[bad_alloc]

People complain a lot about the internet getting worse and worse. We can fix it, if we put in the effort to rebuild it.

* Join fediverse services, e.g. [Lemmy](feddit.de) or Mastodon and post a bit.

* Create your own website if you have sth like a cool hobby to share. Webhosting is available for free or cheap, depending on what you want. Link other pages you like to form a net.

* If you can, host your own instances and federate.

* Look into alternative search engines like marginalia to find "small-web" content

* Talk to your friends to also make the move or at least look at alternatives to the large sites.

We can't just wait for the problem to fix itself, this is something where internet users have to become active. It won't solve itself.

EDIT: Commenters here are rightly saying that discoverability is a problem. Again, relying on search engines is required for productivity, but when we consider browsing for research or leisure, don't underestimate manually curated link pages. Webrings were a thing we might wanna consider again.

[OfSanguineFire]

Fediverse (in the sense of the major servers that federate) is an extreme echo chamber representative of mainly a certain sociopolitical wing and mainly from North America and Western Europe. Just look at mastodon.social/explore and consider that many founding activists of Mastodon have spoken about how they yearn to keep the community just like that even as it grows.

Part of the early internet was about being able to find a huge range of different attitudes and beliefs, every possible politics, every possible religion. It was about being able to get a glimpse of non-Western cultures you might never have been able to learn about before. There is very little diversity in the fediverse.

[afavour]

I disagree about your assessment of the early internet. It was extremely white and nerdy when looked at on average. Certainly diversity was out there but it wasn’t easily found, much like the fediverse today.

Even Wikipedia (not that it counts as early internet):

> I knew that early Wikipedia editors were (and kinda still are) academically-inclined hacker dudes, but it's crazy when you realize the article about mole day, created January 2002, is an entire year older than the article "hip hop music" and five years older than "fashion show"

https://twitter.com/depthsofwiki/status/1716655903695425695

[OfSanguineFire]

By 1995 I was regularly interacting on the internet with Japanese, people in the former USSR (who wouldn't necessarily be considered "white"), Romanians, etc. What was special is that when those people had political and social views that may have differed from one's own, but were representative of their countries, they could air those views. And the result was that a user of the nascent internet could learn about the world's diversity of societies and views.

Mastodon's federation policies, which require mod instances to police anti-LGBT speech for example, expressly excludes that. If you spend any time on the Nigerian internet, for instance, you see this is a matter that ordinary people are strident about, but they would be unwelcome in the fediverse except for those few, often westernized+hipsterized people whose views conform to what the Mastodon founding generation is comfortable with. Don't people in, say, sub-Saharan Africa, or the Middle East, or (Great Firewall aside) China have the right to join this ecosystem and still be the ordinary representatives of their societies that they are?

[2devnull]

It was much more diverse back then only if you were looking for or desiring that diversity. I was drawn to it for that reason, the foreign languages, the strangeness. I feel like the same people now who prefer homogenization of their internet are people who never experienced that diversity. Because they are people who don’t really like diversity, not in the literal sense. They like a certain type of diversity, which is how the internet got ruined.

[shadowgovt]

I'd be interested to learn more. What is the bad kind of diversity, and what is the good kind of diversity?

[RationalDino]

The bad kind of diversity is projecting your ideology onto others, and deciding to like them. The good kind of diversity is attempting to understand what it would be like to think in ways that are alien to you.

To consider current events, let's take Hamas. Hamas is a deeply conservative and radicalized group. They believe in banning abortion, killing gays, killing Jews, and that atheists are evil. This is not slander, they would agree with all of this. And there are good historical reasons why they believe these things.

Suppose that you're LBGTQ+ and aren't a member of a church, and are carrying a sign saying, "Palestine will be free from sea to sea." What are you actually supporting? You're supporting people who are brown and oppressed, who in turn would like to see you dead. Now it may be that in your ideology it is worth this on ethical principles. But most people like that who I've dealt with simply ignore the fact that they are supporting people who believe in banning abortion, killing gays, killing Jews, and that atheists are evil. And then are caught by surprise if they encounter the fact that Hamas believes in banning abortion, killing gays, killing Jews, and that atheists are evil. (And try to forget that they heard it.)

I, personally, like knowing a diverse group of people. And understanding them for who they are. I may disagree with them violently, but I still like trying to understand them. But this requires a very different kind of tolerance than most progressives preach. For a start, you can't start by banning intolerant speech. Because there is no way to express the intolerant views that many people actually have without being willing to listen to (though not agree with) intolerant speech.

[soundnote]

Presumably: The bad sort is a diversity where people look different but all think more or less the same, so the proponents can pat themselves on the back for being good and openminded people but don't actually have to deal with genuinely different people. You can see it in how those sorts tend to despise people who look the same as themselves but have different views and how their love of diversity disappears the second the different-looking person doesn't hew to their ideology.

[2devnull]

Like San Francisco used to be more diverse, that’s what I’m getting at. People will argue that point, because the word diversity has taken on different meanings. I’d say there is diverse-diversity and less-diverse-diversity. I prefer one thing, other people are more tribal and prefer that other structure. Both types are needed, but I think we could use a bit more diverse-diversity at the moment, to increase dynamism. Mix things up a bit. At least with respect to the internet.

