The TikTok ban and Donald Trump's rise to power show how fragile our social media accounts are. We must normalize and invest in decentralized social media.
Honest question, what are the incentives for instance operators to play nice, so to speak? And not just recreate new oligarch safe havens?
It seems like each instance is a miniature zone of centralization and it’s still incumbent on individuals to create their own circles of influence. For better or worse that’s how we get hivemind echo chambers and I’m not sure it’s even in human nature to seek anything else.
Alternatively we have to rescue our friends and families when they start to fall for BS and educate them aggressively on improving the sourcing of their information.
For better or worse that’s how we get hivemind echo chambers and I’m not sure it’s even in human nature to seek anything else.
There it is, in every shoddy analysis someone has to mix up the thing we have with “the only thing possible”.
Echo chambers aren’t part of “human nature”, they’re designed into the algorithms by the broligarchs to rachet up engagement – giving them $$$ – while making it impossible to build consensus and community in a way that threatens them.
Up until a couple of decades ago, there weren’t widespread echo chambers on the Internet. The first version of websites (even social ones) were simple chronological feeds. Nowadays, thanks to the assmasters in charge you don’t even know what you aren’t seeing online on most of these sites. Comments look completely different based upon even simple things like gender.
Federation provides some answers. While it is entirely possible to defederate everyone you as an admin disagree with or don’t want to promote, most commonly instances pick the option to not defederate all at will, as the majority of people actually prefers to be connected for the most part.
Although I realize something like this might not be possible, i’d love (in a theoretical perfect world) a delegative/liquid federation. where you can “delegate” your blocklist be an aggregate of other people’s blocklist, which would allow a community of users independent of any admin to create a decentralized blocklist based upon mutual trust.
To word it with an example, if I trust user A, who in turn trusts user B and C’s idea of who(/what communities) to block, i’ll then be blocking the same people as user B and C.
It could work in reverse too, if I trust user A who allows anime communities and user B who allows game communities, then I can see anime and game communities. If people trust me, they can see the same thing i’m seeing. Imo that would spur user interaction and make a decentralized way to not put any one person in power. If user B suddenly decides to only trust fascists, I don’t have to trust them anymore and those changes would be propagated.
I don’t know if that made sense, so sorry if that explanation is wack! It is loosely based on this concept that I read from awhile ago, for which I haven’t thought of the possible downsides.
Will not happen on lemmy, structurally the power flows from instance owners and their delegates. Their power to shape discourse and association and to steer thoughts of the lemmy user will not be relinquished.
The first fundamental block to this, like on mastodon, is their power to silence and eliminate users from lemmy history without recourse and with transparency at their discretion.
I don’t believe the transitive principle of trust that you cite is all that workable, unless it can be done at a finer granularity.
In my own case, I (A) trust B and C. But B doesn’t trust C, for reasons that have conditioned my relationships with both B and C so that I can still trust them. The reason for that is that trust is multifactorial: A can trust B for some things, not others. So what we’re trying to model is an ontological relation, not just a directed acyclic graph.
Based on that, the best we can probably achieve is being able to set the degrees of separation of delegated trust (maybe 2 hops and that’s all in my case), and add the ability to subclass or otherwise tweak someone else’s blocklist (say, B’s a fine person but habitually forwards Joe Rogan crap that I find to be nothing but vexatious noise), or C despises my favorite band but is otherwise quite sound, etc.
That’s a cool concept, but there are indeed some caveats to address, especially with the propagation part. For example, if you rely on user A to filter you gaming posts, and they suddenly decide they’re not into gaming anymore, you and everyone who relies on you will not get gaming feeds anymore. Or if he is a sudden Nazi, not only you but people who trust you will get that content until you react (and until then, some others will unsubscribe you).
With a complicated enough network of trusted people, this will trigger a chaotic chain reaction that will make your feed less stable than a chair with one leg.
Also, conflicts should be resolved somehow. If a person A whitelists some content and person B blacklists it, and you follow both, what should be done?
One way to go about it is to create a limited list of authorities, but that obviously comes with the danger of someone having too much power. You can make groups of people vote for inclusion or exclusion of topics, but it’s not feasible to vote for every single filter because there are simply too many. You can elect someone to do this, but we know what may happen to elected officials.
and they suddenly decide they’re not into gaming anymore, you and everyone who relies on you will not get gaming feeds anymore
I was thinking along the same lines for different reasons. For multi-hop trust delegations, I’d really want a way to see what I’m seeing through the composition of all those blocklists. And once I’ve seen that, a “flatten into my own blocklist” command might be interesting: I want a snapshot of how A through B through C would look, and I’d like to mash it down into my own list so I can manage it there.
