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I see this kind of thing over and over. It’s a symptom of a larger problem: We are building communities on closed platforms that we don’t control. We need to m

by EGreg 3y ago

I see this kind of thing over and over. It’s a symptom of a larger problem: We are building communities on closed platforms that we don’t control. We need to move from Feudalism to a Free Market: https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/ https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/ When you choose where to host your Wordpress or whatever, you don’t worry about someone shutting off the API keys. On this page is a video explaining how that would work: https://qbix.com/platform https://qbix.com/platform On the other hand we see this all the time: https://twitter.com/nk1tz/status/1197347554201133056?s=46&t=Zz0nAwCHEPYpfIHcldbqWQ https://twitter.com/nk1tz/status/1197347554201133056?s=46&t=... Isn’t that lovely? The screenshot of HN complaining bitterly about someone controlling their own giant platform that we have all come to rely on. And the only solution is “switch to {{their competitor}}” as if that will solve it. This is just one of thousands of examples.

mschuster91 3y ago
> We are building communities on closed platforms that we don’t control. We need to move from Feudalism to a Free Market A free market literally overrun by Nazis is what that means in the end. It's best seen on all the Twitter clone attempts that marketed themselves as "free speech" alternatives - most notably Parler, Gab and Truth Social: they all ended up being echo chambers of Nazis, where no one but them would want to hang out. The "board scene" had similar moments... from OG 4chan to 8chan and others, as soon as the current "hot" platform began to moderate away the worst of the worst (usually due to some terrorist focusing the police and general public spotlight on it), they simply moved away. The other way, federation of instances like with Mastodon, has a different problem set: while Nazi, CSAM and otherwise problematic instances get cut off from the larger instances, discovery absolutely sucks compared to the elephant (or rather, bird) in the room - there's no way to run "trending topic" campaigns, which was the feature that made Twitter so successful among protesters and dissidents: it allowed them to easily reach a global audience to put a spotlight on government abuses. The solution to go forward is what the EU is doing with the DSA/DMA: allow big, centralized platforms, and force the operators to adhere to a common baseline of moderation standards.
- BeFlatXIII 3y ago
  Perhaps not being able to run trending topic campaigns is a _draw_ for Masto users. Not being able to create your own means you don't have to be spammed with attempts from others.
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    For me, the experience of Mastodon is worse than Twitter - essentially, either you follow the global firehose feed, or you're limited to the small amount of content your direct followings create or re-toot.
- EGreg 3y ago
  That’s a fixable problem. First of all — if you are so worried about being overrun by nazis, you should worry about being overrun by bots, who could gradually astruturf any ideology including nazism or 4chan QAnon or recruiting of incels into jihadism or something as simple as “let’s go to war against China”. (And furthermore, Carthage delendum est.) It is far more insidious because it would be done as a coordinated, long-term swarm attack. A persistent advanced threat, in all communities, available to anyone to deploy. All open communities would turn into a dark forest and you’ll cry out to Zuck and Elon to save you, and trust them even more. That is why we will soon all be moving to private communities where we — not Zuck or Elon’s algorithms — select who we hear from, and where membership is grandfathered in and/or depends on actually showing up to events in person once in a while and interacting (gasp, you mean like, BEFORE the Internet? When people had fulfilling social lives?) Rather than preventing people from forming their own communities, you should support open source tools that give them access to their own infrastructure. If they want to label Nagorno-Karabakh on their copy of OpenStreetMap “Armenia” or “Azerbaijan”, they can, and don’t have to kill each other in the name of The State flags. How about if we each have our own private keychains to sign what we say, rather than Facebook and Google’s “real names” policy (which Google apologized for) or their centralized sign-in which basicallly controls your identity? Or CBDCs and National IDs from The State which are coming? Or even worse, scanning your eyeballs by “Worldcoin” founded by the same OpenAI guys who promised to be open nonprofit and later became closed for-profit? Tell me, when you are jacked into a metaverse for 10 hours a day (eg for work and some fun), would you want it to be owned by a corporation, their world and you just live in it? Are you preferring to trust Facebook, a company that has surreptitiously spied on your audio and your camera every chance they got until they got caught? We have perfectly good Web2 solutions like Verified Claims and certificate chains, for many of these things, and you can watch my interviews with the technologists who actually roll it out, such as: Private Keys and Civic Participation: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GRzVj2W9WGM https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GRzVj2W9WGM Founder of Freenet, the first decentralized encrypted file sharing platform: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JWrRqUkJpMQ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JWrRqUkJpMQ

