Decentralised Social Media

[gelbphoenix]

Hey LMG Team and Community,

 

I have a simple question for y'all:

 

Have you thought about joining or even joined decentralised social media (for example: the "ATmosphere" with Bluesky or even the Fediverse with Mastodon, Pixelfed,...)?

 

If you have only joined one: Why not the other one? What would maybe a point for you to look at the other (if you haven't already)?

If you haven't joined: Why haven't you joined an decentralised social media? What would be an point where you would take a look at decentralised social media?

 

I would like to ask you to please keep possible discussions civil and focused. 

[Biohazard777]

36 minutes ago, gelbphoenix said:

Have you thought about joining or even joined decentralised social media

No, no.

 

36 minutes ago, gelbphoenix said:

If you have only joined one: Why not the other one? What would maybe a point for you to look at the other (if you haven't already)?

If you haven't joined: Why haven't you joined an decentralised social media? What would be an point where you would take a look at decentralised social media?

You assume everyone uses social media.
Add an option: "I don't care about social media in general, decentralised or not".

PS You can setup a poll in your thread.

[Sir_Alex]

1 hour ago, gelbphoenix said:

Hey LMG Team and Community,

 

I have a simple question for y'all:

 

Have you thought about joining or even joined decentralised social media (for example: the "ATmosphere" with Bluesky or even the Fediverse with Mastodon, Pixelfed,...)?

 

If you have only joined one: Why not the other one? What would maybe a point for you to look at the other (if you haven't already)?

If you haven't joined: Why haven't you joined an decentralised social media? What would be an point where you would take a look at decentralised social media?

 

I would like to ask you to please keep possible discussions civil and focused. 

Why? The more decentralized, the more garbage it becomes in my findings. Then you have moderation problems as well.
Disgusting things can be posted on decentralized social media. And has been the case last time I checked out Mastadon.
I even had to submit a bunch of FBI reports just to have instances taken down.
If you can moderate it, then its centralized somewhere.

The only decentralized app I use is Element, to be in "discord" like channel with Louis Rossman.
Because I know he's running the server himself and keeps a tight ship.
 

[gelbphoenix]

On 2/13/2025 at 11:05 PM, Biohazard777 said:

No, no.

 

You assume everyone uses social media.
Add an option: "I don't care about social media in general, decentralised or not".

PS You can setup a poll in your thread.

I could have made my post a poll but then I would have to misuse the question title field for the whole text.

[gelbphoenix]

On 2/14/2025 at 12:15 AM, Sir_Alex said:

Why? The more decentralized, the more garbage it becomes in my findings. Then you have moderation problems as well.
Disgusting things can be posted on decentralized social media. And has been the case last time I checked out Mastadon.
I even had to submit a bunch of FBI reports just to have instances taken down.
If you can moderate it, then its centralized somewhere.

The only decentralized app I use is Element, to be in "discord" like channel with Louis Rossman.
Because I know he's running the server himself and keeps a tight ship.
 

Can I ask when it was that you checked Mastodon out? And what instance (if you know)?

[TudorFinalBosz]

I got interested in joining Diaspora once, but it was closed for new applications. I haven't followed up on this subject since then.

Yes, I think this will be the future of whatever will be left of social media. The biggest chance for this to get traction is for Europe to force a decoupling from US megacorps. Like if some countries eventually decide to ban X, then maybe some of those federated microblogging sites will see some influx of users.

 

Lack of moderation doesn't bother me that much, as long as there are tools to hide content I don't want to see or to block users that post it.

And I like the idea of linking up with people, each having his/her own pod/small-server, and seeing random content every day.

And knowing there's no corporation datamining or ads being shoved in our view.

[GarlicDeliverySystem]

I am not aware how decentralised social media is working, or what it's supposed advantages are. But my main issue would be, how does it deal with echo chambers and polarization?

 

A huge part of the problem with social media imho is the algorithm driven selection of what you get to see. These are based on engagement and user response, naturally, as they are intended and designed to keep you hooked as long as possible. Unfortunately this lead to the effect that people get put it into bubbles not only of hobbies and personal interests, but also polarising politics and social issues, as these appear to create the most engagement. 

If this isn't solved (and I wouldn't know how to), I have not interest in any social media, apart from a few forums or browsing for memes.

[Sir_Alex]

20 hours ago, gelbphoenix said:

Can I ask when it was that you checked Mastodon out? And what instance (if you know)?

It was about 2019-2020
The instance was the main one everyone was recommending I think. I can't find it anymore.
I tried multiple Instances at the time. All of them had issues including mastodon.social

 

8 hours ago, GarlicDeliverySystem said:

I am not aware how decentralised social media is working, or what it's supposed advantages are. But my main issue would be, how does it deal with echo chambers and polarization?

