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Social Networks Open Source The Internet

'Decentralized Social Media Is the Only Alternative To the Tech Oligarchy' (404media.co) 54

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.*

    • 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.

  • 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.

    • People can't even pick up their own dog's poop from the sidewalk.
    • Somehow this seems like the way people talked when CB expanded to 40 channels. Dollars to donutes, logging into social media will soon seems as unlikely as saying 'breaker breaker'.

      Mind you this will mostly be due to the tech revolution reversing the urbanisation required by the Industrial revolution leaving everyone but the few wealthy as unlanded peasants adrift in the new normal of homelessness.

    • 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.

  • censorship (Score:4, 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.

  • 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:4, 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.

    • the decision to not cooperate with government requests to take down information

      The difference is the relation of the broligarchs to the government. Last year, for example, the government's election wasn't paid and run entirely by a broligarch, and the broligarch did not threaten the supporters of the government in the legislative branch with "primarying".

      Also, we saw the broligarch who did the purchasing and the threatening throwing a Nazi salute from the president inauguration for the first time in US history.

      It is a bit more disconcerting than before, I'm afraid.

    • That and buying governments such as the US that they are unable to topple alone. Look at how FB and Cambridge Analytica made Brexit a reality.

      Breaking up the EU and UK was nothing compared to what Zuckerberg did on his own in Myanmar. Getting Buddhists to commit genocide is some seriously disruptive technology coming to a nation state near you.

      Continuing to do so in order to make a buck off of the mass murder after being called out by the UN, that's serious oligarch territory.

    • 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.

    • Hey there bucko, you need to cool it with the anti-semitism!

    • 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:4, 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

  • 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.
  • 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:3)

    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.

  • 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 me

    • 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

  • I don't think the same normies who jumped from X to Bluesky instead of Mastodon, and were casually tricked by a handful of influencers to pre-emptively moving to Rednote from TikTok are capable of switching to decentralized social media even if it's spoonfed to them like Mastodon was. They seek shiny commercial centralized surveillance-capitalism tracking anklets like a moth to the flame.

  • 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.

  • Part of the problem is rich folks who own one site and make a killing off it buying up other sites, launching features to compete with other rich folks' sites, etc.

    Did Facebook buying WhatsApp and Instagram actually make things better for consumers? Probably not. Did launching Threads to compete with Twitter? Not as much as BlueSky did. Does people who own rocket companies buying media companies make the world better? Probably not.

    I get more value from reading Slashdot, Fark and Quora than I do from al

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by vbdasc ( 146051 )

      Quora, ugh... The new Goatse. Where old-timers trick newbies to visit and be shocked.

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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

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