Closed instances with vetted members, there’s no other way.
TheFogan@programming.dev
on 21 Jan 18:27
nextcollapse
Isn’t that basically the same result though…
Problem with tech oligarchy is it just takes one person to get corrupted and then he blocks out all opinion that attacks his goals.
So the solution is federation, free speech instances that everyone can say whatever they want no matter how unpopular.
How do we counteract the bots…
Well we need the instances to verify who gets in, and make sure the members aren’t bots or saying unpopular things. These instances will need to be big, and well funded.
How do we counter these instance owners getting bought out, corrupted (repeat loop).
No? The problem of tech oligarchy is that they control the systems. Here anyone can start up a new instance at the press of a button. That is the solution, not allowing unfiltered freeze peach garbage.
Small “local” human sized groups are the only way we ensure the humanity of a group. These groups can vouch for each-other just as we do with Fediseer.
One big gatekeeper is not the answer and is exactly the problem we want to get away from.
You counter them by moving to a different instance.
Concept is however that if a new instance is detatched from the old one… then it’s basically the same story of leaving myspace for facebook etc… we go through the long vetting process etc… over and over again, userbase fragments reaching critical mass is a challange every time. I mean yeah if we start with a circle of 10 trusted networks. One goes wrong it defederates, people migrate to one of the 9 or a new one gets brought into the circle. but actual vetting is a difficult process to go with, and makes growing very difficult.
Techy people are a lot more likely to jump through a couple of hoops for something better, compared to your average Joe who isn’t even aware of the problem
Techy people are a lot more likely to jump through hoops because that knowledge/experience makes it easier for them, they understand it’s worthwhile or because it’s fun.
If software can be made easier for non-techy people and there’s no downsides then of course that aught to be done.
I know people don’t want to hear it but can we expect non-techies to meet techies half way by leveling their tech skill tree?
In order to charge her iphone, my mom first turns on airplane mode, and THEN she powers it down. Turns it off completely. I asked why she does any of that. She says “Because they won’t flip the charge switch for me until they do! I wish I could take the battery out first, and THEN turn off the phone. But I suppose if they can’t see my battery with airplane mode on first, this is just as good.”
Learning is difficult but I have to believe it is still part of the solution.
TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world
on 21 Jan 23:48
collapse
Why would she ever need to use a terminal?
I imagine she’d be doing normal computer stuff, not writing bash scripts.
Flatworm7591@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 21 Jan 20:19
nextcollapse
We have a human vetted application process too and that’s why there’s rarely any bots or spam accounts originating from our instance. I imagine it’s a similar situation for programming.dev. It’s just not worth the tradeoff to have completely open signups imo. The last thing lemmy needs is a massive influx of Meta users from threads, facebook or instagram, or from shitter. Slow, organic growth is completely fine when you don’t have shareholders and investors to answer to.
10th largest instance being like 10k users… we’re talking about the need for a solution to help pull the literal billions of users from mainstream social media
FourPacketsOfPeanuts@lemmy.world
on 21 Jan 21:56
collapse
There isn’t a solution. People don’t want to pay for something that costs huge resources. So their attention becoming the product that’s sold is inevitable. They also want to doomscroll slop; it’s mindless and mildly entertaining. The same way tabloid newspapers were massively popular before the internet and gossip mags exist despite being utter horseshite. It’s what people want. Truly fighting it would requires huge benevolent resources, a group willing to finance a manipulative and compelling experience and then not exploit it for ad dollars, push educational things instead or something. Facebook, twitter etc are enshitified but they still cost huge amounts to run. And for all their faults at least they’re a single point where illegal material can be tackled. There isn’t a proper corollary for this in decentralised solutions once things scale up. It’s better that free, decentralised services stay small so they can stay under the radar of bots and bad actors. When things do get bigger then gated communities probably are the way to go. Perhaps until there’s a social media not-for-profit that’s trusted to manage identity, that people don’t mind contributing costs to. But that’s a huge undertaking. One day hopefully…
paraphrand@lemmy.world
on 21 Jan 18:52
nextcollapse
I dunno man. Discord has thousands of closed servers that are doing great.
We’re talking about the need for a system to deal with major access of a main facebook/insta/twitter etc… to a majority of people.
IE of the scale that someone can go “Hey I bet my aunt that I haven’t talked to in 15 years might be on here, let me check”. Not a common occourance in a closed off discord community.
Also, noting that doesn’t fully solve the primary problem… of still being at the whims and controls of a single point of failure. of which if Discord Inc could at any point in time decide to spy on closed rooms, censor any content they dislike etc…
I question if we really need spaces like that anymore. But I see where you are coming from.
I was definitely only thinking about social places like Lemmy and Discord. Not networking places like Facebook and LinkedIn.
It really feels like there are zero solutions available. I’m at a point where I realize that all social networks have major negative impacts on society. And I can’t imagine anything fixing it that isn’t going back to smaller, local, and private. Maybe we don’t need places where you can expect everyone to be there.
When we can expect everyone on the planet to be present in a network the conflict and vitrol would be perpetual. We are not mature enough and all on the same page enough as a species to not resort to mud slinging
a1studmuffin@aussie.zone
on 21 Jan 22:53
nextcollapse
It’s how most large forums ran back in the day and it worked great. Quality over quantity.
@a1studmuffin@ceenote the only reason these massive Web 2.0 platforms achieved such dominance is because they got huge before governments understood what was happening and then claimed they were too big to follow basic publishing law or properly vet content/posters. So those laws were changed to give them their own special carve-outs. We're not mentally equipped for social networks this huge.
Could do something like discord. Rather than communities, you have “micro instances” existing on top of the larger instance, and communities existing within the micro instances. And of course make it so that making micro instances are easier to create.
Well, what doesn’t work, it seems, is giving (your) access to “anyone”.
Maybe a system where people, I know this will be hard, has to look up outlets themselves, instead of being fed a “stream” dictated by commercial incentives (directly or indirectly).
I’m working on a secure decentralised FOSS network where you can share whatever you want, like websites. Maybe that could be a start.
If you have some algorithm or few central points distributing information, any information, you’ll get bot problems. If you instead yourself hook up with specific outlets, you won’t have that problem, or if one is bot infested you can switch away from it. That’s hard when everyone is in the same outlet or there are only few big outlets.
A few have registration requirements, but it’s usually something banal like “say I agree in Spanish to prove your Spanish enough for this instance” etc.
This is a choice any instance can make if they want, none are but that doesn’t mean they can’t or it doesn’t work.
Doesn’t matter if they’re shit or not, they don’t want bots crawling their sites, straining their resources, or constantly shit posting, but they do anyway. And if the billion dollar corporations can’t stop them, it’s probably a good bet that you can’t either.
Those companies want an easy quick way for people to join because they want constant growth. That means not doing any sort of real checking or verification, it’s not because these billion dollar company cannot afford to, it’s because they don’t want to.
BaroqueInMind@lemmy.one
on 21 Jan 18:14
nextcollapse
We also need a solution to fucking despot mods and admins deleting comments and posts left-and-right because it doesn’t align with their personal views.
I’ve seen it happen to me personally across multiple Lemmy domains (I’m a moron and don’t care much to have empathy in my writing, and it sets these limp-wrist morbidly obese mods/admins to delete my shit and ban me), and it happens to many people as well.
BruceAlrighty@lemmy.nz
on 21 Jan 18:29
nextcollapse
You have that tool, it’s called finding or hosting your own instance.
Plebcouncilman@sh.itjust.works
on 21 Jan 19:15
collapse
Freedom of expression does not mean freedom from consequences. As someone who loves to engage on trolling for a laugh online I can tell you that if you get banned for being an asshole you deserve it. I know I have.
Self Moderated is just fine. Why do I need to doxx myself to be online? I’m not giving away my birth certificate or SSN just to post on social media that idea is crazy lmao.
PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat
on 21 Jan 19:27
collapse
lemm.ee and lemmy.dbzer0.com both seem like very level-headed instances. You can say stuff even if the admins disagree with it, and it’s not a crisis.
Some of the big other ones seem some other way, yes.
DontMakeMoreBabies@lemm.ee
on 21 Jan 20:33
collapse
Lemm.ee hasn’t booted me yet? Much like OP, I’m not the most empathetic person, and if I’m annoyed then what little filter that I have disappears.
Shockingly, I might offend folks sometimes!
