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People complain a lot about the internet getting worse and worse. We can fix it, if we put in the effort to rebuild it. * Join fediverse services, e.g. [Lemmy]

People complain a lot about the internet getting worse and worse. We can fix it, if we put in the effort to rebuild it. * Join fediverse services, e.g. [Lemmy](feddit.de) or Mastodon and post a bit. * Create your own website if you have sth like a cool hobby to share. Webhosting is available for free or cheap, depending on what you want. Link other pages you like to form a net. * If you can, host your own instances and federate. * Look into alternative search engines like marginalia to find "small-web" content * Talk to your friends to also make the move or at least look at alternatives to the large sites. We can't just wait for the problem to fix itself, this is something where internet users have to become active. It won't solve itself. EDIT: Commenters here are rightly saying that discoverability is a problem. Again, relying on search engines is required for productivity, but when we consider browsing for research or leisure, don't underestimate manually curated link pages. Webrings were a thing we might wanna consider again.

WesolyKubeczek 3y ago
I’ve been to fediverse. Many mastodongs are just the same entitled first world outrage vents as twitters, even more toxic at times because there are no moderators to shut them up.
- ants_everywhere 3y ago
  This is true. Just from a technical perspective I think toxicity isn't an entirely intractable problem. The combination of moderator + tooling + AI should eventually get to acceptable levels where you can scale moderation acceptably on average for most users most of the time. But I do think there will be a cat and mouse game as tools to evade moderation also get more advanced and are perhaps only revealed when the moderation tools are needed most. That's where it's nice to have the resources of a large corporation to invest in being able to be proactive about threats.
  - tentacleuno 3y ago
    Agreed. Though I think an important point here is that moderation has the potential to be a lot more personal on Fediverse instances, as the ratio between moderators and users is a lot higher than traditional social media outlets (Facebook, Twitter). Maybe AI has a place in moderation? I've always wondered why it isn't used more; if you give it an adequate training phase (a year?), it may be able to quickly identify and flag malicious content -- of course, you wouldn't want to ban whoever the AI tells you to, just use it as one of the signals for whether content could potentially be harmful.
    - ants_everywhere 3y ago
      Yes I think that's exactly right. In the ideal case you would want to moderate with a personal touch at the start and the use automation to scale that personality as needed. I was thinking of AI in moderation mainly as signals. Like looking for synchronized activity or standard canned tactics and just surface them as signals or alerts to be looked at by humans. Basically make it easier to combat coordination and scale that is hard for any one moderater to see. There is also the client side scanning stuff that Apple and others have experimented with. Basically try to warn users before they do something so that they're at least aware of the guidelines and leave it up to them whether they think they should proceed.
      - tentacleuno 3y ago
        > I was thinking of AI in moderation mainly as signals. Like looking for synchronized activity or standard canned tactics and just surface them as signals or alerts to be looked at by humans. Basically make it easier to combat coordination and scale that is hard for any one moderater to see. 100%. It would be great if that could become public, too -- perhaps moderators could contribute to the model, maybe even automatically, through the software. Though I'm unsure as to how you would prevent bias from entering the model. I feel like AI isn't used much in solutions such as these because you can't read what its been trained upon (e.g. if a right-leaning instance uses it, it may be biased against left-leaning content), and how the final model reacts to content. (Maybe there's a way to achieve this, not an AI expert by any means.) It seems like it would be less transparent than the (arguably not great) solution we have now: shared blocklists. Anyway, on the whole it would be great if we could take advantage of technology to reduce the administrative work required to host a public Mastodon / AP instance -- if we could achieve it, such work would most likely give way to more instances.
- thih9 3y ago
  Anecdotally, I'm happy with my mastodon instance and its level of moderation. > Many mastodongs are just the same entitled first world outrage vents Calling others "mastodongs" is not exactly the opposite of an entitled first world outrage vent. Have you tried to solve the problem yourself, e.g. finding an instance that suits you better?
  - WesolyKubeczek 3y ago
    There’s this directory of mastodon instances one is invited to browse to pick one, and after sifting through an insane amount of instances that are no longer up, instances that highly favor furry anime erotica, instances that are inclusive of LGBT+ people to the point of exlusion of everyone else at all, instances that are full of left wing activists so peaceful and welcoming that they have users with nicknames like “Let’s dismember Scott Adams” and user avatars with the sickle and the hammer, I’ve come to a conclusion that it’s not an environment I’m going to enjoy much. Since “the federation” is actively nurturing the environment to be like that, my hopes are not high.
- kalleboo 3y ago
  At least on federated services there are no algorithms pushing them in your face. Create your own instance, invite like-minded people. You can't do that on centralized services. The first time I heard about Mastodon was from conservative libertarian-type folk who disagreed with Twitter policy, several years ago. I disagree strongly with their politics but at least they decided to create something instead of just use it as victim politics like the mainstream politicians.
- Zambyte 3y ago
  You only see posts that you look for on the Fediverse. If you don't want to see those posts, stop looking for them. Join a moderated instance. Follow people you want to see posts from. Unfollow people you don't want to see posts from anymore.
  - unpopularopp 3y ago
    >You only see posts that you look for on the Fediverse >Follow people you want to see posts from. Unfollow people you don't want to see posts from anymore But that's the same on Twitter or Reddit too. I only follow 20 people on Twitter and I only see their posts. I only read 10 reddit subs through RSS and I only see posts from those subs. To me there is no reason to switch to an alternative because what I want is not there.
- serial_dev 3y ago
  Mastodon will never make it (e.g my parents, non tech siblings at least know what it is). My experience, too, wasn't positive, the only time there was meaningful activity there was when everyone said they hate Elon and Twitter, it's an echo chamber, no interesting voices, and that whole fediverse stuff is confusing even as a software developer, imagine how nontech people would feel (they _would_ if they ever heard about Mastodon). It might just be me, but I also hate the name. "Follow me on Mastodon" sounds like something that will get the cops called on me. It had its chance when Elon took over, but then people realized that federation will not make a good user experience and will not make a community. I see anyone who offers Mastodon as a solution to anything in 2023 as "too deep in their bubble". Stop trying to make Mastodon happen, it's not going to happen.
  - kalleboo 3y ago
    I agree that Mastodon's technical limitations will never make it the mainstream choice, although something like Threads actually going through with their threat of implementing ActivityPub may make AP that through user-friendly centralized services that Mastodon servers can interact with (like with google actually supported xmpp) But I disagree with some of your other comments > The only time there was meaningful activity there was when everyone said they hate Elon and Twitter The first few months after the "exodus" when Twitter was in chaos this was true, but after that I just muted the keywords "twitter" and "birdsite" and don't hear much about it anymore, even after the rebranding to X made it impossible to keyword filter people just don't talk about it. I hear more from IRL friends "they're removing likes!" (??? apparently?) than I've seen on Mastodon. > it's an echo chamber, no interesting voices For me I've found far more interesting voices on Mastodon than on Twitter now that I'm just seeing boosts by humans instead of whatever the algorithm deemed was viral. I was bored with Twitter before I switched since there wasn't anything going on but outrage (and I made a point of unfollowing Americans who retweeted political stuff to try to signal to the algorithm I want technical stuff) but now on Mastodon my feed is full of people making and doing things instead, it's far more interesting. > It might just be me, but I also hate the name. "Follow me on Mastodon" sounds like something that will get the cops called on me. The ridiculousness of "Twitter" and "tweeting" were literally daily jokes on late-night shows when Twitter was rising. Names mean nothing. And somehow "X" is still somehow even worse. It sounds like a porn site. > will not make a community If there's anything Mastodon has created, it's communities. I doubt it will create a "world's town square" like Twitter did, but it has created lots of interesting thriving communities. Similarly to how Usenet and IRC did, which both probably had far fewer users.
tusqasi 3y ago
I think that is not how we can rebuild the internet. The majority don't even know what is wrong with the internet in the place, not everyone reads hnews(That is nichest of the communities), and most users aren't even using twitter for alternatives to have an impact. (I have zero idea about the actual numbers)
- marginalia_nu 3y ago
  Does the majority need to be part of it? Since day one the web was always built by the oddball minorities. It's easy to forget how weird it was considered to spend any amount of time online in the pre-smartphone era.
  - tusqasi 3y ago
    Think of the numbers of tik-tok, youtube, facebook, instagram, snapchat, and all those Social media users. All these users are "normal" people nowadays. Maybe the effects habits of the minorities on the trajectories of "The Internet" are diminished. (Just thoughts. Not based on anything other my opinions)