[pastage]

> [nigerians] would be unwelcome in the fediverse except for those few, often westernized+hipsterized people

Considering people are sentenced to death by stoning for being LGBTQ in Nigeria. It is easy to understand why this might be an issue worth policing if you can.. Is it sane to fedderate with people who might be killed for what they interact with on your fediverse. Ordinary people does include gay people you know.

There is nothing hindering the ones who want to kill all gays to run their own fediverse.

[EricE]

Ah yes, the noble bigotry argument. Historically that's never, ever lead to disaster.

[pastage]

It is quite hard to understand short comments. What are the relevant disasters you are talking about in this instance?

[KittenInABox]

How can you possibly claim that social diversity was universal in the old school internet when "tits or gtfo" was an extremely common meme for anyone who claimed to be female?

No, in my experience people mostly kept to individual federated spaces dependent on interests or demographics. LGBTQ people kept to their IRC channels, black people kept to their channels, and banned anyone who was also a member of the local nazi IRC channel. This was totally normal and I don't see a difference between 1990s era IRC and Fediverse in this respect.

[shadowgovt]

There's nothing about the fediverse, as a protocol-backed set of services and nodes, that prevents a group of like-minded individuals from forming an LGBTQ hostile family of, for example, mastodon nodes. But there's also nothing about the fediverse, as a community, that compels anyone else who owns a node to host or share that content.

You are remembering experiences on forums or, depending on your age, BBSs or perhaps even USENET, the only system I can think of that was architected to move much power from the hands of the service administrators to the hands of the clients attaching to the service (and, not coincidentally, an experiment that lapsed into obsolescence because that's a terrible bargain for anybody to want to host if there are any alternatives).

The internet you are imagining still exists. It just hasn't grown because it turns out most users don't want that. But if someone wants to build a community that is LGBTQ-hostile online, all the pieces are there. They just have to do the legwork themselves because very few people will be interested in helping support that.

(I would also humbly hypothesize that most of that culture mixing you remember is because when the internet was small, people attended communities with others who had hostile worldviews to their own because it was the only community where, for example, Star Trek was being discussed and people wanted to participate in hobbies more than they cared about having to put up with phobes. Now that there's an option to join a Star Trek fan group in social media that is LGBTQ friendly versus one that isn't, the marketplace of ideas rewards one and not the other).

[extraduder_ire]

Somewhat unrelated: a few months ago, before most mastodon instances started censoring their list of servers they blocked from federating, you could just look at the rules page of almost any popular server and see a server URL and why they were blocked.

To me, this seemed counterproductive. But it was at least interesting to see the creative URLs some people come up with.

[jmbwell]

> Mastodon's federation policies

Perhaps you're referring to the policies of individual instance administrators, as "Mastodon" has no centralized "policies" as far as I know.

I run more than one instance, and as far as I can tell, I can manage them however I want.

[t-3]

You seem to be viewing the fediverse as a blob, but it's actually a federated network. There's no need to join an instance if you don't like the moderation!

[soundnote]

The point is that the federation mechanism explicitly means that any server that is federated will have to follow those policies, because the admins of all the large servers hew to a certain ideology that will not tolerate dissent from key talking points. So the server can technically speaking exist on the protocol but in practice won't be federated with the broader network unless it's palatable to Californicated activist types.

[kelseyfrog]

This reads like, "I don't like it because my messages won't end up on other servers," which I guess that's fine. We have to be cognizant that no one running a server is obligated technically, socially, or morally to platform anyone's speech because doing so would violate the NAP of admins.

[shadowgovt]

An alternative federation with different core tenets could exist, but it would have to do the legwork to find people interested in supporting it, build out nodes that want to be in that federation, and publicize its existence.

It's the same kind of leg work that the existing status quo of the major mastodon nodes had to undertake, and there's no reason anyone should expect that the existing status quo of Mastodon nodes would help a mastodon federation ideologically opposed to their own succeed.

[t-3]

What's wrong with that, though? Forcing people who don't want to interact to interact in the name of diversity isn't likely to lead anywhere productive. Those who are so heavily invested in their political views that they don't want to speak with anyone who they don't fully agree with will be siloed, and those who want diversity can be federated more broadly.

[wwweston]

If you literally can’t find a space where your views are palatable, then it’s possible there’s something wrong with them.

And if what you’re seeking is the privilege to compel other people who take responsibility for setting up and administering such spaces to carry / broadcast your unmoderated views regardless of their own, what we’re talking about isn’t really any principled kind of liberty.

[carapace]

Nothing prevents Nigerians from setting up Mastodon servers.

The point of federation is not to force people to talk to people they don't like (for whatever reasons).

[afavour]

I think “political and social views” covers a very wide range of thought. For instance, an avowed Nazi would not have been welcome in a holocaust survivors newsgroup in the early internet. Someone who is “anti-LGBT” to the extent that they wish those people dead have a similarly extreme view and I’m not surprised that they are policed.

> they would be unwelcome on the Fediverse

I think part of the problem here is central identities. Someone with anti-LGBT views would be entirely welcome in, say, a Lemmy community dedicated to software engineering… because they wouldn’t be discussing LGBT issues and no one would know. But because we have this notion of identity that persists between communities they may find themselves censored because of statements they made somewhere else.