Dindonmasker@sh.itjust.works
on 21 Jan 18:14
nextcollapse
Also is data scraping as much of an issue?
osaerisxero@kbin.melroy.org
on 21 Jan 18:25
collapse
Data scraping is a logical consequence of being an open protocol, and as such I don't think it's worth investing much time in resisting it so long as it's not impacting instance health. At least while the user experience and basic federation issues are still extant.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world
on 21 Jan 18:25
nextcollapse
There are simple tests to out LLMs, mostly things that will trip up the tokenizers or sampling algorithms (with character counting being the most famous example). I know people hate captchas, but it’s a small price to pay.
Also, while no one really wants to hear this, locally hosted “automod” LLMs could help seek out spam too. Or maybe even a Kobold Hoard type “swarm.”
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip
on 21 Jan 18:41
collapse
Captchas don’t do shit and have actually been training for computer vision for probably over a decade at this point.
Also: Any “simple test” is fixed in the next version. It is similar to how people still insist “AI can’t do feet” (much like rob liefeld). That was fixed pretty quick it is just that much of the freeware out there is using very outdated models.
Well, that’s kind of intuitively true in perpetuity
An effective gate for AI becomes a focus of optimisation
Any effective gate with a motivation to pass will become ineffective after a time, on some level it’s ultimately the classic “gotta be right every time Vs gotta be right once” dichotomy—certainty doesn’t exist.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world
on 21 Jan 21:32
collapse
Somehow I didn’t get pinged for this?
Anyway proof of work scales horrendously, and spammers will always beat out legitimate users of that even holds. I think Tor is a different situation, where the financial incentives are aligned differently.
But this is not my area of expertise.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world
on 21 Jan 21:29
collapse
I’m talking text only, and there are some fundamental limitations in the way current and near future LLMs handle certain questions. They don’t “see” characters in inputs, they see words which get tokenized to their own internal vocabulary, hence any questions along the lines of “How many Ms are in Lemmy” is challenging even for advanced, fine tuned models. It’s honestly way better than image captchas.
They can also be tripped up if you simulate a repetition loop. They will either give a incorrect answer to try and continue the loop, or if their sampling is overturned, give incorrect answers avoiding instances where the loop is the correct answer.
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip
on 21 Jan 21:38
collapse
They don’t “see” characters in inputs, they see words which get tokenized to their own internal vocabulary, hence any questions along the lines of “How many Ms are in Lemmy” is challenging even for advanced, fine tuned models.
And that is solved just by keeping a non-processed version of the query (or one passed through a different grammar to preserve character counts and typos). It is not a priority because there are no meaningful queries where that matters other than a “gotcha” but you can be sure that will be bolted on if it becomes a problem.
Again, anything this trivial is just a case of a poor training set or an easily bolted on “fix” for something that didn’t have any commercial value outside of getting past simple filters.
Sort of like how we saw captchas go from “type the third letter in the word ‘poop’” to nigh unreadable color blindness tests to just processing computer vision for “self driving” cars.
They can also be tripped up if you simulate a repetition loop.
If you make someone answer multiple questions just to shitpost they are going to go elsewhere. People are terrified of lemmy because there are different instances for crying out loud.
You are also giving people WAY more credit than they deserve.
Instances that don’t vet users sufficiently get defederated for spam. Users then leave for instances that don’t get blocked. If instances are too heavy handed in their moderation then users leave those instances for more open ones and the market of the fediverse will balance itself out to what the users want.
FundMECFSResearch@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 21 Jan 20:26
collapse
I wish this was the case but the average user is uninformed and can’t be bothered leaving.
Otherwise the bigger service would be lemmy, not reddit.
the market of the fediverse will balance itself out to what the users want.
Just like classical macroeconomics, you make the deadly (false) assumption that users are rational and will make the choice that’s best for them.
lindicks@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 21 Jan 20:03
collapse
You don’t need blockchain for reputations systems, lol. Stuff like Gnutella and PGP web-of-trust have been around forever. Admittedly, the blockchain can add barriers for some attacks; mainly sybil attacks, but a friend-of-a-friend/WoT network structure can mitigate that somewhat too,
Space is much more developed. Would need ever improving dynamic proof of personhood tests
lindicks@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 22 Jan 01:10
collapse
I think a web-of-trust-like network could still work pretty well where everyone keeps their own view of the network and their own view of reputation scores. I.e. don’t friend people you don’t know; unfriend people who you think are bots, or people who friend bots, or just people you don’t like. Just looked it up, and wikipedia calls these kinds of mitigation techniques “Social Trust Graphs” en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack#Social_trust_g… . Retroshare kinda uses this model (but I think reputation is just a hard binary, and not reputation scores).
A simple thing that may help a lot is for all new accounts to be flagged as bots, requiring opt out of the status for normal users. It’s a small thing, but any barrier is one more step a bot farm has to overcome.
daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 21 Jan 21:22
nextcollapse
We could ask for anonymous digital certificates. It works this way.
Many countries already emit digital certificates for it’s citizens. Only one certificate by id. Then anonymous certificates could be made. The anonymous certificate contains enough information to be verificable as valid but not enough to identify the user. Websites could ask for an anonymous certificate for register/login. With the certificate they would validate that it’s an human being while keeping that human being anonymous. The only leaked data would probably be the country of origin as these certificates tend to be authentificated by a national AC.
The only problem I see in this is international adoption outside fully developed countries: many countries not being able to provide this for their citizens, having lower security standards so fraudulent certificates could be made, or a big enough poor population that would gladly sell their certificate for bot farms.
Your last sentence highlights the problem. I can have a bot that posts for me. Also, if an authority is in charge of issuing the certificates then they have an incentive to create some fake ones.
Bots are vastly more useful as the ratio of bots to humans drops.
Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world
on 21 Jan 21:48
nextcollapse
What? I post a lot, but the majority?
…oh, you said LLM. I thought you said LMM.
mspencer712@programming.dev
on 21 Jan 22:58
nextcollapse
I mentioned this in another comment, but we need to somehow move away from free form text. So here’s a super flawed makes-you-think idea to start the conversation:
Suppose you had an alternative kind of Lemmy instance where every post has to include both the post like normal and a “Simple English” summary of your own post. (Like, using only the “ten hundred most common words” Simple English) If your summary doesn’t match your text, that’s bannable. (It’s a hypothetical, just go with me on this.)
Now you have simple text you can search against, use automated moderation tools on, and run scripts against. If there’s a debate, code can follow the conversation and intervene if someone is being dishonest. If lots of users are saying the same thing, their statements can be merged to avoid duplicate effort. If someone is breaking the rules, rule enforcement can be automated.
Ok so obviously this idea as written can never work. (Though I love the idea of brand new users only being allowed to post in Simple English until they are allow-listed, to avoid spam, but that’s a different thing.) But the essence and meaning of a post can be represented in some way. Analyze things automatically with an LLM, make people diagram their sentences like English class, I don’t know.
I think we are going to need to reconceptualize the Internet and why we are on here at all.
It already is practically impossible to stop bots and I’m a very short time it’ll be completely impossible.
mspencer712@programming.dev
on 22 Jan 02:18
collapse
I think I communicated part of this badly. My intent was to address “what is this speech?” classification, to make moderation scale better. I might have misunderstood you but I think you’re talking about a “who is speaking?” problem. That would be solved by something different.
we have to use trust from real life. it’s the only thing that centralized entities can’t fake
Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works
on 22 Jan 03:21
collapse
I feel like it’s only a matter of time before most people just have AI’s write their posts.
The rest of us with brains, that don’t post our status as if the entire world cares, will likely be here, or some place similar… Screaming into the wind.
Olgratin_Magmatoe@slrpnk.net
on 21 Jan 18:27
nextcollapse
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.
The only solution guns provide are dead people. You have fallen for the pathetic lie of the right.
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip
on 21 Jan 18:52
collapse
Oh. Guns are even better for that.
On the right? They are a lightning rod for criticism and complaints. “All the jobs in our state were taken away and my daughter is dying of an easily curable disease. BUT THOSE FUCKING LIBERALS ARE TRYING TO TAKE AWAY MY SECOND AMENDMENT RIGHTS!!!”
On the left? they are a way to “meet in the middle” on a lot of legislature while also being a great way to villify and target groups. For example, anyone with even a passing understanding of history knows that the Civl Rights Movement was not MLK Jr giving one speech and fist bumping Rosa Parks on the bus. The threat of violence was definitely a factor (beyond that it gets murkier). And people LOVE to argue that Blacks picking up guns is how that was “won”.
You know what else came of that? “That kid is a gangbanger and has a gun. SHOOT HIM. Oh shit, uhm. Fuck it, we’ll just say the toy train looked like a gun”.
