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Social Networks Open Source The Internet

'Decentralized Social Media Is the Only Alternative To the Tech Oligarchy' (404media.co) 150

Posted by BeauHD from the decentralized-FTW dept.
An anonymous reader quotes an op-ed from 404 Media's Jason Koebler: If it wasn't already obvious, the last 72 hours have made it crystal clear that it is urgent to build and mainstream alternative, decentralized social media platforms that are resistant to government censorship and control, are not owned by oligarchs and dominated by their algorithms, and in which users own their follower list and can port it elsewhere easily and without restriction. [...] Mastodon's ActivityPub and Bluesky's AT.Protocol have provided the base technology layer to make this possible, and have laid important groundwork over the last few years to decorporatize and decentralize the social internet.

The problem with decentralized social media platforms thus far is that their user base is minuscule compared to platforms like TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram, meaning the cultural and political influence has lagged behind them. You also cannot directly monetize an audience on Bluesky or Mastodon -- which, to be clear, is a feature, not a bug -- but also means that the value proposition for an influencer who makes money through the TikTok creator program or a small business that makes money selling chewing gum on TikTok shop or a clothes brand that has figured out how to arbitrage Instagram ads to sell flannel shirts is not exactly clear. I am not advocating for decentralized social media to implement ads and creator payment programs. I'm just saying that many TikTok influencers were directing their collective hundreds of millions of fans to follow them to Instagram or YouTube, not a decentralized alternative.

This doesn't mean that the fediverse or that a decentralized Instagram or TikTok competitor that runs on the AT.Protocol is doomed. But there is a lot of work to do. There is development work that needs to be done (and is being done) to make decentralized protocols easier to join and use and more interoperable with each other. And there is a massive education and recruitment challenge required to get the masses to not just try out decentralized platforms but to earnestly use them. Bluesky's growing user base and rise as a legitimately impressive platform that one can post to without feeling like it's going into the void is a massive step forward, and proof that it is possible to build thriving alternative platforms. The fact that Meta recently blocked links to a decentralized Instagram alternative shows that big tech sees these platforms, potentially, as a real threat. "This is all to say that it is possible to build alternatives to Elon Musk's X, Mark Zuckerberg's Instagram, and whatever TikTok will become," concludes Koebler. "It is happening, and it is necessary. The richest, most powerful people in the world have all aligned themselves and their platforms with Donald Trump. But their platforms' relevance and importance doesn't necessarily have to last forever. A different way is possible, if we build it."

Further reading: 'The Tech Oligarchy Arrives' (The Atlantic)

'Decentralized Social Media Is the Only Alternative To the Tech Oligarchy' More | Reply

'Decentralized Social Media Is the Only Alternative To the Tech Oligarchy'

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  • Wait, aren't they trying to get rid of censorship? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by jfdavis668 ( 1414919 ) on Tuesday January 21, 2025 @10:33PM (#65108321)
    Isn't that what removing all the controls on fake news all about, getting rid of censorship?

  • Maybe something like USENET + trust? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ctilsie242 ( 4841247 ) on Tuesday January 21, 2025 @10:40PM (#65108327)

    Maybe we might be well off going back to a store and forward protocol like USENET, except with some web of trust system. For example, I trust Bob 100% with his opinion. Alice sends me an article, Bob marks that Alice is good enough to read, so the article is weighted up. On the other hand Charlie only sends me stuff about grits and Natalie Portman statues. His stuff gets weighted up because of the sheer gravity of the wordsmithing. Mallory sends me stuff that is just clickbait, and both Alice and Bob have negatively weighted Mallory, so their posts wind up not being visible.

    I remember this discussed on the Cypherpunks list in antediluvian times, and it might just be the way to go, although the posts would have to be limited to text with a length attached, so it doesn't turn into another decentralized storehouse for alt.binaries.*

    • Re:Maybe something like USENET + trust? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by ctilsie242 ( 4841247 ) on Tuesday January 21, 2025 @10:44PM (#65108329)

      Following up to my own post... maybe decentralization in general is a must. Everything from farm to market to local eateries, 3D printing and machining stuff at local metal shops as opposed to buying from overseas, and focusing on community building instead of living in a walled echo chamber.

