11 ms·

I've been working to get more involved with, eg, mutual aid groups and other forms of local capacity and resiliency building over the last year - one thing that

by roughly 10mo ago

I've been working to get more involved with, eg, mutual aid groups and other forms of local capacity and resiliency building over the last year - one thing that's stuck out to me is how many of these groups' public face is an Instagram site. That might not have been existential a couple years ago, but given what we're seeing now with, for instance, Paramount making a rival bid for Warner based solely on their coziness with the current administration, it doesn't feel like the corporate media ecosystem is going to be an even "squint and you can kind of pretend" neutral territory for organizing and information dissemination going forward. For all that tools like PeerTube, Mastodon, etc are clunkier and more limited than things like YouTube, Bluesky, etc, I think that argument is increasingly going to be irrelevant to their value - we need to start ensuring our capacity to go from 0-1 on media distribution, not from 10-100 or 100+.

immibis 10mo ago
The problem is that everyone is reading Instagram. I don't understand why. I made an account recently in order to access a specific thing. I can confirm the app is 100% pure garbage. The home feed is garbage and navigation is awful (to keep you on the home feed). I uninstalled it after they were caught bypassing the permission system to spy on you, by binding localhost ports that web ads would access. The web app is no better garbage-wise (but it can't bind ports). And it's the subcultures that you'd expect to be the most untied from corporate shackles, that are the ones most on Instagram. I don't get it.
- MichaelZuo 10mo ago
  By definition someone’s actions, if repeated sufficiently often, define their real character. You don’t have to take claimed pretenses seriously.
  - fsflover 10mo ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
  - roughly 10mo ago
    This is a bit of a harsh take. These same groups use Signal for all their internal messaging - by and large the will is there, but they're not tech savvy and we haven't given them viable alternatives.
    - MichaelZuo 10mo ago
      People can have multiple facets of character? Or do you think that’s not even possible?
- ipaddr 10mo ago
  Instagram is useless unless their are people you want to follow or get people to follow you.
- roughly 10mo ago
  I think it's two aspects - one is that Insta started out as the "not-facebook" platform and Meta's somehow managed not to fuck that up, and the other is there's a massive network effect - every tattoo artist, venue, and band are on instagram now, and it all becomes very self-reinforcing.
  - timeon 10mo ago
    > Meta's somehow managed not to fuck that up But then they fucked up. Several years ago.
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
  - stephen_g 10mo ago
    They're trying... They finally released a native iPad version of the app this year (after so many years), and its default pane is not the one that includes people you actually follow (like the phone app) - it's just reels, and you have to go looking for the right page in the menu to see anything from people you care about. It's very revealing about where they wish they could have taken the app already, where you don't follow anyone, just trust the algorithm to force-feed you content. Doing that too quickly would instantly kill it, so it's been years of boiling the frog. The 'Snooze suggested content in feed for 30 days' thing is already bad enough, if they stopped letting you do that Instagram would be insufferable to use.
- charcircuit 10mo ago
  >bypassing the permission system On Android you can't make a network service permissioned. And when you make a binder service permissioned it's up to the app itself to specify with what permission a caller needs in order to be able to use the service, or the service can choose to be unpermissioned. Either way apps on Android are free to host unpermissioned services that other apps on the system connect to. Chrome connecting to such a service did not have to bypass a permission since there was no permission protecting it.
  - immibis 10mo ago
    What they were caught doing was opening some local port via TCP sockets (let's say localhost:9000) and then advertisements would connect to localhost:9000 to add themselves to your advertising profile even if you were in a private browser, had cookies blocked, or anything like that. Both Facebook and Instagram apps were caught doing it. Now, if they were formally caught by the legal system, they'd go to prison (,in countries other than the USA) so as soon as it made front page HN, they removed it from the apps.
    - charcircuit 10mo ago
      >even if you were in a private browser Incognito mode is about not saving data or browser history to your computer. Sites can still identify you if you login or even just from your IP. It's not meant to make you anonymous. This is a common misconception which is why these modes show a big warning explaination when you enable them. >they'd go to prison That's for the courts to decide. The Facebook and Instagram apps may have already gotten consent from the user to share this information.
      - immibis 10mo ago
        I don't understand your defense of Instagram. It's not even a very good defense. The fact that Facebook removed the code as soon as they were caught means they also think they would be in serious trouble. Unauthorized use of a computer is broadly illegal in many jurisdictions, including the USA federally. In Europe, misinformed consent is not consent. "Authorization" generally refers to a reasonable person's expectation of giving consent, and does not refer to any technical property such as Android permissions.
TulliusCicero 10mo ago