And we’ll see that continue. LGBTQ folk will decide they need a gun and you can bet the cops and the chuds will be glad to open fire at protestors because “THEY HAVE A GUN!!!”
And the absolute best part? “Both sides” are fucking delusional if they think their guns are going to accomplish anything against an oppressive government. Cops won’t go near a pistol if a kid’s life is on the line. But they’ll open fire like mel gibson if they think a business is in trouble. Let alone the military with tanks and drones and there will be a lot more “combat footage” to watch online.
If there was ANY chance that The 2nd Amendment could pose ANY threat to a tyrannical government, it would have been destroyed decades ago.
If there was ANY chance that The 2nd Amendment could pose ANY threat to a tyrannical government, it would have been destroyed decades ago.
Somebody almost killed Trump in July. A couple of inches was the difference between a Republican party in chaos just before the election and a party united behind their fascist hamberdler. The way this is going the 2A is going to be your only real defense against modern Nazism so you’d be better off hitting the range and getting proficient with a firearm than you are posting pics with #resist on Instagram.
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip
on 21 Jan 20:00
collapse
In many ways, trump’s campaign was bolstered by the image of him standing “defiant” with a fist raised in the air and someone else’s blood all over him.
If trump HAD gotten got? Evil deep state assassination attempt by biden and here is your new candidate that the entire party would rally behind. And democrats would be even more reluctant to say or do anything out of “decorum”.
Because here is the thing: trump isn’t even the problem. He is an evil bastard but he is a symptom of the problem. Project 2025 is what those rapid fire EOs come from. And Project 2025 very much benefits from right wing fascists controlling basically all of social media.
And I will just, once again, ask: What do you think your guns are going to do against a military that is cracking down on you and your buddies as “terrorists”? Because if there was ANY chance of a civilian force posing ANY threat to a government, we would have banned guns back in the late 1700s.
You’re making a lot of unfounded assumptions about what would have happened if Trump were assassinated. No one else has been able to harness MAGA energy the way he has. It’s entirely possible the movement would splinter without its figurehead. We won’t know that until he’s gone. Although it seems less likely now that he presumably has 4 years to enact policy changes and put people in place to keep his agenda moving after his term is up.
There’s plenty of debate to be had on the topic of the effectiveness of guns in civil resistance. All of which can be found in more detail elsewhere than we’re going to be able to cover here. However, suffice it to say that your understanding of resistance in general and guerilla tactics specifically is severely lacking if you’re assuming that this situation would play out as an open confrontation between the US military and some sort of militia. Despite the fact that such a conflict would provide more room for maneuvering than you are giving it credit, that would not be the preferred method of engagement. Generals and other senior officers have to buy groceries and go to the DMV just like everyone else. You pick your targets when and where you can get them. More than anything else, it’s important to acknowledge that in the situation where it becomes necessary to think about these kinds of things in more detail, my guns afford me many more options than your knives (or whatever else you prefer to rely on) would. Unless, of course, you plan on giving up without a fight, in which case we clearly have such different outlooks that additional discussion will not help us find common ground.
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip
on 21 Jan 21:45
collapse
Yeah…
Your mass assassinations plan doesn’t work when there is a camera on every corner and traffic light. L Dog was always going to get caught if he hadn’t fled the country within hours of blapping that exec. You are also apparently assuming everyone is Jason Bourne in your fantasy and are a highly trained guerilla fighting force that can blend in and out of everything.
You pick your targets when and where you can get them.
Yeah. The difference between being the chosen one in a young adult novel and actually accomplishing anything of value is what taking out your “target” accomplishes.
And… a great example of that is Palestine. For the sake of simplicity, let’s call what Hamas did “attacking a target”. What was the outcome of that? Israel had “justification” to engage in mass ethnic cleansing for over a year.
Unless, of course, you plan on giving up without a fight, in which case we clearly have such different outlooks that additional discussion will not help us find common ground.
I believe in fighting for change in ways that can actually protect others and accomplish things. Rather than fantasizing about living in a Call of Duty commercial and just painting an even bigger target on the backs of the groups I claim to be helping.
If you or the other “Buy a gun, it is the only thing you can do. I hear Fred’s on 4th street have great deals on assault rifles!” folk had ACTUALLY engaged in any activism whether peaceful or otherwise you would have long since had it explained to you: YOU DO NOT BRING A FUCKING GUN TO A PROTEST. Because the moment the other side sees it? They open fire. Because cops will give a bottle of water to the white kid with an assault rifle looking for some n*****s to kill. They’ll fucking murder anyone who looks even slightly brown if they have a bulge in their jacket pocket.
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 21 Jan 19:45
collapse
And we’ll see that continue. LGBTQ folk will decide they need a gun and you can bet the cops and the chuds will be glad to open fire at protestors because “THEY HAVE A GUN!!!”
Exactly, the presence of a weapon just gives them a reason to pull the “THEY’RE COMIN RIGHT FOR US” bullshit from South Park Season Fucking One.
sunzu2@thebrainbin.org
on 21 Jan 18:46
nextcollapse
2a is there in case 1a don't work
erotador@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 21 Jan 20:43
nextcollapse
so we just all buy guns and fend for ourselves? we need communities in order to fight fascism, we need to be able to organize and share valuable information with people. is technology the answer to the problem? no its not, but it is part of the answer, and to ignore that is shortsighted.
VerticaGG@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 22 Jan 01:03
nextcollapse
As to an answers beyond simply getting-armed-and-fostering-healthy-gun-culture-and-education-among-us:
“Practicing mutual aid is the surest means for giving each other and
to all the greatest safety, the best guarantee of existence and progress,
bodily, intellectually and morally.”
And then Modern Libs even observe, more verbosely:
“The structures of our state economies are going to matter in terms of protecting democracies, and by that I mean if you look at economies that were based in the kind of small producer economies like New England was vs states like the South and the American West that were always built on the idea of very high capital using extractive methods to get resources out of the land either cotton or mining or oil or water or agri business, those economies always depend on a few people with a lot of money, and then a whole bunch of people who are poor and doing the work for those Rich guys – and that I’m not sure is compatible in terms of governance without addressing the reality that you know if people have more of a foothold in their own communities, they are then more likely to support the kinds of legislation that Community [Education, Healthcare, …] and that may be the future of democracy, if not a national democracy”
Heather Cox Richardson, professor of American history
On The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart on Trump’s Win and What’s Next
youtu.be/D7cKOaBdFWo?t=2139 (time-stamped)
If a Conservative wants me dead, they’re going to have to work and sweat for it.
I’m not doing the heavy lifting for them
(A Quote I agree with)
Our resulting interactions may seem chaotic and illegible to authority,
but it is through that seeming chaos that vastly complex, horizontal,
and resilient practices of learning, cooperation, and reciprocity have
historically arisen.
Elon Musk, who had already turned X into a cesspool of hate and an overt tool to get President Trump elected, is now formally part of the Trump administration, meaning the platform is literally owned by a member of the Trump White House.
The word is literally being used correctly.
NineMileTower@lemmy.world
on 21 Jan 19:51
nextcollapse
I’m trying to find one right now that doesn’t suck. I want one where I can microblog, share pics, and videos to my friends and family. Essentially Facebook. Friendica is EMPTY. I deleted Meta products. I’m not on X. There is no alternative.
Isn’t Mastodon a good alternative? It’s a microblogging service like Twitter. You can post statuses, pictures, videos, etc.
You can also make it private and set it to approve your followers.
NineMileTower@lemmy.world
on 21 Jan 20:44
collapse
I guess, but I don’t want the job of trying to talk people into using a platform. No one I know has even heard of it. The platform is good for what I want, but no one I know locally is there and getting them on it seems unlikely.
Bob_Robertson_IX@discuss.tchncs.de
on 21 Jan 21:18
nextcollapse
Setup an account and start using it. Learn the ins and outs of it, then offer to teach your friends and family who might be interested. Someone has to be the first, then that person has to find their ‘first follower’. It isn’t easy, but with persistence it will pay off
Yea agreed, but not Lemmy or Mastodon. Or, really anything with ActivityPub as these places are an echo chamber filled with trigger happy jannies who will ban you from a community if you have a differing of opinion to their groupthink.
i dont disagree implicitly with activitypub being echo chamber prone but its interesting that your most recent replies are litigating the veracity of a nazi salute caught on national television
Well, as a Jew, I haven’t seen anything else from Elon that’s emblematic of being a Nazi. Sure, he has some right wing beliefs, but those were pretty centrist ideals prior to the past decade. And I have encountered real neo-Nazis who have wished death upon my [k expletive] ass and attempted doxing. I think Elon is just an awkward person in general, but I’m not buying into the stats quo hype that he’s some neo-fascist, Hitler sympathizer. That’s just my opinion. You’re welcome to believe what you want too 👍
Are you suggesting that we shouldn’t be worried about toxically insecure people in power when they are behaving awkwardly? Does an appearance of awkwardness grant automatic innocence?
