HeatherTx
sarah zedig! ๐๐it's unbelievable what's happening to the internet right now. just a vacuum of stolen wealth into the pockets of stupendously ignorant tech moguls, with virtually zero regulatory oversight stopping them from joyfully annihilating the informational backbone of modern society.
like it is genuinely embarrassing how tech illiterate our politicians are that they're just as clueless today as they were 20 years ago. every single day i see some new wretched development that makes me want to scream, please, for the love of god, will SOMEONE just make them STOP ALREADY
we need regulation. we NEED regulation. i'm no reformist, i believe the only acceptable longterm solution is the abolition of the profit motive, but holy hell will i settle for literally any government retaliation against these brazen thieving con artists
we're two generations deep into a cultural shift towards primarily online society, yet it's somehow less stable now than it was in 2008! every time we get a healthy network going, some 30-under-30 ivy league failson buys the house sight unseen and burns it down for the insurance.
it's crazy! no one wants this! we're all fucking miserable! and our leaders are just letting it happen, because i guess the only thing a government exists to do is means test the poor and blow up foreign nations
i've been consistently online in some form since at least 2004. most every platform i've ever used is long dead, its content erased, its history forgotten. how are we supposed to make sustainable careers online when the infrastructure is so chaotically ephemeral?
it would be trivially easy for the government to put the brakes on this shit. it's so fucking bad out there now that i'd take even the limpest of liberal regulation if it meant i didn't have to rethink my entire career every six months
of course this problem goes hand in hand with corporate consolidation of news outlets, film studios, ISPs, payment processors, health insurance, you name it.
that our government calls this farce a strong, healthy economy gives the game away. all we are is a casino for the rich. all that labor creates, every unmet need, every nexus of human communication, it's all categorically the same to them: an un-mined mineral deposit, an object of speculation, just money on the table.
and our government's official position seems to be that it's constitutionally immoral to ask (let alone legally mandate) profiteers to not seek profit at literally any/every expense.
it's depressing. i feel lost. everyone i know feels lost, exhausted, scared, fed the fuck up. it cannot be allowed to go on like this. something HAS to give
Jeff@sarahzedig @jenniferplusplus
I agree and it is really disappointing. Do what you can, accept what is, donโt get too attached to your preferred outcome is what I try to tell myself. Life will go on in some new avoidably worse way and it will still be amazing. It will also be mega sad to experience the unnecessary suffering.
I agree and it is really disappointing. Do what you can, accept what is, donโt get too attached to your preferred outcome is what I try to tell myself. Life will go on in some new avoidably worse way and it will still be amazing. It will also be mega sad to experience the unnecessary suffering.
Tsunderdog@sarahzedig the only way to ensure that your work survives an ephemeral, chaotic environment is to create your own hub.
if you don't already have a dedicated website, you may really want to consider it soon.
LP๐ธLight up the night@tsunderdog @sarahzedig unfortunately not a scalable solution because not literally everybody online can afford the energy and money to be their own sysadmin
I hope "small community shared hosting" can be the salve here, but masto is already showing that good migration support is absolutely essential (and currently absent) there.
@LionsPhil sysadmin not required. if the problem is that the work can't be kept online forever, a simple personal gallery will do the job
@tsunderdog I mean, if it's truly standalone, at the end of the day you have to own your own domain. So long as we're talking something interwebby, DNS is kinda the root of identity you can hold on to as companies and services come and go. That's an obstacle, and unfortunately the only way to make it not an obstance is to trust *someone*.
@tsunderdog There is a difference that if my masto instance admin decides they've had enough, I can at least move within mastodon and stay as part of the same system with the same people; whereas as Bad Person decides to burn down birdsite, well, too bad, it's gone.
That's where my hope lies, but there's...still a lot of room for improvement in account mobility for the fediverse.
@tsunderdog (If an instance goes away without warning of course, then, well, hope you were disciplined about keeping current exports. We almost need an inverse cloud backup so people get regular local copies of their stuff.)
@LionsPhil i came to plush from the instance "snouts online". the community exploded in a fireball of internal admin drama and i watched the person who had been handed the keys to the instance the domain destroy it and revel in it over the course of 30 days
communities come and go. BBSes, forums, chatrooms, and services have always been ephemeral.
you can really only save what you love and move on
@LionsPhil i hear what you're saying, i'm in agreement that not everyone can be their own admin. as a freelance artist and general hobbyist, i find my personal website to be a key and essential hub
i don't have to write it on my own with my own skill but i'm doing it because i want to learn
Sofia โญ๐ง๐ทโญ@tsunderdog @sarahzedig sure, personal websites are cool, but how is anyone supposed to know to go to your website if you aren't on other platforms?
