Technology

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.

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.

Guns are the only alternative to the tech oligarchy.

You think they can't buy, manipulate, or just crush decentralized social media? If anything they can do it easily, divide and conquer. FOSS ain't gonna free you, esp. when the largest contributors to FOSS projects are big corps.

It might be the only path forward.

Guillotines are another option.

1000% agree. There is no freedom but the freedom that we build together.

I want not just decentralized

but peer to peer

like Briar, but Lemmy-style

I'm thinking of starting a friendica node for my city. I feel that a big problem with federated apps is that the audience isn't local enough; it's usually mostly tech-oriented people and doesn't have enough local services.

Unfortunately, Lemmy demonstrates pretty clearly that decentralized systems are just as vulnerable to propaganda and brain rot.

Well it helps, but if you live under an oligarchy they will find ways to stop uncontrolled social media.

You have to address the root of the problem or you will ultimately fail as soon as you get big enough to be a problem.

How is Lemmy (or whatever) ever gonna scale up to the size of Reddit though? If they can’t deal with trolls and bots and spam then what the hell are we gonna do?

All we need is people at this point. Still way too many people on Reddit and they've gone downhill significantly since the push for monetization

I am so happy I have an account on here, even if some people can be quite abrasive

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.

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?