I have been be intensely awkward with my insecurity in the past, and in my awkwardness i have definitely hurt people. If the victims of my insecurity brushed me off as awkward they would be enabling me to continue to harm others
YarHarSuperstar@lemmy.world
on 22 Jan 02:53
collapse
He made Twitter into a Nazi bar. This too. There’s plenty more that you can certainly find yourself if you actually look.
TheLowestStone@lemmy.world
on 21 Jan 21:31
collapse
Every person that has ever made a post like this has multiple comments defending Nazis.
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?
Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world
on 21 Jan 21:47
nextcollapse
What do you do in real life? You tell them to fuck off.
on reddit majority of heavy lifting is done by community mods.
hosting, however, is a pain, lemmy is centralized as fuck.
mspencer712@programming.dev
on 21 Jan 21:38
nextcollapse
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.
Checked the rules and I think this is allowed? But if you’ve still got reddit and don’t mind being a fediverse evangelist please go consider hitting this thread: reddit.com/…/decentralized_social_media_is_the_on…
I agree but let’s be honest. That may be how it worked in revolutionary France but that wasn’t how it worked in the US in the 20th century. The “3rd Places” that most people were involved in were union halls, civic organizations, and social societies. We’ve largely forgotten that history, but it’s not something we can get back without organizing online first.
That’s the nature of the beast. You can’t have human users on a network without at least some slop.
But the decentralized network ensures that a “techno-baron” has no more say than you or I, which is exactly what the internet is supposed to do.
That’s decidedly better than a centralized system, especially now.
ShadowWalker@lemmy.world
on 21 Jan 22:44
nextcollapse
So long as it is humans posting this will be a problem. The benefit of a federated system is that you can’t compromise the person at the top and then everything collapses.
I just jumped on here today (from seeing this article on Reddit) but my understanding is that the advantage is that the CEO can’t decide he wants to suck authoritarian cock and destroy our ability to discuss and/or organize.
(Admittedly I joined the biggest server I could find so I kind of violated that idea as well).
There’s many apps and frontends and too. Some are preincluded into lemmy.world. If you like old reddit try old lemmy for example.
asdfasdfasdf@lemmy.world
on 21 Jan 23:01
nextcollapse
Humans are vulnerable to propaganda. Lemmy’s architecture is against censorship. This helps to push back against propaganda, but only so much. But at least not being censored is a big win IMO.
Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works
on 21 Jan 23:20
nextcollapse
Really? Just as? There are rogue groups and certainly rogue mods and individuals with axes to grind, but I’ve never dealt that there was anything on a system wide basis or anything that was driven by profit here. There’s some really wild hive-mind attitudes here too but, I don’t see how it could possibly be as attractive as centralized platforms for manipulation, profit, or thought control. Feel free to shine some light on my naivety if there’s something I’m missing here.
I think we have to build systems that use real-life interpersonal trust networks so that centralized entities cannot just outspend and bot their way to prominence.
I guess we could stack the rich on top of each other. That way we wouldn’t even have to modify the guillotine. We’d just have to make sure the blade is extra sharp.
fuck_u_spez_in_particular@lemmy.world
on 22 Jan 01:00
collapse
Make the design 4D, and stack them in multiple dimensions, maybe one 4D guillotine is even sufficient?
Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works
on 22 Jan 00:25
nextcollapse
But what about places where heads won’t roll? They deserve a space to be able to access.
lemmy_get_my_coat@lemmy.world
on 22 Jan 00:57
collapse
The heads yearn for the guillotines
Suavevillain@lemmy.world
on 21 Jan 23:42
nextcollapse
It might be the only path forward.
fuck_u_spez_in_particular@lemmy.world
on 22 Jan 00:56
collapse
I mean humanity survived thousands of years without any social media at all…
ThePrivacyPolicy@lemmy.ca
on 22 Jan 02:12
nextcollapse
This is the better path forward… That everyone just gets so sick of it that they drop it - I’ve actually seen a lot of that among my own friends over the last week (and we aren’t from America even). But the right wingers will never drop it because it’s their community and echo chamber, and that’s where the further dangers to democracy come into play when they’re all in the sandbox together without parents…
schizo@forum.uncomfortable.business
on 22 Jan 02:15
collapse
Gonna disagree here.
Humans have always had “social media”, but it’s not been directed by a cadre of oligarchs until recently.
I mean shit, humans have been sitting around the campfire telling stories to each other going all the fucking way back to forever. Sure, a campfire story isn’t a tweet, but for our monkey brains it’s essentially the same thing: how we interact with our social groups and learn what’s going on around us.
The problem is that the campfire stories couldn’t be manipulated into making your cavemen neighbors hate the other half, because half of them were totally pro rabbit fur while you’re pro squirrel fur.
You absolutely can do that and worse now, so while we’ve always had social media, we just simply never had anyone with enough control to make an entire society eat each other because of it’s influence.
demizerone@lemmy.world
on 21 Jan 23:55
nextcollapse
Decentralized is too complicated. Worker owned is a better path forward and is centralized so it’s easier to support and be understood by its users. Moderators are workers and should have equity.
limer@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 22 Jan 00:23
nextcollapse
This is early days; I have a feeling in a few short years there will be ownership and simplicity of distributed services and whatever evolves from them.
interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml
on 22 Jan 00:46
nextcollapse
Communication is not for sale.
YourShadowDani@lemm.ee
on 22 Jan 01:43
nextcollapse
I think if we had co-ops running some of these systems it would definitely alleviate some issues
I can imagine better and safer infrastructure, along with better funding alternatives than “please donate to your instance”. If people can make a living from maintaining an instance, service can be hugely improved. Think most people are running instances on their own spare time and resources.
cy_narrator@discuss.tchncs.de
on 22 Jan 01:57
collapse
If it’s free, why does it say “This post is for paid members only”?
porsche13@lemmy.today
on 22 Jan 00:45
nextcollapse
Decentralized money as well. We need to move away from the control of government and corporations (they are now one and the same). I’m putting more and more of my money in bitcoin. The dollar will continue to erode while wages stay flat. And Trump and his new oligarch buddies will completely decimate the American economy and stock market while they make out like bandits, leaving everyone else the bag holder. Your 401k isn’t safe anymore.
shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip
on 22 Jan 01:29
nextcollapse
Same but with Monero. I don’t need my friends, neighbors, $5 wrench attackers, and governments knowing how much money I have. And neither should you.
cy_narrator@discuss.tchncs.de
on 22 Jan 01:54
collapse
Trust me bro, if your underground stash of money is robbed or stolen because you refuse to trust a bank to safeguard it, it will be considered your fault
I want to believe, but decentralizing is what got us into this mess. The Fox people lived in their own world long enough that it created this whole alternate reality that spawned Trump.
If we keep our heads in the sand 2028 is going to end up exactly the same and we will all be scratching our heads when the Undertaker becomes president.
ramjambamalam@lemmy.ca
on 22 Jan 03:06
nextcollapse
Preaching to the choir!
Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works
on 22 Jan 03:17
nextcollapse
I just wish we had a bit more political balance here… I’m not talking about fascists, but more people that don’t blame everything on capitalism would be kind of nice…
Not trying to get into a whole ugly thing, just curious what your pro-capitalism stance is. Because I would definitely fall into this big Lemmy category of seeing 90-905% of modern problems being rooted in capitalism. So I would (civilly!) disagree, no doubt. Doesn’t mean we can’t have a reasonable discussion!
Sixtyforce@sh.itjust.works
on 22 Jan 03:34
collapse
I’m not so sure. Depends if there’s a solution to the bots.
Bluesky is inundated with them already.
threaded - newest
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.
Closed instances with vetted members, there’s no other way.
Isn’t that basically the same result though…
Problem with tech oligarchy is it just takes one person to get corrupted and then he blocks out all opinion that attacks his goals.
So the solution is federation, free speech instances that everyone can say whatever they want no matter how unpopular.
How do we counteract the bots…
Well we need the instances to verify who gets in, and make sure the members aren’t bots or saying unpopular things. These instances will need to be big, and well funded.
How do we counter these instance owners getting bought out, corrupted (repeat loop).