[soundnote]

You don't need to be very anti rainbow ideology (which should be distinguished from simply being gay, for example: "Listen to gay people" never means Douglas Murray or the Gays Against Groomers organization, for example, because they may be gay but they have the wrong politics) to be tossed from most spaces rainbow activist types moderate.

[shadowgovt]

There's a reason there's other letters besides 'G', and "a minority can be hostile to another minority" isn't a new idea.

Of course a person gets booted for attacking other members of the community regardless of who they are.

[marcusverus]

Lefties always rationalize their embrace of illiberal tactics like censorship by citing extreme cases (“we just want to filter out people who want us dead”), only to turn around and apply the tactic very broadly (wrongthink = permanban). This Motte-and-Bailey fallacy is the rhetorical lever which has allowed the left to crybully millions of erstwhile liberals into becoming so many cheerleaders for censorship.

[gvurrdon]

Your comment reminds me of a time I was a member of a sports club. One other member was thrown out as they were revealed in a newspaper article to also be an active member of a neo-Nazi organisation. But, they'd never said or done anything that gave the slightest hint of it and appeared to be quite pleasant and liked within the club.

I wonder if anyone in the sports club would ever have noticed if it weren't for a journalist looking into that neo-Nazi group.

[ekianjo]

> It was extremely white and nerdy when looked at on average.

Nerdy = Educated, because most people joining at that time were academics or people who really wanted to use the internet despite the difficulty to get there at the time.

As for the "white" part, that's a very racist thing to say. There were a lot of people from different continents even in the early days, while of course the majority was from the US. And as far as I know, diversity of thought is not tied to the type of melanin you have in your skin.

[RationalDino]

> As for the "white" part, that's a very racist thing to say.

I'm sorry, but you're taking offence at reality here.

When I got to Usenet in the early 1990s, it was clear that most users were from North America and involved with college. This group was overwhelmingly white. Furthermore at many institutions, access required learning enough Unix to run rn. A barrier to entry that favored people who were nerdy relative to the general population. Email had similar demographics at the time, for similar reasons.

Therefore it is historically accurate to say that more than 50% of users were white and nerdy, even relative to other educated people. You're right that the other users included a lot of diversity. But afavour is absolutely right about the majority.

On diversity of thought. It is absolutely true that we had diverse thinking on Usenet at that point. However it is like clustering in some high dimensional space. The existence of diversity along some dimensions of thought within some dimensions doesn't change the fact that along some other dimensions there is more diversity of thought when you include people from different backgrounds and cultures.

[sph]

The Early Internet was white and middle class because they could afford it. But there were no recommendation algorithms or content siloes, so even if it was less diverse, it was potentially much more diverse and free than whatever we have today.

Today we have most of the world online, but they live on 5 websites, so even though it feels like there's more diversity and breadth, it has become a much more homogeneous culture.

There must be a name for this scientific phenomenon (variable increases between two spans of time, but the relative effect of it on the entire system has decreased)

[elpocko]

> It was extremely white and nerdy when looked at on average.

What did you expect? It was invented and operated by "white nerds".

[cameronh90]

I suspect GP was referring to the diversity of thought as well as the diversity of race. However, I would also expect the average isn't a useful metric in this context.

The early internet didn't attempt to silo you as it had no real technical capacity for it. Maybe only (for argument's sake) ~2% of the internet back then was non-US/Europe, but that meant ~2% of the messages I read came from non-US/Europe. Nowadays, Xitter, Reddit, TikTok, etc. all have algorithms that try to fit me into a bucket with similar people, so even if now 50% of the internet is non-US/Europe, what I'm actually experiencing is far closer to 0% than it used to be.

The internet I experience now is far less diverse even than just walking down my local high street. Looking at that mastodon link, for example, is so unbelievably unrepresentative of the kind of diversity (by all axes) I experience just by going outside.

[throw555chip]

> It was extremely white and nerdy when looked at on average.

Many of us in the world chatted and conversed (VoIP was a thing already) with people around the world in the mid-1990's.

[ToValueFunfetti]

It took a bit of digging, but the page 'Hip hop' was created in June 2001. 'Hip Hop (Music)' was mostly a retitle of that page in April 2003, and what was left eventually became 'Hip Hop (culture)' by way of 'Hip hop culture'. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hip_hop_culture&o...

[lisper]

> It was extremely white and nerdy

and male.

[PH95VuimJjqBqy]

diversity doesn't imply race and anyone who thinks so is a racist.

Just as minorities are not defined by their skin color, neither are whites.

[seattle_spring]

I always find it deeply hilarious when people online expand on their definition of "diversity of thought." Mostly because it always means more of exactly one single type of "thought".

[PH95VuimJjqBqy]

As I'm fond of saying, I'll always defend your right to make such statements, but that never implies it's valid or true.

[NoboruWataya]

My experience of the internet in the 90s is that it was very homogenous and Western-focused, and I doubt it was much more diverse pre-Eternal September. Also most discussion took place in smaller forums which either focused on a specific topic (and so all members shared at least one common interest) or had a very specific culture.