    - marginalia_nu 3y ago
      There are still those weird spaces on the web where creative oddballs gather though. Have you checked out the Gemini protocol for example? It's a weird space for weird people, in the best way.
  - Grumbledour 3y ago
    I noticed a kind of sickness that seems to have taken hold of many people working in tech over the last 15 years. The belief, that nothing can be done unless you got dozens of people, millions of funding and years of time. Or maybe it's just more younger people in this space, who don't remember that we used to build social networks in our free time in our garages? Now, maybe it's mainly a hacker news problem, because you can find people out there who just build something without thinking to much about monetization and it seems many of them consciously avoid this site. But the willingness to be an active part in making something better seems to have dwindled and people project a powerlessness to change the status quo, when indeed it was in the past always the technical people who were forerunners with this kind of stuff (and consequently are also at least partly to blame for the things we have now). But these days, you can't even convince many techies to stop using chrome, even if they admit to hating it. I wonder how we get that back? How we can convince techies, that not only can they do it, but when they build it, they will come? Because they always do!
ants_everywhere 3y ago
These are all great ideas, and I echo them. But I do feel like these sorts of collective problems are hard to solve by each person trying to do their own part working alone. One reason that corporate internet won is that money transfers to a single entity, and that pot of money can be used to coordinate action in some particular direction (for better or worse depending on your view). Without some coordination mechanism, it seems a a bit too divided. It's unclear to me what the appropriate mechanism is, but I think that's the right sort of way to frame the problem.
- js8 3y ago
  I think socialism is the mechanism - one person one vote with the stake of ownership. I am pretty liberal but it I believe it needs socialism (democracy in economic sphere) to avoid capture by corporations. (And vice versa, socialism needs liberalism to prevent capture by government. They can't survive without each other, being constantly threatened by authoritarianism.)
  - wildrhythms 3y ago
    Socialism has nothing to do with 'government capture'; it only concerns itself with worker ownership over the means of production.
    - senortumnus 3y ago
      And government protections / mandates toward that end or masquerading as being toward that end
      - velcrovan 3y ago
        So what?
    - suoduandao3 3y ago
      The means of production these days is a laptop or a smartphone. A solar panel or a garden if one is in the physical portion of the economy. We are kind of already at a point where working class individuals can own the means of production without ever needing to 'smesh capitalism'. I expect as a result we'll see a divergence between people who want to own the means of production and people who want to impoverish the current owners.
CuriouslyC 3y ago
SEO, content farms and click mills are the things ruining the internet. All of this is the result of advertising as a business model. For any content, the perverse incentive is to copy it repeatedly with slight variations then monetize the copies with ads and SEO your monetized version to the top of the search results. What we need is a social-first internet where every piece of content is associated with an actual human and people query for content through their social graph. This will be doubly important in the age of AI.
- hliyan 3y ago
  Also, a pay-per-use Internet (where appropriate), where people will vote for content with their wallets, instead of having to purchase subscriptions whether they read an article or not. Just a few minutes ago, I wanted to read an NYT article but it asked me to buy a $1/mo subscription. Very cheap, but a) I don't read NYT that regularly and b) doing that with every news outlet I occasionally read, adds up. On the other hand, if it had asked for $0.25 to read just that article, I might have paid it. I would have been even more likely to pay if there had been some service, possibly provided by the ISP itself, where all such microtransactions of mine are aggregated and billed once for me at the end of the month.
  - sanex 3y ago
    I've been saying this for a while. It doesn't even need to be that expensive either. Pay a penny to watch a YouTube video type of deal. It can be done through lightning network to avoid per transaction credit card fees which would probably otherwise make it too expensive. My biggest hangup is paying for something that quickly turns out to be crap. I guess people would learn pretty quickly and hopefully the recommendation algorithm would start to favor just good content over clickbait sellout garbage.
    - gosub100 3y ago
      I would love that. just a tip jar button on my browser that I load up with a few bucks every month, and send to websites or commenters who made me laugh or got me thinking. Streamers have proven (albeit crudely) that viewers are more than willing to part with their money (if they have it). And I'm not just hinting at salacious young women (who probably receive the bulk of the dollar value). There's a streamer team who broadcast live at LAX and other airports and get excited about the various air traffic. It's fun watching their dedication and passion, their broadcasting skills grow, and how happy they are to do what they enjoy. I've donated probably $200-$300 over the years to them.
derelicta 3y ago
What id like to see is a federated MySpace-like service. Users could host their blog on an instance of their choice, toy around its styling or its content directly as to learn about web techs (or keep it simple and remain with the default stylesheet!), and yet remain discoverable thanks to the federated nature of such service. If I had the time its honestly something id love working on.
- toyg 3y ago
  We had that, when feeds and pingbacks were a thing. But the masses don't want to self-host, nor do they want to learn about web stuff. Hence Facebook.
  - derelicta 3y ago
    Well you can selfhost if you feel like it in such situation, otherwise you can rely on the good will of good folks to do the tough job for you :)
- Grumbledour 3y ago
  But discoverability seems the Achilles heel of federated services. How would you solve that? How would I discover a blog in practice and how would this work from a technical standpoint? I am asking not to poke holes, but because this is an interesting topic. Finding content seems the biggest problem to me in a more decentralized web and we need more good solutions and ideas here.
  - kreeben 3y ago
    Someone, say Google, will index them thus make them discoverable?
  - derelicta 3y ago
    I don't know either tbh. Discoverability in federated services is indeed their Achilles heel and I don't know nearly enough to suggest a solution to that.
  - 3y ago
eloisant 3y ago
The problem is that too many people don't go to website other than their usual social media sites.
linuxdeveloper 3y ago
My pitch to the public: “Join the Fediverse and help build the weird new Internet.” The Epsilon galaxy is a friendly outpost of services in the brave new decentralized digital universe, now known as the Fediverse. (I coined the term Fediverse “galaxy” to refer to a cluster of federated services/nodes run by a single entity, and it’s gained some traction on Mastodon). My galaxy is completely bootstrapped, no VC investment: https://epsilon.lol https://epsilon.lol We even have our first paying customer (8 euro/ year)!
endisneigh 3y ago
I find it very ironic that this is the top post given the centralized nature of this site.
chrsw 3y ago
I don't know if it can be fixed. Maybe we can slow the deterioration but we might be beyond the tipping point. The internet I joined 25 years ago is long gone and it's never coming back. It's partly a technological problem and a resource problem but it's also larger scale problem with our values.
vasco 3y ago
Taking a much higher level of perspective on the issue, I don't know if people complain in the way that it matters. I mean sure they complain, but internet usage globally is up by a lot and it keeps going up, even as we discover some issues with over-use on our health. So yeah people complain but the internet, even as it is today, is I think by any metric the most loved technology available worldwide. If the internet was getting way worse in practice wouldn't a bunch of people start using somethng else and new user rates decreasing? By all metrics the internet is the best it ever was and keeps being super useful for everyone.
lo_zamoyski 3y ago
A path to some desired state requires an incentive and a reduction of friction (like cost). Absent those things, you will get nowhere.
unpopularopp 3y ago
>or Mastodon and post a bit. Yet when I open the explore page on Mastodon I still see the same shit: politics. https://mastodon.social/explore https://mastodon.social/explore It's almost as if the whole point of Mastodon wasn't anything more than just to be another echo chamber. But hey no bad guys from "the other side" so guess we good. HN is still the best. We need more HN not Twitter or Mastodon.
- ggpsv 3y ago
  The whole point of Mastodon/Fediverse is that mastodon.social is not your sole option. Unlike other platforms, you have a choice. You're in control of who to follow or block, and what to mute. There is no algorithmic timeline that surfaces unwanted content to you. You can hide the boosts (i.e retweets) of any account. You can simply default to follow accounts you're interested and rely entirely on your local timeline. There are many Mastodon servers that are more niche, or at least less akin to Twitter/Mastodon.social. I originally made my account in mastodon.social but I'm in the process of moving to another server where the server timeline aligns more with what I'm looking for (though I can migrate my followers/followings, yay!). This server is also run cooperatively, which further aligns the interests and motives of everyone involved. I'd say we need HN AND more Mastodon servers.
abetusk 3y ago