No? The problem of tech oligarchy is that they control the systems. Here anyone can start up a new instance at the press of a button. That is the solution, not allowing unfiltered freeze peach garbage.
Small “local” human sized groups are the only way we ensure the humanity of a group. These groups can vouch for each-other just as we do with Fediseer.
One big gatekeeper is not the answer and is exactly the problem we want to get away from.
You counter them by moving to a different instance.
Concept is however that if a new instance is detatched from the old one… then it’s basically the same story of leaving myspace for facebook etc… we go through the long vetting process etc… over and over again, userbase fragments reaching critical mass is a challange every time. I mean yeah if we start with a circle of 10 trusted networks. One goes wrong it defederates, people migrate to one of the 9 or a new one gets brought into the circle. but actual vetting is a difficult process to go with, and makes growing very difficult.
Too high of a barrier to entry is doomed to fail.
Programming.dev does this and is the tenth largest instance.
The bar is not particularly high with lemmy and that is a focused community.
People aren’t (generally) being made aware of the injustice on the other side of the planet while they are asking a question about C#.
Techy people are a lot more likely to jump through a couple of hoops for something better, compared to your average Joe who isn’t even aware of the problem
Techy people are a lot more likely to jump through hoops because that knowledge/experience makes it easier for them, they understand it’s worthwhile or because it’s fun. If software can be made easier for non-techy people and there’s no downsides then of course that aught to be done.
Yeah that was kinda my point
Ok, now tell the linux people this.
It’s not always obvious or easy to make what non-techies will find easy. Changes could unintentionally make the experience worse for long-time users.
I know people don’t want to hear it but can we expect non-techies to meet techies half way by leveling their tech skill tree a bit?
In order to charge her iphone, my mom first turns on airplane mode, and THEN she powers it down. Turns it off completely. I asked why she does any of that. She says “Because they won’t flip the charge switch for me until they do! I wish I could take the battery out first, and THEN turn off the phone. But I suppose if they can’t see my battery with airplane mode on first, this is just as good.”
And you want this woman to learn terminal?
Learning is difficult but I have to believe it is still part of the solution.
Why would she ever need to use a terminal?
I imagine she’d be doing normal computer stuff, not writing bash scripts.
We have a human vetted application process too and that’s why there’s rarely any bots or spam accounts originating from our instance. I imagine it’s a similar situation for programming.dev. It’s just not worth the tradeoff to have completely open signups imo. The last thing lemmy needs is a massive influx of Meta users from threads, facebook or instagram, or from shitter. Slow, organic growth is completely fine when you don’t have shareholders and investors to answer to.
10th largest instance being like 10k users… we’re talking about the need for a solution to help pull the literal billions of users from mainstream social media
There isn’t a solution. People don’t want to pay for something that costs huge resources. So their attention becoming the product that’s sold is inevitable. They also want to doomscroll slop; it’s mindless and mildly entertaining. The same way tabloid newspapers were massively popular before the internet and gossip mags exist despite being utter horseshite. It’s what people want. Truly fighting it would requires huge benevolent resources, a group willing to finance a manipulative and compelling experience and then not exploit it for ad dollars, push educational things instead or something. Facebook, twitter etc are enshitified but they still cost huge amounts to run. And for all their faults at least they’re a single point where illegal material can be tackled. There isn’t a proper corollary for this in decentralised solutions once things scale up. It’s better that free, decentralised services stay small so they can stay under the radar of bots and bad actors. When things do get bigger then gated communities probably are the way to go. Perhaps until there’s a social media not-for-profit that’s trusted to manage identity, that people don’t mind contributing costs to. But that’s a huge undertaking. One day hopefully…
I dunno man. Discord has thousands of closed servers that are doing great.
If we’re talking about breaking tech oligarchs hold on social media, no closed server anywhere comes close as a replacement to meta or Twitter.
We’re talking about the need for a system to deal with major access of a main facebook/insta/twitter etc… to a majority of people.
IE of the scale that someone can go “Hey I bet my aunt that I haven’t talked to in 15 years might be on here, let me check”. Not a common occourance in a closed off discord community.
Also, noting that doesn’t fully solve the primary problem… of still being at the whims and controls of a single point of failure. of which if Discord Inc could at any point in time decide to spy on closed rooms, censor any content they dislike etc…
I question if we really need spaces like that anymore. But I see where you are coming from.
I was definitely only thinking about social places like Lemmy and Discord. Not networking places like Facebook and LinkedIn.
It really feels like there are zero solutions available. I’m at a point where I realize that all social networks have major negative impacts on society. And I can’t imagine anything fixing it that isn’t going back to smaller, local, and private. Maybe we don’t need places where you can expect everyone to be there.
When we can expect everyone on the planet to be present in a network the conflict and vitrol would be perpetual. We are not mature enough and all on the same page enough as a species to not resort to mud slinging
It’s how most large forums ran back in the day and it worked great. Quality over quantity.
@a1studmuffin @ceenote the only reason these massive Web 2.0 platforms achieved such dominance is because they got huge before governments understood what was happening and then claimed they were too big to follow basic publishing law or properly vet content/posters. So those laws were changed to give them their own special carve-outs. We're not mentally equipped for social networks this huge.
Could do something like discord. Rather than communities, you have “micro instances” existing on top of the larger instance, and communities existing within the micro instances. And of course make it so that making micro instances are easier to create.
If you could vet members in any meaningful way, they’d be doing it already.
Well, what doesn’t work, it seems, is giving (your) access to “anyone”.
Maybe a system where people, I know this will be hard, has to look up outlets themselves, instead of being fed a “stream” dictated by commercial incentives (directly or indirectly).
I’m working on a secure decentralised FOSS network where you can share whatever you want, like websites. Maybe that could be a start.
I think you replied to the wrong comment.
Well no?
What did I miss?
I’m speaking broadly in general terms in the post, about sharing online.
This conversation was about bots. Yours is about “outlets” and “streams”, whatever that is.
If you have some algorithm or few central points distributing information, any information, you’ll get bot problems. If you instead yourself hook up with specific outlets, you won’t have that problem, or if one is bot infested you can switch away from it. That’s hard when everyone is in the same outlet or there are only few big outlets.
Sorry if it’s not clear.
What is an outlet?
Most instances are open wide to the public.
A few have registration requirements, but it’s usually something banal like “say I agree in Spanish to prove your Spanish enough for this instance” etc.
This is a choice any instance can make if they want, none are but that doesn’t mean they can’t or it doesn’t work.
I was referring to some of the larger players in the space, ie Meta, Twitter, etc.
Right, but they’re shit and don’t good things out of principle.
We, the Fediverse, are the alternative to them.
Doesn’t matter if they’re shit or not, they don’t want bots crawling their sites, straining their resources, or constantly shit posting, but they do anyway. And if the billion dollar corporations can’t stop them, it’s probably a good bet that you can’t either.
Because they want user data over anything.
We want quality communities over anything.
We can be selective, they go bankrupt without consistent growth.
Okay, but the bots work for other people…
… Yes? What does that have to do with anything?
Those companies want an easy quick way for people to join because they want constant growth. That means not doing any sort of real checking or verification, it’s not because these billion dollar company cannot afford to, it’s because they don’t want to.
Their problems are not our problems.
Have you tried to sign up for one of these services recently? It’s a fucking nightmare. They can’t stop them. Money is no object and they can’t do it.
It could be cool to get a blue check mark for hosting your own domain (excluding the free domains)
It would be more expensive than bot armies are willing to deal with.
Can you have an instance that allows viewing other instances, but others can’t see in?
Vetted members could still bot though or have ther accounts compromised. Not a realistic solution.
How is it going to be as big as reddit if EVERYONE is vetted?
Why do you want it to be as big as Reddit?
We also need a solution to fucking despot mods and admins deleting comments and posts left-and-right because it doesn’t align with their personal views.
I’ve seen it happen to me personally across multiple Lemmy domains (I’m a moron and don’t care much to have empathy in my writing, and it sets these limp-wrist morbidly obese mods/admins to delete my shit and ban me), and it happens to many people as well.
You have that tool, it’s called finding or hosting your own instance.
Just create your own comm.
Yeah you can go fuck yourself for pinning your flavor of bullshit on ADHD. Take some accountability for your actions.
I do indeed fuck myself, every day, thanks.
So much irony in this one
Good job chief 🤡
Freedom of expression does not mean freedom from consequences. As someone who loves to engage on trolling for a laugh online I can tell you that if you get banned for being an asshole you deserve it. I know I have.
Who is the asshole here?
That tells me all I need to know
Don’t go blaming your inability to have empathy on adhd. That is in absolutely no way connected. You’re just a rude person.
