IninewCrow

The greatest thing that social media ever did for humanity was in its ability to allow all of us to talk to each other in an open platform.

Those private corporate platforms have slowly been eroded and controlled to only waste our time and designed to keep us all angry, afraid, anxious and confused.

Open decentralized social media is bringing us back to that era 20 years ago when social media was just starting and people just talked and openly discussed the issues of the day with one another. It doesn’t matter what kind of platform we have or can create, as long as it is decentralized and controlled by people, everyone will always find value in it because it allows us to talk to one another. The greatest thing I’ve ever found in taking part in the fediverse was in connecting to like minded people who want to talk about the important issues of the day without all the distractions of advertising and without having having to give up my privacy or security and have my identity sold to the highest bidder.

Feb 5, 2025 at 6:41pmWeb
Show threadheavydustFeb 5, 2025

allow all of us to talk to each other

I was doing that just fine 30/40 years ago with BBS, newsgroups, and later with forums such as Lemmy. Social media put a name or a face on people, and was combined with the regular “eternal septembers,” but it didn’t bring anything useful to the conversation IMHO.

Show threadbobs_monkeyFeb 5, 2025
It did break down the barriers for those less technical by bringing the conversation to a web browser that was certainly more accessible as opposed to a terminal, for better or worse. It’s not far off from the fediverse in that it does take some technical understanding to navigate, which does create a sort of barrier. Now, whether that is good or bad is a subject of debate, and I’m inclined to agree that the more accessible a platform is, the more watered down the conversations become.
Show threadrottingleafFeb 5, 2025

It did break down the barriers for those less technical by bringing the conversation to a web browser that was certainly more accessible as opposed to a terminal, for better or worse.

I beg your pardon, but what about web forums? I don’t think anything technical was required with those.

Show threadSckharshantallasFeb 6, 2025
They were good, but is there good forum platforms nowadays that are mobile friendly, have apps etc.?
Show threadrottingleafFeb 6, 2025

WDYM mobile-friendly? There are plenty of engines, I suppose some have adaptive design.

Anyway, I remember browsing websites of that time using Sony PSP default browser. This was certainly harder than anything you get today. Still bearable enough.

Just opened one forum made with Invision Power Board, it is of course not adaptive, but I don’t need endless scroll on a forum. Pretty usable with, well, zoom in, zoom out, tap. All that.

WDYM have apps? You have a web browser. It’s intended to visit websites. I would understand if those apps would provide any functionality outside of that of a website. Maybe putting website bookmarks on the home screen would be a good user-friendly feature for Android though. Those could even use RSS to indicate something. Maybe those should be just RSS indicators even.

If you mean that you don’t want web, just something like Usenet - I have no answer except Usenet itself. Freenet (Locutus) seems to have a winter depression, but I haven’t visited their Matrix channel lately.

Show threadSckharshantallasFeb 6, 2025

What I mean is that there’s a whole different world of how you make an app usable on a mobile phone with portrait screen and a website that’s displayed on a big screen. Many remaining forums I’ve seen from the past were built for a different time, with outdated designs and no good usability on a vertical-based screen.

Now, I’ve seen something line the Swift and Rust forums that do look good on mobile, simple and aesthetically pleasing.

About apps, they’re not necessary indeed, but for many services it’s an assurance that the usability was thought for that environment. For example, the only reason I do enjoy browsing Lemmy is because of the Voyager app that resemble the defunct Apollo for Reddit and copied all the good usability of it for iOS. If it wasn’t for the apps people built for Lemmy, I’d probably not have much drive to come back to it often.

Swift Forums

Swift Forums

Swift Forums
Show threadrottingleafFeb 6, 2025
I know what hobby project I’d want to lift, but I also know that I struggle with much simpler undertakings - like, for example, cooking something normal more than twice a week.
Show threadZorqueFeb 5, 2025

You are the exception, not the rule. Just because you have an easy time with something does not mean everyone does. Everyone experiences interaction in a different way.