In my opinion, a big part of the success of Wikipedia is that it offers its content under a libre/free license (CC-BY-SA). This specifically allows for commercial re-use and re-sale. The license provides a wide umbrella so that many different people and entities can use the content without worry. Contributions provide a fly-wheel of improvement. A lot of the current batch of internet companies provide walled gardens and eventually succumb to the trappings of monopolies. In some sense, I think it's survivorship bias. The only entities that stand the test of time are the ones that provide content under libre/free licensing. While I don't disagree with your list, I think a missing component is access to the commons. Without a rich commons, our society suffers as content sinks into a copyright quagmire.
OfSanguineFire 3y ago
Fediverse (in the sense of the major servers that federate) is an extreme echo chamber representative of mainly a certain sociopolitical wing and mainly from North America and Western Europe. Just look at mastodon.social/explore and consider that many founding activists of Mastodon have spoken about how they yearn to keep the community just like that even as it grows. Part of the early internet was about being able to find a huge range of different attitudes and beliefs, every possible politics, every possible religion. It was about being able to get a glimpse of non-Western cultures you might never have been able to learn about before. There is very little diversity in the fediverse.
- someuser2345 3y ago
  Isn't that how the first internet started? I assume most early adopters were also based in NA and Europe.
- afavour 3y ago
  I disagree about your assessment of the early internet. It was extremely white and nerdy when looked at on average. Certainly diversity was out there but it wasn’t easily found, much like the fediverse today. Even Wikipedia (not that it counts as early internet): > I knew that early Wikipedia editors were (and kinda still are) academically-inclined hacker dudes, but it's crazy when you realize the article about mole day, created January 2002, is an entire year older than the article "hip hop music" and five years older than "fashion show" https://twitter.com/depthsofwiki/status/1716655903695425695 https://twitter.com/depthsofwiki/status/1716655903695425695
  - giraffe_lady 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - nkozyra 3y ago
      > hahaha seriously. this is the internet they want to go back to. Well there were obviously good and bad things about it. Some people think there's a way to be inclusive unlike the way it was once very exclusive while still embracing the general ethos of the original Internet - which was people connected directly via the infrastructure rather than through third party corporations. We can have an inclusive internet - digital democracy, as it was once called - without walled gardens.
afavour 3y ago
IMO these are tech solutions to social problems. As engineers it’s perhaps only natural that we gravitate towards them but I think there’s real danger of counter-productivity. Lemmy and Mastodon are good examples of this. Federation is a PITA. I know people who tried to switch from Twitter to Mastodon and never succeeded, getting lost in the concept of different instances etc etc. Mastodon instances are relatively expensive to run because the day to day operation of federation is way more complex than a centralised solution would be. There’s nothing wrong with centralised services and Wikipedia is a great example of one that works. You just need the right governance structure and an audience willing to chip in to cover costs. Federation is over complicated and often unnecessary.
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  > Mastodon instances are relatively expensive to run Compared to a theoretic distributed alternative, yes. But the largest instance of Mastodon, with something around 1% of the users of Twitter costs around $700 a month.
datadeft 3y ago
Think about with you mother in mind. The issue with thinking we can fix it is that you think about another HN reader in mind. Humanity's biggest issues are coming from concentration or centralisation. You can apply this pretty much to anything: wealth, population, corporations, etc. We create bubbles based on these. The solution is decentralisation. The question is how to get there?
- esafak 3y ago
  Centralization is what made Wikipedia, Facebook, and other sites great before they deteriorated. You can go farther when united. Up or down.
marak830 3y ago
I do not discount anything you posted. At all. * I don't use any social media except here. * I have nothing to say so don't host * Duck duck go? * I tell everyone to move to firefox, help them set it up and most are convinced. Just wish I knew a way to actually help.
- bad_alloc 3y ago
  > I tell everyone to move to firefox, help them set it up and most are convinced. That already helps significantly. :) > I have nothing to say so don't host A fair point, probably only a small % of people on the internet need to actualyl host something. There is some middle ground with federated hosting like write.as , so hosting is not always needed.
- yard2010 3y ago
  Vivaldi on mobile with builtin tracker and ads blocker. I'm not affiliated just a big fan.
dbingham 3y ago
I think we're taking the wrong lesson here. Wikipedia is the "Last Good Place" on the internet - it's not decentralized or federated. It is governed by a non-profit and funded by donations. There are good reasons the fediverse hasn't caught on yet and it comes down to user experience. We haven't figured out how to build a federated service that truly coheres as a single platform, network, or community across the whole network. (Yes, individual instances act as coherent communities, but the links to other instances are weak.) And we haven't figured out how to reduce the cognitive load of joining a federated platform to the point where it's accessible to the average user . I think this is a big part of why Mastodon is still touting usage in the single digit millions while Threads and Bluesky grew several orders of magnitude more as Twitter melted down. Until we solve those problems - which by necessity includes solving the discovery problem - we're not going to be able to successfully decentralize the net. Those problems are a huge part of what lead the net to centralize into massive platforms in the first place, and we can't undo it with out resolving those factors. And solving coherence and discovery in federation is a multi-trillion dollar, decades and a research team, Very Hard Problem (tm). ...but we know how to build centralized platforms that are democratically governed by non-profits. Wikipedia showed us how, and there's a lot that could be improved upon to do even better in terms of transparency and governance. And yes, democracy is hard. It just is. Community is hard. Society is hard. It requires deliberation and compromise. And it will never be perfect (as Wikipedia is far from perfect). But it would sure as hell be better than what we've got. The main piece that's missing is startup funding. Non-profit funders mostly don't understand software. We need non-profit funders who are willing to fund the development of platforms until they gain the sorts of critical mass that would allow them to fund their operations through donations.
akudha 3y ago
I’d add - pay for services when you can afford it. For example, encourage smaller search engines like Kagi. Maybe pay for email, instead of using gmail. Pay for smaller/local news orgs that do original and honest reporting. And so on. And donate to archive.org etc, even if it is only 5$ When we pay for services, we can fight spam/ad invested sites, at least to some extent
- snorremd 3y ago
  This is my approach. I've almost completely de-Googled my private life. For email I use Fastmail. I've migrated most my mail over there, but some remains on my old Google address. So many accounts to port. For search I now mainly use Kagi. Sometimes I drop into Google if I can't find what I'm looking for on Kagi. The nice thing about Kagi is I can manually block or de-prioritize SEO spam domains so I get more relevant results. Takes a bit of time to build these lists, but it does work. I use primarily Firefox and Safari as browsers. I also support Mozilla via my Pocket subscription. Edit: I also have my own website where I post content without any ads or tracking. The content is even licensed under a CC attribute and share-alike license so people can re-post and remix my content as long as they give proper attribution.
  - akudha 3y ago
    Would you recommend fastmail? I am shopping for email service
    - snorremd 3y ago
      Yes. I've used them for a few years now and never had any serious issues. Their delivery rate seems good, I don't get much spam, and so far as I know I have not missed legitimate emails. They have a fast web client where you can perform actions on your entire inbox. So far as I remember gmail only allowed you to do actions on the current page of mails. If you don't want to use their official clients you can always connect via standard IMAP and SMTP. Also they support plus-addressing like gmail, but also subdomain addressing. I.e. instead of name+alias@yourdomain.com you can use alias@name.yourdomain.com. You can also set up nice email filters quite easily, and their server supports the JMAP protocol [1], which they made. So if you want to interface with your mailbox programmatically they have a more modern protocol to use. The years I've used them I only remember them having actual noticeable downtime once. Other than that rock solid. Their first line support isn't super technical, but I've only tried to contact them once. Edit: Essentially if you want good olf-fashioned mail, Fastmail is about as good as it gets. It does not have the smart inbox concepts that Google Mail and Hey do. And not so much in terms of other fancy stuff either. But it makes up for it by using open protocols for mail, calendar, and contact lists. So no danger of lock-in. [1] https://jmap.io/index.html https://jmap.io/index.html
jmyeet 3y ago
I'm honestly shocked how often I still hear technical and educated people argue that the solution is federation. You know what services we have that are federated? Phone (POTS), SMS and email. You know what services have a massive problem with spam, fraud, false positives on detection of the aforementioned, ID spoofing, etc? The exact same services. People ignore the real reason Wikipedia is successful: ownership. It's also worth noting that Wikipedia isn't federated either. We have the same issue with ISPs in the US. The best Internet is municipal broadband. The national ISPs are pretty much universally despised. Again, what's the difference? Ownership. With municipal broadband, the residents own the broadband. National ISPs exist to extract wealth from customers while doing the least possible and lobbying for legal protections against competition. It's almost like the best results are achieved when the workers own the means of production. Someone should really look into that.