I think it's revisionism to suggest that the old internet was far more politically and culturally diverse. It is in fact modern social media that has sucked in people of all walks of life and dumped them onto the same platform. An internet of small, open communities sounds more like the internet I grew up with.

[gorbachev]

"My experience of the internet in the 90s is that it was very homogenous and Western-focused"

So was mine, but that was because I was living in a western country.

I bet the experience of people not living in western countries was quite different.

[ekianjo]

> I think it's revisionism to suggest that the old internet was far more politically and culturally diverse

Of course it was more diverse because no-one was kicking anyone off any platform when there was no social media and content policy in application in the first place. I don't even know how you can seriously think that this was not the case.

[Jcowell]

Wasn’t there but I find it hard to believe that webmasters were kicking off people with views they found toxic. That Forms don’t have ban wars. There’s nothing about the internet or social media in regards to “cancel culture” or anything like it. Humanity has been doing it since we formed communities.

[PH95VuimJjqBqy]

I've read people cannot actually fathom large numbers, and by extension I have to conclude they also cannot fathom scale or how that changes things.

There's a difference between your neighbor rejecting your belief in green jesus (thrall from World of Warcraft) and the entire world doing it.

That's the difference between your bog standard PHPBB forum from the 90's and FB today. We have _precedence_ for this, people have literally been booted off all major platforms at the same time.

[RGamma]

Depends on the community. Some were very quick to ban you. But there'd ~always be other ones.

[OfSanguineFire]

The early internet had both people interested in Communism in its myriad splinter groups (Marxists.org was one of the first big websites) and people advocating libertarianism in its myriad strands. Compare Mastodon where there was discussion that sites failing to mod out libertarianism might be considered beyond the pale, and ineligible for federation. (I'm not defending libertarian rhetoric, which I find tiresome, but it has been present in internet nerd culture since forever).

The early internet had a huge Buddhist scene (which produced a massive boom in IRL communities). Plus every other "alternative religion" in a Western context, from Hare Krishna to Eckankar. It was where New Atheism started, and at the same time, you could see the occasional figure advocating for American evangelicalism of precisely the sort that most riled New Atheists. People post-internet who know anything about the religions of the world outside the ones in their own area, almost certainly gained that knowledge from the internet.

The rather limited nationalities and races then using the internet did not mean little diversity of views, because you had just enough curious people around that, in aggregate, they could be curious about everything.

[PH95VuimJjqBqy]

as if any gathering of people doesn't have their own culture.

Where did this idea come from that people are cardboard cutouts that you can write on to perfection?

Having said that, I don't agree with your second paragraph at all. Individuals would get into shouting matches when they disagreed, but if you think for a second it's more diverse in todays cancel-culture I can only conclude you're not thinking well.

flame wars have been a thing since almost the beginning, and contrary to what you may think, politics and differences were a _major_ driver of that.

[yuck39]

Clearly you haven't seen the entire fediverse. There are tons of "free speech" instances along with a garden variety of other "alt" instances that are as active as the mastodon affiliated ones.

They tend to all be mutually blacklisted by each other, meaning that you won't see their posts appear in your federated timeline, however you can still individually follow and interact with accounts across the blacklist line.

What I personally do is host my own Pleroma instance where I can manually configure which instances I chose to associate with. Sure, I don't show up on anyone else's federated timeline but I mostly lurk anyways so I don't care and I get a large degree of control over what kind of content I see.

[oceanplexian]

“Fediverse” tools are a bait and Switch. I don’t need a glorified Wordpress blog that has elaborate censorship tools built into it. Networks like Mastodon also won’t implement E2E encryption because it would throw a wrench into their ideological crusade. Sounds like exactly the kinds of people I don’t want to associate with.

I can run my own web server, serve millions of users, and provide an RSS feed with technology from 10+ years ago. The Internet is Federated by design and it works fine for me.

[isodev]

> Just look at mastodon.social/explore

.social is but one of hundreds of instances. That's also what the parent comment was trying to say - we don't have to be drones, all unified under the same social server.

You're welcome to find an instance that aligns with your mindset or create one and shape it the way you like.

[someuser2345]

Isn't that how the first internet started? I assume most early adopters were also based in NA and Europe.

[bloqs]

The fediverse is an echo chamber for many groups, including notably hard left gen Z. It's integrity is similar to that of early days 4chans /b/, in that it wholly rejects reality around it, and it serves not as a discussion forum, but a self-fed enshittification engine racing to the most extreme take.

It couldn't look any more different from the intellectually curious people that largely constituted the beautiful artificial frontier of the early net, sprinkled with little webpages, and optimistic exchanges of early explorers.

[PH95VuimJjqBqy]

I've never interacted or understood /b/ much but my impression of 4chan in general is that you kind of get a slice of humanity because of their rules + anonymity. Both the good and the bad.

But I've never seen anyone describe it as rejecting reality, nor have I ever got that impression from much that I've seen from there. It's mostly people fucking around, whereas the hard left you're referring to seem to be taking it a lot more seriously than most on /b/ (that I've seen, not much personal experience with it).

[parasti]

What you see on mastodon.social is the result of Elon Musk buying Twitter. One and a half years ago it looked very different from the current mix of US politics and social issues, with more European-oriented, non-English content. As a European, it lost a lot of relevance to me, personally.

