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Agreed. But we need a solution against bots just as much. There’s no way the majority of comments in the near future won’t just be LLMs.
We need digital identities, like, yesterday.
Yeah I’m not seeing any way around that sadly. At least for places where you want/need to know the content is from an actual person.
Precisely, and it can stay pseudo-anonymous. A trusted third party (Governments? Banks? A YMCA gym membership?) issuing a hashed certificate or token is all that’s needed. You don’t need to know my name, age, gender: but if you could confirm that I DO have those attributes, and X, Y, and Z parties confirmed it, then it’s likely I’m a human.
Closed instances with vetted members, there’s no other way.
Too high of a barrier to entry is doomed to fail.
Programming.dev does this and is the tenth largest instance.
Techy people are a lot more likely to jump through a couple of hoops for something better, compared to your average Joe who isn’t even aware of the problem
Techy people are a lot more likely to jump through hoops because that knowledge/experience makes it easier for them, they understand it’s worthwhile or because it’s fun. If software can be made easier for non-techy people and there’s no downsides then of course that aught to be done.
Yeah that was kinda my point
Ok, now tell the linux people this.
It’s not always obvious or easy to make what non-techies will find easy. Changes could unintentionally make the experience worse for long-time users.
I know people don’t want to hear it but can we expect non-techies to meet techies half way by leveling their tech skill tree a bit?
I started using Twitter in 2009. It was just techy people back then. Things are allowed to take time and grow organically.
10th largest instance being like 10k users… we’re talking about the need for a solution to help pull the literal billions of users from mainstream social media
There isn’t a solution. People don’t want to pay for something that costs huge resources. So their attention becoming the product that’s sold is inevitable. They also want to doomscroll slop; it’s mindless and mildly entertaining. The same way tabloid newspapers were massively popular before the internet and gossip mags exist despite being utter horseshite. It’s what people want. Truly fighting it would requires huge benevolent resources, a group willing to finance a manipulative and compelling experience and then not exploit it for ad dollars, push educational things instead or something. Facebook, twitter etc are enshitified but they still cost huge amounts to run. And for all their faults at least they’re a single point where illegal material can be tackled. There isn’t a proper corollary for this in decentralised solutions once things scale up. It’s better that free, decentralised services stay small so they can stay under the radar of bots and bad actors. When things do get bigger then gated communities probably are the way to go. Perhaps until there’s a social media not-for-profit that’s trusted to manage identity, that people don’t mind contributing costs to. But that’s a huge undertaking. One day hopefully…
They also want to doomscroll slop; it’s mindless and mildly entertaining. The same way tabloid newspapers were massively popular before the internet and gossip mags exist despite being utter horseshite. It’s what people want.
The same analogy is applicable to food.
People want to eat fastfood because it’s tasty, easily available and cheap. Healthy food is hard to come by, needs time to prepare and might not always be tasty. We have the concepts of nutrition taught at school and people still want to eat fast-food. We have to do the same thing about social/internet literacy at school and I’m not sure whether that will be enough.
We have a human vetted application process too and that’s why there’s rarely any bots or spam accounts originating from our instance. I imagine it’s a similar situation for programming.dev. It’s just not worth the tradeoff to have completely open signups imo. The last thing lemmy needs is a massive influx of Meta users from threads, facebook or instagram, or from shitter. Slow, organic growth is completely fine when you don’t have shareholders and investors to answer to.
The bar is not particularly high with lemmy and that is a focused community.
People aren’t (generally) being made aware of the injustice on the other side of the planet while they are asking a question about C#.
Yeah but people ARE (generally) being made aware about Linux while they are asking a question about the injustice on the other side of the planet. You’re welcome Lemmy!
/s, also I do not officially represent the instance in any capacity, lol
It’s how most large forums ran back in the day and it worked great. Quality over quantity.
@a1studmuffin @ceenote the only reason these massive Web 2.0 platforms achieved such dominance is because they got huge before governments understood what was happening and then claimed they were too big to follow basic publishing law or properly vet content/posters. So those laws were changed to give them their own special carve-outs. We’re not mentally equipped for social networks this huge.