You don't, it's basically back to Forum days with admin choosing how to moderate. Just in Twitter, or continuous feed format.

 

 

[ewitte]

I've used MeWe before because of lot of good information is censored if it doesn't fit narrative.  Really, I barely do any Social Media these days.  I have some X feeds pushing live crypto information that is about it.  They info on there is really mostly FUD I don't pay attention to either.

[smcoakley]

54 minutes ago, Sir_Alex said:

You don't, it's basically back to Forum days with admin choosing how to moderate. Just in Twitter, or continuous feed format.

Well, I miss the forum days (it's why I'm here) so sounds good to me. Personally, if I'm going to use any social media these days, a smaller or niche group in its own "place" (whether self hosted or not is a technical concern) would be what I would go for. I don't think humans are designed to be omnipresent, and just basking in the firehose of a global social community is very taxing on our limited mental and social capacities.

 

News is a related, but separate issue. I consume news as something distinct from social media. I use RSS readers for news.

[WereCat]

I use Lemmy I find Mastodon too annoying to use. I was unable to find anything of interest and the way to content I like is just cumbersome and time consuming. 

[Kisai]

10 hours ago, Sir_Alex said:

It was about 2019-2020
The instance was the main one everyone was recommending I think. I can't find it anymore.
I tried multiple Instances at the time. All of them had issues including mastodon.social

 

 

The problem with truely decentralized social media is that it increases balkanization and siloing of data. You are over here, on site AXYS, and the stuff you want to read is on PARALLELOGRAM and ANIMECRABGAMES. In order to read content you need to basically subscribe to all these individual silos (which is re-inventing RSS) and because it's all public, if you subscribe to ULTRALEFTWING or ULTRARIGHTWING silo's you will suddenly be not welcome to any other silo. The reason I know this works this way is because that is exactly what happened with sites that made your follows/followings private like twitter and livejournal before it.

 

That's a bug, not a feature. Censorship is a bug. Filter is a feature. By following/subscribing to certain content and showing that following and followers, that de-facto indicates alignment with everything that social media circle agrees with. If you're not on board, you are thrown overboard. No room for moderate, centerist positions or fence-sitting.

 

What these systems really need is to learn from the mechanics of Usenet, IRC and forums that came before them.

 

1) Stable platform, Stable protocol. You can not withdraw a feature once it's introduced. You can not make someone running version 1.0 of the client unable to connect to servers on version 101.0, 10 years later, and can not make version 101.0 unable to read content made on version 1.0 .

 

Usenet, never broke your ability to do anything, but because of the proliferation of spam, spoofing and increasingly wasteful alt.binaries groups, some ISP's just removed the alt.binaries hierarchy entirely, knowing for fact that 99% of the bandwidth was porn and pirated content in the 90's.

 

IRC has solved the spam problem by having chanserv and nickserv services that were introduced in the late 90's. IRC always had a +V mode (voice or VIP in twitch terminology) to make a channel expressly permissive on who can speak in specific settings. Twitch itself has actually improved in some regards to how the IRC sevice works, removing identifiable information from all users, but at the cost of requiring things like phone numbers and email addresses in order to even start using the account. Yet, ANY standard IRC client can connect to Twitch chat to this very day, and various chat integration features require it.

 

Most online forums are anything but stable. Take phpBB for instance, there is a direct upgrade path from 1 to 3.x, but you have to upgrade all the intermediate stuff, and the data backend is incredibly fragile. So if it fails, be it missing php modules or incompatible versions of PHP to cross-upgrade with. This is one of the key reasons why forums just stop being updated and stagnate. They can't update it because the underlying OS/programming language would need to be updated, breaking other things connected into it. The truth is, when you mod a forum, you basically freeze that forum in that state forever, otherwise you need to manually re-apply every manual edit, every time.

 

2)  A verified, non-throwaway domain. So the main way to solve this is by requiring silos to actually have a domain (Eg a dot com) under which all their content can be read on the web without being filtered or censored. What does this sound like? Yes. A website. Subscribing to a website feed? RSS. So if all this effort is more effort than a website, why not just make a website? Because of the decentralized aspect. You can't climb over censorship barriers if all it takes to censor a site is for some wacko country regulator to declare the site illegal to access because it doesn't align with the domestic laws despite the foreign site not being subject to those laws.

 

3) A "routing protocol" by which someone in one location and receive data in another location via a middle-man if a direct connection is impossible. What does this sound like? VPN.