    • This is exactly what I've been agitating for.. for over a decade here on Slashdot. Congrats on getting positive moderation for it, I normally get downmodded for proposing exactly the same thing. Maybe my problem was not explaining what a web of trust is for the people who don't actually belong here.

      I'm not sure you could solve the binaries problem with a length limit, though, I think a lot of people will be perfectly happy posting a binary in 10,000 pieces. Towards the end it was practically getting like th

      • Times also change. A few years ago, web of trusts, PGP keysigning parties and such were "old people's stuff", and people said, "why bother with that security when I can send stuff via Whatsapp without needing all the fancy crypt overhead?" Now, with both sides having lost trust in social media and so many hacks abounding, people are starting to return to the concept of a web of trust and older, proven, decentralized protocols.

        There are a few things we have now that we didn't have back in the 1990s. For P

    • Nothing stopping anyone from grafting this kind of thing onto ActivityPub.

      We already have an "ActivityPub USENET" called Lemmy (modelled on Reddit you can quickly see how Reddit itself is a crappy USENET clone.)

      Lemmy is a distributed, decentralized, Reddit. You can stand up your own instance and subscribe to whatever "magazines" (subreddits, or newsgroups) you want, using its interface. Magazines have moderators, though nothing stops someone from creating a dummy mod that doesn't moderate.

      Nothing stops some

  • Decentralization is the dream (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Baron_Yam ( 643147 ) on Tuesday January 21, 2025 @10:44PM (#65108331)

    Unfortunately, it won't work. The average person is not going to police their own segment and keep it clean when they're too busy trying to look like they're keeping up with the Joneses, selling home crafts, trying to become an 'influencer', or share their manifesto.

    And that's just the humans; any such system will quickly get taken over by state-run bots running agitprop campaigns and corporations trying to shove ads in your face.

    Of course, at least such a system wouldn't support a Musk or Zuck, so it'd be marginally better.

    • Re:Decentralization is the dream (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Mr. Dollar Ton ( 5495648 ) on Tuesday January 21, 2025 @11:07PM (#65108353)

      Without the algorithms that push crap and fakes, decentralized systems are much better, not marginally.

      I have an account on facebook, created via tor, using a popular anonymous email service. I've never used it outside of tor, I only read the algorithm wall.

      I don't follow, don't click, don't even put the mouse over the web site.

      I get nothing but fake news, russian trolls and Nazi propaganda. A bubble of Zuck.

      On mastodon, I get literally a scroll of what people post, quite random and never the same.

      Completely different worlds.

      • I don't think so. Posts by random cranks are only marginally better than ads. I unironically think geocities and myspace were better than what we have today, because I had to search for the cranks and the ads, rather than have them spoon fed to me while I doom scroll like a zombie.

    • People can't even pick up their own dog's poop from the sidewalk.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Cyberax ( 705495 )

      The average person is not going to police their own segment and keep it clean when they're too busy trying to look like they're keeping up with the Joneses, selling home crafts, trying to become an 'influencer', or share their manifesto.

      That's why Bluesky is great. It represents moderation as a layer on top of the content. If you don't like Bluesky's moderators, you can switch to something else.

    • The average person is not going to police their own segment and keep it clean when they're too busy trying to look like they're keeping up with the Joneses, selling home crafts, trying to become an 'influencer', or share their manifesto.

      Although I can't help reflecting that in a better economy, where the super-rich had not "acquired" so much money that the average person is actually poor, there wouldn't be so many "selling home crafts, trying to become an 'influencer', or share their manifesto".

      As a writer and editor, I am dismally aware that it is far, far harder for a beginner to get fiction or non-fiction published than it was 50 years ago. There are literally millions of decently educated, somewhat well-read people jostling to get thei

  • censorship (Score:5, Insightful)

    by roman_mir ( 125474 ) on Tuesday January 21, 2025 @10:49PM (#65108337) Homepage Journal

    So do you want censorship? Because it will end up censored the way Wikipedia or reddit are censored. Can you have uncensored channels as well as censored ones and can you choose to turn censorship on and off for your own account rather than having it being imposed by the moderators from above? Provide functionality like that if you want to make a dent in the user numbers.