I disagree, I think we’re built for social networks that huge. The problems happen when money comes into the equation. If we lived in a world without price tags, and resources went where they needed to go instead of to who has the most money, and we were free to experiment with new lifestyles and ideas, we would thrive with a huge and diverse social network. Money is like a religious mind-virus that triggers psycopathy and narcissism in human beings by design, yet we believe in it like it’s a force of nature like God or something. A new enlightenment is happening all thanks to huge social networks allowing us to express our nature, it’s the institutions of control that aren’t equipped to handle such breakdown of social barriers (like the printing press protestant revolution, or the indigenous critiques before the enlightenment period)
I dunno man. Discord has thousands of closed servers that are doing great.
We’re talking about the need for a system to deal with major access of a main facebook/insta/twitter etc… to a majority of people.
IE of the scale that someone can go “Hey I bet my aunt that I haven’t talked to in 15 years might be on here, let me check”. Not a common occourance in a closed off discord community.
Also, noting that doesn’t fully solve the primary problem… of still being at the whims and controls of a single point of failure. of which if Discord Inc could at any point in time decide to spy on closed rooms, censor any content they dislike etc…
I question if we really need spaces like that anymore. But I see where you are coming from.
I was definitely only thinking about social places like Lemmy and Discord. Not networking places like Facebook and LinkedIn.
It really feels like there are zero solutions available. I’m at a point where I realize that all social networks have major negative impacts on society. And I can’t imagine anything fixing it that isn’t going back to smaller, local, and private. Maybe we don’t need places where you can expect everyone to be there.
When we can expect everyone on the planet to be present in a network the conflict and vitrol would be perpetual. We are not mature enough and all on the same page enough as a species to not resort to mud slinging
If we’re talking about breaking tech oligarchs hold on social media, no closed server anywhere comes close as a replacement to meta or Twitter.
Could do something like discord. Rather than communities, you have “micro instances” existing on top of the larger instance, and communities existing within the micro instances. And of course make it so that making micro instances are easier to create.
How is it going to be as big as reddit if EVERYONE is vetted?
Why do you want it to be as big as Reddit?
Reputation systems. There is tech that solves this but Lemmy won’t like it (blockchain)
You don’t need blockchain for reputations systems, lol. Stuff like Gnutella and PGP web-of-trust have been around forever. Admittedly, the blockchain can add barriers for some attacks; mainly sybil attacks, but a friend-of-a-friend/WoT network structure can mitigate that somewhat too,
Instances that don’t vet users sufficiently get defederated for spam. Users then leave for instances that don’t get blocked. If instances are too heavy handed in their moderation then users leave those instances for more open ones and the market of the fediverse will balance itself out to what the users want.
I wish this was the case but the average user is uninformed and can’t be bothered leaving.
Otherwise the bigger service would be lemmy, not reddit.
the market of the fediverse will balance itself out to what the users want.
Just like classical macroeconomics, you make the deadly (false) assumption that users are rational and will make the choice that’s best for them.
The sad truth is that when Reddit blocked 3rd party apps, and the mods revolted, Reddit was able to drive away the most nerdy users and the disloyal moderators. And this made Reddit a more mainstream place that even my sister and her friends know about now.
I feel like it’s only a matter of time before most people just have AI’s write their posts.
The rest of us with brains, that don’t post our status as if the entire world cares, will likely be here, or some place similar… Screaming into the wind.
I feel like it’s only a matter of time before most people just have AI’s write their posts.
That’s going right into /dev/null as soon as I detect it-- both user and content.
There are simple tests to out LLMs, mostly things that will trip up the tokenizers or sampling algorithms (with character counting being the most famous example). I know people hate captchas, but it’s a small price to pay.
Also, while no one really wants to hear this, locally hosted “automod” LLMs could help seek out spam too. Or maybe even a Kobold Hoard type “swarm.”
Captchas don’t do shit and have actually been training for computer vision for probably over a decade at this point.
Also: Any “simple test” is fixed in the next version. It is similar to how people still insist “AI can’t do feet” (much like rob liefeld). That was fixed pretty quick it is just that much of the freeware out there is using very outdated models.
