Anti-social media

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Dedicated to antisocial behavior of social media corporations, censorship, algorithmic bias, filter bubbles, privacy and psychological effects of mainstream social media.

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Governable Spaces - Democratic Design for Online Life (luminosoa.org)

submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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When was the last time you participated in an election for an online group chat or sat on a jury for a dispute about a controversial post? Platforms nudge users to tolerate nearly all-powerful admins, moderators, and “benevolent dictators for life.” In Governable Spaces, Nathan Schneider argues that the internet has been plagued by a phenomenon he calls “implicit feudalism”: a bias, both cultural and technical, for building communities as fiefdoms. The consequences have spread far beyond online spaces themselves. Feudal defaults train us to give up on our communities’ democratic potential, inclining us to be more tolerant of autocratic tech CEOs and authoritarian politicians. But online spaces could be sites of a creative, radical, and democratic renaissance. Schneider shows how the internet can learn from governance legacies of the past to become a more democratic medium, responsive and inventive unlike anything that has come before.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

This makes me think about structures that are even more fundamental to the Internet:

The Domain Name System is inherently hierarchical, and the highest levels are usually controlled by corporations that are much more powerful than I am.
The process to register a domain name (like piefed.social) requires having a lot of cashflow (it seems that you need to pay many thousands of dollars each year): https://hostadvice.com/blog/domains/how-become-domain-registrar/
The process to make registrations available with a new top-level domain (like .social or .name) requires having a lot of capital (it seems that you need to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars): https://dev.to/kailyons/tutorial-make-your-own-top-level-domain-name-like-com-org-and-net-jhd

Fundamentally, my ability to send a message between China and Argentina or Fiji and Kyrgyzstan is mediated by a relatively small number of people. For example, the ICANN "key ceremony" is probably not easy for me to participate in: https://www.icann.org/en/blogs/details/the-key-to-the-internet-and-key-ceremonies-an-explainer-11-07-2023-en

I think it'd be hard to maintain connections to people that are far away from me (I don't know people in very many cities, and I certainly don't know enough people or have enough money to lay my own cables or launch my own satellites or set up my own radio towers to enable me to be independent of ICANN). Similarly, I'm not about to set up my own postal service or courier system.