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Why Decentralized Social Media Matters

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  • They really are, wished they had more diverse communities like reddit.

    That'll come over time. Reddit didn't start with all those diverse groups either. It was mostly tech based stuff with some news sprinkled in initially.

  • I will never go back. Lemmy and Mastodon are just amazing.

    Same brother. Still using Reddit from time to time though but wouldn't touch Xitter with even a pair of pliers.

    It's true that Lemmy doesn't have the same magnitude of content as Reddit but I'm trying to cut down on the doom scrolling so it's a good thing for me personally.

  • This post did not contain any content.

    I think it'd be great as well for giving better control towards what the user can block. Like servers or regions.

    Respectfully I don't care for German or Indian meme culture. It's just noise I have to scroll by.

  • Decentralization solves some problems, sure, but it creates new and arguably worse problems. Let's take Lemmy for example. Power hungry mods can and do still ban you from communities that you've never interacted with and there's nothing you can do about it. They can and do still remove your posts when they didn't actually break any rules and there's nothing you can do about it. There's still only really 1 big community per topic, because having a dozen tiny communities that all repost the same things but only have a dozen different people commenting on each one just doesn't work, which leads straight back to having centralized social media with centralized mods who control the narrative and bans.

    The point of social media is to interact with people, and splitting up a topic over a dozen tiny barely used instances isn't a better way of doing that than having one big centralized one. The only real benefit of decentralized social media is that it can't just disappear because one company turned it off.

    Reddit turned into a complete shitshow of power abusing mods, agendas being pushed, and circle jerk safe spaces for a particular political sides followers.......but almost every Lemmy instance is the same, many significantly worse in terms of how authoritarian they are.

    Then there's the federation/defederation issue, where the instance you signed up to won't allow you to access some other instances and their communities because the owners/admins don't want you to, yet if you make another account on a different instance and don't hide that you're the same person as the other account, some mods will then ban you for "alt accounts" lol. Much like how reddit had no problem with alt accounts, but some mods and later admins did.

    Most people don't care about decentralization, they just want a place where everyone they disagree with is banned. That's why the left LOVED twitter pre-musk buyout, and then hated it since. That's why the right love truth social, cause there are no left people there. Now that reddit doesn't allow just outright death threats and calls for violence against people they hate, the left who love it are now claiming it's a "right leaning" platform and looking for other places.

    Some of us just want a place with zero bans and where unless you break the law with your speech, zero censorship and moderation. Some of us believe that self moderation is all that's needed - if you don't like what someone is saying, just block them and move on. Don't call for their opinion to be silenced and their access to be taken away.

    Most people don’t care about decentralization, they just want a place where everyone they disagree with is banned. That’s why the left LOVED twitter pre-musk buyout, and then hated it since. That’s why the right love truth social, cause there are no left people there. Now that reddit doesn’t allow just outright death threats and calls for violence against people they hate, the left who love it are now claiming it’s a “right leaning” platform and looking for other places.

    You had me at first, but you lost me here. "reddit doesn’t allow just outright death threats and calls for violence" is not a correct description of what's going on over there and consequently the rest of that sentence is nonsense, just like the one-dimensional politicizing.

    Some of us just want a place with zero bans and where unless you break the law with your speech, zero censorship and moderation.

    Sure, "some" certainly want that, but that's not the point of the fedi/lemmiverse and you know it. You took a very loooong breath to get to this in the end, even making it political along the way. Some people will upvote you only because they didn't take the time to finish reading.

    Also - the law is different in different countries, and the fediverse is global. "Unless you break the law with your speech" really isn't the point you think it is.

  • Oh, that's so much worse than Reddit, since there are no power hungry mods there /s

    Yeah that paragraph really got me. Very far from what is actually going down on reddit these days.

  • As you mentioned, Reddit had a huge problem with moderators who banned without just cause so this is in no way related to decentralization. If you want zero moderation then you're free to join one of the instances that have that as a guiding principle, but that is almost inevitably where all the nazis end up, which is why the rest of us avoid them.

    Reddit had a huge problem with moderators who banned without just cause

    And they now have a huge problem with bots & admins who ban "without just cause". Except to them it's no problem at all, it's the desired shift towards more "marketability" I guess.

  • Is there any Mastodon server that actually has an experience closer to Twitter? For example, having search enabled

    No. Unfortunately, ActivityPub just isn't geared up for that kind of thing. It's why BlueSky uses a different federation protocol called AtProtocol which is a lot more demanding than ActivityPub but is specifically intended for Twitter/TikTok style services.

