Comment by AnthonyMouse
5 months ago
> Much like how monopolies can destroy free markets, unchecked propaganda can bury information by swamping it with a data monoculture.
The fundamental problem here is exactly that.
We could have social media that no central entity controls, i.e. it works like the web and RSS instead of like Facebook. There are a billion feeds, every single account is a feed, but you subscribe to thousands of them at most. And then, most importantly, those feeds you subscribe to get sorted on the client.
Which means there are no ads, because nobody really wants ads, and so their user agent doesn't show them any. And that's the source of the existing incentive for the monopolist in control of the feed to fill it with rage bait, which means that goes away.
The cost is that you either need a P2P system that actually works or people who want to post a normal amount of stuff to social media need to pay $5 for hosting (compare this to what people currently pay for phone service). But maybe that's worth it.
>We could have social media that no central entity controls, i.e. it works like the web and RSS instead of like Facebook. There are a billion feeds, every single account is a feed, but you subscribe to thousands of them at most. And then, most importantly, those feeds you subscribe to get sorted on the client.
The Fediverse[1] with ActivityPub[0]?
[0] https://activitypub.rocks/
[1] https://fediverse.party/
Something along those lines, but you need it to be architectured in such a way that no organization can capture the network effect in order to set up a choke point. You need all moderation to be applied on the client, or you'll have large servers doing things like banning everyone from new/small independent servers by default so that people have to sign up with them instead. The protocol needs to make that impossible or the long-term consequences are predictable.
>but you need it to be architectured in such a way that no organization can capture the network effect in order to set up a choke point.
How is that not the case now?
>You need all moderation to be applied on the client, or you'll have large servers doing things like banning everyone from new/small independent servers by default so that people have to sign up with them instead.
I suppose. There are ActivityPub "clients" which act as interfaces that allow the former and act as agents for a single user interacting with other ActivityPub instances. which, I'd expect can take us most of the way you say we should go.
I haven't seen the latter, as there's really no incentive to do so. Meta tried doing so by federating (one-way) with threads, but that failed miserably as the incentives are exactly the opposite in the Fediverse.
I suppose that incentives can change, although money is usually the driver for that and monetization isn't prioritized there.
>The protocol needs to make that impossible or the long-term consequences are predictable.
Impossible? Are you suggesting that since ActivityPub isn't perfect, it should be discarded?
ActivityPub is easily 75% of where you say we should go. Much farther along that line than anything else. But since it's not 100% it should be abandoned/ignored?
I'm not so sure about your "long-term consequences" being predictable. Threads tried to do so and failed miserably. In fact, the distributed model made sure that it would, even though the largest instances did acquiesce.
ActivityPub is the best you're going to get right now. and the best current option for distributed social media.
Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Edit: I want to clarify that I'm not trying to dunk on anyone here. Rather, I'm not understanding (whether that's my own obtuseness or something else) the argument being made against ActivityPub in the comment to which I'm replying. Is there some overarching principle or actual data which supports the idea that all social media is doomed to create dystopian landscapes? Or am I missing something else here?
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