    • What "censorship", you can run your instance and syndicate whatever you choose.

      • Re:censorship (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Bert64 ( 520050 ) <bert@@@slashdot...firenzee...com> on Wednesday January 22, 2025 @08:17AM (#65109021) Homepage

        Pretty much this, but replace the censorship with your own user-controlled filtering so you can decide what you want to see or not.

        But in terms of running your own instance, this is becoming increasingly problematic due to the slow rollout of IPv6 (and the fact services like bluesky don't even support it).

        A lot of ISPs around the world only provide legacy access through CGNAT so you simply cannot host anything yourself. Some of them also provide IPv6, so you usually *can* host via IPv6 but then users with only legacy connectivity would not be able to reach it (and browsers giving poor error messages will make users think the site is offline rather than just unreachable due to their own antiquated connectivity).

        You're left having to rent a server, which means extra costs and still relying on another tech company.

        • Yeah, the infrastructure problems are unfortunately present with basically anything one would like to run on the internet.

          As for bluesky and the like single-company managed, one-domain services, I really don't know why people flock to them. They got screwed so many times, and yet...

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by jp10558 ( 748604 )

            I don't think most people understand or expect there could be another way. And then network effects. I kind of think the "best" we'll get for mass adoption would be Signal and Telegram and Discord where it's "easy" to sign up, and kind of private groups where you can't google the contents of posts really.

            It's also the case that everyone wants it to be free, that's why there's like 3 e-mail providers now for 99% of people.

  • Why are they oligarchs now but not last year? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by poity ( 465672 ) on Tuesday January 21, 2025 @10:53PM (#65108339)

    Zuck, Bezos, and Musk are still the same and have the same amount of wealth-enabled power as they did a year ago. Is it just the decision to not cooperate with government requests to take down information that makes one suddenly an oligarch?

    • Re:Why are they oligarchs now but not last year? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by medusa-v2 ( 3669719 ) on Tuesday January 21, 2025 @11:06PM (#65108351)
      It sounds like you've been flat out ignoring the critics since the days of OWS.

    • Re:Why are they oligarchs now but not last year? (Score:5, Informative)

      by dhasenan ( 758719 ) on Tuesday January 21, 2025 @11:58PM (#65108431)

      They had a lot less influence over the sitting President a year ago, for one thing, but otherwise, yeah, I agree that we should have been calling them oligarchs in the past too.

      • They had a lot less influence over the sitting President a year ago...

        Ho ho ho! You can believe that if you want to.

      • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

        by Evtim ( 1022085 )

        "They had a lot less influence over the sitting President a year ago"

        Brilliant insight!

        Of course you are correct! It wasn't that they had more control over the president. Instead the authorities exercised control over them in a blatant, criminal violation of the First Amendment. The useful idiots (upper middle class westerners; the elite) had no problem with that, since it was their deranged propaganda. My goodness, for a decade Tweeter was running the entire West. Every gaslighting propaganda BS from the m

        • Academia, "journalists", wall street, all the tech bros sans Elon, all of these were behind Harris. The rich and powerful white men were overwhelmingly behind Harris.

          The heart of mango Mussolini's election bid was he was going to keep his bogus tax cuts. Those tax cuts kept the billionaires taxes low and raises all others.

          Why would they be against that and for Harris?

          In that respect, in this election, Wall Street is a lot like a swing state. Trump’s promises to cut taxes and reduce regulation would be a boon for financial firms, and those promises have helped him rebuild the coalition of high-powered donors and financiers who supported him through his first t

    • It is the decision to use one's money and influence to exert control over government that makes one an oligarch. The USA has been substantially run by oligarchs since before it was formally established. You can tell because discussing the matter is so energetically discouraged.

      oligarchy
      n noun (plural oligarchies) a small group of people having control of a country or organizaton. Øa country governed by an oligarchy.