I’m also rude in real life too! 😄
Communities should be self moderated. Once we have that we can really push things forward.
Self Moderated is just fine. Why do I need to doxx myself to be online? I’m not giving away my birth certificate or SSN just to post on social media that idea is crazy lmao.
lemm.ee and lemmy.dbzer0.com both seem like very level-headed instances. You can say stuff even if the admins disagree with it, and it’s not a crisis.
Some of the big other ones seem some other way, yes.
Lemm.ee hasn’t booted me yet? Much like OP, I’m not the most empathetic person, and if I’m annoyed then what little filter that I have disappears.
Shockingly, I might offend folks sometimes!
Also is data scraping as much of an issue?
Data scraping is a logical consequence of being an open protocol, and as such I don't think it's worth investing much time in resisting it so long as it's not impacting instance health. At least while the user experience and basic federation issues are still extant.
There are simple tests to out LLMs, mostly things that will trip up the tokenizers or sampling algorithms (with character counting being the most famous example). I know people hate captchas, but it’s a small price to pay.
Also, while no one really wants to hear this, locally hosted “automod” LLMs could help seek out spam too. Or maybe even a Kobold Hoard type “swarm.”
Captchas don’t do shit and have actually been training for computer vision for probably over a decade at this point.
Also: Any “simple test” is fixed in the next version. It is similar to how people still insist “AI can’t do feet” (much like rob liefeld). That was fixed pretty quick it is just that much of the freeware out there is using very outdated models.
Well, that’s kind of intuitively true in perpetuity
An effective gate for AI becomes a focus of optimisation
Any effective gate with a motivation to pass will become ineffective after a time, on some level it’s ultimately the classic “gotta be right every time Vs gotta be right once” dichotomy—certainty doesn’t exist.
@NuXCOM_90Percent @brucethemoose would some kind of proof of work help solve this? Ifaik its workingnon tor
Somehow I didn’t get pinged for this?
Anyway proof of work scales horrendously, and spammers will always beat out legitimate users of that even holds. I think Tor is a different situation, where the financial incentives are aligned differently.
But this is not my area of expertise.
I’m talking text only, and there are some fundamental limitations in the way current and near future LLMs handle certain questions. They don’t “see” characters in inputs, they see words which get tokenized to their own internal vocabulary, hence any questions along the lines of “How many Ms are in Lemmy” is challenging even for advanced, fine tuned models. It’s honestly way better than image captchas.
They can also be tripped up if you simulate a repetition loop. They will either give a incorrect answer to try and continue the loop, or if their sampling is overturned, give incorrect answers avoiding instances where the loop is the correct answer.
And that is solved just by keeping a non-processed version of the query (or one passed through a different grammar to preserve character counts and typos). It is not a priority because there are no meaningful queries where that matters other than a “gotcha” but you can be sure that will be bolted on if it becomes a problem.
Again, anything this trivial is just a case of a poor training set or an easily bolted on “fix” for something that didn’t have any commercial value outside of getting past simple filters.
Sort of like how we saw captchas go from “type the third letter in the word ‘poop’” to nigh unreadable color blindness tests to just processing computer vision for “self driving” cars.
If you make someone answer multiple questions just to shitpost they are going to go elsewhere. People are terrified of lemmy because there are different instances for crying out loud.
You are also giving people WAY more credit than they deserve.
Instances that don’t vet users sufficiently get defederated for spam. Users then leave for instances that don’t get blocked. If instances are too heavy handed in their moderation then users leave those instances for more open ones and the market of the fediverse will balance itself out to what the users want.
I wish this was the case but the average user is uninformed and can’t be bothered leaving.
Otherwise the bigger service would be lemmy, not reddit.
Just like classical macroeconomics, you make the deadly (false) assumption that users are rational and will make the choice that’s best for them.
Reputation systems. There is tech that solves this but Lemmy won’t like it (blockchain)
Do you have a proof of concept that works?
docs.ergoplatform.com/eco/reputation-system/
You don’t need blockchain for reputations systems, lol. Stuff like Gnutella and PGP web-of-trust have been around forever. Admittedly, the blockchain can add barriers for some attacks; mainly sybil attacks, but a friend-of-a-friend/WoT network structure can mitigate that somewhat too,
Space is much more developed. Would need ever improving dynamic proof of personhood tests
I think a web-of-trust-like network could still work pretty well where everyone keeps their own view of the network and their own view of reputation scores. I.e. don’t friend people you don’t know; unfriend people who you think are bots, or people who friend bots, or just people you don’t like. Just looked it up, and wikipedia calls these kinds of mitigation techniques “Social Trust Graphs” en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack#Social_trust_g… . Retroshare kinda uses this model (but I think reputation is just a hard binary, and not reputation scores).
Slashdot had this 20 years ago. So you’re right this is not new.or needing some new technology.
A simple thing that may help a lot is for all new accounts to be flagged as bots, requiring opt out of the status for normal users. It’s a small thing, but any barrier is one more step a bot farm has to overcome.
We could ask for anonymous digital certificates. It works this way.
Many countries already emit digital certificates for it’s citizens. Only one certificate by id. Then anonymous certificates could be made. The anonymous certificate contains enough information to be verificable as valid but not enough to identify the user. Websites could ask for an anonymous certificate for register/login. With the certificate they would validate that it’s an human being while keeping that human being anonymous. The only leaked data would probably be the country of origin as these certificates tend to be authentificated by a national AC.
The only problem I see in this is international adoption outside fully developed countries: many countries not being able to provide this for their citizens, having lower security standards so fraudulent certificates could be made, or a big enough poor population that would gladly sell their certificate for bot farms.
Your last sentence highlights the problem. I can have a bot that posts for me. Also, if an authority is in charge of issuing the certificates then they have an incentive to create some fake ones.
Bots are vastly more useful as the ratio of bots to humans drops.
What? I post a lot, but the majority?
…oh, you said LLM. I thought you said LMM.
I mentioned this in another comment, but we need to somehow move away from free form text. So here’s a super flawed makes-you-think idea to start the conversation:
Suppose you had an alternative kind of Lemmy instance where every post has to include both the post like normal and a “Simple English” summary of your own post. (Like, using only the “ten hundred most common words” Simple English) If your summary doesn’t match your text, that’s bannable. (It’s a hypothetical, just go with me on this.)
Now you have simple text you can search against, use automated moderation tools on, and run scripts against. If there’s a debate, code can follow the conversation and intervene if someone is being dishonest. If lots of users are saying the same thing, their statements can be merged to avoid duplicate effort. If someone is breaking the rules, rule enforcement can be automated.
Ok so obviously this idea as written can never work. (Though I love the idea of brand new users only being allowed to post in Simple English until they are allow-listed, to avoid spam, but that’s a different thing.) But the essence and meaning of a post can be represented in some way. Analyze things automatically with an LLM, make people diagram their sentences like English class, I don’t know.
A bot can do that and do it at scale.
I think we are going to need to reconceptualize the Internet and why we are on here at all.
It already is practically impossible to stop bots and I’m a very short time it’ll be completely impossible.
I think I communicated part of this badly. My intent was to address “what is this speech?” classification, to make moderation scale better. I might have misunderstood you but I think you’re talking about a “who is speaking?” problem. That would be solved by something different.
we have to use trust from real life. it’s the only thing that centralized entities can’t fake
I feel like it’s only a matter of time before most people just have AI’s write their posts.
The rest of us with brains, that don’t post our status as if the entire world cares, will likely be here, or some place similar… Screaming into the wind.
<img alt="" src="https://slrpnk.net/api/v3/image_proxy?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.kym-cdn.com%2Fphotos%2Fimages%2Fnewsfeed%2F002%2F182%2F171%2Feb0.jpg">
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.
That’s absurd. Large sharp dropped blades, poison, starvation, spears, looped ropes, fire… There are many alternatives available.
We could make a wiki filled with all the options.
But let’s prioritize the non-violent ones first.
We did prioritize non-violent ones, and this is where it got us. The ONLY option is violence.
I’m just talking about how we design the wiki. Gotta be tasteful and present ourselves in the best light.
That’s fair, it’s important in some ways to conceal the hand a bit. We have to make to make the rich as uncomfortable as we are though.
Oh, absolutely. With quicklinks to any old category the user may want to get to fast.
The only solution guns provide are dead people. You have fallen for the pathetic lie of the right.
Oh. Guns are even better for that.
