When I saw this article I was like oh damn if I post it here I’ll get loads of upvotes lmao.
If social media becomes decentralized we might even gain traction reversing some of the brainwashing on the masses. The current giants are just propaganda machines. Always have been, but it’s now blatant and obvious. They don’t even care to hide it.
Let’s call it by it’s name: neofeudalism/technofeudalism
In the same way that email has been decentralized from the get go, social media could have been equally decentralized, and I don’t mean in the older php forums, but in a different way that would allow people to reconnect with others and maintain contacts.
I’m currently reading The Expanse, and at one point a character mentions checking in on the family aggregator his cousin set up to help everyone keep track of who’s living where.
Dude spun up a private Lemmy instance for his family. The future is now!
Tech Broligarchy*
Hey, that’s us!
There’s another alternative, which is no social media at all. There is no particular problem that it solved. If it disappeared, would your quality of life be worse in any way?
My mom asked what she should replace FB/Insta with and I reminded her we lived decades without them so we just go back to that.
Forums and communities like these were very important for me growing up in the rural US South
Same here. Forums (about science fiction, aeromodelism, electric vehicles) have been important to me, and continue to be important in some fields.
Sounds great, but completely unrealistic. People have almost universally embraced social media because we’re social animals. How would it disappear, short of an outright global ban?
I could live without all the news and stuff, and I do just ignore it when it gets too much. The ability to communicate with other people across the entire world however is something I really appreciate.
Sometimes when it gets overwhelming I don’t do any news or social media at all for a few weeks. It seems to help my mental health, particularly when every bit of news suggests that everything is going to shit.
when you stick your hand on a hot stove and feel pain, it’s so you know to do something about it. you don’t want to shut that off.
Yeah that’s a fair point. Thing is, I don’t know what to do about this shit (Gestures to world). I used to get involved in a lot of direct action when I was younger but I’m a bit old for that now. And I can’t really say that all the times I got battered by the police, arrested on airbases, shit like that - I’m not sure I made any difference at all. Some of those actions made headlines but those were mostly negative. And I know people say “Vote!” - but I do, and that doesn’t seem to help either.
So yeah, sometimes I just don’t use the stove for a while. I just feel a bit fuckin defeated.
Removed by mod
Yeah not sure who’s gonna click this sketchy looking thing without any context.
Word.
google hasn’t done much with YouTube yet
There’s Peertube as an alternative. It lacks some content, but the platform is on par. It is developed by a French association called Framasoft. Thus said, you’re right, Youtube is still okay, even thus there are some fake videos and scam, but they are easy to avoid.
It lacks some content
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, if this isn’t the understatement of the century.
Peertube sucks ass, so much content simply not even there, most videos don’t work or they’re in either mostly french or russian, and this is on the biggest instances.
Now I might be stupid, but I really don’t see how peertube is an alternative. Odysee or rumble are my personal best bets, but in case of youtube it’s hard to find a real alternative in my opinion. Especially as a creator.
“This centralized website sucks, let’s fix it with the same thing!” Last time I used Odysee it was full of tinfoil hat flat earthers. Rumble is youtube for people that got banned from youtube, and Odysee is youtube with the block chain pointlessly added to it. If either site ever hits youtube’s size they’ll just become the same issue youtube is, enshitification is bound to happen. I know having options is better than a monopoly, and Peertube admittedly is rough, but I think as it’s decentralized and self hosted it is the better option.
im subscribed to many privacy creators on odysee like mental outlaw
That’s fair, I like mental outlaw, and there’s nothing wrong with spreading your eggs out to other baskets. Having alternatives is better for sure, I just don’t think we should flock over to these centralized options as the defacto alternative.
I agree. I don’t use it for these reasons. But technologically speaking, it’s an open source alternative.
Preaching to the choir!
It might be good to reiterate (in part) why we’re all in here.
Guillotines are another option.
More will just spawn and take their place.
actually, if we could remove the sociopaths from power, it would allow academics to over. it’s not that hard to engineer a society where people aren’t like they are now. we’re learned behavior creatures. it’s possible to unlearn what we know now and teach our children to never be this way again.
More heads require more guillotines.
But what about places where heads won’t roll? They deserve a space to be able to access.
The heads yearn for the guillotines
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.
we have to use trust from real life. it’s the only thing that centralized entities can’t fake
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.
I feel like it’s only a matter of time before most people just have AI’s write their posts.
That’s going right into /dev/null as soon as I detect it-- both user and content.
Instances that don’t vet users sufficiently get defederated for spam. Users then leave for instances that don’t get blocked. If instances are too heavy handed in their moderation then users leave those instances for more open ones and the market of the fediverse will balance itself out to what the users want.
I wish this was the case but the average user is uninformed and can’t be bothered leaving.
Otherwise the bigger service would be lemmy, not reddit.
the market of the fediverse will balance itself out to what the users want.
Just like classical macroeconomics, you make the deadly (false) assumption that users are rational and will make the choice that’s best for them.
The sad truth is that when Reddit blocked 3rd party apps, and the mods revolted, Reddit was able to drive away the most nerdy users and the disloyal moderators. And this made Reddit a more mainstream place that even my sister and her friends know about now.
I mentioned this in another comment, but we need to somehow move away from free form text. So here’s a super flawed makes-you-think idea to start the conversation:
Suppose you had an alternative kind of Lemmy instance where every post has to include both the post like normal and a “Simple English” summary of your own post. (Like, using only the “ten hundred most common words” Simple English) If your summary doesn’t match your text, that’s bannable. (It’s a hypothetical, just go with me on this.)