ravenstine 3y ago
I can appreciate this kind of thinking as much as everyone else, but I think that the "fediverse" is too much of a distraction. Federation can be a great thing, but it's an adjunct to a solution, and not much of a large scale solution in and of itself. What the web needs is new layers to make what your suggestions much more practical. Creating a website was a nice idea back in 2003 when mostly geeks with skills were using the web. Today, most people don't want to put forth the effort of creating a website. Many geeks with skills that are still around today don't want to bother creating a website because few people will find it. If you make a website, at best only people who read websites will find it. A growing number of people today don't even know what a "website" is because they hardly live on the web proper. Free web hosting is generally bad news because the platform is far more likely to either shut down or provide zero support. So back to the thing I said about new layers to the web... If we're going to bring back websites, then we need to bring back the idea that sites will be hosted on many individual machines that aren't necessarily server infrastructure. With the bandwidth most ISPs and devices are capable of today, data isn't a limiting factor in terms of serving a standard website to even thousands of users. The web was meant to be closer to a peer-to-peer model, and it can be used peer-to-peer, but the layer just isn't there to make that model seamless. Most P2P protocols avoid fiddling with the actual network stack and do entirely their own thing; BitTorrent for the most part lives in their own client applications, as historically have many other P2P protocols. That was fine when geeks were using them, but this is insufficient for making the web itself P2P. The closest implementation to what I am describing here is Yggdrasil: https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/ https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/ Yggdrasil implements P2P mesh networks by behaving like a VPN, assigning an IPv6 address to peers based on public keys. There's no one network, so people are free to create their own networks, and the same address can be used between networks. Although it has some similarities with anonymity networks like Tor, it is not designed for anonymity, which I think is a good thing because Yggdrasil should focus specifically on the networking aspect. Although it's technically in alpha status, I've already been using it to network devices together in my home office. I even have it installed in my car's Android head unit so I can SSH into it and do Linuxy things with it. The current issue I see with Yggdrasil is that it's not plug-n-play enough to become the de facto next generation layer of the web/internet. It still requires manually configuring a JSON file in order to join a network and so forth. Yggdrasil isn't difficult to install, but if the world wants to go with something like it as this next layer, we need to get it to a state where the user needs next to no knowledge to set it up. With this hypothetical layer, groups of people can form their own networks and exchange addresses. This is perfect if you want to have an application similar to WhatsApp or Signal that is mostly private and scoped to groups of people, but allows users to cross into multiple groups. In terms of websites, it's perfect because you get an IPv6 address that is publicly available to anyone on your network and with none of the hassle that's involved with getting a public IP address on the clearnet. It's all a matter of who is connected to the network. If you want anonymity, this layer can still work through another layer like Tor, or even live entirely within something like I2P. A benefit to using I2P here is that its design makes DDoS attacks more difficult, at least in theory. With such a layer, hosting sites can become much more trivial. For everyday people who are a little more technically savvy but don't want to be fussing with the command line, I picture simply downloading something like a Reddit clone that runs like any other app on Linux or MacOS and it runs with a neat little admin interface. Share the address (or the domain if a secondary DNS is used) and you're off to the races.
Semaphor 3y ago
I was on the (Lemmy) fediverse for a few months, selfhosted instance, a lot of comments and post, kept one niche community from Reddit alive over there. It’s pretty much worse than Reddit in most ways. Most small communities don’t exist, small-ish communities get all the assholes big subs have on reddit, because so many people browse all instead of subscribed and post on anything (literally. I had a meta community on my single user instance where I’d just log some descisions and had people vote & comment on those). You have the power mods issue, only far worse, because they are vastly more powerful now that they control whole instances. Then you have all the fascists who claim they are leftists but are actually just "anything Anti-USA is amazing". They also run major instances. I ended up deleting my instance, returning to Reddit (and simply using it from desktop only, and regularly delete my content), and the quality of discourse is already so much better again. I did create an account on beehaw and treat it as unfederated (only subscribing to local communities), the people there can be a bit strange, and there’s not a huge amount of content, but at least they aren’t as bad as the rest of the Lemmy fediverse.
amelius 3y ago
The main thing that should happen is that there is a threshold of effort before people can post things. Like before Eternal September, people had to learn stuff to do things on the internet.
- pessimizer 3y ago
  That's just leaving the internet to the most insane. A tiny bit of effort to post cuts out 95% of participants, leaving mostly the obsessed, often with a specific axe to grind. Cutting by 95% again is distilling nuttiness. The thing that should happen is carefully cultivating closed memberships, and real tools for formal group decision-making. Mods are just benevolent dictators, and the debate that happens around mods with absolute power is essentially theater. Wikipedia barely hides this with its votes that anybody can show up to, and its code of rules being a arbitrary wise-sounding series of koan-shaped aphorisms. Wikipedia has been vulnerable to anybody with a few bucks and an issue that they're willing to camp on. The only reason one can't manipulate Wikipedia at will is because you may have some real life opposition who is also attacking the same articles you are. Instead of formalizing that competition between people of different opinions, Wikipedia has ultimately fallen into dictating who is correct based on the opinion of the highest ranked interested person, within an organization that survives on donations and on volunteer editors who get income from any number of sources. This can't stand up to the manipulation of someone invested in distorting the history of hard-shelled tacos, it certainly can't (and isn't) standing up to state-state level actors.
isk517 3y ago
I'd also add try and give monetary support content creators that you enjoy. Consuming things for free then relying on ads to pay the people that make things is part of how we got to this point. Also in response to your edit, isn't the entire point of Hacker News about discovery? One thing we could do right here on is have a weekly thread for people to post general places on the internet they find interesting (webpages, services, communities) but perhaps don't feel like they constitute a unique thread of their own.
__MatrixMan__ 3y ago
I love your attitude, and I agree that we should be trying to fix this, but the problem is not a lack of signal, it's an increase in noise. Fixing the web means changing it in fundamental ways. Suppose your webbable hobby is curating trustworthy product reviews. You're the hero that's going to fix the web AND capitalism. You can still do that, but you're going to help fewer people because you have to split your attention between you know, doing the thing, and doing the kind of marketing which helps people tell the difference between your thing and the ones that are secretly ads. Meanwhile, the bad guys can focus entirely on the latter. Sorry about the time you wanted to spend comparing blenders, your hobby is now competing with marketers... Or you have to make peace with either obscurity, or contributing to the thing you're trying to kill, because you know that the second you start making an impact somebody is going to rehost your site interleaved with misinformation. Yes, let's fix this thing but the answer is protocols with different inherent priorities. We can't shout over the noise, we need to build something less noisy. My personal view is that we should stop building trust around server names and implicitly trusting whatever those servers send us. In this model the non-content-generating work converges on systems to identify and remove malicious content (either from the server or from the browser screen). Instead we should be addressing content, and sourcing it from whatever device has a copy and is most near. Our browser should know which people we trust and should make it easy for us to lean on that trust such that we can propagate only the trusted bits in the first place. That is: stop identifying ads so that we can block them, start identifying trustworthy content so we can all participate in propagating it more efficiently and supporting it's creators. Or to put it differently: there needs to be no way to spend money to promote content. No third parties injecting bits anywhere. If you notice that kind of shit, you apply annotations which distinguish the signal from the noise and then you propagate only the signal. If people abuse this power, you revoke trust in them and move on. It'll require an awareness of information hygiene, which will be work to maintain, but all of the alternatives I can see involve tolerating life in a Skinner box
deleted 3y ago
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xnx 3y ago
This will likely be an unpopular opinion, but TikTok has been a great place for me to learn about all kinds of unique and interesting things and hobbyist communities I'd never known about: homesteading, commercial plane transport, tether car racing, DIY halloween decorations, interpretive dance, and a lot more. Top comments tend to be funny (though often the same joke) and smart.