by EGreg 3y ago

mschuster91 3y ago

> We are building communities on closed platforms that we don’t control. We need to move from Feudalism to a Free Market A free market literally overrun by Nazis is what that means in the end. It's best seen on all the Twitter clone attempts that marketed themselves as "free speech" alternatives - most notably Parler, Gab and Truth Social: they all ended up being echo chambers of Nazis, where no one but them would want to hang out. The "board scene" had similar moments... from OG 4chan to 8chan and others, as soon as the current "hot" platform began to moderate away the worst of the worst (usually due to some terrorist focusing the police and general public spotlight on it), they simply moved away. The other way, federation of instances like with Mastodon, has a different problem set: while Nazi, CSAM and otherwise problematic instances get cut off from the larger instances, discovery absolutely sucks compared to the elephant (or rather, bird) in the room - there's no way to run "trending topic" campaigns, which was the feature that made Twitter so successful among protesters and dissidents: it allowed them to easily reach a global audience to put a spotlight on government abuses. The solution to go forward is what the EU is doing with the DSA/DMA: allow big, centralized platforms, and force the operators to adhere to a common baseline of moderation standards.

BeFlatXIII 3y ago
Perhaps not being able to run trending topic campaigns is a _draw_ for Masto users. Not being able to create your own means you don't have to be spammed with attempts from others.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  For me, the experience of Mastodon is worse than Twitter - essentially, either you follow the global firehose feed, or you're limited to the small amount of content your direct followings create or re-toot.
EGreg 3y ago
That’s a fixable problem. First of all — if you are so worried about being overrun by nazis, you should worry about being overrun by bots, who could gradually astruturf any ideology including nazism or 4chan QAnon or recruiting of incels into jihadism or something as simple as “let’s go to war against China”. (And furthermore, Carthage delendum est.) It is far more insidious because it would be done as a coordinated, long-term swarm attack. A persistent advanced threat, in all communities, available to anyone to deploy. All open communities would turn into a dark forest and you’ll cry out to Zuck and Elon to save you, and trust them even more. That is why we will soon all be moving to private communities where we — not Zuck or Elon’s algorithms — select who we hear from, and where membership is grandfathered in and/or depends on actually showing up to events in person once in a while and interacting (gasp, you mean like, BEFORE the Internet? When people had fulfilling social lives?) Rather than preventing people from forming their own communities, you should support open source tools that give them access to their own infrastructure. If they want to label Nagorno-Karabakh on their copy of OpenStreetMap “Armenia” or “Azerbaijan”, they can, and don’t have to kill each other in the name of The State flags. How about if we each have our own private keychains to sign what we say, rather than Facebook and Google’s “real names” policy (which Google apologized for) or their centralized sign-in which basicallly controls your identity? Or CBDCs and National IDs from The State which are coming? Or even worse, scanning your eyeballs by “Worldcoin” founded by the same OpenAI guys who promised to be open nonprofit and later became closed for-profit? Tell me, when you are jacked into a metaverse for 10 hours a day (eg for work and some fun), would you want it to be owned by a corporation, their world and you just live in it? Are you preferring to trust Facebook, a company that has surreptitiously spied on your audio and your camera every chance they got until they got caught? We have perfectly good Web2 solutions like Verified Claims and certificate chains, for many of these things, and you can watch my interviews with the technologists who actually roll it out, such as: Private Keys and Civic Participation: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GRzVj2W9WGM https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GRzVj2W9WGM Founder of Freenet, the first decentralized encrypted file sharing platform: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JWrRqUkJpMQ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JWrRqUkJpMQ