Just because it brings no value to your life does not mean that opinion is universal.

Show threadheavydustFeb 5, 2025

Just because you have an easy time with something does not mean everyone does

That was the whole point of my answer.

Show threadbluGillFeb 5, 2025
Only for the moment. Spammers have already found us, but so far in small numbers. All the other bad parts of social media are already here too, just so far not in large amounts and so you can find useful content. But those who gain from the garbage are coming and decentralization doesn't help.
Show threadalvvaysonFeb 5, 2025

The next step, in my opinion, is strong privacy and decentralized organization that fully leverages constitutional rights.

I.e. a privacy preserving social media where labour unions, political parties and religious groups can federate with each other. Servers hosted on their premises and members register through an on-premise process.

A church in a foreign country could generate a thousand aliases and distribute them to their federated sister organizations in a privacy preserving way. Only the church knows which organizations got which aliases and they protect this information.

Your local labour union chapter picks up 20 of those aliases and distributes them to members. They are the only one who knows the person behind the alias.

An observer in this private fediverse trying to obtain the identity would first need to approach the church. The church can stall them and warn downstream through a canary.

The labour union chapter observes the canary and immediately wipes all information.

And if that fails, then full I2P and Tor, with nodes hosted on-premise of churches, political parties and labour unions.

Show threadbobs_monkeyFeb 5, 2025

constitutional rights

Hate to say it, but there’s the very real possibility those days are numbered.

As it sits, those of us that are savvy need to be actively using and promoting privacy-centric communications methodology to ensure we have a means to communicate safely and effectively as time goes on and those tights are further eroded. I don’t see the internet completely dying, given the technical nature of it, but peering and connectivity will likely be hampered in the coming months and years, so it is in our best interest to find and employ feasible solutions now to attempt getting out ahead of anything those muppets come up with.

Show threadsamus12345Feb 5, 2025
Yeah, the US Constitution is just a piece of paper now because nobody’s enforcing it.
Show threadbobs_monkeyFeb 5, 2025

It may be a good time to note that the constitution page on whitehouse.gov is still 404ing.

It’s available on congress.gov and archived under bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov, but the current admin has yet to put it back.

Show threadsamus12345Feb 5, 2025
Oh god, I haven’t checked the White House website since it went full fascist. A big-ass picture of Dear Leader right at the top. North Korea, China, Russia…even those countries don’t have anything so blatantly cult of personality on the front page of their government websites.
Show threadalvvaysonFeb 6, 2025

You are missing the point.

Those days might be numbered, but these places are the last bastion.

They will invade private homes, businesses and offices with impunity first.

Churches in particular have a long history of being relatively safe in (civil) war.

Not immune, just relatively.

Show threadbobs_monkeyFeb 6, 2025

these places are the last bastion.

That’s what I mean? We need to cultivate and solidify our online sanctuaries, or at least methods of secure and private communication now, before everything goes full tits up, because, as you said, they will be all up in our business before we know it.

Like, I’m working on a solution to have someone “steal” my guns so I can file the police report relatively soon, as well as shoring up my servers/archives in the event that the internet becomes intermittent, including hosting a full copy of Wikipedia. I’m also looking into buying some ham radio equipment and speed running that learning curve. I hate to have a tinfoil hat on, but I’m fairly certain something between widespread civil disturbance, civil war, and the collapse of our country are right around the corner, and shit is about to get nasty real quick. The absolute most effective tools we’ll have are communications and information.

Show threadalvvaysonFeb 8, 2025

You are right, but you are just missing an important ingredient: a physical community.

It’s quite easy for autocrats and gangs to isolate and eliminate loners.

And as for the communities, there is a hierarchy. Police officers and soldiers have no hesitation to eliminate gangs and terrorists. That’s their job.

They will have a little more hesitation to attack civil organisations, e.g. sports clubs, political parties and trade union places. But eventually, if someone tells them that terrorist activities were being undertaken, they’ll just follow orders. The way this is done is by getting people unfamiliar with the community to come in and do the dirty job.