WesolyKubeczek 3y ago

I’ve been to fediverse. Many mastodongs are just the same entitled first world outrage vents as twitters, even more toxic at times because there are no moderators to shut them up.

ants_everywhere 3y ago
This is true. Just from a technical perspective I think toxicity isn't an entirely intractable problem. The combination of moderator + tooling + AI should eventually get to acceptable levels where you can scale moderation acceptably on average for most users most of the time. But I do think there will be a cat and mouse game as tools to evade moderation also get more advanced and are perhaps only revealed when the moderation tools are needed most. That's where it's nice to have the resources of a large corporation to invest in being able to be proactive about threats.
- tentacleuno 3y ago
  Agreed. Though I think an important point here is that moderation has the potential to be a lot more personal on Fediverse instances, as the ratio between moderators and users is a lot higher than traditional social media outlets (Facebook, Twitter). Maybe AI has a place in moderation? I've always wondered why it isn't used more; if you give it an adequate training phase (a year?), it may be able to quickly identify and flag malicious content -- of course, you wouldn't want to ban whoever the AI tells you to, just use it as one of the signals for whether content could potentially be harmful.
  - ants_everywhere 3y ago
    Yes I think that's exactly right. In the ideal case you would want to moderate with a personal touch at the start and the use automation to scale that personality as needed. I was thinking of AI in moderation mainly as signals. Like looking for synchronized activity or standard canned tactics and just surface them as signals or alerts to be looked at by humans. Basically make it easier to combat coordination and scale that is hard for any one moderater to see. There is also the client side scanning stuff that Apple and others have experimented with. Basically try to warn users before they do something so that they're at least aware of the guidelines and leave it up to them whether they think they should proceed.
    - tentacleuno 3y ago
      > I was thinking of AI in moderation mainly as signals. Like looking for synchronized activity or standard canned tactics and just surface them as signals or alerts to be looked at by humans. Basically make it easier to combat coordination and scale that is hard for any one moderater to see. 100%. It would be great if that could become public, too -- perhaps moderators could contribute to the model, maybe even automatically, through the software. Though I'm unsure as to how you would prevent bias from entering the model. I feel like AI isn't used much in solutions such as these because you can't read what its been trained upon (e.g. if a right-leaning instance uses it, it may be biased against left-leaning content), and how the final model reacts to content. (Maybe there's a way to achieve this, not an AI expert by any means.) It seems like it would be less transparent than the (arguably not great) solution we have now: shared blocklists. Anyway, on the whole it would be great if we could take advantage of technology to reduce the administrative work required to host a public Mastodon / AP instance -- if we could achieve it, such work would most likely give way to more instances.
thih9 3y ago
Anecdotally, I'm happy with my mastodon instance and its level of moderation. > Many mastodongs are just the same entitled first world outrage vents Calling others "mastodongs" is not exactly the opposite of an entitled first world outrage vent. Have you tried to solve the problem yourself, e.g. finding an instance that suits you better?
- WesolyKubeczek 3y ago
  There’s this directory of mastodon instances one is invited to browse to pick one, and after sifting through an insane amount of instances that are no longer up, instances that highly favor furry anime erotica, instances that are inclusive of LGBT+ people to the point of exlusion of everyone else at all, instances that are full of left wing activists so peaceful and welcoming that they have users with nicknames like “Let’s dismember Scott Adams” and user avatars with the sickle and the hammer, I’ve come to a conclusion that it’s not an environment I’m going to enjoy much. Since “the federation” is actively nurturing the environment to be like that, my hopes are not high.
kalleboo 3y ago
At least on federated services there are no algorithms pushing them in your face. Create your own instance, invite like-minded people. You can't do that on centralized services. The first time I heard about Mastodon was from conservative libertarian-type folk who disagreed with Twitter policy, several years ago. I disagree strongly with their politics but at least they decided to create something instead of just use it as victim politics like the mainstream politicians.
Zambyte 3y ago
You only see posts that you look for on the Fediverse. If you don't want to see those posts, stop looking for them. Join a moderated instance. Follow people you want to see posts from. Unfollow people you don't want to see posts from anymore.
- unpopularopp 3y ago
  >You only see posts that you look for on the Fediverse >Follow people you want to see posts from. Unfollow people you don't want to see posts from anymore But that's the same on Twitter or Reddit too. I only follow 20 people on Twitter and I only see their posts. I only read 10 reddit subs through RSS and I only see posts from those subs. To me there is no reason to switch to an alternative because what I want is not there.
serial_dev 3y ago
Mastodon will never make it (e.g my parents, non tech siblings at least know what it is). My experience, too, wasn't positive, the only time there was meaningful activity there was when everyone said they hate Elon and Twitter, it's an echo chamber, no interesting voices, and that whole fediverse stuff is confusing even as a software developer, imagine how nontech people would feel (they _would_ if they ever heard about Mastodon). It might just be me, but I also hate the name. "Follow me on Mastodon" sounds like something that will get the cops called on me. It had its chance when Elon took over, but then people realized that federation will not make a good user experience and will not make a community. I see anyone who offers Mastodon as a solution to anything in 2023 as "too deep in their bubble". Stop trying to make Mastodon happen, it's not going to happen.
- kalleboo 3y ago
  I agree that Mastodon's technical limitations will never make it the mainstream choice, although something like Threads actually going through with their threat of implementing ActivityPub may make AP that through user-friendly centralized services that Mastodon servers can interact with (like with google actually supported xmpp) But I disagree with some of your other comments > The only time there was meaningful activity there was when everyone said they hate Elon and Twitter The first few months after the "exodus" when Twitter was in chaos this was true, but after that I just muted the keywords "twitter" and "birdsite" and don't hear much about it anymore, even after the rebranding to X made it impossible to keyword filter people just don't talk about it. I hear more from IRL friends "they're removing likes!" (??? apparently?) than I've seen on Mastodon. > it's an echo chamber, no interesting voices For me I've found far more interesting voices on Mastodon than on Twitter now that I'm just seeing boosts by humans instead of whatever the algorithm deemed was viral. I was bored with Twitter before I switched since there wasn't anything going on but outrage (and I made a point of unfollowing Americans who retweeted political stuff to try to signal to the algorithm I want technical stuff) but now on Mastodon my feed is full of people making and doing things instead, it's far more interesting. > It might just be me, but I also hate the name. "Follow me on Mastodon" sounds like something that will get the cops called on me. The ridiculousness of "Twitter" and "tweeting" were literally daily jokes on late-night shows when Twitter was rising. Names mean nothing. And somehow "X" is still somehow even worse. It sounds like a porn site. > will not make a community If there's anything Mastodon has created, it's communities. I doubt it will create a "world's town square" like Twitter did, but it has created lots of interesting thriving communities. Similarly to how Usenet and IRC did, which both probably had far fewer users.

