4 ms·

> these organizations would self-manage their own social media infrastructure What could possibly go wrong...

riffic 8y ago
Lots could go wrong, but a lot could be learned from this and it's a chance to make the internet work the way it was originally designed to work. Walled gardens are an aberration.
asdff 8y ago
What could that wouldn't with a private platform? A hypothetical public forum would be excellent! It would be a place where people could feel comfortable to disseminate knowledge without worrying about their information and psychological profile being bought, sold, and manipulated because it wouldn't be financially supported by those practices. If it's kept far away from Ajit Pai types, maybe bad actors could be forced out (SSN or other official verification, maybe?) Take a look at a well-run government resource like PubMed. Sure it looks awkward at first, but its extensively documented, and as you learn more and more about it you begin to appreciate how robust it is being isolated from metrics like time on platform or ad engagement. You have powerful search operators, and extensive public databases of primary literature and entire seminal textbooks. Functionality is only added, never removed. Everything we know about biology is indexed on this website and available at your fingertips (ignoring Elsevier for a moment). You don't even have to visit it unless you need to; it's trivial to set up email notifications or an RSS feed for an active search. Social media is broken. The playbook used by the Russians only worked because it benefitted from these same algorithms designed to keep peoples eyes fixed on these platforms and no other. Who would have known that designing a platform to maximize viral advertising could be used as is to maximize viral propaganda? Certainly not Zuckerberg, as he claims. The original premise of Facebook, an online extension to strictly local connections, seems so idyllic and utopian now.
- ucaetano 8y ago
  > What could that wouldn't with a private platform? Well, with a private company you don't have the one who makes and enforces the rules also running your social network. And that's a very, very bad scenario. We'll be going back to the Pravda.
  - riffic 8y ago
    With the ActivityPub "Fediverse" each publisher only controls the instance they publish to, not the entire network at large. Anyone can run an instance of a server implementing the protocol and anyone can subscribe to messages published by a microblogger. What experience do you have here, and have you read the protocols yet? Here's a reference implementation: https://github.com/dariusk/express-activitypub https://github.com/dariusk/express-activitypub My larger statement here is that organizations that the public give tax dollars into should be running open infrastructure that they self-manage and would then provision accounts for their users (users in this case being the agencies that utilize and publish to social media feeds and the offices of elected officials that do the same), and not be subscribers to centralized social media services (that is, twitter, facebook, instagram, et cetera et cetera. If you haven't been living under a rock you know these services have issues and are being gamed.)

Lots could go wrong, but a lot could be learned from this and it's a chance to make the internet work the way it was originally designed to work. Walled gardens are an aberration.

asdff 8y ago

What could that wouldn't with a private platform? A hypothetical public forum would be excellent! It would be a place where people could feel comfortable to disseminate knowledge without worrying about their information and psychological profile being bought, sold, and manipulated because it wouldn't be financially supported by those practices. If it's kept far away from Ajit Pai types, maybe bad actors could be forced out (SSN or other official verification, maybe?) Take a look at a well-run government resource like PubMed. Sure it looks awkward at first, but its extensively documented, and as you learn more and more about it you begin to appreciate how robust it is being isolated from metrics like time on platform or ad engagement. You have powerful search operators, and extensive public databases of primary literature and entire seminal textbooks. Functionality is only added, never removed. Everything we know about biology is indexed on this website and available at your fingertips (ignoring Elsevier for a moment). You don't even have to visit it unless you need to; it's trivial to set up email notifications or an RSS feed for an active search. Social media is broken. The playbook used by the Russians only worked because it benefitted from these same algorithms designed to keep peoples eyes fixed on these platforms and no other. Who would have known that designing a platform to maximize viral advertising could be used as is to maximize viral propaganda? Certainly not Zuckerberg, as he claims. The original premise of Facebook, an online extension to strictly local connections, seems so idyllic and utopian now.

ucaetano 8y ago
> What could that wouldn't with a private platform? Well, with a private company you don't have the one who makes and enforces the rules also running your social network. And that's a very, very bad scenario. We'll be going back to the Pravda.
- riffic 8y ago
  With the ActivityPub "Fediverse" each publisher only controls the instance they publish to, not the entire network at large. Anyone can run an instance of a server implementing the protocol and anyone can subscribe to messages published by a microblogger. What experience do you have here, and have you read the protocols yet? Here's a reference implementation: https://github.com/dariusk/express-activitypub https://github.com/dariusk/express-activitypub My larger statement here is that organizations that the public give tax dollars into should be running open infrastructure that they self-manage and would then provision accounts for their users (users in this case being the agencies that utilize and publish to social media feeds and the offices of elected officials that do the same), and not be subscribers to centralized social media services (that is, twitter, facebook, instagram, et cetera et cetera. If you haven't been living under a rock you know these services have issues and are being gamed.)