The TikTok ban and Donald Trump's rise to power show how fragile our social media accounts are. We must normalize and invest in decentralized social media.
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.
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
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.
Closed instances with vetted members, there’s no other way.
Too high of a barrier to 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.
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
I started using Twitter in 2009. It was just techy people back then. Things are allowed to take time and grow organically.
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…
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.