 

The point I'm getting at, is that a lot of decentralized "Stuff" has already been done in better ways before. All that is lacking is standards and mutual cooperation in not putting political or censorship goals as features. If someone doesn't want to see porn, then they shouldn't subscribe to porn. Someone pushing porn into a non-porn silo, should have their access to post to that silo cut off, but keeping trillions of decentralized addresses blacklist is a non-starter. It has to come from requiring a registered alternative to the DNS system that is "one computer-device, one address" that is attached to a physical identity object in the real world (eg a passport, drivers license, a physical IC card that has to be plugged into the USB port to re-verify, etc), so that if someone were to be banned from a site, they can't simply spin up another VM and start again. There has to be a level of reliability established before that identity will be allowed to post to an "free to post" system. That can be acquired by posting to other related free-to-post sites to earn some level of silo karma there before you can post to bigger silo's with bigger audiences.

 

The risk there of course is that starts making people adjust their behavior to game the site karma's system (eg "forum games") and this is seen on sites like slashdot and reddit. Which is why you don't inherit karma from one silo to join a new silo, you can't start a new thread without a higher level of karma, you can only reply/comment in thread. If your karma on a silo goes negative (posts are rated -1 spam/abuse) right after joining, you have no means of getting yourself out of that effective ban. As we used to say on IRC and BBS's "lurk before you leap" (or "lurk moar")

 

The problem there is that effectively creates a internet social credit system and that might come off a censorship. So let's say you have +200 Karma on LEFTLEANING and -2 on RIGHTLEANING, that -2 automatically keeps you out of posting to RIGHTWINGCONSPIRACY, but not LEFTWINGCONSPIRACY. Yet you are more likely to get negative karma from LEFTWINGCONSPIRACY, let's also say -2. So then you try to join a silo called THECENTERISTCONSPIRACY, that silo might be setup to cross-check posts to the silo if the user is subscribed to LEFTWINGCONSPIRACY or RIGHTWINGCONSPIRACY at all, and if there are any negative scores on other political silos. You're not being censored, you're being unwelcomed because of your reliability to be civil. Meanwhile a reliable source like Reuters or Associated Press might always have a Karma level of 200 in it's own silo, so if you subscribe to Reuters or AP , you will always see their posts if you subscribe to their SILO, but you will never be able to post INTO their silo unless invited by being a vetted journalist.  See the problem is that sites like Reddit and Slashdot, say their Karma systems are to keep out spam, which it does, but it's users also use it to downvote into oblivion any idea they don't agree with, which isn't what the Karma system is for. This is being seeing right now with the community notes on Twitter (X) where most CN's are civil, but the second something political comes up, there's a fight between "NNN" (because people have poor media literacy and don't know when something is satire) and unreliable sources (eg tabloids, propaganda) that doesn't fit the narrative.

 

To put that another way, forums, including this one, often have waves of spam attacks because 'captcha's no longer work. The easiest solution to that is a quiz that requires knowledge of recent videos to actually sign up, but that imposes a human cost as that information quickly gets out. To cycle that information perfectly, LMG would have to put an "invite code" to the forum inside a video (Eg via QR code) and ask a question about that video to prove they watched the whole thing (eg "what was the sponsor of today's video" or "what product did Linus drop in today's video")

 

When you mention too many spam-adjacent keywords in a post on this forum, it gets held for moderators. I've only seen this maybe twice myself, and that was only after mentioning things like crypto and payments.

 

But you don't have moderation controls like that in a decentralized system. Everyone sees, everything. You can only filter out what you don't want to see by not subscribing to the silo in the first place, or by blocking certain users of that silo, by which then you lose entire segments of the conversation.

 

For example, I block exactly one person on LMG's, forum. I have to manually "view" their post. Because I blocked them, I don't get notifications when they reply. That's about the extent of how I think censorship should work. You block someone it just goes "you've blocked this content, click here to read anyway" However it doesn't prevent other people from replying to that person and you seeing the content of that post anyway in a quote.

 

The reason why Mastodon doesn't work is precisely because silo'ing only works for content, not users. You don't need to subscribe to content you don't want to see. But because the difference between a 'user' and 'a content' is fuzzy at best, you get people who basically destroy their access to silo's because they wanted to be funny in the moment. This has been seen frequently on Twitter (X) when people will say something that is intended as a parody or a satire of the post being replied to and then suddenly getting banned.

 

Anyway, I think ultimately something might work out, but at present I see Mastodon as a failed project, for no other reason then censorship was put in as a feature and the rest of it was designed around it. I have more hope for ATProtocol. 

At least from my understanding of it, AT Protocol isn't designed around a censorship directive, but a subscription directive. So you could operate your own "PDS" (self-hosted) and interact with whatever else is out there and it's just distributed like like how Usenet worked originally. You don't have to carry everything.

 

[Mark Kaine]

If people wanted decentralized they'd use discord... Oh, wait... They do. Oh well.

