I suggest watching the video, https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QkC1aK7jfLo but the article has an OK summary.
Also a Mastodon shout-out in the video.
She was a great guest - and it was really cool to hear the “mastadonverse” shoutout haha.
While not 100% her final point, one of the greatest disappointments of the Internet has been watching rot and crumble into just 5 websites, each just posting screenshots/videos from the other four.
I’m doing my part!
I never used Twitter in the first place, so I guess I’m not in the “addicted” category, but I did have an account, in November of 2024 I did actively cancel that X account. Google pushes me X links in my “news feed” I consistently tell Google “No more stories from ____ on X” (they won’t let you block all of X, I wonder why…)
Seriously, folks, how hard is it to just walk away? I was on BlueSky for about 3-4 months, got a little invested/addicted to the platform and took a hard look at what value I was getting from it - on balance: negative. Cold turkey, do I miss it? No.
Facebook holds a (solitary) users group I occasionally want to talk with captive, they acknowledge it’s a terrible platform but they’re too lazy to leave, so I log in when I need to talk with them and that’s it. Anybody “in there” I care about? Long distance phone calls are free these days, e-mail works, why should I be sharing stuff with people I don’t know just to communicate with people I do know?
The average American feels an unmet need for connection. Social media immediately fills that need, exactly like a drug. For a few minutes anyway. You don’t get the benefits of a real connection, just the dopamine. Pretty soon you feel worse, and the best way to stop feeling bad is to hit refresh or keep scrolling. I’m glad we’re finally looking at the consequences of social media for kids, then we can look at what it does to adults.
in other news, water is wet.
I’ve been telling people this for over 15 years.
I hope one day people finally do it, but I won’t waste my breath anymore on insufferable people who are willing to sell out their freedom for convenience.
They’ve both been irrelevant to me for years now.
Since this is Lemmy, I can’t tell if you’re talking Meta/X or EFF and Jon…
All of them lol, i used to watch jon stewart every night during the bush years but now under trump it’s just i dont need to hear it anymore been the same story since i was a little kid and now it’s less funny than ever how much worse trump is than even bush was
Yeah, I hear ya. I can’t watch Jon, Colbert, or any comedian really because it’s all too depressing. Before, you had this naive assumption that it’ll get fixed eventually. The “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”, blah blah blah. I don’t know if Dr King knew just how long he was talking about.
There was a similar post recently about Cambridge leaving twitter, and it got me thinking that universities are really the ideal organizations to host lemmy servers. They have a vested interest in truth and community building. They have a decent enough sense of free speech to stay federated with most other instances. They have pre-existing communities on topic ranging from clubs to technical subjects. Users can confirm their identities by association with the universities, which will keep things civil. Obviously I don’t think they should be the only instances - anonymity has it’s place and value - but I really think universities should be hosting instances.
Im surprised there aren’t student clubs or something hosting instances now that you mention it. That would be a great student project for any CS or even journalism schools.
Right! Plus, it’d be an ideal route to solicit donations to the university - people are more attached to their social media than sports ball teams. Not hosting lemmy and mastadon instances is practically throwing away money!
Depends on the university. Some of them are still like that, some of them are totally ideologically captured such that they have encoded being anti-free speech into their conduct codes, and/or they simple would not want to deal with the fallout of bad actors would/could do to their servers.
A lot of university’s slide towards authoritarian centralizing of power post COVID along with internalizing their student bodies. Sadly. They themselves aren’t the bastions of freedom and truth they once were, because those things don’t make the bottom line go up. Many also closed off spaces and programs that were previous open to the public to further isolate themselves from the rest of the world. MIT had libraries and other facilities anyone could use, and now they shut them all off from public access post COVID.
Then she says Bluesky doesn’t have an algorithm while he defends the openness of Reddit.
These are the experts…
Yeah it’s just follow the money, if a giant corporate entity owns it, it’s going to fuck you and leave you for dead without flinching. It’s really that simple, whether its mcdonalds verizon google geico paramount or any of the other large companies, youre a number on a spreadsheet and if you die they don’t even notice and they will sell you dogshit and leave a smiley face on the receipt. If you owe anything they send your account to collections and minimum wage workers will tell your family they have to pay the debts you left behind.
