8 ms·

Among the first page and 2nd page (top 60) there is always atleast 1 post about how we're gonnna "take back the web" or make it back into some form of our 90s m

• erlend_sh 1y ago
  This is demonstrably not fantasy as the example case is a fully productionized network (Bluesky and the rest of AT-net) that’s having real-world impact to the point where it’s under threat from several authoritarian states.
  • ffsm8 1y ago
    It has? Don't get me wrong, I'm in the tech industry and generally more online then likely 95% of the population, but ime ... Nobody even knows what bluesky is? (They also don't know what X is, though they DO know what Twitter is) And even more niche products like mostodon, the fediverse altogether etc are entirely unknown to most of the tech industry too.
    • tomrod 1y ago
      Sometimes tech leads the world, however unwillingly, to better outcomes.
      • oceanplexian 1y ago
        Tech is downstream of culture. Seems that smart people keep getting duped by this idea. For example Twitter and Facebook didn’t result in a bunch of Democracies springing up after the Arab Spring, it resulted in the complete opposite. Tech simply amplifies the culture that was already there.
    • cwmoore 1y ago
      Sounds like a feature. I like some self-selection bias, it might have character. Maybe a little less global competition for my attention.
    • layer8 1y ago
      You must live in a different tech industry than I do. They might not be using it, but most know about it.
  • hnlmorg 1y ago
    Honestly, that’s not been my experience. Granted the UK is less authoritarian than most. But the general attitude is people who care don’t even use Bluesky and those that don’t continue to use Meta services because why wouldn’t they if they don’t care. I know the topic of mental health and social media is different from the topic of independence vs the monolithic web. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t significant overlap in terms of those who are willing to boycott Meta for privacy reasons are also the kinds of people who likely dislike social media for other societal reasons too.
  • pessimizer 1y ago
    > the point where it’s under threat from several authoritarian states. This is a victim fantasy, and if being under intense attack from the state meant you were rebelling against the authoritarian system, then you would be capping for Parler, Gab, X and Tiktok. Bluesky, however, is only under attack from its own users, who are authoritarian trolls. At least the management seem to be getting sick of them, because it is actively inhibiting their growth* that they've been used as a base for the angriest, most entitled, least interesting people on the planet. It must be hell trying to manage a site filled with people demanding to speak to the manager. It is also just a centralized twitter clone backed by VC looking for a return; not a revolution. [*] Of course, it was their strategy to cater to that group because of all the free advertising they'd get from the media. But it had and has nothing to do with Dorsey's hopeful redemption arc, which was only about decentralization (i.e. not having speech under the control of people like him) and resilience. Bluesky was supposed to be bittorrent.
  • floundy 1y ago
    Wasn’t BlueSky kinda ruined by the whole leftist Twitter exodus while simultaneously being fawned over and settled by Reddity political types? Maybe I’m missing something but I’ve tried to use it a few times and it just feels like another internet echo chamber silo (even if that’s due to user self-isolation and not the underlying tech).
  • immibis 1y ago
    Bluesky is not decentralized. Building a centralized system on top of a protocol that can also theoretically support decentralized systems does not make it decentralized. https://arewedecentralizedyet.online/ https://arewedecentralizedyet.online/
• jstummbillig 1y ago
  Nothing changes because the ask is silly and disconnected from the reality of normal people's lives. So what happens if Google has all your data? To the best of my observations over the past 20 years: best in class services, cheap, paired with excellent security and data availability.
  • coderatlarge 1y ago
    unless you travel to the 25% of the world they antagonize politically. or unless you don’t comply quickly enough when they say “jump” and they unilaterally take away “your” gvoice number.
  • j4hdufd8 1y ago
    ...while selling you crap you don't need because they follow you everywhere.
  • tomrod 1y ago
    Look at QC Safe sometime. Same idea applies. Incentives are not consistent over time. Giving all your data for better services is easily hijackable.
  • carefulfungi 1y ago
    Exactly. "It's good for you and takes some effort" is a bad growth strategy. For this movement to win, something will have to replace social media and walled gardens with a better dopamine hit, that just happens to keep data private.
    • jbeninger 1y ago
      I think we're still missing an "open social" closed social network. Something like old-Facebook where you can post to an intimate audience of friends and family, and your feed isn't stuffed full of ads and influencers. Just a little private windows into your friends' lives. That feels like something that could displace other social media in a way that's difficult for for-profit businesses to replicate since it goes against every product manager's instinct to leave engagement on the table, and would stand in stark contrast to the current social media landscape.