  • Or in Lemmy's situation, to continue the censorship after Twitter put a stop to theirs.

    Luckily that's a per-instance issue you can easily work around.

  • Decentralization solves some problems, sure, but it creates new and arguably worse problems. Let's take Lemmy for example. Power hungry mods can and do still ban you from communities that you've never interacted with and there's nothing you can do about it. They can and do still remove your posts when they didn't actually break any rules and there's nothing you can do about it. There's still only really 1 big community per topic, because having a dozen tiny communities that all repost the same things but only have a dozen different people commenting on each one just doesn't work, which leads straight back to having centralized social media with centralized mods who control the narrative and bans.

    The point of social media is to interact with people, and splitting up a topic over a dozen tiny barely used instances isn't a better way of doing that than having one big centralized one. The only real benefit of decentralized social media is that it can't just disappear because one company turned it off.

    Reddit turned into a complete shitshow of power abusing mods, agendas being pushed, and circle jerk safe spaces for a particular political sides followers.......but almost every Lemmy instance is the same, many significantly worse in terms of how authoritarian they are.

    Then there's the federation/defederation issue, where the instance you signed up to won't allow you to access some other instances and their communities because the owners/admins don't want you to, yet if you make another account on a different instance and don't hide that you're the same person as the other account, some mods will then ban you for "alt accounts" lol. Much like how reddit had no problem with alt accounts, but some mods and later admins did.

    Most people don't care about decentralization, they just want a place where everyone they disagree with is banned. That's why the left LOVED twitter pre-musk buyout, and then hated it since. That's why the right love truth social, cause there are no left people there. Now that reddit doesn't allow just outright death threats and calls for violence against people they hate, the left who love it are now claiming it's a "right leaning" platform and looking for other places.

    Some of us just want a place with zero bans and where unless you break the law with your speech, zero censorship and moderation. Some of us believe that self moderation is all that's needed - if you don't like what someone is saying, just block them and move on. Don't call for their opinion to be silenced and their access to be taken away.

    Power hungry mods can

    Power-hungry people will do stupid shit, power corrupts. The more diluted the power the better.
    The issue is that before mass social media was a thing, people would just block someone they deemed annoying. Nowadays people whine for the mods to block undesirables because they got offended.

  • I think it'd be great as well for giving better control towards what the user can block. Like servers or regions.

    Respectfully I don't care for German or Indian meme culture. It's just noise I have to scroll by.

    You can already block instances in your profile. Just block feddit.org , never hear from me again, but also you won't see much german content. And you can deselect languages in your profile, too.

  • Is there any Mastodon server that actually has an experience closer to Twitter? For example, having search enabled

    Doesn’t mastodon leak a ton of metadata

  • As you mentioned, Reddit had a huge problem with moderators who banned without just cause so this is in no way related to decentralization. If you want zero moderation then you're free to join one of the instances that have that as a guiding principle, but that is almost inevitably where all the nazis end up, which is why the rest of us avoid them.

    I feel like you didn’t even read my post, as every sentence you wrote was already addressed.

  • Oh, that's so much worse than Reddit, since there are no power hungry mods there /s

    Completely missed the point I see.

  • Yeah that paragraph really got me. Very far from what is actually going down on reddit these days.

    What’s “actually going down” on Reddit these days?

  • Most people don’t care about decentralization, they just want a place where everyone they disagree with is banned. That’s why the left LOVED twitter pre-musk buyout, and then hated it since. That’s why the right love truth social, cause there are no left people there. Now that reddit doesn’t allow just outright death threats and calls for violence against people they hate, the left who love it are now claiming it’s a “right leaning” platform and looking for other places.

    You had me at first, but you lost me here. "reddit doesn’t allow just outright death threats and calls for violence" is not a correct description of what's going on over there and consequently the rest of that sentence is nonsense, just like the one-dimensional politicizing.

    Some of us just want a place with zero bans and where unless you break the law with your speech, zero censorship and moderation.

    Sure, "some" certainly want that, but that's not the point of the fedi/lemmiverse and you know it. You took a very loooong breath to get to this in the end, even making it political along the way. Some people will upvote you only because they didn't take the time to finish reading.

    Also - the law is different in different countries, and the fediverse is global. "Unless you break the law with your speech" really isn't the point you think it is.