I mentioned this in another comment, but we need to somehow move away from free form text. So here’s a super flawed makes-you-think idea to start the conversation:
Suppose you had an alternative kind of Lemmy instance where every post has to include both the post like normal and a “Simple English” summary of your own post. (Like, using only the “ten hundred most common words” Simple English) If your summary doesn’t match your text, that’s bannable. (It’s a hypothetical, just go with me on this.)
Now you have simple text you can search against, use automated moderation tools on, and run scripts against. If there’s a debate, code can follow the conversation and intervene if someone is being dishonest. If lots of users are saying the same thing, their statements can be merged to avoid duplicate effort. If someone is breaking the rules, rule enforcement can be automated.
Ok so obviously this idea as written can never work. (Though I love the idea of brand new users only being allowed to post in Simple English until they are allow-listed, to avoid spam, but that’s a different thing.) But the essence and meaning of a post can be represented in some way. Analyze things automatically with an LLM, make people diagram their sentences like English class, I don’t know.
It sounds like you’re describing doublespeak from 1984.
Simplifying language removes nuance. If you make moderation decisions based on the simple English vs. what the person is actually saying, then you’re policing the simple English more than the nuanced take.
I’ve got a knee-jerk reaction against simplifying language past the point of clarity, and especially automated tools trying to understand it.
We also need a solution to fucking despot mods and admins deleting comments and posts left-and-right because it doesn’t align with their personal views.
I’ve seen it happen to me personally across multiple Lemmy domains (I’m a moron and don’t care much to have empathy in my writing, and it sets these limp-wrist morbidly obese mods/admins to delete my shit and ban me), and it happens to many people as well.
Don’t go blaming your inability to have empathy on adhd. That is in absolutely no way connected. You’re just a rude person.
I’m also rude in real life too! 😄
Yeah you can go fuck yourself for pinning your flavor of bullshit on ADHD. Take some accountability for your actions.
I do indeed fuck myself, every day, thanks.
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.
Guillotines are another option.
More will just spawn and take their place.
More heads require more guillotines.
Can we not design guillotines that cut multiple heads at once, thus reducing the head to guillotine ratio?
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.
Are we foementing revolution or creating a new compression algorithm?
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!
Hey, that’s us!
I want not just decentralized
but peer to peer
like Briar, but Lemmy-style
It might be the only path forward.
I mean humanity survived thousands of years without any social media at all…
There was not a 8 billion people supply chain back then.
Yeah, which actually underlines my point even. We weren’t “designed” for connecting with everyone around the world. Evolutionary there were smaller groups, sometimes having contact with other groups.
Today we can just connect with our bubbles (like here on lemmy) and get validated and reinforce our beliefs independently if they are right or wrong (mostly factually). As we see this doesn’t seems to be healthy for most people. In smaller circles (like scientific community) this helps, but in general… Well I don’t think I have to explain the situation on the world (and especially currently in the USA) currently…
Gonna disagree here.
Humans have always had “social media”, but it’s not been directed by a cadre of oligarchs until recently.
I mean shit, humans have been sitting around the campfire telling stories to each other going all the fucking way back to forever. Sure, a campfire story isn’t a tweet, but for our monkey brains it’s essentially the same thing: how we interact with our social groups and learn what’s going on around us.
The problem is that the campfire stories couldn’t be manipulated into making your cavemen neighbors hate the other half, because half of them were totally pro rabbit fur while you’re pro squirrel fur.
You absolutely can do that and worse now, so while we’ve always had social media, we just simply never had anyone with enough control to make an entire society eat each other because of it’s influence.
You certainly could tell cavemen stories to manipulate them, back then.
The difference was you could only reach one campfire at a time. Nowadays the whole Internet is one campfire, metaphorically.
Lol chimpanzees kill each other in literal wars with torture, kidnapping, extortion, terrorism and more, and you think a caveman never thought of lying about the enemy group?
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?
I could live without all the news and stuff, and I do just ignore it when it gets too much. The ability to communicate with other people across the entire world however is something I really appreciate.
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.
I hope not. I just arrived!
Yeah I finally decided to actually commit to getting off reddit would be unfortunate.