• xandrius 1y ago
  If even the people who experience a different time gives up because "nothing changes" then it's truly over. We need to do what we preach: sure, things are worse in certain things but for sure setting up a local network with top-level open source self-hosted alternatives is the easiest it has ever been ever. Also I think people forget to realise that the type of people who were online in the 90s are still online, many still does exactly the same things. The Internet just got so much easier to use for the rest of the people who doesn't really see the magic of it all. And that's ok. People always complaining how bad things currently are, they are doing a disservice to all the services and communities still around. They are not sexy or cool but they exist.
  • pessimizer 1y ago
    > We need to do what we preach You start. edit: I have no idea what people think they're talking about when they're like "people should just" and "you should just." The cage is not all in your mind, dude; it's an actual cage, guarded by people with guns.
    • ArcHound 1y ago
      Not OP, but I am self-hosting a bunch of things, like my blog. I am trying to move away from Google, my primary email for important things is under my domain (not purely self-hosted, but still). I am also creating backups so that I can recover if a service is gone for any reason. So yea, some of us are practicing what we preach.
      • ryandrake 1y ago
        Exactly, I've stopped worrying so much about what "everyone" is doing, and just continue to do my own thing. I've self-hosted E-mail and web for 15+ years at this point. I keep my music and movies on spinning metal in my garage with an NFS server running on it. Photos stored locally too, and everything backed up on my own storage. I don't care how locked-in Spotify keeps you, because I don't need Spotify. I don't care how much data Netflix collects, because I don't use it. It's always fun to read articles about how urgently we need to go back to local-this and self-hosted that, knowing I never left!
• aprilfoo 1y ago
  I think it's about showing that different models are possible for people who do care and are willing to reflect and change the way they operate. The big majority goes with the comfort of the mainstream, almost by definition.
• pavlov 1y ago
  > “Applying for a job or apartment or anything today means creating endless pointless copies of your pesonal information in databases across the world that will eventually be neglected, hacked, exploited, sold off etc” This problem is practically fixed in the EU (to the extent that legislation can fix it). Data protection laws have enough teeth that real companies can’t afford to keep or sell customer information illegally. But people only see the tip of the iceberg and think EU data protection is something to do with annoying cookie banners. We need to do a better job of celebrating Europe’s real achievements in making the digital world better for its citizens. Instant zero-fee bank transfers are another example.
  • coldtea 1y ago
    >This problem is practically fixed in the EU (to the extent that legislation can fix it). Data protection laws have enough teeth that real companies can’t afford to keep or sell customer information illegally Not even close to the case for any big player. It just exists as a moat for smaller companies.
    • IsTom 1y ago
      https://www.enforcementtracker.com/ https://www.enforcementtracker.com/ and sort by amount, these are not small companies and amounts aren't exactly trivial either, with a mechanism to get bigger if ignored.
      • onion2k 1y ago
        Meta appear 4 times in the top 10 with a total of about 2.25bn in fines. That sounds like a lot but it's only 1.6% of their revenue. As a cost of doing business that's probably acceptable to the Meta board. It'd cost them more to do things properly, so there's little incentive to do so.
        • layer8 1y ago
          The fines will increase if they continue breaking the rules, so there is incentive.
• Arthurian 1y ago
  Yep, it’s all totally pointless so why bother thinking and dreaming of a way out, right? Even if the ideas in this post are a little unrealistic in the face of modern convenience, it’s productive to talk about it. Is there something else we should be doing instead?
• teeray 1y ago
  > creating endless pointless copies of your pesonal (sic) information in databases across the world that will eventually be neglected, hacked, exploited, sold off etc… I dont know the way out if there is The data needs to be viewed by the holder of that data as a dangerous liability, not an asset. If there were headlines about “Megabank Files Bankruptcy Over Data Breach, Executives Jailed” instead of the general sentiment of “LOL another data breach, here’s a free trial of LifeLock,” there would be changing attitudes about storing arbitrary user data.
  • seemaze 1y ago
    I think it's advantageous for data to be viewed as an asset, but an asset owned by the source of the data. If Megabank was like; 'Oops, we left our vault unlocked and someone walk off with your savings' people would be up in arms.
• Workaccount2 1y ago
  Everyone wants "free ad-free no tracking no payment" Internet. Nobody wants to compensate anyone for it, and therefore nobody wants to host it. Then the people who have not viewed an ad or paid a subscription in 20 years complain that the internet sucks and we need to go back to IRC and chan boards. As if ideologically non-paying customers have a voice worth listening to.
  • Dylan16807 1y ago
    IRC has pretty much always been free without ads. You make it sound unworkable when it's become so much easier to run over time. And tons of forums are in the same category. Also there isn't a way for people to pay their share of server cost for services like that. For your average non-video communication service your options are paying 0x or paying 50x.
    • oblio 1y ago
      IRC doesn't offer multi device, high availability log archives. IRC doesn't offer a lot things, actually. Fairly sure the standards don't offer persistent identity.