[iteratethis]

Fully agree. It's a far-left Gen-Z ex-Twitter doom cult depression network.

[1over137]

>representative of mainly a certain sociopolitical wing... Just look at mastodon.social/explore

Wow, I've never used Twitter or Mastodon, but I just visited that link, and it's all American politics, abortion, trans, and computer nerd stuff. Wow. Boring.

[4ggr0]

> and computer nerd stuff. Wow. Boring.

if not even computer nerd stuff©™ interests you, I wonder what you're doing on HN :)

[CuriouslyC]

SEO, content farms and click mills are the things ruining the internet. All of this is the result of advertising as a business model. For any content, the perverse incentive is to copy it repeatedly with slight variations then monetize the copies with ads and SEO your monetized version to the top of the search results.

What we need is a social-first internet where every piece of content is associated with an actual human and people query for content through their social graph. This will be doubly important in the age of AI.

[hliyan]

Also, a pay-per-use Internet (where appropriate), where people will vote for content with their wallets, instead of having to purchase subscriptions whether they read an article or not.

Just a few minutes ago, I wanted to read an NYT article but it asked me to buy a $1/mo subscription. Very cheap, but a) I don't read NYT that regularly and b) doing that with every news outlet I occasionally read, adds up. On the other hand, if it had asked for $0.25 to read just that article, I might have paid it. I would have been even more likely to pay if there had been some service, possibly provided by the ISP itself, where all such microtransactions of mine are aggregated and billed once for me at the end of the month.

[sanex]

I've been saying this for a while. It doesn't even need to be that expensive either. Pay a penny to watch a YouTube video type of deal. It can be done through lightning network to avoid per transaction credit card fees which would probably otherwise make it too expensive. My biggest hangup is paying for something that quickly turns out to be crap. I guess people would learn pretty quickly and hopefully the recommendation algorithm would start to favor just good content over clickbait sellout garbage.

[gosub100]

I would love that. just a tip jar button on my browser that I load up with a few bucks every month, and send to websites or commenters who made me laugh or got me thinking. Streamers have proven (albeit crudely) that viewers are more than willing to part with their money (if they have it). And I'm not just hinting at salacious young women (who probably receive the bulk of the dollar value). There's a streamer team who broadcast live at LAX and other airports and get excited about the various air traffic. It's fun watching their dedication and passion, their broadcasting skills grow, and how happy they are to do what they enjoy. I've donated probably $200-$300 over the years to them.

[hliyan]

I've literally read several articles today (mostly via HN) from which I have garnered enough value to pay at least $1 to each author. And I'd gladly pay it, as long as it's not a subscription and I don't have to enter my card details all over the place, or have my money charged as a large number of individual transactions.

[gosub100]

Especially for micropayments. If I google and find a minor 1-liner that taught me something I'd deposit $0.10 or $0.25. If it was something I was struggling with for a long time - like some arcane tar or mt command to use my tape backup drive, I'd give at least a few $. These amounts add up quickly, and encourage a much more wholesome form of publishing.

[SleepilyLimping]

This was kind of the theory of using Brave Browser to earn BAT through ads, and then set up an "auto-contribute" list that took your earned BAT and distributed a % that you set to each person. The adoption didn't exactly happen, especially with Brave's weirdness lately.

[PH95VuimJjqBqy]

I like the idea of BAT but I just don't fully trust it.

[gspencley]

> and hopefully the recommendation algorithm would start to favor just good content over clickbait sellout garbage.

My problem with recommendation algorithms, at least YouTube's, is that by design they recommend things based on keywords and categories for videos you have watched previously. So what happens is that I get hooked on some new topic, say cave diving for example. And then I watch a whole bunch of cave diving videos ... until I get sick of cave diving and want something different. But because of my viewing patterns, my recommendations are FLOODED with cave diving videos that I don't care about anymore.

I don't know how to solve that problem. And it might even just be a "me" problem related to the way that my brain works.

[skydhash]

Not just a "you" problem. I have to routinely reset my youtube history (I don't have time to prune it) to avoid stale recommendation. I have few interests, but every once in a while, I'm on a research spree or just want some new vibes, then my home view is ruined.

If they are not getting rid of the algorithm, it would make sense to let me manage the keywords that are driving it.

[silvestrov]

I really want the ability to easily create multiple persons/personalities like Netflix lets you do.

On Netflix I have a seperate "user" for asian movies so the main user is not flooded with recommendations for asian movies. Those 2 users have extremly different list of recommended movies.

When I watch a few "The girl is doing her homework" music movies on YouTube they quickly drown out everything else on the homepage. When I later watch a few "watch later" engineering movies, the music videos are drowned out and I then have difficulty finding more music videos. It's like starting over from scratch every time.

[spacemadness]

This is giving me PTSD from using old online services like Quantum Link on the C64 and having my parents freak out on me for racking up a huge bill.

[pjc50]

We had per-use systems. I remember when people would pay multiple £ for one (1) phone ringtone. I think Minitel may have been per-use metered as well? Either way, both were obliterated by the massive benefit of not paying per use.

[toyg]

> if it had asked for $0.25

The economics of credit-card transactions, unfortunately, make this fundamentally impossible.