Now you have simple text you can search against, use automated moderation tools on, and run scripts against. If there’s a debate, code can follow the conversation and intervene if someone is being dishonest. If lots of users are saying the same thing, their statements can be merged to avoid duplicate effort. If someone is breaking the rules, rule enforcement can be automated.
Ok so obviously this idea as written can never work. (Though I love the idea of brand new users only being allowed to post in Simple English until they are allow-listed, to avoid spam, but that’s a different thing.) But the essence and meaning of a post can be represented in some way. Analyze things automatically with an LLM, make people diagram their sentences like English class, I don’t know.
It sounds like you’re describing doublespeak from 1984.
Simplifying language removes nuance. If you make moderation decisions based on the simple English vs. what the person is actually saying, then you’re policing the simple English more than the nuanced take.
I’ve got a knee-jerk reaction against simplifying language past the point of clarity, and especially automated tools trying to understand it.
A bot can do that and do it at scale.
I think we are going to need to reconceptualize the Internet and why we are on here at all.
It already is practically impossible to stop bots and I’m a very short time it’ll be completely impossible.
I think I communicated part of this badly. My intent was to address “what is this speech?” classification, to make moderation scale better. I might have misunderstood you but I think you’re talking about a “who is speaking?” problem. That would be solved by something different.
What? I post a lot, but the majority?
…oh, you said LLM. I thought you said LMM.
Also is data scraping as much of an issue?
Reputation systems. There is tech that solves this but Lemmy won’t like it (blockchain)
Do you have a proof of concept that works?
Are they just putting everything on layer 1, and committing to low fees? If so, then it won’t remain decentralized once the blocks are so big that only businesses can download them.
It has adjustable block size and computational cost limits through miner voting, NiPoPoWs enable efficient light clients. Storage Rent cleans up old boxes every four years. Pruned (full) node using a UTXO Set Snapshot is already possible.
Plus you don’t need to bloat the L1, can be done off-chain and authenticated on-chain using highly efficient authenticated data structures.
There are simple tests to out LLMs, mostly things that will trip up the tokenizers or sampling algorithms (with character counting being the most famous example). I know people hate captchas, but it’s a small price to pay.
Also, while no one really wants to hear this, locally hosted “automod” LLMs could help seek out spam too. Or maybe even a Kobold Hoard type “swarm.”
Captchas don’t do shit and have actually been training for computer vision for probably over a decade at this point.
Also: Any “simple test” is fixed in the next version. It is similar to how people still insist “AI can’t do feet” (much like rob liefeld). That was fixed pretty quick it is just that much of the freeware out there is using very outdated models.
I’m talking text only, and there are some fundamental limitations in the way current and near future LLMs handle certain questions. They don’t “see” characters in inputs, they see words which get tokenized to their own internal vocabulary, hence any questions along the lines of “How many Ms are in Lemmy” is challenging even for advanced, fine tuned models. It’s honestly way better than image captchas.
They can also be tripped up if you simulate a repetition loop. They will either give a incorrect answer to try and continue the loop, or if their sampling is overturned, give incorrect answers avoiding instances where the loop is the correct answer.
They don’t “see” characters in inputs, they see words which get tokenized to their own internal vocabulary, hence any questions along the lines of “How many Ms are in Lemmy” is challenging even for advanced, fine tuned models.
And that is solved just by keeping a non-processed version of the query (or one passed through a different grammar to preserve character counts and typos). It is not a priority because there are no meaningful queries where that matters other than a “gotcha” but you can be sure that will be bolted on if it becomes a problem.
Again, anything this trivial is just a case of a poor training set or an easily bolted on “fix” for something that didn’t have any commercial value outside of getting past simple filters.
Sort of like how we saw captchas go from “type the third letter in the word ‘poop’” to nigh unreadable color blindness tests to just processing computer vision for “self driving” cars.
They can also be tripped up if you simulate a repetition loop.
If you make someone answer multiple questions just to shitpost they are going to go elsewhere. People are terrified of lemmy because there are different instances for crying out loud.
You are also giving people WAY more credit than they deserve.
Well, that’s kind of intuitively true in perpetuity
An effective gate for AI becomes a focus of optimisation
Any effective gate with a motivation to pass will become ineffective after a time, on some level it’s ultimately the classic “gotta be right every time Vs gotta be right once” dichotomy—certainty doesn’t exist.
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.
Plus we can have AI read a post history for us and either make a reputational decision, or highlight in the interface how reputable or disreputable tye user is. You could have it collapse but not delete a user’s comment and you could also lower and raise the bar of acceptibility at anytime. We need better tools than a polished BBS descendant.
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.
Peer to peer.
I’ve spent a bit of time developing some related ideas, but haven’t had time to start building it.
It’s a bit rough still, but I’d love some feedback! https://freetheinter.net/
It might be the only path forward.
I mean humanity survived thousands of years without any social media at all…
There was not a 8 billion people supply chain back then.
Yeah, which actually underlines my point even. We weren’t “designed” for connecting with everyone around the world. Evolutionary there were smaller groups, sometimes having contact with other groups.
Today we can just connect with our bubbles (like here on lemmy) and get validated and reinforce our beliefs independently if they are right or wrong (mostly factually). As we see this doesn’t seems to be healthy for most people. In smaller circles (like scientific community) this helps, but in general… Well I don’t think I have to explain the situation on the world (and especially currently in the USA) currently…
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…