Dr.Implausible@sofiav @tsunderdog @sarahzedig Only recently learning of POSSE as an acronym for that very thing (that was sought, but unnamed), let me shout its praises. https://indieweb.org/POSSE
POSSE
POSSE is an abbreviation for Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere, the practice of posting content on your own site first, then publishing copies or sharing links to third parties (like social media silos) with original post links to provide viewers a path to directly interacting with your content.
Ilobmirt@sarahzedig really, where regulation is concerned, at the heart of it, user data is an import and export. User data is a product and it is a super valuable commodity to advertisers. This has been our status quo from the early 2010s onward. Specially since Facebook tossed up into public consciousness.
Social Media companies harvest user data.
Advertisers pay Social Media companies to leverage that data to deliver advertisement.
Right now, user data is training AI to cultivate user experiences that create addiction in the name of extracting more value from communities.
If anything needs regulation, it's user data as a commodity. (Among other things)
@ilobmirt @sarahzedig here we go. This is the right answer. Lemme go download my #audiencecommodity notes off my other lecture spaces. #tinab
@drimplausible @sarahzedig I look forward to reading them whenever you have the time to bring such notes here. ๐ถ๐
Maho ๐ณ๏ธโโง๏ธ@sarahzedig i've been semi-permanently online since 1998. To reach most content of that era i rely on a few magazine cd-roms, and a nonprofit's archival efforts that at the same time is under attack by the world's biggest publishers, and that is unable to archive some of the world's biggest sites anyway because their design is explicitly anti-archival.
Vegetable Gremlin โผโ๐ป@sarahzedig or a grifty over fifty
Mr. Matt 
@sarahzedig there are days I miss crappy phpBB message boards and ICQ as our main means of communicating.
David NetoCan recommend Clay Shirky book "Here comes everybody"
Jigen@sarahzedig While the underlying problem of capitalism caused this, if people hadn't been manipulated to gathering into a single place, putting all their eggs into one basket to enhance their personal profit from the movements of technology, none of this would have occurred. It comes down to individual, collective greed. We need a more holistic solution or we'll be in perpetual whack-a-mole.
Tsutsuku (he/they)@sarahzedig
Even worse because the internet is one of the few third spaces left that anyone has. A place for socialization and entertainment that's open to anyone at any time. Now it's enshittifying the same as the skate parks, malls, and every other third place people used to hang out.
Even worse because the internet is one of the few third spaces left that anyone has. A place for socialization and entertainment that's open to anyone at any time. Now it's enshittifying the same as the skate parks, malls, and every other third place people used to hang out.
kira :3@sarahzedig i have felt for a while that there needs to be some rules or regulation specific to the biggest players because of how much of society works through them now. like they don't even have human customer service for when your accounts get messed up, you can get customer service for an mmo but not for your google account that you need for actual important life shit
Calamity Beast Seydlitz@sarahzedig I'm moving towards an offline existence myself. This online shit ain't worth. It brings out the worst in people.
Kimen ๐ณ๏ธโโง๏ธ@sarahzedig I am a reformist, in the sense that the system is a ball of clay, and it needs to be squashed, pulled apart and reformed.
IAG@sarahzedig I disagree. Regulation won't work because you just know there will be a sneaky sneaky clause that allows tech empires to keep doing the same shit they're already doing. Regulations only apply to poor people when the rich people are writing them.
Dataless@sarahzedig Sane guys, for the most part.
Allan Chow@sarahzedig ngl most of the younguns are also tech illiterate
Clockwork โ๏ธโ๏ธJust the other day I watched a documentary on the Dotcom Bubble and...
How are institutions still failing to deal with this shit for the fifth time in a row??
Andres@sarahzedig Of course they're as clueless today as they were 20 years ago - a bunch of them WERE STILL IN OFFICE 20 YEARS AGO ๐ญ
SaftyKumaStart by enforcing and bolstering antitrust laws. Microsoft, Google, Amazon, the ISPs and telcos...
None of them should exist as they do.
@sarahzedig >"Our politicians are just as clueless today as they were 20 years ago"
Because they are the same fucking people
Because they are the same fucking people
Zฬoรฉ@sarahzedig hopefully this will be a lesson for us all about never letting the capital ever control crowdsourced information
oh wait we've seen this many times before );
stoicmike@sarahzedig Innovation has turned into a series of scams...
\u1f0a1@sarahzedig "But, if you follow the chain of dominoes that falls down what they're really trying to do is shut off our access to information itself.
If they can't do it by law they know there's other ways to do it." โ Jello Biafra / Ice-T
Tagaziel@sarahzedig As it turns out, centralized platforms were a capital B Bad Idea.
Rick Thoman@sarahzedig I had no exception that the US would do anything meaningful to regulate the abuses but though the EU would. So much for thatโฆ
Ricardo Harvin@sarahzedig Collectively, our mistake was not understanding that the web was designed primarily to be a decentralized way to connect the information of individuals and institutions, not a way to aggregate that information.