If a person A whitelists some content and person B blacklists it, and you follow both, what should be done?
Merge conflict alerts, just like version-control systems use? Allowing an order of precedence would be another way, but I think it’d get messy fast.
Honest question, what are the incentives for instance operators to play nice, so to speak? And not just recreate new oligarch safe havens?
It seems like each instance is a miniature zone of centralization and it’s still incumbent on individuals to create their own circles of influence. For better or worse that’s how we get hivemind echo chambers and I’m not sure it’s even in human nature to seek anything else.
Alternatively we have to rescue our friends and families when they start to fall for BS and educate them aggressively on improving the sourcing of their information.
There it is, in every shoddy analysis someone has to mix up the thing we have with “the only thing possible”.
Echo chambers aren’t part of “human nature”, they’re designed into the algorithms by the broligarchs to rachet up engagement – giving them $$$ – while making it impossible to build consensus and community in a way that threatens them.
Up until a couple of decades ago, there weren’t widespread echo chambers on the Internet. The first version of websites (even social ones) were simple chronological feeds. Nowadays, thanks to the assmasters in charge you don’t even know what you aren’t seeing online on most of these sites. Comments look completely different based upon even simple things like gender.
Federation provides some answers. While it is entirely possible to defederate everyone you as an admin disagree with or don’t want to promote, most commonly instances pick the option to not defederate all at will, as the majority of people actually prefers to be connected for the most part.
Although I realize something like this might not be possible, i’d love (in a theoretical perfect world) a delegative/liquid federation. where you can “delegate” your blocklist be an aggregate of other people’s blocklist, which would allow a community of users independent of any admin to create a decentralized blocklist based upon mutual trust. To word it with an example, if I trust user A, who in turn trusts user B and C’s idea of who(/what communities) to block, i’ll then be blocking the same people as user B and C.
It could work in reverse too, if I trust user A who allows anime communities and user B who allows game communities, then I can see anime and game communities. If people trust me, they can see the same thing i’m seeing. Imo that would spur user interaction and make a decentralized way to not put any one person in power. If user B suddenly decides to only trust fascists, I don’t have to trust them anymore and those changes would be propagated.
I don’t know if that made sense, so sorry if that explanation is wack! It is loosely based on this concept that I read from awhile ago, for which I haven’t thought of the possible downsides.
Will not happen on lemmy, structurally the power flows from instance owners and their delegates. Their power to shape discourse and association and to steer thoughts of the lemmy user will not be relinquished. The first fundamental block to this, like on mastodon, is their power to silence and eliminate users from lemmy history without recourse and with transparency at their discretion.
I don’t believe the transitive principle of trust that you cite is all that workable, unless it can be done at a finer granularity.
In my own case, I (A) trust B and C. But B doesn’t trust C, for reasons that have conditioned my relationships with both B and C so that I can still trust them. The reason for that is that trust is multifactorial: A can trust B for some things, not others. So what we’re trying to model is an ontological relation, not just a directed acyclic graph.
Based on that, the best we can probably achieve is being able to set the degrees of separation of delegated trust (maybe 2 hops and that’s all in my case), and add the ability to subclass or otherwise tweak someone else’s blocklist (say, B’s a fine person but habitually forwards Joe Rogan crap that I find to be nothing but vexatious noise), or C despises my favorite band but is otherwise quite sound, etc.
That’s a cool concept, but there are indeed some caveats to address, especially with the propagation part. For example, if you rely on user A to filter you gaming posts, and they suddenly decide they’re not into gaming anymore, you and everyone who relies on you will not get gaming feeds anymore. Or if he is a sudden Nazi, not only you but people who trust you will get that content until you react (and until then, some others will unsubscribe you).
With a complicated enough network of trusted people, this will trigger a chaotic chain reaction that will make your feed less stable than a chair with one leg.
Also, conflicts should be resolved somehow. If a person A whitelists some content and person B blacklists it, and you follow both, what should be done?
One way to go about it is to create a limited list of authorities, but that obviously comes with the danger of someone having too much power. You can make groups of people vote for inclusion or exclusion of topics, but it’s not feasible to vote for every single filter because there are simply too many. You can elect someone to do this, but we know what may happen to elected officials.
I was thinking along the same lines for different reasons. For multi-hop trust delegations, I’d really want a way to see what I’m seeing through the composition of all those blocklists. And once I’ve seen that, a “flatten into my own blocklist” command might be interesting: I want a snapshot of how A through B through C would look, and I’d like to mash it down into my own list so I can manage it there.
Merge conflict alerts, just like version-control systems use? Allowing an order of precedence would be another way, but I think it’d get messy fast.