Guillotines are another option.
this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2025
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More will just spawn and take their place.
More heads require more guillotines.
Can we not design guillotines that cut multiple heads at once, thus reducing the head to guillotine ratio?
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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.
I think the key is building a social information system based on connections we have in real life. Key exchange parties, etc
It's the only way to introduce a prohibitively high cost to centralized broadcast and reduce the power of these mega-entities
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It might be the only path forward.
I mean humanity survived thousands of years without any social media at all...
Gonna disagree here.
Humans have always had "social media", but it's not been directed by a cadre of oligarchs until recently.
I mean shit, humans have been sitting around the campfire telling stories to each other going all the fucking way back to forever. Sure, a campfire story isn't a tweet, but for our monkey brains it's essentially the same thing: how we interact with our social groups and learn what's going on around us.
The problem is that the campfire stories couldn't be manipulated into making your cavemen neighbors hate the other half, because half of them were totally pro rabbit fur while you're pro squirrel fur.
You absolutely can do that and worse now, so while we've always had social media, we just simply never had anyone with enough control to make an entire society eat each other because of it's influence.
Lol chimpanzees kill each other in literal wars with torture, kidnapping, extortion, terrorism and more, and you think a caveman never thought of lying about the enemy group?
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I just wish we had a bit more political balance here... I'm not talking about fascists, but more people that don't blame everything on capitalism would be kind of nice...
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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.
Closed instances with vetted members, there’s no other way.
Too high of a barrier to entry is doomed to fail.
Programming.dev does this and is the tenth largest instance.
Techy people are a lot more likely to jump through a couple of hoops for something better, compared to your average Joe who isn't even aware of the problem
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10th largest instance being like 10k users... we're talking about the need for a solution to help pull the literal billions of users from mainstream social media
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we have to use trust from real life. it's the only thing that centralized entities can't fake
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Unfortunately, Lemmy demonstrates pretty clearly that decentralized systems are just as vulnerable to propaganda and brain rot.
That's the nature of the beast. You can't have human users on a network without at least some slop.
But the decentralized network ensures that a "techno-baron" has no more say than you or I, which is exactly what the internet is supposed to do.
That's decidedly better than a centralized system, especially now.
So long as it is humans posting this will be a problem. The benefit of a federated system is that you can't compromise the person at the top and then everything collapses.
I just jumped on here today (from seeing this article on Reddit) but my understanding is that the advantage is that the CEO can't decide he wants to suck authoritarian cock and destroy our ability to discuss and/or organize.
(Admittedly I joined the biggest server I could find so I kind of violated that idea as well).
Welcome! Some people have gripes with dot world for being the biggest, etc. but generally you'll be fine.
You can always search for communities here as well. .
There's many apps and frontends and too. Some are preincluded into lemmy.world. If you like old reddit try old lemmy for example.
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Humans are vulnerable to propaganda. Lemmy's architecture is against censorship. This helps to push back against propaganda, but only so much. But at least not being censored is a big win IMO.
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Except the propaganda was explicitly grown on reddit.
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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.
That's absurd. Large sharp dropped blades, poison, starvation, spears, looped ropes, fire... There are many alternatives available.
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I want not just decentralized
but peer to peer
like Briar, but Lemmy-style
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.
This is probably why the tech industry has been hardened against that sort of thing, and is, say, famously hard to unionize.
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