Tildes (a closed garden Reddit alternative) frequently love to reminisce about the days of small forum communities. Maybe we need to bring them back.
I have a feeling this place and other decentralized social medias will be banned in the near future. Look at what’s happening to TIktok. You either bend the knee or you get axed. It’s why the other social media giants bent the knee. They understand the writing on the wall. There’s more going on behind the scenes that they don’t share with us. I think we’re sort of watching a quiet coup.
If social media becomes decentralized we might even gain traction reversing some of the brainwashing on the masses. The current giants are just propaganda machines. Always have been, but it’s now blatant and obvious. They don’t even care to hide it.
Let’s call it by it’s name: neofeudalism/technofeudalism
In the same way that email has been decentralized from the get go, social media could have been equally decentralized, and I don’t mean in the older php forums, but in a different way that would allow people to reconnect with others and maintain contacts.
Hey, that’s us!
Tech Broligarchy*
There’s another alternative, which is no social media at all. There is no particular problem that it solved. If it disappeared, would your quality of life be worse in any way?
Word.
Removed by mod
Preaching to the choir!
It might be good to reiterate (in part) why we’re all in here.
google hasn’t done much with YouTube yet
Guillotines are another option.
More will just spawn and take their place.
actually, if we could remove the sociopaths from power, it would allow academics to over. it’s not that hard to engineer a society where people aren’t like they are now. we’re learned behavior creatures. it’s possible to unlearn what we know now and teach our children to never be this way again.
More heads require more guillotines.
Can we not design guillotines that cut multiple heads at once, thus reducing the head to guillotine ratio?
Based
You’re onto something here.
I guess we could stack the rich on top of each other. That way we wouldn’t even have to modify the guillotine. We’d just have to make sure the blade is extra sharp.
What really matters is the back-to-nose distance, this gives you the head-per-chop ratio but also drives the max-head-per-chop value which itself depends on the blade weight and max blade height which limited by the ceiling height if inside or the max free standing of the pillars if outside.
This guy guillotines.
Make the design 4D, and stack them in multiple dimensions, maybe one 4D guillotine is even sufficient?
And for testing purposes, we could try them on the designers!
What a blast!
The heads yearn for the guillotines
But what about places where heads won’t roll? They deserve a space to be able to access.
My own “we need” list, from a dork who stood up a web server nearly 25 years ago to host weeb crap for friends on IRC:
We need a baseline security architecture recipe people can follow, to cover the huge gap in needs between “I’m running one thing for the general public and I hope it doesn’t get hacked” and “I’m running a hundred things in different VMs and containers and I don’t want to lose everything when just one of them gets hacked.”
(I’m slowly building something like this for mspencer.net but it’s difficult. I’ll happily share what I learn for others to copy, since I have no proprietary interest in it, but I kinda suck at this and someone else succeeding first is far more likely)
We need innovative ways to represent the various ideas, contributions, debates, informative replies, and everything else we share, beyond just free form text with an image. Private communities get drowned in spam and “brain resource exhaustion attacks” without it. Decompose the task of moderation into pieces that can be divided up and audited, where right now they’re all very top down.
Distributed identity management (original 90s PGP web of trust type stuff) can allow moderating users without mass-judging entire instances or network services. Users have keys and sign stuff, and those cryptographic signatures can be used to prove “you said you would honor rule X, but you broke that rule here, as attested to by these signing users.” So people or communities that care about rule X know to maybe not trust that user to follow that rule.
Plus we can have AI read a post history for us and either make a reputational decision, or highlight in the interface how reputable or disreputable tye user is. You could have it collapse but not delete a user’s comment and you could also lower and raise the bar of acceptibility at anytime. We need better tools than a polished BBS descendant.
I think the key is building a social information system based on connections we have in real life. Key exchange parties, etc
It’s the only way to introduce a prohibitively high cost to centralized broadcast and reduce the power of these mega-entities
Could you clarify? A sneaker net? Peer to peer?
I think the good news is, regardless of what gets done, people are hungry for real connections and the old internet.
Peer to peer.
I’ve spent a bit of time developing some related ideas, but haven’t had time to start building it.
It’s a bit rough still, but I’d love some feedback! https://freetheinter.net/
honestly, i’ll donate money to whomever can design this and make it scalable.
