Technology

Honest question, what are the incentives for instance operators to play nice, so to speak? And not just recreate new oligarch safe havens?

It seems like each instance is a miniature zone of centralization and it's still incumbent on individuals to create their own circles of influence. For better or worse that's how we get hivemind echo chambers and I'm not sure it's even in human nature to seek anything else.

Alternatively we have to rescue our friends and families when they start to fall for BS and educate them aggressively on improving the sourcing of their information.

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...

I haven't read the full article due to sign up paywall, but...

First, millions of small business owners and influencers who make a living on TikTok were left to beg their followers in TikTok’s last moments to follow them elsewhere in hopes of being able to continue their businesses on other corporate social media platforms. This had the effect of fracturing and destroying people’s audiences overnight, with one act of government.

How is decentralised social media going to help with this if the entire point of decentralisation is the opposite?

How do we protect ourselves from propagandists and censors? Large, small, popular and individual.

Preaching to the choir!

I'm not so sure. Depends if there's a solution to the bots. Bluesky is inundated with them already.

It might be the only path forward.

I dont want to deal with people gore spamming every single Matrix channel again.

Guillotines are another option.

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.