tusqasi 3y ago

I think that is not how we can rebuild the internet. The majority don't even know what is wrong with the internet in the place, not everyone reads hnews(That is nichest of the communities), and most users aren't even using twitter for alternatives to have an impact. (I have zero idea about the actual numbers)

marginalia_nu 3y ago
Does the majority need to be part of it? Since day one the web was always built by the oddball minorities. It's easy to forget how weird it was considered to spend any amount of time online in the pre-smartphone era.
- tusqasi 3y ago
  Think of the numbers of tik-tok, youtube, facebook, instagram, snapchat, and all those Social media users. All these users are "normal" people nowadays. Maybe the effects habits of the minorities on the trajectories of "The Internet" are diminished. (Just thoughts. Not based on anything other my opinions)
  - marginalia_nu 3y ago
    There are still those weird spaces on the web where creative oddballs gather though. Have you checked out the Gemini protocol for example? It's a weird space for weird people, in the best way.
- Grumbledour 3y ago
  I noticed a kind of sickness that seems to have taken hold of many people working in tech over the last 15 years. The belief, that nothing can be done unless you got dozens of people, millions of funding and years of time. Or maybe it's just more younger people in this space, who don't remember that we used to build social networks in our free time in our garages? Now, maybe it's mainly a hacker news problem, because you can find people out there who just build something without thinking to much about monetization and it seems many of them consciously avoid this site. But the willingness to be an active part in making something better seems to have dwindled and people project a powerlessness to change the status quo, when indeed it was in the past always the technical people who were forerunners with this kind of stuff (and consequently are also at least partly to blame for the things we have now). But these days, you can't even convince many techies to stop using chrome, even if they admit to hating it. I wonder how we get that back? How we can convince techies, that not only can they do it, but when they build it, they will come? Because they always do!

ants_everywhere 3y ago

These are all great ideas, and I echo them. But I do feel like these sorts of collective problems are hard to solve by each person trying to do their own part working alone. One reason that corporate internet won is that money transfers to a single entity, and that pot of money can be used to coordinate action in some particular direction (for better or worse depending on your view). Without some coordination mechanism, it seems a a bit too divided. It's unclear to me what the appropriate mechanism is, but I think that's the right sort of way to frame the problem.

js8 3y ago
I think socialism is the mechanism - one person one vote with the stake of ownership. I am pretty liberal but it I believe it needs socialism (democracy in economic sphere) to avoid capture by corporations. (And vice versa, socialism needs liberalism to prevent capture by government. They can't survive without each other, being constantly threatened by authoritarianism.)
- wildrhythms 3y ago
  Socialism has nothing to do with 'government capture'; it only concerns itself with worker ownership over the means of production.
  - senortumnus 3y ago
    And government protections / mandates toward that end or masquerading as being toward that end
    - velcrovan 3y ago
      So what?
  - suoduandao3 3y ago
    The means of production these days is a laptop or a smartphone. A solar panel or a garden if one is in the physical portion of the economy. We are kind of already at a point where working class individuals can own the means of production without ever needing to 'smesh capitalism'. I expect as a result we'll see a divergence between people who want to own the means of production and people who want to impoverish the current owners.

CuriouslyC 3y ago

SEO, content farms and click mills are the things ruining the internet. All of this is the result of advertising as a business model. For any content, the perverse incentive is to copy it repeatedly with slight variations then monetize the copies with ads and SEO your monetized version to the top of the search results. What we need is a social-first internet where every piece of content is associated with an actual human and people query for content through their social graph. This will be doubly important in the age of AI.

hliyan 3y ago
Also, a pay-per-use Internet (where appropriate), where people will vote for content with their wallets, instead of having to purchase subscriptions whether they read an article or not. Just a few minutes ago, I wanted to read an NYT article but it asked me to buy a $1/mo subscription. Very cheap, but a) I don't read NYT that regularly and b) doing that with every news outlet I occasionally read, adds up. On the other hand, if it had asked for $0.25 to read just that article, I might have paid it. I would have been even more likely to pay if there had been some service, possibly provided by the ISP itself, where all such microtransactions of mine are aggregated and billed once for me at the end of the month.
- sanex 3y ago
  I've been saying this for a while. It doesn't even need to be that expensive either. Pay a penny to watch a YouTube video type of deal. It can be done through lightning network to avoid per transaction credit card fees which would probably otherwise make it too expensive. My biggest hangup is paying for something that quickly turns out to be crap. I guess people would learn pretty quickly and hopefully the recommendation algorithm would start to favor just good content over clickbait sellout garbage.
  - gosub100 3y ago
    I would love that. just a tip jar button on my browser that I load up with a few bucks every month, and send to websites or commenters who made me laugh or got me thinking. Streamers have proven (albeit crudely) that viewers are more than willing to part with their money (if they have it). And I'm not just hinting at salacious young women (who probably receive the bulk of the dollar value). There's a streamer team who broadcast live at LAX and other airports and get excited about the various air traffic. It's fun watching their dedication and passion, their broadcasting skills grow, and how happy they are to do what they enjoy. I've donated probably $200-$300 over the years to them.

derelicta 3y ago

What id like to see is a federated MySpace-like service. Users could host their blog on an instance of their choice, toy around its styling or its content directly as to learn about web techs (or keep it simple and remain with the default stylesheet!), and yet remain discoverable thanks to the federated nature of such service. If I had the time its honestly something id love working on.

toyg 3y ago
We had that, when feeds and pingbacks were a thing. But the masses don't want to self-host, nor do they want to learn about web stuff. Hence Facebook.
- derelicta 3y ago
  Well you can selfhost if you feel like it in such situation, otherwise you can rely on the good will of good folks to do the tough job for you :)
Grumbledour 3y ago
But discoverability seems the Achilles heel of federated services. How would you solve that? How would I discover a blog in practice and how would this work from a technical standpoint? I am asking not to poke holes, but because this is an interesting topic. Finding content seems the biggest problem to me in a more decentralized web and we need more good solutions and ideas here.
- kreeben 3y ago
  Someone, say Google, will index them thus make them discoverable?
- derelicta 3y ago
  I don't know either tbh. Discoverability in federated services is indeed their Achilles heel and I don't know nearly enough to suggest a solution to that.
- 3y ago

eloisant 3y ago

The problem is that too many people don't go to website other than their usual social media sites.

linuxdeveloper 3y ago

My pitch to the public: “Join the Fediverse and help build the weird new Internet.” The Epsilon galaxy is a friendly outpost of services in the brave new decentralized digital universe, now known as the Fediverse. (I coined the term Fediverse “galaxy” to refer to a cluster of federated services/nodes run by a single entity, and it’s gained some traction on Mastodon). My galaxy is completely bootstrapped, no VC investment: https://epsilon.lol https://epsilon.lol We even have our first paying customer (8 euro/ year)!

endisneigh 3y ago

I find it very ironic that this is the top post given the centralized nature of this site.

chrsw 3y ago

I don't know if it can be fixed. Maybe we can slow the deterioration but we might be beyond the tipping point. The internet I joined 25 years ago is long gone and it's never coming back. It's partly a technological problem and a resource problem but it's also larger scale problem with our values.

vasco 3y ago

Taking a much higher level of perspective on the issue, I don't know if people complain in the way that it matters. I mean sure they complain, but internet usage globally is up by a lot and it keeps going up, even as we discover some issues with over-use on our health. So yeah people complain but the internet, even as it is today, is I think by any metric the most loved technology available worldwide. If the internet was getting way worse in practice wouldn't a bunch of people start using somethng else and new user rates decreasing? By all metrics the internet is the best it ever was and keeps being super useful for everyone.

lo_zamoyski 3y ago

A path to some desired state requires an incentive and a reduction of friction (like cost). Absent those things, you will get nowhere.

unpopularopp 3y ago

>or Mastodon and post a bit. Yet when I open the explore page on Mastodon I still see the same shit: politics. https://mastodon.social/explore https://mastodon.social/explore It's almost as if the whole point of Mastodon wasn't anything more than just to be another echo chamber. But hey no bad guys from "the other side" so guess we good. HN is still the best. We need more HN not Twitter or Mastodon.

ggpsv 3y ago
The whole point of Mastodon/Fediverse is that mastodon.social is not your sole option. Unlike other platforms, you have a choice. You're in control of who to follow or block, and what to mute. There is no algorithmic timeline that surfaces unwanted content to you. You can hide the boosts (i.e retweets) of any account. You can simply default to follow accounts you're interested and rely entirely on your local timeline. There are many Mastodon servers that are more niche, or at least less akin to Twitter/Mastodon.social. I originally made my account in mastodon.social but I'm in the process of moving to another server where the server timeline aligns more with what I'm looking for (though I can migrate my followers/followings, yay!). This server is also run cooperatively, which further aligns the interests and motives of everyone involved. I'd say we need HN AND more Mastodon servers.

abetusk 3y ago

In my opinion, a big part of the success of Wikipedia is that it offers its content under a libre/free license (CC-BY-SA). This specifically allows for commercial re-use and re-sale. The license provides a wide umbrella so that many different people and entities can use the content without worry. Contributions provide a fly-wheel of improvement. A lot of the current batch of internet companies provide walled gardens and eventually succumb to the trappings of monopolies. In some sense, I think it's survivorship bias. The only entities that stand the test of time are the ones that provide content under libre/free licensing. While I don't disagree with your list, I think a missing component is access to the commons. Without a rich commons, our society suffers as content sinks into a copyright quagmire.