 

Well... U can also still use rcq chat and stuff afaik...

 

To me it's more about finding ppl with similar interests (aka forums, discord, to an extent reddit) vs a bunch of idiots who hate each other (aka Twitter, twitch, etc). It's not how you call it, it's the ppl. 乁⁠ ⁠˘⁠ ⁠o⁠ ⁠˘⁠ ⁠ㄏ

 

18 hours ago, Sir_Alex said:

Just in Twitter, or continuous feed format.

So discord, but worse? 

[SteveHeist]

On 2/13/2025 at 2:24 PM, gelbphoenix said:

Hey LMG Team and Community,

 

I have a simple question for y'all:

 

Have you thought about joining or even joined decentralised social media (for example: the "ATmosphere" with Bluesky or even the Fediverse with Mastodon, Pixelfed,...)?

 

If you have only joined one: Why not the other one? What would maybe a point for you to look at the other (if you haven't already)?

If you haven't joined: Why haven't you joined an decentralised social media? What would be an point where you would take a look at decentralised social media?

 

I would like to ask you to please keep possible discussions civil and focused. 

I've kept a Mastodon account from the original days of the Twitter exodus. The problem with Mastodon is that it is a ghost town. You can follow people and get something going in the feed but it rarely feels like there's any interaction. Click on a message in the feed and it's just empty of replies. Biggest upside is that, because no one is really talking, if someone has sent a message it sparks a long conversation with the OP.

 

I tried Lemmy (Mastodon but Reddit) briefly and the same experience exemplifies itself when put in that format.

 

Haven't tried Bluesky yet. Have considered it a couple times, as the people I originally moved to Mastodon to follow have since moved to Bluesky and abandoned their Mastodon accounts, but just haven't gotten there because I increasingly find I don't care to bounce between socials. Considering deleting my Masto and just being done with it.

[TudorFinalBosz]

I too tried Mastodon since I made the other post ITT. And it's functional, you subscribe to some accounts that have content you're interested in then you get that in your feeds.

But it does look like a ghost town. And frankly it looks like a hard-left echo chamber mostly. Probably because the people that landed there are ex-Twitter refugees.

Overall boring, but I suppose if it were more populated, that would spice it up (and bring on the usual problems with such large communities).

I suppose if more high-profile or very informative contributors joined, it could drive more people to join.

I think these networks will only get mass adoption if some disruptive event happened, like X getting banned in Europe, which would force a mass migration to something that already exists and works.

My whole feed today is from this account, because the people I subscribed to haven't posted anything for some time

Spoiler

 

[Mark Kaine]

5 hours ago, TudorF said:

I too tried Mastodon since I made the other post ITT. And it's functional, you subscribe to some accounts that have content you're interested in then you get that in your feeds.

But it does look like a ghost town. And frankly it looks like a hard-left echo chamber mostly. Probably because the people that landed there are ex-Twitter refugees.

Overall boring, but I suppose if it were more populated, that would spice it up (and bring on the usual problems with such large communities).

I suppose if more high-profile or very informative contributors joined, it could drive more people to join.

I think these networks will only get mass adoption if some disruptive event happened, like X getting banned in Europe, which would force a mass migration to something that already exists and works.

My whole feed today is from this account, because the people I subscribed to haven't posted anything for some time

  Hide contents

 

Ok so I have to ask... What's wrong with discord? Like I get it, if you want mass feed of fake news you have no other chance than Twitter (or FB I guess) but otherwise...? Why not just use discord, it's "social media" without, for the most part, the toxicity of twitter and (well, twitter...)?

 

Is it really just doom scrolling? You can do that on discord... (lol)

[Mark Kaine]

14 hours ago, Kisai said:

The problem with truely decentralized social media is that it increases balkanization and siloing of data. You are over here, on site AXYS, and the stuff you want to read is on PARALLELOGRAM and ANIMECRABGAMES

Discord solved that problem...

 

It's like a forum with a gazillion sub forums and you only subscribe to the ones you want (lots of overlapping stuff of course but that's not a bad thing, you get different views on the same subject)

 

It's that people don't know how to use it, isn't it?? 

 

PS: you can even archive stuff,but idk how... But some people do and it's incredible.... "BUT YOU SAID THIS AND THIS 4 YEARS AGO..." with quotes and links too ...!

 

 

[smcoakley]

1 hour ago, Mark Kaine said:

Discord solved that problem...

 

It's like a forum with a gazillion sub forums and you only subscribe to the ones you want (lots of overlapping stuff of course but that's not a bad thing, you get different views on the same subject)

 

It's that people don't know how to use it, isn't it?? 

 

PS: you can even archive stuff,but idk how... But some people do and it's incredible.... "BUT YOU SAID THIS AND THIS 4 YEARS AGO..." with quotes and links too ...!