Dont worry, lemmings worry about some shutdown every other week. Been here since the API closures, and its quite nice (if you block the news communities)
then we will all get on WordPress or something and go back to rss feeds. they can’t ban everything, the Internet is too big. people will find a way
they can’t ban everything, the Internet is too big. people will find a way
they don’t really have to ban everything. for example, the persistent chinese internet-goer has the ability to view things he’s not supposed to see even though China bans large swathes of the internet.
but by making it as difficult as possible for most people and creating strict punishments for breaking the rules, you can effectively ban most things you want for majority of people
if posting on lemmy makes you an enemy of the state and the state is becoming increasingly harsh with its punishments… would you still be going on and posting regularly? i would certainly think twice.
if posting on lemmy makes you an enemy of the state and the state is becoming increasingly harsh with its punishments… would you still be going on and posting regularly? i would certainly think twice.
Where else would we go? Perhaps it’s my non-American privilege but I think in a time like that I couldn’t be silent.
that’s kinda where i am. I’m in the mindset to be as gay as possible and as loud as possible about my dissent on what’s happening here.
me and my partner are both also trans. our lives are probably worthless anyway, why would i cower now?? I’ve worked too hard to become my own person to let the fuckin GOVERNMENT take it away from me. they can strip my rights and even kill me, but they can’t make me not be queer.
Not saying you are wrong if anything though I think Reddit is probably the next obvious victim after TikTok they’ll simply point to the Chinese Tencent who own shares and the next thing you know Musk will be part owner.
Fediverse I think will probably be the last hit simply because it’s small and because of the design can’t be hit easily, wouldn’t surprise me if they just targeted the biggest servers though.
A decent amount of the larger servers are hosted outside the US, which might complicates matters. However, many also use Cloudflare (US based) as a proxy, which might make targeting the Fediverse easier.
Isn’t it possible to just move the site under a different domain name, or have mirrored secondary servers in an entirely different location in case the primary one gets taken down?
Changing domains is essentially like starting a whole new instance. It can be done but communities and accounts start from scratch.
The lack of frictionless secure user level migration is the achille’s heel of lemmy.
Isn’t decentralization a thing that makes that much harder? There isn’t the same “national security” concern. I’m not saying it won’t happen just that the mechanism is much more difficult to make work.
I am so happy I have an account on here, even if some people can be quite abrasive
We tend to have strong opinions here that’s for sure. Most people are good about giving space for honest discussion, which is nice.
1000% agree. There is no freedom but the freedom that we build together.
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.
This is why I don’t agree with the “lemmy is cozy, it doesn’t need to grow” point of view. There’s always specific, largely defederated instances that provide that cozy feeling, but I really want decentralized platforms to replace the corporate ones. If that’s ever going to happen, the fediverse needs to grow.
check out “the gentleman’s guide to forum sliding”….
as long as teams of people sit in a row of computers using dozens of sock puppets, no place is safe once it gets kinda popular….
I just wish we had a bit more political balance here… I’m not talking about fascists, but more people that don’t blame everything on capitalism would be kind of nice…
That’s gonna be kind of an issue in a network where civil discourse and disagreement falls between calling people a Nazi/fascist at best and wishing them double death by murder rape at worst
Guns are the only alternative to the tech oligarchy.
You think they can’t buy, manipulate, or just crush decentralized social media? If anything they can do it easily, divide and conquer. FOSS ain’t gonna free you, esp. when the largest contributors to FOSS projects are big corps.
so we just all buy guns and fend for ourselves? we need communities in order to fight fascism, we need to be able to organize and share valuable information with people. is technology the answer to the problem? no its not, but it is part of the answer, and to ignore that is shortsighted.
That’s absurd. Large sharp dropped blades, poison, starvation, spears, looped ropes, fire… There are many alternatives available.
We could make a wiki filled with all the options.
But let’s prioritize the non-violent ones first.
We did prioritize non-violent ones, and this is where it got us. The ONLY option is violence.
I’m just talking about how we design the wiki. Gotta be tasteful and present ourselves in the best light.
Oh, absolutely. With quicklinks to any old category the user may want to get to fast.
The only solution guns provide are dead people. You have fallen for the pathetic lie of the right.
Oh. Guns are even better for that.