      DERIVATIVES
      oligarchic adjective

    • It's their politics, obviously.

      Twitter was glorious when it aggressively filtered the Bad People. Then Musk bought it and it sucks because everyone gets to talk.

      Zuck was bad when he originally failed to mute the Orange Tyrant in 2016, spent the time since then desperately trying to curry favor with the Left again, and has now sucked up to Trump.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Temkin ( 112574 )

      And consider... USENET and related technologies predate the fall of the USSR. Completely distributed, a total free-for-all... All that's needed is a modern UI grafted on top.

      "The Net Interprets Censorship As Damage and Routes Around It" - multiple attributions...

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by vbdasc ( 146051 )

        Speaking of USENET and USSR, the former was never very popular in the latter... However, another technology, the so called FIDONET, was widely used instead of USENET in the waning days of USSR and the first several post-Soviet years. It was really huge.

    • When USENET was opened to the general public in September 1993, it immediately became a cesspool of spam and trolls.

      Eternal September [wikipedia.org]

      • Re:USENET & UUCP Rides AGAIN! (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Temkin ( 112574 ) on Tuesday January 21, 2025 @11:19PM (#65108379)

        When USENET was opened to the general public in September 1993, it immediately became a cesspool of spam and trolls.

        My Internet use predates '93 by 6 or 7 years, so... I have somewhat different memories... Yes, it was a shit show... But there was no centralized authority policing it. And there's the goal... Present a UI that pushes the policing down to the individual user.

        Pro-Abortion? Fine mark it in your local UI as such. Anti... Same.

        Left wing prog? Fine... Mark it in your local UI... Right wing handmaiden type... Same deal...

        All the filters local to the user on all topics, everywhere... Stop the madness of censorship. It never works.

        T

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by MikeS2k ( 589190 )

          I started using Usenet as a teenager around 1999 (you can guess what my favourite binary groups may have been) and I remember it being 80% on topic, 10% spam, and 10% the one lunatic that would post basically the same nutcase post over and over and over and over.
          So it hadn't totally fallen. But why did Slashdot get so big back in those days? Perhaps the moderation system here is better than just showing totally everything.

  • Out of the three billionaires that were at the inauguration to pledge infinite love to the new POTUS, Zuckerberg was actually the least wealthy of the group. People who are sufficiently tech savvy to move away from facebook have been blocking ads on there for years anyways, so he wasn't making money off of them. Until you can get ordinary people to leave you won't make any meaningful impact.

    Even worse is the idea that leaving twitter (or x.com) somehow impacts Musk. He is so diversified in his investments that if twitter (or x.com) went down permanently this evening it wouldn't make a meaningful difference to him.

    In case you hadn't heard, those three billionaires collectively made over $200 billion just since December.

    If you ever questioned whether or not the game is rigged, you should have all the evidence you need now to answer that question. The only difference is this time the person running to show is far, far, too stupid to know how to mask it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by vbdasc ( 146051 )

      Poor Zuck. I didn't know he was that broke.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Wheely ( 2500 )

      It wouldn't make a financial mark on Musk at all if X went down but it would turn off his megaphone.

      • It wouldn't make a financial mark on Musk at all if X went down but it would turn off his megaphone.

        X is irrelevant to Musk's ability to tell us everything he wants us to hear now. He has an office in the White House. He likely has more power than Vance in the White House. If X goes down this afternoon we'll still know if he passes gas in the oval office and what he thinks about the latest version of Madden football on the PS5.

    • Trump isnâ(TM)t stupid. In fact, heâ(TM)s one of the smartest politicians in a long time: he realized a long time ago that people underestimate him and it is his superpower. Also that by showing people how wealthy and obscene you are, they love you in America. It's disgustingly American. People still are not catching onto this! look at the evidence. Someone who is a complete moron does not get into the presidency twice. before he left, Harry Reid said that Donald Trump is very smart and very dange

    • Even worse is the idea that leaving twitter (or x.com) somehow impacts Musk. He is so diversified in his investments that if twitter (or x.com) went down permanently this evening it wouldn't make a meaningful difference to him.