> For all that tools like PeerTube, Mastodon, etc are clunkier and more limited than things like YouTube, Bluesky, etc, I think that argument is increasingly going to be irrelevant to their value Their value is going to stay limited if people don't want to actually use them. Technically proficient people may overlook something being clunky if it suits their needs in other ways, but it's a harder sell for the average user. And really, it shouldn't be an issue. Good UX isn't trivial, but it's not especially complicated or budget-busting either.
- treyd 10mo ago
  At least for Mastodon and the rest of the Fediverse ecosystem it does seem that people actually want to use them, and more people every day.
  - jamesbelchamber 10mo ago
    People moved on from Mastodon to Bluesky because it was more responsive to user needs. I encouraged people to move to Mastodon but then watched them move on. It is what it is - but it's worth being clear-eyed about what it is.
    - jmcnulty 10mo ago
      It has actually improved a lot since then. The UI has had changes, search is better, it has quote posts now. More usability enhancements are under active development.
      - palata 10mo ago
        Once "normies" have tried and moved away, I think it's too late. Unfortunately such services don't get a second chance. It was probably hard enough to convince them to try once.
      - JoshTriplett 10mo ago
        > search is better Search is still awful, in part because a few people don't seem to want it. It needs substantial improvement.
alisonatwork 10mo ago
This situation is so frustrating to me, and despite my attempts, nobody seems to get why it's problematic. I still have a Facebook account from over a decade ago that I use occasionally to access stuff that is only visible on Facebook, but by the time Insta kicked off I had already decided social media was bad, so I never got one, and it didn't seem like a great loss because I wasn't that interested in looking at other people's photos anyway. Except now, apparently - and I'm still not exactly sure how - business owners and activist groups and event promoters communicate everything about what is going on via... photos?! I suppose it's the digital version of flyers, except you could see flyers posted up all over town, in all the record stores or cafes you already frequented, friends could hand you them when they saw you out and about, you'd get bombarded with them when you left related events... And none of those situations forced you to enter a heavily-surveilled gated community owned by a spectacularly wealthy foreign company notorious for enabling genocide, live streaming murder etc. I was at some event a couple weekends ago and an organizer came up to me saying that there was going to be an after and just check the Insta for the address, and I'm like... But I don't have that? Can't you tell me now? And because the site is login-walled even when at some point later in the day the thumbnail did appear, trying to click on it to see the details resulted in the login block and so I missed out. But I am well aware that I am a teeny tiny minority of people involved in this boycot and so I'm only really hurting myself. The way I've heard it described by activists is that using Insta (or X or YouTube) is like tacitly accepting that we already live in a panopticon and thus all resistance has to take place within full view of the authorities, it just needs to be smart and present itself as something that isn't actually resistance, or that works around censorship using codewords, or this, or that, "just like how it's done in China". And it's like, great, the new generation of western activists who actually still live in a society which grants them some civil liberties have decided they're all doomed to exist under the totalitarian jackboot and practice their resistance accordingly. After all, you can't build a movement out there on the actually free fediverse or the small web where there's only a smattering of nerds. I don't know if I should be depressed or just suck it up and get that stupid Insta account.
- alex1138 10mo ago
  Facebook simultaneously makes it hard for you to access anything without an account (connecting the world?) while also having been known to change people's privacy settings from Friends to Friends of Friends or Public Zuck, you do not deserve to be spoken of in the same breath as actual internet pioneers
complianceowl 10mo ago
I wish you were right, but you're wrong. It's a wishful thinking that I have been participatory in for decades. However, it will not come to fruition. Why? It's very simple: we, as a people and as a society, are not willing to give up convenience. Secondly, the corporate media have been straight up propaganda centers for decades now and anyone who has been paying attention has known that for a long time now. That is not something that we are on the edge of our seats waiting to happen. It happened a long time ago. Remember when CNN was meeting with the Pentagon so that the Pentagon could approve their stories during the Iraq War? Remember when the media constantly lied to us during COVID? Remember when they told us Biden's health was in pristine condition and that he was never better? Don't try and politicize this issue in one way or the other. Anyone paying attention can see that there is no savior on the left or the right. It's the corrupt politicians vs. us.
sandworm101 10mo ago
>> We need to start ensuring our capacity to go from 0-1 on media distribution, not from 10-100 or 100 And a dozen pirate networks stand ready to fill that void at a moment's notice. From oldschool torrent, to cyberlockers, to the dark webs of Tor and FreeNet ... there is an entire ecosystem of hardened video distribution schemes out there. Youtube was aguably born from piracy and fights in the courts to this day. The next thing, whatever replaces youtube, will likely also come from shadows.