 

 

I think people were focused on the decentralization aspect, and Discord is definitely not decentralized.

[Mark Kaine]

45 minutes ago, smcoakley said:

I think people were focused on the decentralization aspect, and Discord is definitely not decentralized.

 

 

That's the thing it is... Same way as mastodon etc (they're owned as well) its just marketing fluff (imo)

[SpaceGhostC2C]

2 hours ago, Mark Kaine said:

Ok so I have to ask... What's wrong with discord?

 

When I look for Skype alternatives, people say "Discord". When someone looks for Facebook alternatives, you say Discord. Twitter alternative? Discord. It does sound like an absolute app from hell.

Which matches my experience. I was already looking for a videocall app to use with my family like 8 years ago or so, and came across the Discord suggestion. Slowest, longest install I ever had for a videocall program, and upon launching it for the first time, it hard-froze my entire computer, unresponsive to anything except forced power off. Uninstalled it immediately after reboot, and kept trying reasonable alternatives to Skype.

I'm sure millions of people use it without issue. I'm also sure it's trying to be too many things at the same time, more deserving of the name "mastodon" than Mastodon  

 

 

7 hours ago, TudorF said:

I too tried Mastodon since I made the other post ITT. And it's functional, you subscribe to some accounts that have content you're interested in then you get that in your feeds.

But it does look like a ghost town.

(...)

 

My whole feed today is from this account, because the people I subscribed to haven't posted anything for some time

 

That's what it's supposed to be. Is what Facebook would look like without spam and bots - in fact, it's what facebook looked like 17 years ago (15 years ago it was already getting infested by Buzzfeed and the like, although your feed was still a timeline, and the crap accounts only got to you if you added them or your contacts reposted them).

The massive sites we came to know have more action in part, yes, because they are massive, but mostly because their owners put a lot of effort into hiding that most people, most of the time, have nothing to say online, and no one to say it to. Which is not a bad thing, I mean, they're busy living their lives 

[Potatoes__]

I was thinking about taking a look at bluesky but then it hit me - while modern xwitter is a cesspit, I never actually liked the "good old times" of it. In fact I think that the whole idea of posting short posts for likes and reposts is in itself a precursor to modern internet enshittification and advent of clickbait, but that's the whole other story. If a social media is still about being an ass to other people on the internet and splurging any random thought you have encountered in your noggin for everyone to see, it will be a crap place even without the alt-right suckers and no matter how deeply federalized.

 

Pretty much the reason why I pushed myself to post more on this forum - people seem chill, lots of shared interests, and proper moderation that gets rid of people with an urge to be spicy. And I'd rather support a "OoOOH cLosEtEd NaRcIsSisT" rather than a nazi junkie on a power trip  

 

I'm looking for more places to chill like here, any kind of "good" mass social media or convoluted federalized platforms kinda feels just like a different flavor of existing media.

[smcoakley]

5 hours ago, Mark Kaine said:

 

 

That's the thing it is... Same way as mastodon etc (they're owned as well) its just marketing fluff (imo)

I don't think you understand decentralization. In this case it has a very specific technical meaning to it; there's no "imo" about it. In order to be decentralized:

• The hosting of servers must not be the sole responsibility of a single party.
• It must be possible to host a server on your own computer hardware.
• Any communication or interaction between servers must be done in a peer-to-peer fashion using protocols, and not rely on a central mediating service.

Discord is very much not decentralized. All hosting is done by Discord Inc; it is not possible to host a server on your own hardware. If Discord Inc goes away, Discord itself also goes away forever. If Discord Inc's hosting platform has an outage, all Discord servers go down. I cannot run a Discord server on my own hardware.

 

Side note: Discord's use of the word "server" is misleading. It is extremely unlikely that when you create a Discord "server" that you get your own dedicated hardware or system where that "server" runs. They just use the term "server" to refer to a somewhat isolated group of users/channels within their platform. A Discord "server" is not necessarily an actual server in the typical definition of that word.

 

Mastodon is decentralized, because you can install and run a Mastodon server on your own hardware, that can operate completely independently if you want, or interop with someone else's Mastodon server (federation) using protocols. As long as you have the know-how, you could keep your Mastodon server up and running indefinitely, even if Mastodon was no longer being developed, and you were the last person on Earth to even care about hosting a Mastodon server.

 

Now to be fair, decentralization doesn't necessarily mean that a platform is good or useful, it just means those specific technical things are true about it. And it is also true that sometimes people use decentralization as a primary feature to market their application. Which as long as it is a true statement is fine I guess, but most people don't really care about decentralization, they care about how good or useful it is. And a decentralized app that is crappy is still crappy.

