confuserIEEE talking about fediverse
schnurritou wot m8
The article simultaneously takes the positions:
- that it’s a good and acceptable thing that governments are banning social media for young people, prescribing how social media companies must design their platforms, that the recent court ruling on “social media addiction” was well decided. (in the section “How Governments Are Regulating Social Media”)
- that we should move to services independent from big tech companies, such as the fediverse. (in the section “How Social Media Platforms Could Be Redesigned”)
Do they not see that these are, at least in practice, contradictory positions? For big tech companies, it’s possible to comply with the kinds of government regulations described there, they have hordes of lawyers who can advise them how to do that. For fediverse instance admins meanwhile, it is a lot more difficult to do that. The future of the fediverse absolutely depends on governments staying out of the Internet as much as possible, especially from applying their laws to foreign website operators. All that government regulation does is make sure no one who doesn’t have a revenue from which they can pay any claims they are liable for can ever operate a website where users can participate.
julianI disagree. I think that you can have both.
I think big tech has proven that it cannot be trusted. Their priorities are simply not in alignment with our own. Legislation seems to be the only lever that can hope to rein them in (market forces are no longer strong enough).
At the same time, smaller networks do not have the resources to comply with government regulations to a T, and so they should be given a longer leash. Governments also do not have the resources to chase down every Tom, Dick, and Harry running a Lemmy server (well, they do, but they shouldn't.)
Whether reality will play out this way is uncertain.
I think big tech has proven that it cannot be trusted. Their priorities are simply not in alignment with our own.
agreed
Legislation seems to be the only lever that can hope to rein them in (market forces are no longer strong enough).
I don’t agree. The Internet, at least when not regulated to death, allows new websites to rise and old ones to fall, this has happened many times and can happen again in the future.
At the same time, smaller networks do not have the resources to comply with government regulations to a T
agreed
and so they should be given a longer leash
Not easy to implement in terms of legislation.
Governments also do not have the resources to chase down
and you want to rely on governments not having resources to do things that laws say they could do?
artifexI think big tech has proven that it cannot be trusted.
I’d go a step further and say that if big tech must control the internet it would be better to not have an internet at all (and that’s coming from someone who remembers life without it well and currently uses it a lot). But given the current situation I would hand back any true productivity gains, casual enjoyment, etc to take away the global narrative control that a tiny handful of companies have.