OfSanguineFire 3y ago

Fediverse (in the sense of the major servers that federate) is an extreme echo chamber representative of mainly a certain sociopolitical wing and mainly from North America and Western Europe. Just look at mastodon.social/explore and consider that many founding activists of Mastodon have spoken about how they yearn to keep the community just like that even as it grows. Part of the early internet was about being able to find a huge range of different attitudes and beliefs, every possible politics, every possible religion. It was about being able to get a glimpse of non-Western cultures you might never have been able to learn about before. There is very little diversity in the fediverse.

someuser2345 3y ago
Isn't that how the first internet started? I assume most early adopters were also based in NA and Europe.
afavour 3y ago
I disagree about your assessment of the early internet. It was extremely white and nerdy when looked at on average. Certainly diversity was out there but it wasn’t easily found, much like the fediverse today. Even Wikipedia (not that it counts as early internet): > I knew that early Wikipedia editors were (and kinda still are) academically-inclined hacker dudes, but it's crazy when you realize the article about mole day, created January 2002, is an entire year older than the article "hip hop music" and five years older than "fashion show" https://twitter.com/depthsofwiki/status/1716655903695425695 https://twitter.com/depthsofwiki/status/1716655903695425695
- giraffe_lady 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - nkozyra 3y ago
    > hahaha seriously. this is the internet they want to go back to. Well there were obviously good and bad things about it. Some people think there's a way to be inclusive unlike the way it was once very exclusive while still embracing the general ethos of the original Internet - which was people connected directly via the infrastructure rather than through third party corporations. We can have an inclusive internet - digital democracy, as it was once called - without walled gardens.

afavour 3y ago

IMO these are tech solutions to social problems. As engineers it’s perhaps only natural that we gravitate towards them but I think there’s real danger of counter-productivity. Lemmy and Mastodon are good examples of this. Federation is a PITA. I know people who tried to switch from Twitter to Mastodon and never succeeded, getting lost in the concept of different instances etc etc. Mastodon instances are relatively expensive to run because the day to day operation of federation is way more complex than a centralised solution would be. There’s nothing wrong with centralised services and Wikipedia is a great example of one that works. You just need the right governance structure and an audience willing to chip in to cover costs. Federation is over complicated and often unnecessary.

marcosdumay 3y ago
> Mastodon instances are relatively expensive to run Compared to a theoretic distributed alternative, yes. But the largest instance of Mastodon, with something around 1% of the users of Twitter costs around $700 a month.

datadeft 3y ago

Think about with you mother in mind. The issue with thinking we can fix it is that you think about another HN reader in mind. Humanity's biggest issues are coming from concentration or centralisation. You can apply this pretty much to anything: wealth, population, corporations, etc. We create bubbles based on these. The solution is decentralisation. The question is how to get there?

esafak 3y ago
Centralization is what made Wikipedia, Facebook, and other sites great before they deteriorated. You can go farther when united. Up or down.

marak830 3y ago

I do not discount anything you posted. At all. * I don't use any social media except here. * I have nothing to say so don't host * Duck duck go? * I tell everyone to move to firefox, help them set it up and most are convinced. Just wish I knew a way to actually help.

bad_alloc 3y ago
> I tell everyone to move to firefox, help them set it up and most are convinced. That already helps significantly. :) > I have nothing to say so don't host A fair point, probably only a small % of people on the internet need to actualyl host something. There is some middle ground with federated hosting like write.as , so hosting is not always needed.
yard2010 3y ago
Vivaldi on mobile with builtin tracker and ads blocker. I'm not affiliated just a big fan.

dbingham 3y ago

I think we're taking the wrong lesson here. Wikipedia is the "Last Good Place" on the internet - it's not decentralized or federated. It is governed by a non-profit and funded by donations. There are good reasons the fediverse hasn't caught on yet and it comes down to user experience. We haven't figured out how to build a federated service that truly coheres as a single platform, network, or community across the whole network. (Yes, individual instances act as coherent communities, but the links to other instances are weak.) And we haven't figured out how to reduce the cognitive load of joining a federated platform to the point where it's accessible to the average user . I think this is a big part of why Mastodon is still touting usage in the single digit millions while Threads and Bluesky grew several orders of magnitude more as Twitter melted down. Until we solve those problems - which by necessity includes solving the discovery problem - we're not going to be able to successfully decentralize the net. Those problems are a huge part of what lead the net to centralize into massive platforms in the first place, and we can't undo it with out resolving those factors. And solving coherence and discovery in federation is a multi-trillion dollar, decades and a research team, Very Hard Problem (tm). ...but we know how to build centralized platforms that are democratically governed by non-profits. Wikipedia showed us how, and there's a lot that could be improved upon to do even better in terms of transparency and governance. And yes, democracy is hard. It just is. Community is hard. Society is hard. It requires deliberation and compromise. And it will never be perfect (as Wikipedia is far from perfect). But it would sure as hell be better than what we've got. The main piece that's missing is startup funding. Non-profit funders mostly don't understand software. We need non-profit funders who are willing to fund the development of platforms until they gain the sorts of critical mass that would allow them to fund their operations through donations.

akudha 3y ago

I’d add - pay for services when you can afford it. For example, encourage smaller search engines like Kagi. Maybe pay for email, instead of using gmail. Pay for smaller/local news orgs that do original and honest reporting. And so on. And donate to archive.org etc, even if it is only 5$ When we pay for services, we can fight spam/ad invested sites, at least to some extent

snorremd 3y ago
This is my approach. I've almost completely de-Googled my private life. For email I use Fastmail. I've migrated most my mail over there, but some remains on my old Google address. So many accounts to port. For search I now mainly use Kagi. Sometimes I drop into Google if I can't find what I'm looking for on Kagi. The nice thing about Kagi is I can manually block or de-prioritize SEO spam domains so I get more relevant results. Takes a bit of time to build these lists, but it does work. I use primarily Firefox and Safari as browsers. I also support Mozilla via my Pocket subscription. Edit: I also have my own website where I post content without any ads or tracking. The content is even licensed under a CC attribute and share-alike license so people can re-post and remix my content as long as they give proper attribution.
- akudha 3y ago
  Would you recommend fastmail? I am shopping for email service
  - snorremd 3y ago
    Yes. I've used them for a few years now and never had any serious issues. Their delivery rate seems good, I don't get much spam, and so far as I know I have not missed legitimate emails. They have a fast web client where you can perform actions on your entire inbox. So far as I remember gmail only allowed you to do actions on the current page of mails. If you don't want to use their official clients you can always connect via standard IMAP and SMTP. Also they support plus-addressing like gmail, but also subdomain addressing. I.e. instead of name+alias@yourdomain.com you can use alias@name.yourdomain.com. You can also set up nice email filters quite easily, and their server supports the JMAP protocol [1], which they made. So if you want to interface with your mailbox programmatically they have a more modern protocol to use. The years I've used them I only remember them having actual noticeable downtime once. Other than that rock solid. Their first line support isn't super technical, but I've only tried to contact them once. Edit: Essentially if you want good olf-fashioned mail, Fastmail is about as good as it gets. It does not have the smart inbox concepts that Google Mail and Hey do. And not so much in terms of other fancy stuff either. But it makes up for it by using open protocols for mail, calendar, and contact lists. So no danger of lock-in. [1] https://jmap.io/index.html https://jmap.io/index.html

jmyeet 3y ago

I'm honestly shocked how often I still hear technical and educated people argue that the solution is federation. You know what services we have that are federated? Phone (POTS), SMS and email. You know what services have a massive problem with spam, fraud, false positives on detection of the aforementioned, ID spoofing, etc? The exact same services. People ignore the real reason Wikipedia is successful: ownership. It's also worth noting that Wikipedia isn't federated either. We have the same issue with ISPs in the US. The best Internet is municipal broadband. The national ISPs are pretty much universally despised. Again, what's the difference? Ownership. With municipal broadband, the residents own the broadband. National ISPs exist to extract wealth from customers while doing the least possible and lobbying for legal protections against competition. It's almost like the best results are achieved when the workers own the means of production. Someone should really look into that.