[red_admiral]

I can't reply to the child directly due to nesting, so I'll do it here:

As far as I know, for in-person transactions ("contactless" in Europe) the economics work differently - for example SumUp quotes a flat fee of 1.69% plus a small one-time cost to buy and register the reader devices. That gets you parking meters, public toilets and the like.

However, for online credit card transactions (which are a very different risk profile, to be fair) there's a fixed cost of something like $0.20 per transaction on top of the percentage fee.

That is why, for example, substack has a minimum pricing tier of $5 for subscriptions, and why Patreon is "restructuring" because their original micropayments model wasn't breaking even.

So I agree with the parent poster that microtransactions _online_ are currently infeasible - not fundamentally impossible (Visa/MasterCard/Amex/Diners etc. could bring in a new pricing model) but it is impossible for even the NYT to set up a workable "pay $0.50 to read this artice" tier at the moment.

A kind of system where you micropay "on credit" and it's all billed once at the end of the month could, depending on the jurisdiction, make the service provider subject to regulation as a provider of financial services.

[red_admiral]

Reply to hliyan, since HN is not giving me a reply link for their post:

As far as I'm aware, a "medium-like" model works when all content you're paying for is "on the platform", this includes not just medium, but also substack, and a lot of streaming sites like twitch. There's one company involved, and one jurisdiction for settling any disputes.

Once the enities you're paying are corporations themselves - potentially based in different states - the picture becomes a lot messier; I would imagine that a system where both a reader in Germany and one in India can micropay per article for a combination of the NY Times, the Toronto Star and the South China Morning Post is beyond what current market dynamics can offer.

After all, Patreon was supposed to be the next step up from medium etc. albeit with content creators as individuals rather than corporations, and that's already struggling.

[eviks]

NYT could easily setup such a system by asking you to top up your account by a bigger amount (say, the price of a monthly sub), but only charge you cents per read article

[hliyan]

Can't a Medium-like model work -- where a third party aggregates all the credits and bills monthly?

[ixwt]

I've wondered about that. Patreon used to group all of your subscriptions into one payment, but they've recently been going away from that. I can't understand why, the small $0.20 + % adds up for multiple transactions. But if you only have to pay the $0.20 once, it effectively gets distributed across all of your subscriptions. It baffles me why Patreon went away from the single subscription model.

[robertlagrant]

This would have to be a "load up a wallet and 'pay'" sort of thing, where the website owner gets the money in aggregate minus a transaction fee when they request it.

[billywhizz]

there is an ongoing initiative in EU (I think US has something similar brewing) called SEPA-Inst which in theory allows free transfers between bank accounts in the EuroZone. sadly, it still comes with a lot of caveats and not possible to guarantee it being free, depending on counterparty banks and potential FX charges.

https://www.quanloop.com/en/investing/are-sepa-payments-real...

it will be interesting to see if lightning/crypto etc. will continue to increase pressure to improve this capability in the traditional banking system - it would enable all sorts of new payment/pricing models for online services like discussed here.

i would love to be able to just make micro-payments for things i have found useful, regardless of what site they are on.

[mr_mitm]

I pay these tiny amounts by card all the time for public toilets, parking meters and the like.

[toyg]

And it's why, when paying like that, you're typically paying more than would have done in cash, or the amount is high enough to cover the extra transaction fees. That's definitely the case for most UK carpark operators - the minimum amounts you can specify online are always higher than the ones for cash, because of transaction fees.

You're probably also misjudging how tiny those amounts are. Vending machines, for example, nowadays don't really stock anything costing less than £0.50, if they take credit cards. Public toilets can often be £1 or £2.

[renonce]

A social-first Internet makes sense but this is not going to be the way people do it. Let’s consider some models for rewarding content authors:

1. You are asked to pay before viewing the content. This incentivizes content owners to display clickbait titles but does not incentivize content quality. People will click through lots of interesting titles and have a hard time finding out the valuable ones.

2. You are asked to pay after viewing the content. This is similar to a donation - just look at the state of open-source software. Only a few geeks who understand the value of donation will pay.

3. You are asked to pay a subscription fee upfront, and the fee is split between all content owners that you did read. If you view YouTube, have you signed up for YouTube Premium? Why not? Do you trust YouTube not to hold your videos hostage and pay only a tiny bit of revenue to uploaders?

[Gulstar]

There is this Dutch company called Blendle that started out with this idea, the NY times even invested in it. But unfortunately it was not a viable model, so they switched to a all you can consume type of subscription like every other platform

[jrd259]

Ted Nelson's vision (in "Dream Machines") was strongly focused on micro-transactions for this reason.

[teddyh]

To “nickel and dime”¹ is usually seen as a bad thing; to intentionally build it into our information infrastructure would probably be a horrible idea.

1. <https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=nickel_and_dime&...>

[carlosjobim]

You just spent much more than $1 of your time arguing against spending a dollar. You would never spend 25 cents to read an article, don't fool yourself. If that was an option, you'd invent another reason not to pay. Oh, I need to fold my laundry, no time to read this article.

