apparently assuming everyone is Jason Bourne in your fantasy and are a highly trained guerilla fighting force that can blend in and out of everything.
You pick your targets when and where you can get them.
Yeah. The difference between being the chosen one in a young adult novel and actually accomplishing anything of value is what taking out your “target” accomplishes.
And… a great example of that is Palestine. For the sake of simplicity, let’s call what Hamas did “attacking a target”. What was the outcome of that? Israel had “justification” to engage in mass ethnic cleansing for over a year.
Unless, of course, you plan on giving up without a fight, in which case we clearly have such different outlooks that additional discussion will not help us find common ground.
I believe in fighting for change in ways that can actually protect others and accomplish things. Rather than fantasizing about living in a Call of Duty commercial and just painting an even bigger target on the backs of the groups I claim to be helping.
If you or the other “Buy a gun, it is the only thing you can do. I hear Fred’s on 4th street have great deals on assault rifles!” folk had ACTUALLY engaged in any activism whether peaceful or otherwise you would have long since had it explained to you: YOU DO NOT BRING A FUCKING GUN TO A PROTEST. Because the moment the other side sees it? They open fire. Because cops will give a bottle of water to the white kid with an assault rifle looking for some n*****s to kill. They’ll fucking murder anyone who looks even slightly brown if they have a bulge in their jacket pocket.
And… a great example of that is Palestine. For the sake of simplicity, let’s call what Hamas did “attacking a target”. What was the outcome of that? Israel had “justification” to engage in mass ethnic cleansing for over a year.
You put justification in quotes here, and I think you clearly understand why. Netenyanhu propped up hamas as the de facto government specifically in order to ensure a more militant party would give israel the necessary “justification” to attack the people there. So, even their governance, and that attack itself, is traceable to israel’s state violence. A minor note, but an important one, I think. And I think one which requires more thought than just like, pointing to that and then saying “See, I told you, violence doesn’t work, and is bad, and israel wants it!”, because israel’s obviously not an overly rational state which is actually functional, either for it’s people or for it’s goals.
More broadly though, it’s not necessary at all for people to have guns, in order for cops to kill them. Cops can invent any number of reasons to kill someone in their day to day. The gun is something you just see in the news media a lot because it’s incredibly common in america, and especially common in the hoods where cops go out and kill people in larger numbers. Again, we can see that as an extension of a context, created by the state, which has naturally created violence. Partially through the valuable, and illegal, property, mostly in the form of drugs, which must be protected through extralegal means, i.e. cartels and gangs, but also just naturally as a result of police violence in those places as an extension of that, which is an intentional decision to create by the ruling class. It’s a way to create CIA black budgets, it’s a way to incarcerate and vilify your political opponents at higher rates, etc. You can’t be intolerant to the idea of guns as a blanket case, in that context, because it’s a totally different kind of context, and is one which is created by the state.
I would maybe also make the point that a protest is incentive enough against killing people, because it would be widely known and televised as a massacre in the media. You know, just gunning people down in the street, en masse. That line is sort of, becoming less clear over time, as the government seems to be more and more willing to condone that, if not outright do that, but I don’t really think that if, say, everyone in the BLM riots was armed, the cops would just start randomly firing into the crowd. They’d be hopelessly outnumbered, for one, so that’s a pretty clear reason for the police not to just start sputtering off rounds like a bunch of idiots, but you’d also probably see a protracted national guard response over the course of the next several weeks, which nobody really wants to deal with, both in terms of the media response and just the basic type of shit that would happen.
You also have several extrapolations you can make from just that happening in the first place, even though it never would. Like, the kind of city which could get up to that, in america, would maybe reveal something incredibly uncomfortable to the ruling institutions about that particular city and its political disposition and potentially that could be extrapolated to the entire country. Most places don’t get to that point because they reach civil war before that, which is kind of more along the lines of what the preceding commenter is talking about. More along the lines of, say, IRA tactics.
Which is all to say, that this is something which is shaped entirely by the government’s intentional responses and the contexts that they create. When they decide to escalate, that should be seen, naturally, as being on them, and not on your average person. I think what the previous commenter is trying to say, with a good faith reading, is that we are probably due, in the next 4 years and perhaps beyond, for an escalation. I don’t think that’s really a morally great thing, or a good context, but I do think they’re potentially right based on how things shake out, and I think that people should probably come to terms with that even as we try to avoid it.
Edit: Also I forgot to note this, but this isn’t really a disagreement in core ideals, but just of tactics. Dual power isn’t so much a deliberate choice of tactic so much as it should just be a certainty, being that both sides of this debate are mutually beneficial to one another. If you have, or can place, a more reasonable politician in office, either through violence (highly unusual, but does happen occasionally if the dice reroll lands well enough), or through the political system itself, then that reasonable politician is just that, more reasonable. i.e. more likely to accomplish goals which are desirable to any violent guerillas. Likewise, the pressure that violent guerillas exert can be seen as a kind of abstract economic cost constantly being leveraged against unreasonable political powers, in favor of reasonable elements of that political system.
The main point against this, is that the united states is currently so unreasonable, politically, that it’s functionally impossible to bargain with in really any way. Any violence, under such a political system, one which refuses any attempt at change, is seen as kind of ultimately meaningless. But I think that’s maybe also part of a broader point about how people just generally feel, understandably, incredibly pessimistic about the future, and are sort of retreating back into a kind of survival mode. Especially, I think, because they’ve been made to feel totally responsible for the weight of the world, when ultimately the decision of the political power to retaliate and do mass violence is, as previously stated, both inevitable, and entirely their own decision, that they must be held responsible for, rather than the people.
1000% agree. There is no freedom but the freedom that we build together.
if 100% is completely agreeing, what’s 1000%?
completely agreeing, 10 times
From the article:
literally
Look; if you’re a journalist, pretend you know other words. I’m so fucking done.
Weird flex here…
404 at least does some investigative journalism beyond fake news headlines where person a “slams” person b
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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