    What in your opinion is going on at Reddit right now?

    I mentioned politics explicitly. I didn’t hide that. I mentioned it because politics has taken over almost all social media, especially Reddit and Lemmy.

  • They really are, wished they had more diverse communities like reddit.

    Reddit pretty much only had tech, humour, atheism, racism and cp its first 5 or 6 years as a platform.

  • Decentralization solves some problems, sure, but it creates new and arguably worse problems. Let's take Lemmy for example. Power hungry mods can and do still ban you from communities that you've never interacted with and there's nothing you can do about it. They can and do still remove your posts when they didn't actually break any rules and there's nothing you can do about it. There's still only really 1 big community per topic, because having a dozen tiny communities that all repost the same things but only have a dozen different people commenting on each one just doesn't work, which leads straight back to having centralized social media with centralized mods who control the narrative and bans.

    The point of social media is to interact with people, and splitting up a topic over a dozen tiny barely used instances isn't a better way of doing that than having one big centralized one. The only real benefit of decentralized social media is that it can't just disappear because one company turned it off.

    Reddit turned into a complete shitshow of power abusing mods, agendas being pushed, and circle jerk safe spaces for a particular political sides followers.......but almost every Lemmy instance is the same, many significantly worse in terms of how authoritarian they are.

    Then there's the federation/defederation issue, where the instance you signed up to won't allow you to access some other instances and their communities because the owners/admins don't want you to, yet if you make another account on a different instance and don't hide that you're the same person as the other account, some mods will then ban you for "alt accounts" lol. Much like how reddit had no problem with alt accounts, but some mods and later admins did.

    Most people don't care about decentralization, they just want a place where everyone they disagree with is banned. That's why the left LOVED twitter pre-musk buyout, and then hated it since. That's why the right love truth social, cause there are no left people there. Now that reddit doesn't allow just outright death threats and calls for violence against people they hate, the left who love it are now claiming it's a "right leaning" platform and looking for other places.

    Some of us just want a place with zero bans and where unless you break the law with your speech, zero censorship and moderation. Some of us believe that self moderation is all that's needed - if you don't like what someone is saying, just block them and move on. Don't call for their opinion to be silenced and their access to be taken away.

    If you want a place with no bans, then start up your own instance. Nobody can ban you. Sure they could defederate from you, but they couldn’t ban you.

    If you want a platform that can’t ban anyone AND can’t block anyone, well you could make your own platform but I wouldn’t expect many to join you because nobody wants that.

    We have the freedom to say what we want. We don’t have the freedom to force people to hear it though.

  • If you want a place with no bans, then start up your own instance. Nobody can ban you. Sure they could defederate from you, but they couldn’t ban you.

    If you want a platform that can’t ban anyone AND can’t block anyone, well you could make your own platform but I wouldn’t expect many to join you because nobody wants that.

    We have the freedom to say what we want. We don’t have the freedom to force people to hear it though.

    The point is that everyone else can still ban you. I’m not sure you even understood my original post if that’s your response.

    Here we don’t have the freedom to say why we want, because you’ll be banned instantly for saying many things that aren’t even controversial unless you’re deep inside one political side.

  • You can already block instances in your profile. Just block feddit.org , never hear from me again, but also you won't see much german content. And you can deselect languages in your profile, too.

    Just FYI: blocking instances only blocks the communities on the instances, not the users if they post outside of their instance.

    Example: If you blocked Pawb.Social, you'd still see this comment from me on Lemmy.World.

  • I feel like you didn’t even read my post, as every sentence you wrote was already addressed.

    Where did you address them? You just claim that

    almost every Lemmy instance is the same, many significantly worse in terms of how authoritarian they are

    Without any explanation for why that would be the case whereas I have not have at all had the same experience. Therefore, I don't see how it relates to federated social media at all.

    Furthermore, you just state that

    some of us just want a place with zero bans and which unless you break the law with your speech, zero bans and moderation

    And to just "block them and move on". Honestly, I don't want my time using social media to be spent having to personally block multiple accounts (by people who will probably make more accounts) because they're racists, misogynists, foreign bot farms, etc. Furthermore, I don't want my content and my comments to be used, knowingly or otherwise, to prop up comment sections and threads that are spreading disinformation and bigotry.

    If you want that, that's fine. Go to one of those places. But from what I've seen, they are usually where nazis end up congregating, which is one reason why I (and at least some other people) prefer to avoid them.

