People hated exploding-heads and wolfballs for expressing the wrong opinions on lemmy, but the thing that shut down those sites ultimately wasn’t defederation per se, but the fact that lemmy’s architecture inherently lends itself to authoritarian digital feudalism. Now that community is over on nostr where the authoritarian centralized censorship isn’t baked into the architecture.
I’ll take a look at the nostr protocol, but I still think that people will naturally organize themselves into outsourcing “sort/rank/filter/block” functionality to someone else, whether that’s the provider of the service or a third-party plugin that leverages lots of users’ observations and behavior to train the model. In the end, plenty of us want the ability to block content we don’t want to see, rank content (including comments) by interestingness or usefulness or whatever criteria we prefer, whether that’s provided by the actual service or not.
After all, look at how we’ve created an ecosystem of ad blocking: we’ve whitelisted and blacklisted certain sites and domains, certain types of scripts, to where the user can control whether a website shows them ads. But it’s a cat and mouse game, and the software needs to be continually updated to be effective, so most of us just rely on a third-party-maintained browser extension or pihole config to do the ad blocking for us.
In other words, we still want to be able to censor things before they reach ourselves, but certain methods of doing that are more user-friendly, or more user-centered, or more user-configurable than others.
I honestly am just going to go back to making my own websites and using instant messengers again. User-centered control is the way the internet was intended to be used so it’s time we went back to that sort of thing. Obviously relying on other people simply doesn’t work.
…Except for the mods and admins of whatever instance you use, and you can’t even make your own because of the CSAM problem.
It’s turning into digital feudalism, where we peasants try to shop around for a lord to protect us from the other lords.
People hated exploding-heads and wolfballs for expressing the wrong opinions on lemmy, but the thing that shut down those sites ultimately wasn’t defederation per se, but the fact that lemmy’s architecture inherently lends itself to authoritarian digital feudalism. Now that community is over on nostr where the authoritarian centralized censorship isn’t baked into the architecture.
I’ll take a look at the nostr protocol, but I still think that people will naturally organize themselves into outsourcing “sort/rank/filter/block” functionality to someone else, whether that’s the provider of the service or a third-party plugin that leverages lots of users’ observations and behavior to train the model. In the end, plenty of us want the ability to block content we don’t want to see, rank content (including comments) by interestingness or usefulness or whatever criteria we prefer, whether that’s provided by the actual service or not.
After all, look at how we’ve created an ecosystem of ad blocking: we’ve whitelisted and blacklisted certain sites and domains, certain types of scripts, to where the user can control whether a website shows them ads. But it’s a cat and mouse game, and the software needs to be continually updated to be effective, so most of us just rely on a third-party-maintained browser extension or pihole config to do the ad blocking for us.
In other words, we still want to be able to censor things before they reach ourselves, but certain methods of doing that are more user-friendly, or more user-centered, or more user-configurable than others.
We clearly need something better.
I honestly am just going to go back to making my own websites and using instant messengers again. User-centered control is the way the internet was intended to be used so it’s time we went back to that sort of thing. Obviously relying on other people simply doesn’t work.