by roughly 10mo ago

immibis 10mo ago

The problem is that everyone is reading Instagram. I don't understand why. I made an account recently in order to access a specific thing. I can confirm the app is 100% pure garbage. The home feed is garbage and navigation is awful (to keep you on the home feed). I uninstalled it after they were caught bypassing the permission system to spy on you, by binding localhost ports that web ads would access. The web app is no better garbage-wise (but it can't bind ports). And it's the subcultures that you'd expect to be the most untied from corporate shackles, that are the ones most on Instagram. I don't get it.

MichaelZuo 10mo ago
By definition someone’s actions, if repeated sufficiently often, define their real character. You don’t have to take claimed pretenses seriously.
- fsflover 10mo ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
- roughly 10mo ago
  This is a bit of a harsh take. These same groups use Signal for all their internal messaging - by and large the will is there, but they're not tech savvy and we haven't given them viable alternatives.
  - MichaelZuo 10mo ago
    People can have multiple facets of character? Or do you think that’s not even possible?
ipaddr 10mo ago
Instagram is useless unless their are people you want to follow or get people to follow you.
roughly 10mo ago
I think it's two aspects - one is that Insta started out as the "not-facebook" platform and Meta's somehow managed not to fuck that up, and the other is there's a massive network effect - every tattoo artist, venue, and band are on instagram now, and it all becomes very self-reinforcing.
- timeon 10mo ago
  > Meta's somehow managed not to fuck that up But then they fucked up. Several years ago.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- stephen_g 10mo ago
  They're trying... They finally released a native iPad version of the app this year (after so many years), and its default pane is not the one that includes people you actually follow (like the phone app) - it's just reels, and you have to go looking for the right page in the menu to see anything from people you care about. It's very revealing about where they wish they could have taken the app already, where you don't follow anyone, just trust the algorithm to force-feed you content. Doing that too quickly would instantly kill it, so it's been years of boiling the frog. The 'Snooze suggested content in feed for 30 days' thing is already bad enough, if they stopped letting you do that Instagram would be insufferable to use.
charcircuit 10mo ago
>bypassing the permission system On Android you can't make a network service permissioned. And when you make a binder service permissioned it's up to the app itself to specify with what permission a caller needs in order to be able to use the service, or the service can choose to be unpermissioned. Either way apps on Android are free to host unpermissioned services that other apps on the system connect to. Chrome connecting to such a service did not have to bypass a permission since there was no permission protecting it.
- immibis 10mo ago
  What they were caught doing was opening some local port via TCP sockets (let's say localhost:9000) and then advertisements would connect to localhost:9000 to add themselves to your advertising profile even if you were in a private browser, had cookies blocked, or anything like that. Both Facebook and Instagram apps were caught doing it. Now, if they were formally caught by the legal system, they'd go to prison (,in countries other than the USA) so as soon as it made front page HN, they removed it from the apps.
  - charcircuit 10mo ago
    >even if you were in a private browser Incognito mode is about not saving data or browser history to your computer. Sites can still identify you if you login or even just from your IP. It's not meant to make you anonymous. This is a common misconception which is why these modes show a big warning explaination when you enable them. >they'd go to prison That's for the courts to decide. The Facebook and Instagram apps may have already gotten consent from the user to share this information.
    - immibis 10mo ago
      I don't understand your defense of Instagram. It's not even a very good defense. The fact that Facebook removed the code as soon as they were caught means they also think they would be in serious trouble. Unauthorized use of a computer is broadly illegal in many jurisdictions, including the USA federally. In Europe, misinformed consent is not consent. "Authorization" generally refers to a reasonable person's expectation of giving consent, and does not refer to any technical property such as Android permissions.