  • 24 Stimmen
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    I think you're missing some key points. Any file hosting service, no matter what, will have to deal with CSAM as long as people are able to upload to it. No matter what. This is an inescapable fact of hosting and the internet in general. Because CSAM is so ubiquitous and constant, one can only do so much to moderate any services, whether they're a large corporation are someone with a server in their closet. All of the larger platforms like 'meta', google, etc., mostly outsource that moderation to workers in developing countries so they don't have to also provide mental health counselling, but that's another story. The reason they own their own hardware is because the hosting services can and will disable your account and take down your servers if there's even a whiff of CSAM. Since it's a constant threat, it's better to own your own hardware and host everything from your closet so you don't have to eat the downtime and wait for some poor bastard in Nigeria to look through your logs and reinstate your account (not sure how that works exactly though).
  • I am disappointed in the AI discourse

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    I apologize that apparently Lemmy/Reddit people do not have enough self-awareness to accept good criticism, especially if it was just automatically generated and have downloaded that to oblivion. Though I don't really think you should respond to comments with a chatGPT link, not exactly helpful. Comes off a tad bit AI Bro...
  • The technology to end traffic deaths exists. Why aren’t we using it?

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    You’re seriously attempting to argue with me about whether or not transportation existed before cars?
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    Niemand hat geantwortet
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    I made a PayPal account like 20 years ago in a third world country. The only thing you needed then is an email and password. I have no real name on there and no PII, technically my bank card is attached but on PP itself there's no KYC. I think you could probably use some types of prepaid cards with it if you want to avoid using a bank altogether but for me this wasn't an issue, I just didn't want my ID on any records, I don't have any serious OpSec concerns otherwise. I'm sure you could either buy PayPal accounts like this if you needed to, or make one in a country that doesn't have KYC laws somehow. From there I'd add money to my balance and send money as F&F. At no point did I need an ID so in that sense there's no KYC. Some sellers on localmarket were fancy enough to list that they wanted an ID for KYC, but I'm sure you could just send them any random ID you made in paint from the republic of dave and you'd be fine.
  • Nextcloud cries foul over Google Play Store app rejection

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    I have the regular F-droid and it does automatic updates now.
  • CrowdStrike Announces Layoffs Affecting 500 Employees

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    This is where the magic of near meaningless corpo-babble comes in. The layoffs are part of a plan to aspirationally acheive the goal of $10b revenue by EoY 2025. What they are actually doing is a significant restructuring of the company, refocusing by outside hiring some amount of new people to lead or be a part of departments or positions that haven't existed before, or are being refocused to other priorities... ... But this process also involves laying off 500 of the 'least productive' or 'least mission critical' employees. So, technically, they can, and are, arguing that their new organizational paradigm will be so succesful that it actually will result in increased revenue, not just lower expenses. Generally corpos call this something like 'right-sizing' or 'refocusing' or something like that. ... But of course... anyone with any actual experience with working at a place that does this... will tell you roughly this is what happens: Turns out all those 'grunts' you let go of, well they actually do a lot more work in a bunch of weird, esoteric, bandaid solutions to keep everything going, than upper management was aware of... because middle management doesn't acknowledge or often even understand that that work was being done, because they are generally self-aggrandizing narcissist petty tyrants who spend more time in meetings fluffing themselves up than actually doing any useful management. Then, also, you are now bringing on new, outside people who look great on paper, to lead new or modified apartments... but they of course also do not have any institutional knowledge, as they are new. So now, you have a whole bunch of undocumented work that was being done, processes which were being followed... which is no longer being done, which is not documented.... and the new guys, even if they have the best intentions, now have to spend a quarter or two or three figuring out just exactly how much pre-existing middle management has been bullshitting about, figuring out just how much things do not actually function as they ssid it did... So now your efficiency improving restructuring is actually a chaotic mess. ... Now, this 'right sizing' is not always apocalyptically extremely bad, but it is also essentially never totally free from hiccups... and it increases stress, workload, and tensions between basically everyone at the company, to some extent. Here's Forbes explanation of this phenomenon, if you prefer an explanation of right sizing in corpospeak: https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/rightsizing/
  • Dear Brother Printers: Eat a [Sponsor friendly words here]

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    Why doesn't Amazon just sell a generic printer that works with generic toner or pigment or ink. I would buy.