They will have the most hesitation to attack religious places of their own religion. Many of the grunts tend to still be religious/superstitious.

Show threadbobs_monkeyFeb 8, 2025
Ah gotcha. Yeah my entire purpose for such means of communication is directly for the purpose of supporting a physical community via ease of digital communication, as well as maintaining communication with the wider world to stay on top of what’s happening outside of our local community.
Show threadfuzzy_adFeb 5, 2025

Open decentralized social media is bringing us back to that era 20 years ago when social media was just starting and people just talked and openly discussed the issues of the day with one another.

Unless the mods remove your posts.

Show threadsamus12345Feb 5, 2025
Then start your own server and post whatever you want.
Show threadauraithxFeb 5, 2025
Doesn’t really work once spaces are established. Most of reddits problems aren’t the admins, it’s the volunteer subreddit mods which function just the same as lemmy.
Show threadenkersFeb 6, 2025

Remember, there were plenty of rounds of moderator purges on reddit, especially when subs would lock down in protest. Any mod with ethics and a backbone would’ve been shown the door. So I think it’s fair to say a lot of the moderation problems were at least in part caused by the admins.

At least on Lemmy, different instances have different ethoses, so communities can be more in line with the instance they’re on, and there isn’t this need for absolute centralised conformity.

Show threadauraithxFeb 6, 2025
Yeah there was still problems with the admins. But 95% of the problems people encountered day-to-day and what killed discussion and the vibe was virgin subreddit mods.
Show threadCarbonBasedNPUFeb 6, 2025
How do you solve that though?
Show threadauraithxFeb 7, 2025

Idk. Ban from communities after negative karma threshold with an automatic vote weighted by users subreddit karma to appeal? Just the first thing that popped to mind though sure there’s better ways. Matrix was working towards something iirc last i checked.

As it stands you can get blocked for life from a significant portion of lemmy for saying Trump is worse than Kamala would’ve been.

Show threadCarbonBasedNPUFeb 7, 2025
If that was in place you could get banned from all of lemmy for saying that but it wouldn’t even have to come from a mod just someone with enough free time to make a couple thousand accounts. I personally like the way one of the discords im in does it where it is basically a draft from the mod team to be head mod and leads to significantly less power tripping because they will be gone in the next month.
Show threadauraithxFeb 7, 2025
Hence weighted by reputation.
Show threadsamus12345Feb 7, 2025
If you (rightfully) believe that, then any place blocking you isn’t somewhere you want to be, anyway.
Show threadauraithxFeb 7, 2025
Huh, why? Because of shit management?
Show threadfuzzy_adFeb 7, 2025
You pay mods and make them have rules.
Show threadfuzzy_adFeb 7, 2025

Then there’s nothing unique about open and decentralized social media.

The technology where I could “start my own server” has always existed.

Show threadsamus12345Feb 7, 2025
Right, but getting people to actually know it exists is the problem. That’s why federated decentralized media is a good thing.
Show threadfuzzy_adFeb 10, 2025
Isn’t federation just another version of moderation?
Show threadsamus12345Feb 10, 2025
No. It’s how different instances share content with one another.
Show threadSouthEndSunsetFeb 5, 2025

Same. I’ve learned a lot since I joined Lemmy.

I genuinely believe centralised social media was created to make you feel like you’re doing something.

Show threadirelephant [he/him]🍭Feb 9, 2025
I love mastodon because its actual people I’m following, so I can see whats happening in their lives, in contrast to twitter, which just showed me constant outrage bait and shitposts.
Show threadIninewCrowFeb 9, 2025
I’ve been lazy on Mastodon because I’ve been spending all my time on Lemmy … I really should do more there in the future … thanks for the reminder.
Show threadirelephant [he/him]🍭Feb 9, 2025
Heh, same. The “subreddit” format is incredibly addictive.