      It's not that Musk is making money from X. It's that it gives him direct control over over a highly-effective propaganda machine, where he can boost his own ideology, push false narratives, incite outrage, and suppress opposing points of view.

  • Decentralized, self-censored is code for scammers and pedos. It will never work.
    • A society without scammers and pedos is not real-life society. If a model does not include them, what else did the model overlook?

  • Only obvious in the past 72 hours ?!?! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by cuda13579 ( 1060440 ) on Tuesday January 21, 2025 @11:27PM (#65108389)

    That should have been pretty fucking obvious to people for the past decade....yet, none of you tech nerds have done anything about it.

    But it's not an "oligarch" issue....it's a free speech issue....and the reality is that most of you don't actually want free speech....you just want your "team's" speech to be free, while stamping out the speech of people that belong to the "teams" you don't like.
    So, you've been content with the push-and-pull of the current pissing match surrounding censorship on social media.

    I mean, the only reason THIS article was written, is because the author suddenly feels like their team lost.

    • That should have been pretty fucking obvious to people for the past decade....yet, none of you tech nerds have done anything about it.

      I'm sorry - the tech nerds haven't done anything about it?

      Mastodon has been out for nearly a decade. Matrix just over a decade. Signal - also a decade. If you've been happy using platforms run by billionaires for the past 10 years and today is the day you change your mind, no problem. We all make decisions. But if the past 72 hours is the first time you're getting the memo about tech oligarchs; You've had ten years warning. What else were they supposed to give you?

    • Do you believe mis/disinformation can be dangerous at a species level? Do you believe that a free "marketplace of ideas" will always result in the truth overcoming the lie?

  • Decentralization just feels like an occulted monop (Score:3)

    by PubJeezy ( 10299395 ) on Tuesday January 21, 2025 @11:28PM (#65108397)
    Decentralization just feels like an occulted monopoly. Wasn't Bluesky spun off of Twitter? Wouldn't it have been staffed with Twitter employees? And is now it's competing with Twitter as the "decentralized" option. If it's still being controlled by the exact same people, why would anyone expect it to end up any different?

    Decentralization is just kayfabe. It's all the same folks, generating the same platforms, with all the same problems. Until they effectively solve perverse incentives involved in social media, none of these platforms have much to offer.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by dhasenan ( 758719 )

      Bluesky has some decentralized aspects, but all the data has to go through a relay, and that's sufficiently expensive that only Bluesky has one running. This means that Bluesky's moderation applies to everyone.

      Mastodon is heavily decentralized. My instance doesn't rely on anyone else's servers. No large corporation can moderate my messages globally. There's smaller scale moderation, which is quite necessary to deal with hate speech and organized harassment. But the only people who can moderate my speech acr

    • You're criticizing ONE "decentralized" social network but there are multiple, and one of the biggest that isn't Bluesky is actually mentioned in the summary.

      Mastodon is not spin off from any existing group and is based purely on open protocols. I have as much say in Mastodon (in theory, in practice he's the guy doing the work) as @Gargron because I have my own node. If @Gargron went mad with power, I can ignore his software updates. I can follow anyone, even people on servers the majority of admins have blo

  • Real Problem is Anonymity (Score:3)

    by RossCWilliams ( 5513152 ) on Wednesday January 22, 2025 @12:37AM (#65108487)
    The real problem is that people are generally anonymous on these forums. Facebook works for a lot of people because the users are (mostly) real people. If you want a self-policing forum, people need to be accountable for what they say. That means they are accountable to everyone. That means they will have to self-censor to avoid consequences from people who have power over them. There ain't no free lunch.