[pjc50]

(I know it's bad HN to put two replies to a comment, but I found my prepared argument: The Problem With MicroPayments is MicroFraud)

Unsolved, difficult problems of micropayments:

    pay before viewing: how do you know that the thing you're paying for is the thing that you're expecting? What if it's a rickroll or goatse?

    so do you give refunds a la steam?

    pay and adverts: double-dipping is very annoying

    pay and adverts: how do you know who you're paying? A page appears with a micropayment request, but how do you know you've not just paid the advertiser to view their ad?

    pay and frame: can you have multiple payees per displayed page? (this has good and bad ideas)

    pay and popups: it's going to be like those notification or app install modals, yet another annoyance for people to bounce off

    pay limits: contactless has a £30 limit here. Would you have the same payment system suitable for $.01 payments and $1000 payments? How easy is it to trick people into paying over the odds (see refunds)?

    pay and censors: who's excluded from the payment system? Why?

Part 2: business model problems!

    getting money into the system is plagued by usual fraud problems of stolen card transactions for pure digital goods

    nobody wants to build a federated system; everyone wants to build a Play/Apple/Steam store where they take 30%

    winner-take-all effects are very strong

    Play store et al already exist, why not use that?

    Free substitute goods are just a click away

    Consumers will pirate anything no matter how cheap the original is

    No real consumer demand for micropayments

=> lemma from previous 3 items: market for online goods is efficient enough to drive all marginal prices to zero

    existing problem of the play store letting your kid spend all the money

    friction: it would be great if you didn't have to repeatedly approve things, such as a micropayment for every page of a webcomic archive. But blanket approval lets bad actors drain the jar or inattentive users waste it and then feel conned

    first most obvious model for making this work is porn, which is inevitably blacklisted by the payment processors, has a worse environment for fraud/chargebacks, and is toxic to VCs (see Patreon and even Craigslist)

    Internet has actually killed previously working "micropayment" systems such as Minitel, paid ringtones (anyone remember the dark era of Crazy Frog?); surviving ones like premium SMS and phone have a scammy, seedy feel.

    accounting requirements: do you have to pay VAT on that micropayment? do you have to declare it? Is it a federal offence to sell something to an Iranian or North Korean for one cent?

[rvbissell]

> What we need is a social-first internet

* blood pressure intensifies *

> where every piece of content is associated with an actual human and people query for content through their social graph

I do think that latter part is an interesting idea, modulo performance questions and echo-chamber concerns. Also, what about providing anonymity to oppressed peoples?

Perhaps for my last point above, we could have bifurcated services, where the user explicitly knows if they are operating in verified space or anon space.

[CuriouslyC]

The idea of a social first internet is that each person would maintain their own trust graph, rather than relying exclusively on centralized authorities to do so. It's a lot easier to game google than to try and astroturf the entire internet, and it's harder for google to quickly tweak ranking algorithms to fix some bad results than it is to revoke trust in the social graph from a bad actor.

[api]

I think professional trolls, bad faith argument, toxic influencers, lynch mobs, rage bait, and all the other moving parts that make up the Internet’s profoundly toxic political and social activism sphere also did their part. That stuff really exploded in the mid 20-teens.

Of course you could consider some of that a special case of content mills and spam. It certainly can’t be separated from the ad based business model and the attention maximizing algorithms that drive it, since most of that stuff rides on the fact that being crazy or toxic maximizes engagement.

[marginalia_nu]

I wonder if all the toxicity is just a reflection of people's state of mind. Just seems to be a lot more anger and sadness online in the late 2010s early 2020s than there ever was before.

There just seems to be a lot of lonely and depressed people out there, and unfortunately they often time they seem to congregate to wallow in each other's depressive thought loops. It's hard enough to escape from the gravity well of depression when you're alone in reinforcing the darkness. Can't even imagine what getting stuck into one of those quagmires might be like.

[yetanotherloss]

They were always there, but the impetus for frictionless experiences to drive revenue also removed all the barriers and effort to congregating and often exploiting those people.

It was there on Usenet, it's been there since people were scratching messages on bathroom stalls and subway walls.

But yes, now we have effectively created cult generators and not only does no one want to turn them off, really smart people (even many with good intentions) keep making them more efficient.

[suoduandao3]

When the internet was young, i thought the comments sections were going to leave us confronted with our own shadow selves. I pictured a utopia where we saw that raw honesty and all became a bit more accepting of our own inner critics, shadows, golden shadows and the like.

In retrospect, I was naive. Just because we see something our shadow wrote next to our handle doesn't mean we recognize that as ourselves. If anything, we're shadow projecting much harder than ever.

[PH95VuimJjqBqy]

You're not the only one :)

[robertlagrant]

Two causes spring to mind:

Covid lockdowns - people actually were lonely for a long period.

The decline of traditional news media - more extreme headlines are essential for more money to appear.

[marginalia_nu]

This has been going on far longer than Covid though, but it sure didn't do anyone's mental health any favors.

[sparrowInHand]

To be honest, i do not think the internet invented that. There are parts of the world, were lynch mobs still are considered justice. Were face is more important than facts. To generate a healthy eco-system, for a unhealthy human species.. thats quite the challenge.

[tentacleuno]

> SEO, content farms and click mills are the things ruining the internet.

Right, so how do we fix it? I'm wondering if uBlacklist has a place here (a tool to block domains from search results) -- it would be interesting to see if we could all come together and contribute to a database of SEO farm / junk websites to improve search results.

