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There have been a million reasons for years to support decentralized communication platforms, but it only gets a burst of attention when a fascist / race-nation
by api 6y ago
There have been a million reasons for years to support decentralized communication platforms, but it only gets a burst of attention when a fascist / race-nationalist movement gets de-platformed? I find that more than a little depressing. It says not so flattering things about this community if this is what you folks care about enough to notice what's been obvious for so long.
Big social networks have been mass surveillance and manipulation machines for years. The cloud and locked-down mobile platforms have been dangerous tools of mass control and market manipulation for years. None of these platforms have ever been free, open, or unbiased. Absolutely nothing changed in the past 48 hours.
If you don't like what just happened, it's your fault for not caring for 10+ years. (Unless you are one of the few who have been paying attention...)
- ecliptik 6y agoI 100% agree with you. I submitted this because after seeing all these alternative social media, messaging, etc links the last few days I remembered the dreams of the aughties and thought OpenSocial deserved some attention. The other link I submitted today was for WASTE - the Nullsoft anonymous encrypted P2P chat client from the early aughts, but that one didn't seem to gain traction. Many of these ideas have been around for a long time in a much more rational form and should be re-visited and built upon instead all these fly-by-night knee-jerk response apps.
- kodah 6y ago> There have been a million reasons for years to support decentralized communication platforms, but it only gets a burst of attention when a fascist / race-nationalist movement gets de-platformed? I find that more than a little depressing. It says not so flattering things about this community if this is what you folks care about enough to notice what's been obvious for so long. This is a pretty reductionist way of looking at a post like this. These events have opened up a lot of interesting points: - The practice of websites "soft deleting" content - Reckless data collection - The ease at which managed infrastructure can be revoked by vendors, without warning - The potential for harm that bad actors can have on a centralized network - The limits of curation / moderation - The degrees of separation between companies that manage infrastructure, manage application code, and the people that manage communities and the power dynamics in between - The roles of narratives, misinformation, and how it can be both monopolized, weaponized, and used to radicalize Thinking about these things critically and iteratively does not make anyone a far-right apologist. Decentralization has been discussed on this website off and on for as long as I've been here. It's not always relevant, it's a problem with lots of caveats, and it will take rediscussion over time to find a solution that works well for everyone.
- selfhoster11 6y agoStill, I can't help thinking that it took opening this particular Pandora's Box to have this discussion. The last point in your response might not have been visible until the Capitol attack, but the rest was visible to anyone sufficiently pessimistic about the modern tech/social/legislative landscape.
- kodah 6y agoMaybe you've missed the other decentralization discussions. I came here because of them, although I was (and still more am) concerned about decentralizing code hosting.
- selfhoster11 6y agoI am aware that this was a discussion on the peripheries like the small web/privacy advocate communities. What I'm surprised is that this wasn't discussed earlier in the technical _mainstream_, which is a distinctly different audience.
- kodah 6y agoAh, that makes more sense. I missed that part, my bad.