[Kisai]

7 hours ago, Mark Kaine said:

Discord solved that problem...

 

Discord is just IRC with extra steps and a monetization strategy that is going to backfire due to 18+ content. Partnered servers are prohibited from having NSFW content.

 

It is not the solution. It replaces Skype, not Twitter.

 

Bluesky replaces twitter, but largely what I've seen is that bluesky has been adopted by visual artists and vtubers, and not a whole lot else, and a lot of that is due to anti-AI sentiment, since Twitter (X) is overrun with negativity, crypto scams, some people are apparently seeing porn everywhere, garbage ads for scam products, and well... let me tell you a story because I've seen this repeat enough times. 

 

You know the term "History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme" ?

 

So with social media, we had OpenDiary, Myspace (Gen 1), Livejournal and it's forms (Gen 2), Facebook (Gen 3), Tumblr (Gen 3) Twitter (Gen 3), and now Bluesky/Mastodon/Threads (Gen 4)

 

So what didn't we learn about OD/Myspace that got brought into Livejournal?

- Major corporate ownership (Myspace) always destroys the service due to trying to turn it into something it isn't.

 

So everyone moved to Livejournal and a handful of it's spin offs since the source code was available for free.

 

These are all now abandoned, this was the first attempt at decentralization, and where the predecessor to oAuth came from (lookup OpenID.)

Quote

Nobody should own this. Nobody's planning on making any money from this. The goal is to release every part of this under the most liberal licenses possible, so there's no money or licensing or registering required to play. It benefits the community as a whole if something like this exists, and we're all a part of the community.

 And when Livejournal was sold to Russian interests, and major security issues became apparent with OpenID, sites supporting it started removing it.

 

What did we learn from Gen 2 (Livejournal and forks)

- We need a decentralized identity system that nobody owns if we are to trust folks

- Siloing is bad, as it starts requiring people to have accounts on everything and people hate that (a lesson corporate interests like Netflix and Disney have yet to learn, and discord has made the same mistake)

- Publicly displaying people's who people follow and are followers of leads to harassment

- Public posts are forever if you lose access (eg yahoo removing all it's email TLD's, no recovering accounts if the site forces password changes after the email service is discontinued, ALSO a lesson Discord has not learned)

 

Next we have Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, and a we will be excluding Google's attempt at this, as well as social-media -like aspects of Youtube, Patreon, onlyFans, Fansly, etc) as that's more of a "paywall" system than social media.

 

Facebook was literately created out of stalking people. That should have been a red flag. Zuckerburg thinks privacy and regulation doesn't apply to him, so a lot of facebook's growth and success was borne out of a blatant disregard for people's safety, privacy and regulatory oversight. Facebook has been on the decline since becoming "Meta" because Facebook is controlled solely by Zuckerburg and he treats it as his personal toy like he always has.

 

Twitter (2006) basically grew out of being a service meant to relay messages between cell phones via SMS (hence the 140 character limit) and web users, it rapidly grew when the ability to add pictures to tweets became possible (indeed I had an account but never used the thing until "everyone else was there".) What helped twitter was it came out on the cusp of the iPhone's release (2007).  So what really helped twitter was that people were both seeing the smartphone revolution AND the abandonment of AIM/Y! messenger and MSN (when Microsoft acquired Skype) Twitter  functionally stopped being twitter in 2021 as it was increasly filled with bots and sycophants aiming to kiss the ring of big influencers for clout. Users are now fleeing it for Bluesky, the successor to Twitter, built by former twitter owner and emplyees. People are largely deleting their timelines or entire x accounts to get away from it.

 

Tumblr, as it grew, felt like an extension of twitter, as it's functionality was basically "twitter but endless quote retweet", this also enabled the rapid harassment of people off the platform. Yahoo ultimately dropped the ball with it's ownership and tried to pull a Myspace. Thus people fled Tumblr after having came here from Gen 3 services. Tumblr is where "doom scrolling" started I feel. Because people would reblog function made "bad" content stick around forever, it kept the credit of the original poster/idiot for bad content, leading people to delete their tumblr's entirely to stop the onslaught of harassment.

 

What did we learn from Gen 3?

- Corporate ownership is bad

- Single-entity control over the service is bad

- Publicly displaying people's followers, and followings leads to clout chasing and harassment

- Real Name policy (Facebook) leads to cyberstalking

- Siloing is bad

- We need a decentralized identity system for social media to function properly

- Public posts are forever when email services go extinct

- Paywalls are bad

- Advertisement funded services are doomed to fail

- People are jerks when given too much anonymity, but also people are still jerks even with no anonymity

- Negative feedback loops are high engagement, and exhausting

 

So now we're off to the races on Gen 4, Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads.

