Technology

My own “we need” list, from a dork who stood up a web server nearly 25 years ago to host weeb crap for friends on IRC:

We need a baseline security architecture recipe people can follow, to cover the huge gap in needs between “I’m running one thing for the general public and I hope it doesn’t get hacked” and “I’m running a hundred things in different VMs and containers and I don’t want to lose everything when just one of them gets hacked.”

(I’m slowly building something like this for mspencer.net but it’s difficult. I’ll happily share what I learn for others to copy, since I have no proprietary interest in it, but I kinda suck at this and someone else succeeding first is far more likely)

We need innovative ways to represent the various ideas, contributions, debates, informative replies, and everything else we share, beyond just free form text with an image. Private communities get drowned in spam and “brain resource exhaustion attacks” without it. Decompose the task of moderation into pieces that can be divided up and audited, where right now they’re all very top down.

Distributed identity management (original 90s PGP web of trust type stuff) can allow moderating users without mass-judging entire instances or network services. Users have keys and sign stuff, and those cryptographic signatures can be used to prove “you said you would honor rule X, but you broke that rule here, as attested to by these signing users.” So people or communities that care about rule X know to maybe not trust that user to follow that rule.

Agreed. But we need a solution against bots just as much. There's no way the majority of comments in the near future won't just be LLMs.

Unfortunately, Lemmy demonstrates pretty clearly that decentralized systems are just as vulnerable to propaganda and brain rot.

I'm not so sure. Depends if there's a solution to the bots. Bluesky is inundated with them already.

Decentralized is too complicated. Worker owned is a better path forward and is centralized so it's easier to support and be understood by its users. Moderators are workers and should have equity.

Honest question, what are the incentives for instance operators to play nice, so to speak? And not just recreate new oligarch safe havens?

It seems like each instance is a miniature zone of centralization and it's still incumbent on individuals to create their own circles of influence. For better or worse that's how we get hivemind echo chambers and I'm not sure it's even in human nature to seek anything else.

Alternatively we have to rescue our friends and families when they start to fall for BS and educate them aggressively on improving the sourcing of their information.

How do we protect ourselves from propagandists and censors? Large, small, popular and individual.

I want not just decentralized

but peer to peer

like Briar, but Lemmy-style

Guns are the only alternative to the tech oligarchy.

You think they can't buy, manipulate, or just crush decentralized social media? If anything they can do it easily, divide and conquer. FOSS ain't gonna free you, esp. when the largest contributors to FOSS projects are big corps.

Well it helps, but if you live under an oligarchy they will find ways to stop uncontrolled social media.

You have to address the root of the problem or you will ultimately fail as soon as you get big enough to be a problem.

I dont want to deal with people gore spamming every single Matrix channel again.