  • What we need is censorship as a service (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mamba-mamba ( 445365 ) on Wednesday January 22, 2025 @01:12AM (#65108551)

    What we need, on all these social media systems, is censorship as a service. Organizations invested in safety can publish a censorship list based on specific posts or accounts or whatever. Maybe the ACLU could keep one. Southern Poverty Law Center. Whoever. Anybody who wants this kind of filtering can apply it to their feed. The filter or censorship lists themselves would be publicly inspectable. So who they are blocking would be no secret.

    People who don't want anything filtered could still see their raw feed. Then if the Trump administration or the Biden administration or Elon Musk want to publish a social media filter, and people want that, they can sign up. People who are getting filtered will at least know which organization(s) is (are) filtering them and perhaps they might even be able to figure out what rules they need to follow to avoid the block. And of course consumers would be free to dump a list if they think it is overzealous. It would be totally opt-in. This would let facebook and X (and all social media) to go back to being neutral. Just a dumb network. Of course they would still serve ads and harvest all our private information. In fact, knowing which filter lists we subscribe to might be very valuable information.

    There are a lot of technical details. How do multiple lists interact? Can I prioritize one over the other? Favor explicit white listing over blacklisting? Can I partially over-ride something blocked on my list? Like a personal white list?

    But I think in this day and age it is solvable.

    • Tech companies are 100% against it.  Because then ads are censored.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Sloppy ( 14984 )

      Your post makes a lot more sense if replace the word "censorship" with "ratings."

      As for your 2nd last paragraph of questions, the answer to every one of them becomes "whatever the user wants" if you have the client do it (the user's chosen client, chosen from a pool of many competitors which all speak the same protocol), rather than some backend server.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jp10558 ( 748604 )

      This sounds great until you realize that some content is illegal in different countries and so many governments won't be OK with "Well, the baseline filter filtered it". They'll say "you hosted it, you're liable".

      I think the other issue is there's a large number of people who either do want to limit speech, and another large number of people who want to force speech on others fighting over all this.

  • The last five years have made it clear governments cannot be trusted to not strong arm media platforms and media platforms cannot be trusted to resist strong arming.

    The answer isn't better technology. The answer is to realize people lie and are mistaken on the internet. Don't believe everything you read, do some double checking. Don't assume talking heads who spout things you want to believe are actually right--read stuff by people you vigorously disagree with on a regular basis. Talk to actual people in in

  • Make social media great (again..?) (Score:3)

    by Kokuyo ( 549451 ) on Wednesday January 22, 2025 @03:02AM (#65108697) Journal

    The only way to make social media better is if the communities are somewhat small and get to know one another. If posts are not limited in size. If quotation is possible and if strings of sub discussion have a tree style.

    Yes, I am talking about forums.

    You need a connection to the people you're talking to, you need to be able to formulate a valid argument, link to sources and have coherent discussions because if that is impossible then all that happens is rage baiting and drive by commenting.

    Of social media should be good for society it cannot be primarily about engagement.

    Human communication works up to 85% through gestures, facial expressions and tone of voice. On the internet, we already are limited to 15%... Which then have to pass through the readers' filters.

    It's a small wonder we get a point across at all.

  • Proper functional distributed open and secure protocols have always been the right way.

    Facebook & Co. only exist because the internet is broken in a way that has E-Mail be the fundamental protocol. Which has been due for a serious upgrade for at least 3 decades now.

    Fix DNS making is asynchronous, static and encrypted/signed, build some asynchronous thing like IPFS combined with a strict document and application standard for colorful things to click on - like, for instance, a non-shitty version of HTML a

  • On one side of the spectrum, you have absolute government control over social media, in which the existing regime uses an iron fist to control the narrative, identify and pacify dissenters, etc. If you don't like perpetual dictatorships, you don't want this model.

    On the other side, absolute freedom, something noone can mess with, and it's pure chaos. This is a world in which someone can post child pornography without consequence as noone can track their identity. And it's a world in which we humans - who di

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Sloppy ( 14984 )

      AFAIK nobody has yet invented a way to give government limited capability to control something. If they have the ability to suppress child porn, then they'll also have the ability to suppress Thomas Paine's "Common Sense."

      So do you give government unlimited capabilities and rely on their good faith execution of laws, with court oversight? That used to be the classical answer to everything, but people (with very, very good reason) have lost faith in that.