      • mjevans 1y ago
        All the things you describe are achieved via 'bouncers' or dedicated clients living in a server that an impermanent consumption device like a mobile phone might be able to connect to. No, they're not native to the protocol, nor are they required. However it's an open protocol. You are free to pick from a number of solutions that compose that goal.
        • oblio 1y ago
          I don't want to compose anything and neither does 99% of the world. It's a non solution and we're having the Dropbox announcement discussion 15 years later.
          • 1y ago
• neya 1y ago
  But such consistent "nagging" is what gets attention to the problem. In the EU, you have GDPR exactly because of this kind of nagging. Privacy has nothing to do with nostalgia.
• mariusor 1y ago
  > Meanwhile - Nothing changes Well, TFA, and sibling posts to mine, point out some ways in which federated networks are leading the change in this direction. I would add that alongside SOLID and the AT Protocol, ActivityPub also encourages people taking ownership of their own data. So probably you need to focus your attention to where the change happens instead of waiting for large, ad filled, for profit networks to act on it. Because indeed they have no incentive.
  • A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 1y ago
    << instead of waiting for large, ad filled, for profit networks to act on it. I think I agree. I know I started re-evaluating my internet presence as a whole. I accept that a lot can't or won't do much, but the same was true, when firefox was new and no one wanted to jump ship, but the people, who liked privacy focus and extensions. Those that can, will move. The herd will follow if they see it can work.
• h2zizzle 1y ago
  The way out is mostly antitrust and regulation of the private data market. But too many portfolios depend on the status quo; the way will be opened once the AI bubble pops. The Chrome lawsuit was the jab before an AdX haymaker is thrown just as the arena lights go out.
• torginus 1y ago
  The weird thing is that there are still IRC federators - big servers with channels much like discord, but presumably running on some dude's computer in a basement, and there are tons of people (usually niche interest groups) are still using those.
• sholladay 1y ago
  The most compelling and plausible solution to this that I have seen is a set of standards called Solid, made by Tim Berners Lee, who invented the web. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_(web_decentralization_project) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_(web_decentralization_pr... You’d think that if anybody could pull off reshaping how data is stored and shared on the Internet, it would be him. And the technology is, well, solid. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have as much traction as I would hope. Probably because it requires a new way of thinking about many parts of the tech stack. It’s not as simple as swapping out one library for another one. The existing web has so much momentum, and so many of today’s tools and frameworks have assumptions built into them that aren’t necessarily convenient for building a web where users have true data ownership. Still, I’m rooting for Solid and the team behind it. They clearly understand these issues. They’ve been building libraries and scaffolding tools to make it easier to adopt Solid, For new projects, it’s pretty easy these days.
  • flufluflufluffy 1y ago
    Yeah, that’s... that’s what the whole post was about...
    • sholladay 1y ago
      I was responding to a comment, not the article. I can’t say for certain whether they read the article, but my guess would be no, based on their dismissive (or at least pessimistic) attitude toward these types of articles. So I figured I would share my thoughts on the crux of why this isn’t just “another” data storage project.
• Frieren 1y ago
  > I guess we can keep fantasizing and thinking about it. Strong regulations is the answer. To think that big corporations are going to do anything for us out of their good heart is naive and dangerous. If a society wants nice things then they need to fight for it. Get elected officials that care to fix things, that fights against big corporations, and that help to split their monopolies. The USA thinks that they can get a better Internet by doing nothing, like by magic. The reality is that government and civil society are going to need to put a lot of effort to reign in the big tech monopolies.
• abetusk 1y ago
  In general, I think these types of sticky behaviors only change when there's an application that people gravitate towards with the changing behavior embedded. One such candidate is cryptocurrency and personal finances. The cryptocurrency wallet will necessarily need to be cryptographically secure, so this at least provides an opening for privacy. Tying it to finances means that there's an immediate application, payment processing, that people might want to use and put up with clunky behavior, at least initially. All this lacks specificity and finances, cryptocurrency or no, bring their own drawbacks, but it does seem like it's possible to me. The Internet's attention can be fickle and it's easy to forget that sometimes. IBM used to be a titan before Microsoft supplanted it. Proprietary server operating system, including web servers and databases used to deeply embedded until they were supplanted by FOSS alternatives. Digg, Friendster, Myspace, Yahoo, etc. used to fixtures of the Internet until they weren't.
• m463 1y ago
  > Applying for a job or apartment Let along actually Living in the apartment or working at the job... A friend's apartment required you to sign up with a third party to get your packages. They made you create an account and accept that they would make pictures and videos of you to access the package room. Don't even get me started on connected appliances/wifi and app access for doors.
• akho 1y ago
  > self hosting, federated this or that > creating endless pointless copies of your pesonal information in databases across the world These are completely different, unrelated concerns.