Fuck reddit Fuck spez
🤦
Too little too late. They’re right tho
Turns out getting your news from entities that financially support fascism is a bad idea.
Give them a few more years and every site except big social media will be flagged as dangerous in your browser, like those without valid SSL certs are now.
Pushing SSL was probably the last big tech effort/push that actually benefited users. Sure it made self hosting a little harder, and probably consolidated some tracking behind bigger players, but overall end users did benefit.
Most of what I see now is purely for their benefit and users don’t benefit.
Yeah, rallying against SSL is a weird way to go about it. SSL is one of the biggest and most meaningful changes to come about as a result of the Snowden leaks. The leaks were literally what prompted http to shift towards https instead, because it shined a bright spotlight on how insecure http truly is.
In the short term, it made self-hosting more difficult. But nowadays, with things like nginx and Let’s Encrypt, enabling SSL on your self-hosted site is as simple as selecting a few drop-down boxes, pasting an API key, and automating a cert refresh.
The true “has the potential to gatekeep the entire internet” existential threat is when a company like Meta or Google becomes the authority for things like ID verification or SSO.
“has the potential to gatekeep the entire internet”
Add Cloudflare hosting everything to that list.
A big man in the middle attack service, operating in a hostile nation? What could go wrong?
Cloudflare hosting everything
But it’s so cheeeeeep! My website (continuously hosted since 1996) used to cost me $15 per month, since I migrated it to Cloudfare they’re charging $0.01 ro $0.02 per month for the same hosting services - it’s been about 18 months now, I think - I just got last months “bill” - I now owe them $0.25, but they won’t charge me until it hits $1.00.
Free service? YOU are the product.
I’m not rallying against SSL. Just an example of browser warnings.
Wouldn’t be surprised in the least.
We’re well on our way to being something in between North Korea and Russia. Maybe Hungary would be a good comparison.
People still use them? Why?
Marketplace killed Craigslist because they’re actually halfway decent at detecting and removing scams. Basically the only redeeming feature
Craigslist is still limping along, it’s a smaller group of buyers but still has traction in some markets.
probably sunk cost (time invested, followers gained, networking) + real addiction (meta and x will try to trigger any emotion from you so you are invested in the platform) + accessibility (free or cheap access on mobile data with big providers)
Gee, wonder Fediverse users, how is that even possible? /s
They aren’t important to me, that’s for sure. I never use them and maybe have a stale IG account (since that’s meta related). They could turn off tomorrow and I wouldn’t notice. Good riddance is what I’d say.
I find the disagreement between Cohn and Stewart towards the end to be fascinating. I find it hard to agree or disagree with either. Cohn is looking out for places like the Fediverse - she knows that if the platforms are subjected to regulation that is impossible to live up to for small actors, this will only serve the capitalists. In the US the law would for sure end up serving this purpose because it would be designed by the billionaires themselves, and they would design them in a way that monopolizes the internet even more as they discuss earlier on.
On the other hand, Stewarts is also right. An Instagram feed is not free speech, it’s brain rot and propaganda and ruins society and lives. It needs to be regulated. Just letting then go on as they are while promoting alternatives misses the mark as to the threat posed by these platforms. Cohn seems to have a blind spot here.
I think the EU has reached a reasonable compromise. They regulate very large online platforms - platforms with more than 45 million users in the EU - separately from smaller platforms. So your obligations increase with your number of users. Furthermore, EU regulation has exceptions for open source not-for-profit development, to avoid regulation aimed at big tech from hurting free software.
Interesting enough I keep seeing people on the Fediverse attacking the Digital Services Act as though it’s gonna mean the end of the Fediverse, even though the Commission is actively posting about it on their own Mastodon instance and the EU is actively supporting the development of the Fediverse through NLnet. It seems to me that even in these spaces people fall for big tech propaganda.
As much as anyone may dislike it, it’s a form of private journalism, private opinion, and private art, and almost all the content itself is free speech. You have to regulate the medium as harmful, very specifically described functionality. What is not protected is stuff like infinite scrolling, but something like comments and voting are likely also protected as speech.
I think Mozilla’s controversial “Deplatforming is not enough” lays out a better strategy for “the algorithm” problem to me.
