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Why Decentralized Social Media Matters

Technology
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  • 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.

    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.

  • 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.

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

  • 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.

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    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.

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    PSA OP "wikipediasuckscoop" seems to have a personal vendetta against wikipedia. All their posts are various articles bashing the site.
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    Copyright law is messy. Thank you for the elaboration.
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    Time to start chopping down flock cameras.
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    Yeah, but that's a secondary attribute. The new ones are stupid front and center.
  • OpenAI plans massive UAE data center project

    Technology technology
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    TD Cowen (which is basically the US arm of one of the largest Canadian investment banks) did an extensive report on the state of AI investment. What they found was that despite all their big claims about the future of AI, Microsoft were quietly allowing letters of intent for billions of dollars worth of new compute capacity to expire. Basically, scrapping future plans for expansion, but in a way that's not showy and doesn't require any kind of big announcement. The equivalent of promising to be at the party and then just not showing up. Not long after this reporting came out, it got confirmed by Microsoft, and not long after it came out that Amazon was doing the same thing. Ed Zitron has a really good write up on it; https://www.wheresyoured.at/power-cut/ Amazon isn't the big surprise, they've always been the most cautious of the big players on the whole AI thing. Microsoft on the other hand are very much trying to play things both ways. They know AI is fucked, which is why they're scaling back, but they've also invested a lot of money into their OpenAI partnership so now they have to justify that expenditure which means convincing investors that consumers absolutely love their AI products and are desparate for more. As always, follow the money. Stuff like the three mile island thing is mostly just applying for permits and so on at this point. Relatively small investments. As soon as it comes to big money hitting the table, they're pulling back. That's how you know how they really feel.
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    Jesus that's just straight up porn
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    I think the principle could be applied to scan outside of the machine. It is making requests to 127.0.0.1:{port} - effectively using your computer as a "server" in a sort of reverse-SSRF attack. There's no reason it can't make requests to 10.10.10.1:{port} as well. Of course you'd need to guess the netmask of the network address range first, but this isn't that hard. In fact, if you consider that at least as far as the desktop site goes, most people will be browsing the web behind a standard consumer router left on defaults where it will be the first device in the DHCP range (e.g. 192.168.0.1 or 10.10.10.1), which tends to have a web UI on the LAN interface (port 8080, 80 or 443), then you'd only realistically need to scan a few addresses to determine the network address range. If you want to keep noise even lower, using just 192.168.0.1:80 and 192.168.1.1:80 I'd wager would cover 99% of consumer routers. From there you could assume that it's a /24 netmask and scan IPs to your heart's content. You could do top 10 most common ports type scans and go in-depth on anything you get a result on. I haven't tested this, but I don't see why it wouldn't work, when I was testing 13ft.io - a self-hosted 12ft.io paywall remover, an SSRF flaw like this absolutely let you perform any network request to any LAN address in range.
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    IMO stuff like that is why a good trainer is important. IMO it's stronger evidence that proper user-centered design should be done and a usable and intuitive UX and set of APIs developed. But because the buyer of this heap of shit is some C-level, there is no incentive to actually make it usable for the unfortunate peons who are forced to interact with it. See also SFDC and every ERP solution in existence.