  • The current state of social media is deeply flawed. Centralized platforms control access to information, dictate what can or cannot be shared, and are vulnerable to censorship. These issues stifle open communication and the diversity of thought that a truly decentralized internet was supposed to enable.

    To build a better system, we need more than just new apps—we need a new foundation. This is where i2p comes in. The Invisible Internet Project (i2p) has evolved significantly since its inception in the

    • A self-hostted phpBB (or similar) forum is a centralized web forum? Compared to today's surveillance-based communication, it is not. Not only social media, but most people's email messages are scanned for commercial use. The problem is not the rise of web forums, but their downfall. Why do we need permanence? Privacy is incompatible with permanence. A community should be able to easily self-host a web forum somewhere for their own private use, discuss something, and then remove the whole forum. Perha

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jp10558 ( 748604 )

      I haven't deeply looked into this in years, but the problem with i2p IMHO was it (just like TOR) needed traditional servers running on the network, and those servers are just as centralized and able to be censored or controlled just like open Internet ones, just hidden.

      I think we really needed something like the original FreeNet to grow / scale where to use it you contribute some gigabytes of storage to the network and content was copied based on use, hosted on more and more nodes as it was viewed, and tota

  • It can never hit critical mass because of how complicated it is.

    It also doesn't help all the monopolistic tactics used by Facebook to keep people on their platforms. Every few years there's a fresh batch of kids looking for a new social media platform their parents on home and Facebook finds a way to either buy it or shut it down.

    • Youth are not going to Facebook. The age of the average user is increasing. The youth have spoken moved on and their younger replacements have not returned.

  • Big Tech and other oligarchs have amassed too much power at this point. When the richest guy in the world gives a Nazi salute multiple times and then jokes about it on his social media company, and it's not even the most sensational news item... it's too late.

    The oligarchs and fascists will do what they do best... set fire to society until it is destroyed, and then retreat to the safety of their bunkers as everything comes crashing down. Lets hope that after that, something better will arise.

  • Local press has been dying for years in that it's too slow and takes time to adapt to the quick landscape of the world. This has caused news deserts and pushed us to a point where Facebook or other social media locations become the community hub. I say we find a way, a framework to take that back.
    Let's make the local news central community but find a way to provide news without a paywall, but provide services. Sell a subscription to local users that give them access to post comments or interact with the

  • I am seeing a lot of "low information voters" talking about censorship when they fail to realize this is about state narrative control, and people getting offended when their confirmation bias is not being reinforced by their news feed.

    Regardless of if your candidate "won" or "loss" when you get pass the Kayfabe I doubt we will see them "allow" an alternative to a centralized service. The previous admin wanted to control what you think, and signaling from this new admin is they will control who will tell yo

  • Go outside and socialize with neighbors. (Score:3)

    by Fly Swatter ( 30498 ) on Wednesday January 22, 2025 @11:48AM (#65109749) Homepage
    There, it's decentralized, and you don't have to suffer the minority from the rest of the world inserting themselves trying to shame you and everyone for being someone they are not.
    • If I could mod you up I would.

      Best thing I ever did was kill off social media in my life. I now have a huge amount of more time in my life to do things that are actually worthwhile.

  • Decentralized social media is impossible, because someone has to own the wires, and that will inevitably be centralized.

    • Just because it has been privatized doesn't mean it can't be divested and made public. Why do you think the internet providers lobby governments so hard to deregulate them? Why should a few billionaires control and profit from the infrastructure we all depend on? Because they can? Because it benefits them?

  • The only way these companies can amass such power is because so many people are stupid enough to give them their data. Don't. Just don't. Build your own site and use them to promote yours. Give them nothing. Take everything they haven't nailed down. And then pry some more off on your way out the door.

  • Try dropping social media altogether. Centralized or not, it's a shit show of people trying to make money on your eyeballs. It's just like TV, except we all see different algorithmically curated garbage. If watching TV made us dumber, social media made us dumberer.

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