On the right? They are a lightning rod for criticism and complaints. “All the jobs in our state were taken away and my daughter is dying of an easily curable disease. BUT THOSE FUCKING LIBERALS ARE TRYING TO TAKE AWAY MY SECOND AMENDMENT RIGHTS!!!”
On the left? they are a way to “meet in the middle” on a lot of legislature while also being a great way to villify and target groups. For example, anyone with even a passing understanding of history knows that the Civl Rights Movement was not MLK Jr giving one speech and fist bumping Rosa Parks on the bus. The threat of violence was definitely a factor (beyond that it gets murkier). And people LOVE to argue that Blacks picking up guns is how that was “won”.
You know what else came of that? “That kid is a gangbanger and has a gun. SHOOT HIM. Oh shit, uhm. Fuck it, we’ll just say the toy train looked like a gun”.
And we’ll see that continue. LGBTQ folk will decide they need a gun and you can bet the cops and the chuds will be glad to open fire at protestors because “THEY HAVE A GUN!!!”
And the absolute best part? “Both sides” are fucking delusional if they think their guns are going to accomplish anything against an oppressive government. Cops won’t go near a pistol if a kid’s life is on the line. But they’ll open fire like mel gibson if they think a business is in trouble. Let alone the military with tanks and drones and there will be a lot more “combat footage” to watch online.
If there was ANY chance that The 2nd Amendment could pose ANY threat to a tyrannical government, it would have been destroyed decades ago.
Somebody almost killed Trump in July. A couple of inches was the difference between a Republican party in chaos just before the election and a party united behind their fascist hamberdler. The way this is going the 2A is going to be your only real defense against modern Nazism so you’d be better off hitting the range and getting proficient with a firearm than you are posting pics with #resist on Instagram.
In many ways, trump’s campaign was bolstered by the image of him standing “defiant” with a fist raised in the air and someone else’s blood all over him.
If trump HAD gotten got? Evil deep state assassination attempt by biden and here is your new candidate that the entire party would rally behind. And democrats would be even more reluctant to say or do anything out of “decorum”.
Because here is the thing: trump isn’t even the problem. He is an evil bastard but he is a symptom of the problem. Project 2025 is what those rapid fire EOs come from. And Project 2025 very much benefits from right wing fascists controlling basically all of social media.
And I will just, once again, ask: What do you think your guns are going to do against a military that is cracking down on you and your buddies as “terrorists”? Because if there was ANY chance of a civilian force posing ANY threat to a government, we would have banned guns back in the late 1700s.
You’re making a lot of unfounded assumptions about what would have happened if Trump were assassinated. No one else has been able to harness MAGA energy the way he has. It’s entirely possible the movement would splinter without its figurehead. We won’t know that until he’s gone. Although it seems less likely now that he presumably has 4 years to enact policy changes and put people in place to keep his agenda moving after his term is up.
There’s plenty of debate to be had on the topic of the effectiveness of guns in civil resistance. All of which can be found in more detail elsewhere than we’re going to be able to cover here. However, suffice it to say that your understanding of resistance in general and guerilla tactics specifically is severely lacking if you’re assuming that this situation would play out as an open confrontation between the US military and some sort of militia. Despite the fact that such a conflict would provide more room for maneuvering than you are giving it credit, that would not be the preferred method of engagement. Generals and other senior officers have to buy groceries and go to the DMV just like everyone else. You pick your targets when and where you can get them. More than anything else, it’s important to acknowledge that in the situation where it becomes necessary to think about these kinds of things in more detail, my guns afford me many more options than your knives (or whatever else you prefer to rely on) would. Unless, of course, you plan on giving up without a fight, in which case we clearly have such different outlooks that additional discussion will not help us find common ground.
Yeah…
Your mass assassinations plan doesn’t work when there is a camera on every corner and traffic light. L Dog was always going to get caught if he hadn’t fled the country within hours of blapping that exec. You are also apparently assuming everyone is Jason Bourne in your fantasy and are a highly trained guerilla fighting force that can blend in and out of everything.
Yeah. The difference between being the chosen one in a young adult novel and actually accomplishing anything of value is what taking out your “target” accomplishes.
And… a great example of that is Palestine. For the sake of simplicity, let’s call what Hamas did “attacking a target”. What was the outcome of that? Israel had “justification” to engage in mass ethnic cleansing for over a year.
I believe in fighting for change in ways that can actually protect others and accomplish things. Rather than fantasizing about living in a Call of Duty commercial and just painting an even bigger target on the backs of the groups I claim to be helping.
If you or the other “Buy a gun, it is the only thing you can do. I hear Fred’s on 4th street have great deals on assault rifles!” folk had ACTUALLY engaged in any activism whether peaceful or otherwise you would have long since had it explained to you: YOU DO NOT BRING A FUCKING GUN TO A PROTEST. Because the moment the other side sees it? They open fire. Because cops will give a bottle of water to the white kid with an assault rifle looking for some n*****s to kill. They’ll fucking murder anyone who looks even slightly brown if they have a bulge in their jacket pocket.
Exactly, the presence of a weapon just gives them a reason to pull the “THEY’RE COMIN RIGHT FOR US” bullshit from South Park Season Fucking One.
2a is there in case 1a don't work
so we just all buy guns and fend for ourselves? we need communities in order to fight fascism, we need to be able to organize and share valuable information with people. is technology the answer to the problem? no its not, but it is part of the answer, and to ignore that is shortsighted.
As to an answers beyond simply getting-armed-and-fostering-healthy-gun-culture-and-education-among-us:
“Practicing mutual aid is the surest means for giving each other and to all the greatest safety, the best guarantee of existence and progress, bodily, intellectually and morally.”
That’s Kropotkin
And then Modern Libs even observe, more verbosely:
“The structures of our state economies are going to matter in terms of protecting democracies, and by that I mean if you look at economies that were based in the kind of small producer economies like New England was vs states like the South and the American West that were always built on the idea of very high capital using extractive methods to get resources out of the land either cotton or mining or oil or water or agri business, those economies always depend on a few people with a lot of money, and then a whole bunch of people who are poor and doing the work for those Rich guys – and that I’m not sure is compatible in terms of governance without addressing the reality that you know if people have more of a foothold in their own communities, they are then more likely to support the kinds of legislation that Community [Education, Healthcare, …] and that may be the future of democracy, if not a national democracy”
Heather Cox Richardson, professor of American history On The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart on Trump’s Win and What’s Next youtu.be/D7cKOaBdFWo?t=2139 (time-stamped)
If a Conservative wants me dead, they’re going to have to work and sweat for it. I’m not doing the heavy lifting for them (A Quote I agree with)
Our resulting interactions may seem chaotic and illegible to authority, but it is through that seeming chaos that vastly complex, horizontal, and resilient practices of learning, cooperation, and reciprocity have historically arisen.
By Andrewism youtu.be/qkN_nQPpeSU
MASKING REALLY HELPS; Covid, RSV, Flu is a greater threat to marginalized communities. Can’t do organizing without prioritizing precautions.
Show up for your neighbors. The rest will come.
No, we buy guns AND we organize our coalitions, just like the Black Panthers did.
We can’t intellectualize our way out of Proud Boys lynchings anymore, guys.
(Also all the stuff VerticaGG said)
Guns work better when you can coordinate Resistance movements news to be coordinated. Running out with a gun like a mad man isn’t going to work.
Republican solutions to republican problems eh?
1000% agree. There is no freedom but the freedom that we build together.
if 100% is completely agreeing, what’s 1000%?
completely agreeing, 10 times
From the article:
Look; if you’re a journalist, pretend you know other words. I’m so fucking done.
Weird flex here...
404 at least does some investigative journalism beyond fake news headlines where person a "slams" person b
The word is literally being used correctly.
I’m trying to find one right now that doesn’t suck. I want one where I can microblog, share pics, and videos to my friends and family. Essentially Facebook. Friendica is EMPTY. I deleted Meta products. I’m not on X. There is no alternative.
Isn’t Mastodon a good alternative? It’s a microblogging service like Twitter. You can post statuses, pictures, videos, etc.
You can also make it private and set it to approve your followers.
I guess, but I don’t want the job of trying to talk people into using a platform. No one I know has even heard of it. The platform is good for what I want, but no one I know locally is there and getting them on it seems unlikely.
Setup an account and start using it. Learn the ins and outs of it, then offer to teach your friends and family who might be interested. Someone has to be the first, then that person has to find their ‘first follower’. It isn’t easy, but with persistence it will pay off
How do you think Twitter/Facebook started? If you can talk enough people into losing trust in those mainstream platforms, they’ll eventually catch up.