Having big tech be able to work in secret to pick anf choose what content isnt allowed and then being super charged by the state to do it for them as well just doesnt sit well with me
While I don’t disagree with the transparency Mozilla is advocates, I think it fails to address the underlying problem then tries to compensate by picking and choosing winners (which arguably is the same as the underlying problem). The underlying problem is the ad-incentivized watchtime algorithm, which isn’t a technical issue but a financing one.
I’ve been an advocate of endowments for a long time, but this is just another area where they’d be ideal. They supply a small steady income to support a relatively cheap product. As the website grows you can either do temporary ads to grow the endowment or ask for donations. Either way, it’s not that hard to fund operations this small. Add in federated systems like lemmy and each individual operation is even smaller and cheaper.
Heck, universities who are already accustom to dealing with endowments would be ideal places to host lemmy instances. I can definitely imagine offering to donate 10k to an endowment dedicated to hosting a lemmy and mastadon instance with open to registration to students, staff, and alumni. Maybe coordinate with the computer science and IT folks. Allow some percentage of the endowment income to go to “salary overhead” while the rest just funds the server. Point out that the university would essentially be creating the perfect route to solicit donations and they might do it themselves… Honestly, I’m probably gonna flesh this idea out and email the people at my university because it’s just too perfect of a solution.
On the other hand, Stewarts is also right. An Instagram feed is not free speech, it’s brain rot and propaganda and ruins society and lives. It needs to be regulated. Just letting then go on as they are while promoting alternatives misses the mark as to the threat posed by these platforms. Cohn seems to have a blind spot here.
I don’t think so. She said she wants to make them unable to continue with their business like they did before, with regulations. Just not outright censorship, but instead go fight their data harvesting, decapitating their business strategy.
yeah, the root issue is on their business strategy, the brainrot is just the conclusion of several years spent on optimizing engagement
Very cool of him to have a spokesperson for the EFF on, they have tirelessly been fighting the good fight for decades now, they deserve all the spotlight.
Not just a spokesperson. Cindy Cohn is a warrior queen. She’s retiring as Executive Director of the EFF this year after serving for over 10 years. She’s a lawyer who has been fighting for our civil liberties for over 20 years. Maximum respect.
Fedora tip for m’lady
I love how Jon thinks reddit is now good. way to miss the mark there man.
I guess they had the opposite development of Twitter, banning hateful content and trying to keep their house clean. Compared to Zuck and Musk whoever runs Reddit can probably be argued to be a great humanist.
Not saying it’s a good platform. It’s still a cesspool in my experience, and their approach to moderation produces a wild amount of false positives while bots are roaming free. It seems to me very far from a place for genuine human connection.
Nevertheless, for someone who sees social media as being Instagram, Facebook, X, TikTok, Reddit, and Snapchat, I can see how Reddit stands out as the better option.
It’s too bad Cohn didn’t get to talk more about Mastodon.
While Jon comes across as a white knight, and I really enjoy his satirical personna, I sometimes find his lukewarm condemnation of the Gaza genocide, and take on other subjects, a bit suspicious.
I guess age makes me more cautious.
I had a lot of hopes for Jon, and he’s kind of letting me down here. Not the guy we need, he lacks the killer instinct we need. To take the nomination from the dems establishment and challenge the r’s that is. He trusts the establishment too much.
He could win though, if he tried.
he’s a comedian. not a politician.
It’s not about what he is now, it’s about answering the call for what we need. It’s time to man up and serve because we need a champion.
There isn’t a distinction between those two things anymore. They’re the same.
probably because its astroturfing/supressing anti-zionist content. i notice hes pretty much pro-zionist, not as much as someone like SEINFELD though.
I think he feels a need to defend jewish people, which yeah innocent Jewish people deserve to be defended, but netanyahu and the hardcore zionists do everything to confuse people.
Israel is not all Jewish people, and even netanyahu is not representative of Israeli Jewish citizens. netanyahu has a back log of domestic criminal investigations about as long as trump and he’s also using war to keep criminal investigations paused.
Idk I haven’t seen quite that, but I imagine he’s conflicted, not immune to propaganda and peer pressure. And self preservation in watching what he says. I don’t know enough to agree or disagree with you, but he did come out against Israel’s bullshit towards the start of the gaza thing when even my man Bernie wouldn’t.
He’s probably having to toe a line to not get cancelled.