 

Threads is already doomed due to the "corporate ownership" lesson still not being learned. Maybe it can still be learned if it's un-tangled from Instagram. 

 

Bluesky is so far the main exodus from Twitter, tumblr, facebook

 

Mastodon's heavy emphasis on Silo'ing has probably already doomed it.

 

What I predict, based on what we've already seen. Excluding Gen 0 (Usenet), is that the original way Usenet worked was probably the correct way of doing things (distributed content that you can opt-in to feeds of.) In fact I'd go one further and say FIDONET was probably the correct model to copy. Where everything was store-and-forward. The purpose of FIDONET, and later USENET, was that people didn't have to download the entire fidonet/usenet system to use it. You could just download headers of something you had a 'newsfeed' of (a la email) and decide what you wanted to download/read from that. Fidonet/Usenet largely looked like Email, and usenet itself was largely incorporated into email clients of the day, but people who dealt with alt.binaries had other tools to chop 650MB files into a thousands of, 10KB pieces. It also saved bandwidth for ISP's, because it's users could download content from Usenet instead of the open internet which cost them more bandwidth. There is a reason why usenet was largely "news.exampleispname.com" , as it's intent was to operate like a newspaper. Real newspapers didn't want to give away the farm though and went largely unadopted as they adopted their god-awful paywalls-with-ads-still-on-it.

 

Ultimately Torrents is just a super efficient version of alt.binaries usenet when you get down to it. That's an entire other history lesson about the history of file sharing. But the reason I bring it up is that the way Usenet worked, where there was no obstacle to posting anything (including garbage, spam, malware, porn) is why it was successful as it was, and it had all the same problems email did (spoofing, inefficient binary handling, inability to trust an identity )

 

At least (even though it was financially motivated) the idea of "checkmarks" to verify an identity in Gen 3 social media was on to the right idea. In Bluesky, we instead have "using your own domain" , so that people who camp your bsky username because you were late to game, can't impersonate you because they had invite codes before it was publicly available. You need merely own a domain that you can create a txt record for. Journalists can be vetted on bluesky because sites like AP could have their journalist handles (even not-real-names) at appear from ap.org and nobody can impersonate the Associated Press by doing so. AP could even just run it's own data silo that it connects into the Bluesky network, but ultimately it looks like Bluesky is at least doing things right so far that it could overtake Twitter as long as the people in charge don't try to monetize it with ads or subscription paywalls.

 

But as we've seen, we will see another 7-10 year cycle of something popular growing, and then it will fall off a cliff due to a tactical mistake that comes from management wanting to monetize it, and thus the incentivizing of enshittening.

 

[TudorFinalBosz]

8 hours ago, Mark Kaine said:

Ok so I have to ask... What's wrong with discord? Like I get it, if you want mass feed of fake news you have no other chance than Twitter (or FB I guess) but otherwise...? Why not just use discord, it's "social media" without, for the most part, the toxicity of twitter and (well, twitter...)?

 

Is it really just doom scrolling? You can do that on discord... (lol)

I have been on discord since the early days (I think I joined in 2016 or 7) for about 6 years, maybe. Until I realised it was making me unproductive. I had something like over 100 000 chats in my server. One day I just left and, after several years, I can say I made a good decision. I can definitely get more things done without being distracted by the constant chatting.

 

You will say: but that's a user problem, you'd have the same problem with any social media, it's not due to discord. Not really, because Discord is a chat platform. It's a lot more addictive, fast-paced, and even personal, because others can chat with you instantly.

 

Also since Discord is a chat app, it doesn't really give you something like curated feeds of content, in which you can quickly check out what's new from your favourite sources and maybe react to something or post your own. What you get instead is a long queue of chats that keep updating and there could be lots of interesting replies somewhere buried in the queue, but you have to scroll back to weeks before to find what you missed. It's the format of a chat app itself which leads to content being a lot more volatile, instant, and it quickly buries some good content as new replies keep pushing the feed up.

Sure, admins and mods can set up special rooms where some users post something like articles regularly, emulating the style of classic social media. Though typically, these are locked from other users, they can reply to a particular post, only by using emojis to react. And it makes sense because that section of the chat server is reserved for feature articles. It shows the limitations of social media as a chat app.

 

I still have Discord and could use it if someone asks to connect through it, but been there done that and I don't think I'm going back. 

I like more the format of a site like Quora, where you can read well-considered articles, can react to them by commenting, you also have a live feed, your own profile, followers, groups with large number of followers where you can be a contributor. I think they found a pretty good formula for this niche of people interested more in cognitive-cerebral content rather than the latest pics of Bhad Bhabie's butt.

 

But it would be better if it wasn't owned by a corporation posting ads and most likely mining your posts to train AIs. So a combination between Mastodon's and Quora's formulas for me qould be great. The same format as Quora but decentralised and not used for ads and AI training.