ravenstine 3y ago

I can appreciate this kind of thinking as much as everyone else, but I think that the "fediverse" is too much of a distraction. Federation can be a great thing, but it's an adjunct to a solution, and not much of a large scale solution in and of itself. What the web needs is new layers to make what your suggestions much more practical. Creating a website was a nice idea back in 2003 when mostly geeks with skills were using the web. Today, most people don't want to put forth the effort of creating a website. Many geeks with skills that are still around today don't want to bother creating a website because few people will find it. If you make a website, at best only people who read websites will find it. A growing number of people today don't even know what a "website" is because they hardly live on the web proper. Free web hosting is generally bad news because the platform is far more likely to either shut down or provide zero support. So back to the thing I said about new layers to the web... If we're going to bring back websites, then we need to bring back the idea that sites will be hosted on many individual machines that aren't necessarily server infrastructure. With the bandwidth most ISPs and devices are capable of today, data isn't a limiting factor in terms of serving a standard website to even thousands of users. The web was meant to be closer to a peer-to-peer model, and it can be used peer-to-peer, but the layer just isn't there to make that model seamless. Most P2P protocols avoid fiddling with the actual network stack and do entirely their own thing; BitTorrent for the most part lives in their own client applications, as historically have many other P2P protocols. That was fine when geeks were using them, but this is insufficient for making the web itself P2P. The closest implementation to what I am describing here is Yggdrasil: https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/ https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/ Yggdrasil implements P2P mesh networks by behaving like a VPN, assigning an IPv6 address to peers based on public keys. There's no one network, so people are free to create their own networks, and the same address can be used between networks. Although it has some similarities with anonymity networks like Tor, it is not designed for anonymity, which I think is a good thing because Yggdrasil should focus specifically on the networking aspect. Although it's technically in alpha status, I've already been using it to network devices together in my home office. I even have it installed in my car's Android head unit so I can SSH into it and do Linuxy things with it. The current issue I see with Yggdrasil is that it's not plug-n-play enough to become the de facto next generation layer of the web/internet. It still requires manually configuring a JSON file in order to join a network and so forth. Yggdrasil isn't difficult to install, but if the world wants to go with something like it as this next layer, we need to get it to a state where the user needs next to no knowledge to set it up. With this hypothetical layer, groups of people can form their own networks and exchange addresses. This is perfect if you want to have an application similar to WhatsApp or Signal that is mostly private and scoped to groups of people, but allows users to cross into multiple groups. In terms of websites, it's perfect because you get an IPv6 address that is publicly available to anyone on your network and with none of the hassle that's involved with getting a public IP address on the clearnet. It's all a matter of who is connected to the network. If you want anonymity, this layer can still work through another layer like Tor, or even live entirely within something like I2P. A benefit to using I2P here is that its design makes DDoS attacks more difficult, at least in theory. With such a layer, hosting sites can become much more trivial. For everyday people who are a little more technically savvy but don't want to be fussing with the command line, I picture simply downloading something like a Reddit clone that runs like any other app on Linux or MacOS and it runs with a neat little admin interface. Share the address (or the domain if a secondary DNS is used) and you're off to the races.

Semaphor 3y ago

I was on the (Lemmy) fediverse for a few months, selfhosted instance, a lot of comments and post, kept one niche community from Reddit alive over there. It’s pretty much worse than Reddit in most ways. Most small communities don’t exist, small-ish communities get all the assholes big subs have on reddit, because so many people browse all instead of subscribed and post on anything (literally. I had a meta community on my single user instance where I’d just log some descisions and had people vote & comment on those). You have the power mods issue, only far worse, because they are vastly more powerful now that they control whole instances. Then you have all the fascists who claim they are leftists but are actually just "anything Anti-USA is amazing". They also run major instances. I ended up deleting my instance, returning to Reddit (and simply using it from desktop only, and regularly delete my content), and the quality of discourse is already so much better again. I did create an account on beehaw and treat it as unfederated (only subscribing to local communities), the people there can be a bit strange, and there’s not a huge amount of content, but at least they aren’t as bad as the rest of the Lemmy fediverse.

amelius 3y ago

The main thing that should happen is that there is a threshold of effort before people can post things. Like before Eternal September, people had to learn stuff to do things on the internet.

pessimizer 3y ago
That's just leaving the internet to the most insane. A tiny bit of effort to post cuts out 95% of participants, leaving mostly the obsessed, often with a specific axe to grind. Cutting by 95% again is distilling nuttiness. The thing that should happen is carefully cultivating closed memberships, and real tools for formal group decision-making. Mods are just benevolent dictators, and the debate that happens around mods with absolute power is essentially theater. Wikipedia barely hides this with its votes that anybody can show up to, and its code of rules being a arbitrary wise-sounding series of koan-shaped aphorisms. Wikipedia has been vulnerable to anybody with a few bucks and an issue that they're willing to camp on. The only reason one can't manipulate Wikipedia at will is because you may have some real life opposition who is also attacking the same articles you are. Instead of formalizing that competition between people of different opinions, Wikipedia has ultimately fallen into dictating who is correct based on the opinion of the highest ranked interested person, within an organization that survives on donations and on volunteer editors who get income from any number of sources. This can't stand up to the manipulation of someone invested in distorting the history of hard-shelled tacos, it certainly can't (and isn't) standing up to state-state level actors.

isk517 3y ago

I'd also add try and give monetary support content creators that you enjoy. Consuming things for free then relying on ads to pay the people that make things is part of how we got to this point. Also in response to your edit, isn't the entire point of Hacker News about discovery? One thing we could do right here on is have a weekly thread for people to post general places on the internet they find interesting (webpages, services, communities) but perhaps don't feel like they constitute a unique thread of their own.

__MatrixMan__ 3y ago

I love your attitude, and I agree that we should be trying to fix this, but the problem is not a lack of signal, it's an increase in noise. Fixing the web means changing it in fundamental ways. Suppose your webbable hobby is curating trustworthy product reviews. You're the hero that's going to fix the web AND capitalism. You can still do that, but you're going to help fewer people because you have to split your attention between you know, doing the thing, and doing the kind of marketing which helps people tell the difference between your thing and the ones that are secretly ads. Meanwhile, the bad guys can focus entirely on the latter. Sorry about the time you wanted to spend comparing blenders, your hobby is now competing with marketers... Or you have to make peace with either obscurity, or contributing to the thing you're trying to kill, because you know that the second you start making an impact somebody is going to rehost your site interleaved with misinformation. Yes, let's fix this thing but the answer is protocols with different inherent priorities. We can't shout over the noise, we need to build something less noisy. My personal view is that we should stop building trust around server names and implicitly trusting whatever those servers send us. In this model the non-content-generating work converges on systems to identify and remove malicious content (either from the server or from the browser screen). Instead we should be addressing content, and sourcing it from whatever device has a copy and is most near. Our browser should know which people we trust and should make it easy for us to lean on that trust such that we can propagate only the trusted bits in the first place. That is: stop identifying ads so that we can block them, start identifying trustworthy content so we can all participate in propagating it more efficiently and supporting it's creators. Or to put it differently: there needs to be no way to spend money to promote content. No third parties injecting bits anywhere. If you notice that kind of shit, you apply annotations which distinguish the signal from the noise and then you propagate only the signal. If people abuse this power, you revoke trust in them and move on. It'll require an awareness of information hygiene, which will be work to maintain, but all of the alternatives I can see involve tolerating life in a Skinner box

deleted 3y ago

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xnx 3y ago

This will likely be an unpopular opinion, but TikTok has been a great place for me to learn about all kinds of unique and interesting things and hobbyist communities I'd never known about: homesteading, commercial plane transport, tether car racing, DIY halloween decorations, interpretive dance, and a lot more. Top comments tend to be funny (though often the same joke) and smart.