• 4 Posts
  • 22 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • The answer is obviously as everyone has pointed out already is enshittification.

    Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification. (Cory Doctorow)

    Profit = enshittification. It’s guaranteed as long as profit is a motive.

    An interesting concept is the idea of a distributed social web. It was the concept me, and probably a LOT of other redditors, were looking at last year, but it seems no such thing really exists. The idea that everyone’s home computer (or mobile device nowadays) could act as the client and the server. Perhaps using a firefox addon of some sort.

    Do any software devs (ok that’s like 90% of lemmy, lol) know if any existing projects are trying to do this? It does not seem like an unfeasible thing, and it wouldn’t have to grow overnight, it could possibly just be a feature in an existing addon that allows communication directly between users. No centralized servers of any sort. Distributed communication without central control. Is this possible?

    The existing social media companies own the world (literally), and they can maintain this control because they can buy out competitors. You can’t buy out 5 billion people though, so if people had the tools available to host their own web; and it was as easy as installing a firefox browser addon, a true democracy could exist like the world has never seen.


  • laverabe@lemmy.worldtoFediverse@lemmy.worldBluesky continues to soar
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    14 days ago

    thank you for the link, it was an interesting read. I really like the idea of using a web browser, like firefox or a fork of it, as a basis point for a distributed social web.

    I don’t really understand how it would do that but it is a very interesting idea. I guess since firefox is open source anyone could create this ability. Is there a discussion about this somewhere on the web? Lemmy is a good a place as any as it’s too unimportant and tiny right now ;)


  • laverabe@lemmy.worldtoFediverse@lemmy.worldBluesky continues to soar
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    15 days ago

    The nice thing about Lemmy is that it doesn’t have celibrities and NBA players. It’s (mostly) honest discussion for the most part, sure you have a lot of people who getting angry but at least it’s not like reddit or Facebook or whatever where you never know if a post/comment is real or a paid advertisement. Yeah it’d get more reach, more people, more popularity with thread integration, but there would also be more people. …eternal September . It would be guaranteed to happen. Like you said, it’s about marketing. Once Lemmy has more than a few thousand people, marketers are gonna do the same thing they did to reddit. …destroy it. Yeah the shareholders are making out, but it’s value is gone.

    I started on reddit in 2008, and Lemmy is a mirror image of what the community looked like back then. You don’t need inorganic growth to grow Lemmy. It just needs quality discussions and people, the organic growth will come naturally. The only thing that needs protection against is ‘linking’ with any for profit entity.

    Connecting with threads and bluesky and whatever else would grow Lemmy, but for what purpose? I’d argue Lemmy isn’t the end solution, maybe the devs can evolve it to work over the long term, but really I think if a social media solution is really going to tackle Facebook et al, it’s going to have to be self hosted servers on every computing device in the world; where no government or organization can control, regulate, and most importantly one that cannot be manipulated for gain of a nation state or corporation.

    I know of no such software, but I have a feeling such a solution would be superior to the fediverse in taking down the existing social media cartels.





  • What happens when foreign actors intent on influencing public policy decide to harass everyone critical of their issue? People will just stop being critical of the foreign narrative to stop the harassment, and you’ll wind up with posts that are completely against the public interest and for the foreign narrative.

    You can already see this effect to some degree in comments, it’ll only get worse if everything is made public in the UI.

    As counterintuitive as it is, regulated secrecy is necessary in all democratic processes, and I would argue that includes online forum debates.

    It would actually be nice if community mods had the capability to turn the community to anonymous for comments and posts as well. Is knowing who posts the information more important than the information itself? If it’s worthwhile to share from one person, it’s worthwhile to share from everyone else so identity isn’t all that important.


  • The source code for Lemmy is free for all to view and modify, there will be no authoritarianism… And if it were to happen all of Lemmy administrators would either refuse the upgrade and stay retrograde, or quickly fork. The devs don’t really have total control of thousands of servers to have free reign to do stuff like reddit corp does.

    I’m all for vote privacy in the UI. There are just too many downsides to public votes, and not as much weight to the positives in my opinion. People should not be afraid of backlash from down voting if a post does not contribute, it’ll only create echo chambers/ unchallenged groupthink.