[Mark Kaine]

2 hours ago, smcoakley said:

I don't think you understand decentralization. In this case it has a very specific technical meaning to it; there's no "imo" about it. In order to be decentralized:

• The hosting of servers must not be the sole responsibility of a single party.
• It must be possible to host a server on your own computer hardware.
• Any communication or interaction between servers must be done in a peer-to-peer fashion using protocols, and not rely on a central mediating service.

Discord is very much not decentralized. All hosting is done by Discord Inc; it is not possible to host a server on your own hardware. If Discord Inc goes away, Discord itself also goes away forever. If Discord Inc's hosting platform has an outage, all Discord servers go down. I cannot run a Discord server on my own hardware.

 

Side note: Discord's use of the word "server" is misleading. It is extremely unlikely that when you create a Discord "server" that you get your own dedicated hardware or system where that "server" runs. They just use the term "server" to refer to a somewhat isolated group of users/channels within their platform. A Discord "server" is not necessarily an actual server in the typical definition of that word.

 

Mastodon is decentralized, because you can install and run a Mastodon server on your own hardware, that can operate completely independently if you want, or interop with someone else's Mastodon server (federation) using protocols. As long as you have the know-how, you could keep your Mastodon server up and running indefinitely, even if Mastodon was no longer being developed, and you were the last person on Earth to even care about hosting a Mastodon server.

 

Now to be fair, decentralization doesn't necessarily mean that a platform is good or useful, it just means those specific technical things are true about it. And it is also true that sometimes people use decentralization as a primary feature to market their application. Which as long as it is a true statement is fine I guess, but most people don't really care about decentralization, they care about how good or useful it is. And a decentralized app that is crappy is still crappy.

Ok, that's technically correct, but, my definition is just as correct - and I know I didn't even specify it, but hinted at... 

 

Basically this doesn't seem super productive to me, no offense, you can host your own servers at any time, you can probably even call them mastodon (or whatever) it doesn't change how people use social media, chat platforms, or the Internet...  What's far more important is the surface, the UI, and also philosophy... It needs to be attractive, practical, etc... hence I think something like discord is pretty open and somewhat "decentralized". 

 

I think the main issue with most of this is actually fractioning of platforms... There's just *too much* of it.  Not sure there's a solution either, other than a somewhat natural evolution, maybe. 

 

1 hour ago, TudorF said:

I had something like over 100 000 chats in my server.

But... That's exactly the problem with all "social media" platforms... not limited to, but it's a big thing, people take it *too* seriously... And yes, it's addiction too. Kind of a 

 

1 hour ago, TudorF said:

user problem

 indeed. But that's just how it is, some people post too much on reddit, some on traditional forums, some on discord... etc.  the only solution to that is to find a balance that it's not interfering too much with someone's life.

 

Me, I can use discord daily for months, but then there are times I don't use it at all for months... (it's also because of how easy it is to get into, maybe because of how natural conversations often go, etc) But that's why I like it, it's the least addictive chat platform,to me personally at least.  (And oh boy there are a lot of terrible severs for sure , you actually need a bit of luck to find the good ones I'd say) 

 

As for quora... I very rarely use it, I don't even know how it actually works, but I gotta say it's surprisingly civilised and of comparatively good quality.

 

I think I generally really like small communities more, like small but active forums - I've been reading a weird (because it's so mundane lol) small Italian forum for a while, mostly because I really love the dialect most users use, but also because I learned quite a bit that's interesting for my real life...

 

It's called Südtirol news, and it's really interesting and funny if you actually know the country, as it's so different than anything else, at least in Europe lol.*

 

 

Tldr: as I already said, the platform isn't the deciding factor, it's the people and how it's used, and how open it is (whatever that actually means)

 

 

PS: basically, to me, even when I don't frequent it regularly, something like "Südtirol news" has *much* more value than something like "twitter" which is just not interesting at all (and it's not supposed to be, I'm aware ~)

 

*Just to be clear, while I think the concept is interesting, in no way I think it's actually good quality, it's just funny and interesting to me how narrow minded these people often are - however they're also not completely wrong, just a really weird mix.

 

** I'm also well aware that like 99.9% of the worlds population doesn't understand the language they're talking, and never will, which makes all the better to me (and no, I'm not from that country, but I still understand it perfectly fine) 

 

Edit:  

Spoiler

OMG they changed it, you can't read without making an account - that entirely kills it for me - echo chamber ahoy... It already was a pretty bad one lol... Good example of how structure, usability, moderation, etc is more important than "decentralization", your platform is worthless if no one uses it, I mean it doesn't have to but in the grand scheme it is.