Honestly Mastodon is the closest thing atm unless you can get more people to join Friendica
I want not just decentralized
but peer to peer
like Briar, but Lemmy-style
Yea agreed, but not Lemmy or Mastodon. Or, really anything with ActivityPub as these places are an echo chamber filled with trigger happy jannies who will ban you from a community if you have a differing of opinion to their groupthink.
i dont disagree implicitly with activitypub being echo chamber prone but its interesting that your most recent replies are litigating the veracity of a nazi salute caught on national television
Well, as a Jew, I haven’t seen anything else from Elon that’s emblematic of being a Nazi. Sure, he has some right wing beliefs, but those were pretty centrist ideals prior to the past decade. And I have encountered real neo-Nazis who have wished death upon my [k expletive] ass and attempted doxing. I think Elon is just an awkward person in general, but I’m not buying into the stats quo hype that he’s some neo-fascist, Hitler sympathizer. That’s just my opinion. You’re welcome to believe what you want too 👍
Are you suggesting that we shouldn’t be worried about toxically insecure people in power when they are behaving awkwardly? Does an appearance of awkwardness grant automatic innocence?
I have been be intensely awkward with my insecurity in the past, and in my awkwardness i have definitely hurt people. If the victims of my insecurity brushed me off as awkward they would be enabling me to continue to harm others
He made Twitter into a Nazi bar. This too. There’s plenty more that you can certainly find yourself if you actually look.
Every person that has ever made a post like this has multiple comments defending Nazis.
Good thing I’m not defending any neo-Nazis
Sorry, I don’t carry on conversations with Nazi sympathizers. I hope you have an awful day.
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?
What do you do in real life? You tell them to fuck off.
on reddit majority of heavy lifting is done by community mods. hosting, however, is a pain, lemmy is centralized as fuck.
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.
I think the key is building a social information system based on connections we have in real life. Key exchange parties, etc
It’s the only way to introduce a prohibitively high cost to centralized broadcast and reduce the power of these mega-entities
Could you clarify? A sneaker net? Peer to peer?
I think the good news is, regardless of what gets done, people are hungry for real connections and the old internet.
honestly, i’ll donate money to whomever can design this and make it scalable.
Checked the rules and I think this is allowed? But if you’ve still got reddit and don’t mind being a fediverse evangelist please go consider hitting this thread: reddit.com/…/decentralized_social_media_is_the_on…
Could you maybe edit your comment to something like
“Lemmy has 42k monthly active users
Feel free if you have any questions”
join-lemmy isn’t the best for user onboarding: lemmy.world/post/24220536?scrollToComments=true
Lol I don’t know if you saw but I tried and they deleted the top comment.
Yeah 😔
I would recommend an actual cafe with actual humans in it face to face over this
I agree but let’s be honest. That may be how it worked in revolutionary France but that wasn’t how it worked in the US in the 20th century. The “3rd Places” that most people were involved in were union halls, civic organizations, and social societies. We’ve largely forgotten that history, but it’s not something we can get back without organizing online first.
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.
Unfortunately, Lemmy demonstrates pretty clearly that decentralized systems are just as vulnerable to propaganda and brain rot.
That’s the nature of the beast. You can’t have human users on a network without at least some slop.
But the decentralized network ensures that a “techno-baron” has no more say than you or I, which is exactly what the internet is supposed to do.
That’s decidedly better than a centralized system, especially now.
So long as it is humans posting this will be a problem. The benefit of a federated system is that you can’t compromise the person at the top and then everything collapses.
I just jumped on here today (from seeing this article on Reddit) but my understanding is that the advantage is that the CEO can’t decide he wants to suck authoritarian cock and destroy our ability to discuss and/or organize.
(Admittedly I joined the biggest server I could find so I kind of violated that idea as well).
Welcome! !newcommunities@lemmy.world can help to find communities
Welcome! Some people have gripes with dot world for being the biggest, etc. but generally you’ll be fine.
You can always search for communities here as well. .
There’s many apps and frontends and too. Some are preincluded into lemmy.world. If you like old reddit try old lemmy for example.
Humans are vulnerable to propaganda. Lemmy’s architecture is against censorship. This helps to push back against propaganda, but only so much. But at least not being censored is a big win IMO.
Really? Just as? There are rogue groups and certainly rogue mods and individuals with axes to grind, but I’ve never dealt that there was anything on a system wide basis or anything that was driven by profit here. There’s some really wild hive-mind attitudes here too but, I don’t see how it could possibly be as attractive as centralized platforms for manipulation, profit, or thought control. Feel free to shine some light on my naivety if there’s something I’m missing here.
I think we have to build systems that use real-life interpersonal trust networks so that centralized entities cannot just outspend and bot their way to prominence.
At least we can easily pack up and move camp in familiar territory (same apps/frontends, etc.)
Its time people learn this everything is run by humans and humans suck
Except the propaganda was explicitly grown on reddit.
Guillotines are another option.
More will just spawn and take their place.
More heads require more guillotines.
Can we not design guillotines that cut multiple heads at once, thus reducing the head to guillotine ratio?
You’re onto something here.
I guess we could stack the rich on top of each other. That way we wouldn’t even have to modify the guillotine. We’d just have to make sure the blade is extra sharp.
Make the design 4D, and stack them in multiple dimensions, maybe one 4D guillotine is even sufficient?
But what about places where heads won’t roll? They deserve a space to be able to access.
The heads yearn for the guillotines
It might be the only path forward.
I mean humanity survived thousands of years without any social media at all…
This is the better path forward… That everyone just gets so sick of it that they drop it - I’ve actually seen a lot of that among my own friends over the last week (and we aren’t from America even). But the right wingers will never drop it because it’s their community and echo chamber, and that’s where the further dangers to democracy come into play when they’re all in the sandbox together without parents…
Gonna disagree here.
Humans have always had “social media”, but it’s not been directed by a cadre of oligarchs until recently.
I mean shit, humans have been sitting around the campfire telling stories to each other going all the fucking way back to forever. Sure, a campfire story isn’t a tweet, but for our monkey brains it’s essentially the same thing: how we interact with our social groups and learn what’s going on around us.
The problem is that the campfire stories couldn’t be manipulated into making your cavemen neighbors hate the other half, because half of them were totally pro rabbit fur while you’re pro squirrel fur.
You absolutely can do that and worse now, so while we’ve always had social media, we just simply never had anyone with enough control to make an entire society eat each other because of it’s influence.
Decentralized is too complicated. Worker owned is a better path forward and is centralized so it’s easier to support and be understood by its users. Moderators are workers and should have equity.
This is early days; I have a feeling in a few short years there will be ownership and simplicity of distributed services and whatever evolves from them.
Communication is not for sale.
I think if we had co-ops running some of these systems it would definitely alleviate some issues
I can imagine better and safer infrastructure, along with better funding alternatives than “please donate to your instance”. If people can make a living from maintaining an instance, service can be hugely improved. Think most people are running instances on their own spare time and resources.
Karl Marx 2.0 right there
Said so on paywalled site…
404media paywalled? It’s free to create an account
If it’s free, why does it say “This post is for paid members only”?
Decentralized money as well. We need to move away from the control of government and corporations (they are now one and the same). I’m putting more and more of my money in bitcoin. The dollar will continue to erode while wages stay flat. And Trump and his new oligarch buddies will completely decimate the American economy and stock market while they make out like bandits, leaving everyone else the bag holder. Your 401k isn’t safe anymore.
Same but with Monero. I don’t need my friends, neighbors, $5 wrench attackers, and governments knowing how much money I have. And neither should you.
Trust me bro, if your underground stash of money is robbed or stolen because you refuse to trust a bank to safeguard it, it will be considered your fault
Correct
I dont want to deal with people gore spamming every single Matrix channel again.
I don’t understand this sentence. The two words I don’t know in this context are “gore” and “matrix”
I want to believe, but decentralizing is what got us into this mess. The Fox people lived in their own world long enough that it created this whole alternate reality that spawned Trump.
If we keep our heads in the sand 2028 is going to end up exactly the same and we will all be scratching our heads when the Undertaker becomes president.
Preaching to the choir!
I just wish we had a bit more political balance here… I’m not talking about fascists, but more people that don’t blame everything on capitalism would be kind of nice…
Not trying to get into a whole ugly thing, just curious what your pro-capitalism stance is. Because I would definitely fall into this big Lemmy category of seeing 90-905% of modern problems being rooted in capitalism. So I would (civilly!) disagree, no doubt. Doesn’t mean we can’t have a reasonable discussion!
I’m not so sure. Depends if there’s a solution to the bots. Bluesky is inundated with them already.