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...
this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2025
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How do we protect ourselves from propagandists and censors? Large, small, popular and individual.
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(2 replies)
It might be the only path forward.
I mean humanity survived thousands of years without any social media at all...
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.
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(2 replies)
This is the better path forward.. That everyone just gets so sick of it that they drop it - I've actually seen a lot of that among my own friends over the last week (and we aren't from America even). But the right wingers will never drop it because it's their community and echo chamber, and that's where the further dangers to democracy come into play when they're all in the sandbox together without parents...
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.
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(4 replies)
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.
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!
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I'm not so sure. Depends if there's a solution to the bots. Bluesky is inundated with them already.
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.
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.
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(1 replies)
honestly, i'll donate money to whomever can design this and make it scalable.
I dont want to deal with people gore spamming every single Matrix channel again.
I don’t understand this sentence. The two words I don’t know in this context are “gore” and “matrix”
Better you dont
Gore is probably gross medical pictures. Matrix is a chat room program.
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.
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.
we have to use trust from real life. it's the only thing that centralized entities can't fake
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(92 replies)
Unfortunately, Lemmy demonstrates pretty clearly that decentralized systems are just as vulnerable to propaganda and brain rot.
That's the nature of the beast. You can't have human users on a network without at least some slop.
But the decentralized network ensures that a "techno-baron" has no more say than you or I, which is exactly what the internet is supposed to do.
That's decidedly better than a centralized system, especially now.
Except the propaganda was explicitly grown on reddit.
I think we have to build systems that use real-life interpersonal trust networks so that centralized entities cannot just outspend and bot their way to prominence.
So long as it is humans posting this will be a problem. The benefit of a federated system is that you can't compromise the person at the top and then everything collapses.
I just jumped on here today (from seeing this article on Reddit) but my understanding is that the advantage is that the CEO can't decide he wants to suck authoritarian cock and destroy our ability to discuss and/or organize.
(Admittedly I joined the biggest server I could find so I kind of violated that idea as well).
Welcome! Some people have gripes with dot world for being the biggest, etc. but generally you'll be fine.
You can always search for communities here as well. .
There's many apps and frontends and too. Some are preincluded into lemmy.world. If you like old reddit try old lemmy for example.
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Humans are vulnerable to propaganda. Lemmy's architecture is against censorship. This helps to push back against propaganda, but only so much. But at least not being censored is a big win IMO.
You can certainly be censored on Lemmy, depending on your instance. But you can also easily go to another instance and still talk to everybody you used to talk to on the old instance.
Same thing with propaganda. Your instance can remove it from their hosted communities, or allow it. And you can go to an instance that feels good.
Does this lead to echo chambers? Probably.
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(3 replies)