TulliusCicero 10mo ago

> For all that tools like PeerTube, Mastodon, etc are clunkier and more limited than things like YouTube, Bluesky, etc, I think that argument is increasingly going to be irrelevant to their value Their value is going to stay limited if people don't want to actually use them. Technically proficient people may overlook something being clunky if it suits their needs in other ways, but it's a harder sell for the average user. And really, it shouldn't be an issue. Good UX isn't trivial, but it's not especially complicated or budget-busting either.

treyd 10mo ago
At least for Mastodon and the rest of the Fediverse ecosystem it does seem that people actually want to use them, and more people every day.
- jamesbelchamber 10mo ago
  People moved on from Mastodon to Bluesky because it was more responsive to user needs. I encouraged people to move to Mastodon but then watched them move on. It is what it is - but it's worth being clear-eyed about what it is.
  - jmcnulty 10mo ago
    It has actually improved a lot since then. The UI has had changes, search is better, it has quote posts now. More usability enhancements are under active development.
    - palata 10mo ago
      Once "normies" have tried and moved away, I think it's too late. Unfortunately such services don't get a second chance. It was probably hard enough to convince them to try once.
    - JoshTriplett 10mo ago
      > search is better Search is still awful, in part because a few people don't seem to want it. It needs substantial improvement.

alisonatwork 10mo ago

This situation is so frustrating to me, and despite my attempts, nobody seems to get why it's problematic. I still have a Facebook account from over a decade ago that I use occasionally to access stuff that is only visible on Facebook, but by the time Insta kicked off I had already decided social media was bad, so I never got one, and it didn't seem like a great loss because I wasn't that interested in looking at other people's photos anyway. Except now, apparently - and I'm still not exactly sure how - business owners and activist groups and event promoters communicate everything about what is going on via... photos?! I suppose it's the digital version of flyers, except you could see flyers posted up all over town, in all the record stores or cafes you already frequented, friends could hand you them when they saw you out and about, you'd get bombarded with them when you left related events... And none of those situations forced you to enter a heavily-surveilled gated community owned by a spectacularly wealthy foreign company notorious for enabling genocide, live streaming murder etc. I was at some event a couple weekends ago and an organizer came up to me saying that there was going to be an after and just check the Insta for the address, and I'm like... But I don't have that? Can't you tell me now? And because the site is login-walled even when at some point later in the day the thumbnail did appear, trying to click on it to see the details resulted in the login block and so I missed out. But I am well aware that I am a teeny tiny minority of people involved in this boycot and so I'm only really hurting myself. The way I've heard it described by activists is that using Insta (or X or YouTube) is like tacitly accepting that we already live in a panopticon and thus all resistance has to take place within full view of the authorities, it just needs to be smart and present itself as something that isn't actually resistance, or that works around censorship using codewords, or this, or that, "just like how it's done in China". And it's like, great, the new generation of western activists who actually still live in a society which grants them some civil liberties have decided they're all doomed to exist under the totalitarian jackboot and practice their resistance accordingly. After all, you can't build a movement out there on the actually free fediverse or the small web where there's only a smattering of nerds. I don't know if I should be depressed or just suck it up and get that stupid Insta account.

alex1138 10mo ago
Facebook simultaneously makes it hard for you to access anything without an account (connecting the world?) while also having been known to change people's privacy settings from Friends to Friends of Friends or Public Zuck, you do not deserve to be spoken of in the same breath as actual internet pioneers

complianceowl 10mo ago

I wish you were right, but you're wrong. It's a wishful thinking that I have been participatory in for decades. However, it will not come to fruition. Why? It's very simple: we, as a people and as a society, are not willing to give up convenience. Secondly, the corporate media have been straight up propaganda centers for decades now and anyone who has been paying attention has known that for a long time now. That is not something that we are on the edge of our seats waiting to happen. It happened a long time ago. Remember when CNN was meeting with the Pentagon so that the Pentagon could approve their stories during the Iraq War? Remember when the media constantly lied to us during COVID? Remember when they told us Biden's health was in pristine condition and that he was never better? Don't try and politicize this issue in one way or the other. Anyone paying attention can see that there is no savior on the left or the right. It's the corrupt politicians vs. us.

sandworm101 10mo ago

>> We need to start ensuring our capacity to go from 0-1 on media distribution, not from 10-100 or 100 And a dozen pirate networks stand ready to fill that void at a moment's notice. From oldschool torrent, to cyberlockers, to the dark webs of Tor and FreeNet ... there is an entire ecosystem of hardened video distribution schemes out there. Youtube was aguably born from piracy and fights in the courts to this day. The next thing, whatever replaces youtube, will likely also come from shadows.