On the right? They are a lightning rod for criticism and complaints. “All the jobs in our state were taken away and my daughter is dying of an easily curable disease. BUT THOSE FUCKING LIBERALS ARE TRYING TO TAKE AWAY MY SECOND AMENDMENT RIGHTS!!!”
On the left? they are a way to “meet in the middle” on a lot of legislature while also being a great way to villify and target groups. For example, anyone with even a passing understanding of history knows that the Civl Rights Movement was not MLK Jr giving one speech and fist bumping Rosa Parks on the bus. The threat of violence was definitely a factor (beyond that it gets murkier). And people LOVE to argue that Blacks picking up guns is how that was “won”.
You know what else came of that? “That kid is a gangbanger and has a gun. SHOOT HIM. Oh shit, uhm. Fuck it, we’ll just say the toy train looked like a gun”.
And we’ll see that continue. LGBTQ folk will decide they need a gun and you can bet the cops and the chuds will be glad to open fire at protestors because “THEY HAVE A GUN!!!”
And the absolute best part? “Both sides” are fucking delusional if they think their guns are going to accomplish anything against an oppressive government. Cops won’t go near a pistol if a kid’s life is on the line. But they’ll open fire like mel gibson if they think a business is in trouble. Let alone the military with tanks and drones and there will be a lot more “combat footage” to watch online.
If there was ANY chance that The 2nd Amendment could pose ANY threat to a tyrannical government, it would have been destroyed decades ago.
If there was ANY chance that The 2nd Amendment could pose ANY threat to a tyrannical government, it would have been destroyed decades ago.
Somebody almost killed Trump in July. A couple of inches was the difference between a Republican party in chaos just before the election and a party united behind their fascist hamberdler. The way this is going the 2A is going to be your only real defense against modern Nazism so you’d be better off hitting the range and getting proficient with a firearm than you are posting pics with #resist on Instagram.
In many ways, trump’s campaign was bolstered by the image of him standing “defiant” with a fist raised in the air and someone else’s blood all over him.
If trump HAD gotten got? Evil deep state assassination attempt by biden and here is your new candidate that the entire party would rally behind. And democrats would be even more reluctant to say or do anything out of “decorum”.
Because here is the thing: trump isn’t even the problem. He is an evil bastard but he is a symptom of the problem. Project 2025 is what those rapid fire EOs come from. And Project 2025 very much benefits from right wing fascists controlling basically all of social media.
And I will just, once again, ask: What do you think your guns are going to do against a military that is cracking down on you and your buddies as “terrorists”? Because if there was ANY chance of a civilian force posing ANY threat to a government, we would have banned guns back in the late 1700s.
Tildes (a closed garden Reddit alternative) frequently love to reminisce about the days of small forum communities. Maybe we need to bring them back.
what does closed garden mean in this context? as in contrast to the fediverse?
you must be accepted after filling out an application, then you’ll get your ssh key validated and only then can you tunnel in and join properly
Tildes is invite only similar to lobste.rs
Yea agreed, but not Lemmy or Mastodon. Or, really anything with ActivityPub as these places are an echo chamber filled with trigger happy jannies who will ban you from a community if you have a differing of opinion to their groupthink.
Every person that has ever made a post like this has multiple comments defending Nazis.
Good thing I’m not defending any neo-Nazis
Sorry, I don’t carry on conversations with Nazi sympathizers. I hope you have an awful day.
I’m Jewish so it’s not possible. But cool story bro.
You do know that there are jewish nazis right?
i dont disagree implicitly with activitypub being echo chamber prone but its interesting that your most recent replies are litigating the veracity of a nazi salute caught on national television
Well, as a Jew, I haven’t seen anything else from Elon that’s emblematic of being a Nazi. Sure, he has some right wing beliefs, but those were pretty centrist ideals prior to the past decade. And I have encountered real neo-Nazis who have wished death upon my [k expletive] ass and attempted doxing. I think Elon is just an awkward person in general, but I’m not buying into the stats quo hype that he’s some neo-fascist, Hitler sympathizer. That’s just my opinion. You’re welcome to believe what you want too 👍
He made Twitter into a Nazi bar. This too. There’s plenty more that you can certainly find yourself if you actually look.