[hotnfresh]

Destroy spyvertising ads by making the business model illegal, so don't-care-where-my-ad-is-hosted ad networks die. Non-spying ads on sites that naturally draw lots of real eyeballs will still be a thing, which is fine. Actually-free sites, open source, and open protocols, would all see more interest and development in such a world, filling in most of the gaps people worry about from the death of shitty-ads.

[suoduandao3]

My idea: Align ads to the viewer's self-actualization. I had chatgpt write me a full business plan for it a while back, shameless plug: https://eucyclos.wixsite.com/eucyclos/post/making-advertisin...

[carlosjobim]

> Right, so how do we fix it?

By paying for content you consume, so that there will be no money in SEO, content farms and click mills.

[raisedbyninjas]

Doesn't this just assume that ad domains are some scarce resource? Ada can be served from a GUID domain just as effectively.

[tentacleuno]

It does not -- it follows the same concept as an adblock list, just being used for a different purpose.

As an example, EasyList includes a lot of GUID domains[0].

[0]: https://github.com/easylist/easylist/blob/master/easylist/ea...

[MR4D]

This.

SEO has become a real current day Paperclip Apocalypse, just through ads instead of paperclips. And to think we’ve barely introduced AI to it yet!

[fragmede]

Google's been using ML in ads long before LLMs were invented.

[okr]

You need that. I like the internet as it is.

[the_other]

> What we need is a social-first internet where every piece of content is associated with an actual human and people query for content through their social graph. This will be doubly important in the age of AI.

Isn't that what the social networks are, internally?

I agree that attention/engagement farming is a major driver for the web's enshittification. I don't think content attribution and verified identities are the solution.

Two(ish) key features of the earlier phases of the web that seem relevant to me were:

- most content wasn't profit driven

- social interaction was not gamified, was slower and was often siloed/themed

Trending, dog-piling, attention-economy hacks were all greatly limited.

[ants_everywhere]

These are all great ideas, and I echo them. But I do feel like these sorts of collective problems are hard to solve by each person trying to do their own part working alone.

One reason that corporate internet won is that money transfers to a single entity, and that pot of money can be used to coordinate action in some particular direction (for better or worse depending on your view).

Without some coordination mechanism, it seems a a bit too divided. It's unclear to me what the appropriate mechanism is, but I think that's the right sort of way to frame the problem.

[marginalia_nu]

Isn't individual action the only action? The only ones with hands and thoughts are individuals, whether they imagine themselves part of a collective or imagine themselves to be alone.

Yeah sure you may not be able to fix the world yourself, but you can undeniably make it better. Waiting for some grand wave of collective action to arrive and fix the problem seems like it would above all stand in the way of even making an effort and trying.

[rambambram]

I completely agree. And then I saw your username and knew you've put in the work. Thanks for doing something and putting your money/time/energy where your mouth is! A lot of people approach these problems by waiting for the stars to align or waiting until everybody on this planet agrees with them and then take action. It has to be this, it has to be that, no choices, no priorities, no decisions. In their minds they take on all of the world's problems at once.

For a couple of years I have been working on my website software to make the internet more open again (or at least, keep some of the openness around). I'm by no means making any dent in the universe sofar, but I rolled up my sleeves, I bet on the open internet, and started to work. No need to wait for other people.

For me, it has all to do with RSS and the curation of content. Yeah, curation is more work than having someone else's algorithm decide what you eat for infodinner. The internet itself - and the web in particular - already take care of the sharing and distribution of this curated content. With my software, if I 'retweet' an RSS item from a website that I follow on my own 'timeline', it already spreads further than the initial target group of that item. Virality and connectedness is already baked in the internet. The techniques for a social internet are already there, for years.

[velcrovan]

Individual action takes place in a context of social cues and incentives. Those who understand this try to work together to change those things, which in turn changes the “easy defaults” for everyone. This is a million times more effective than limiting your approach to nagging people to do better for ideological reasons.

[marginalia_nu]

> Individual action takes place in a context of social cues and incentives. Those who understand this try to work together to change those things, which in turn changes the “easy defaults” for everyone.

I think this discounts the fact that people are not mindless automatons following the path of least resistance. Individuals are capable of difficult things that fly in the face of collective theory, and time and time again such individual actions have changed history.

> This is a million times more effective than limiting your approach to nagging people to do better for ideological reasons.

This is ultimately a false dichotomy, blind to a third option, which is to act as an indiviual, act according to what you think is good, in spite of what anyone else is doing or thinking.

If you try to do something yourself in such a way, people will flock to tell you to stop trying to change the world, because it is not pointless and cannot be done. If it is indeed pointless, I ask, why must the attempt be aborted?

I haven't had anyone rushing to tell me I must stop watching a 4 hour video essay on youtube, which is surely even more pointless.

[velcrovan]

> I think this discounts the fact that people are not mindless automatons following the path of least resistance.

That is nowhere implied or required by what I am arguing. I am just saying changing incentives is more effective at a broad societal level than nagging people. This is plainly observable and undisputable.

For example, add a mortgage interest deduction to the tax code. Doing so in no way reduces or discounts the ability of every person in that jurisdiction to make financial decisions based on a million factors that are weighted uniquely by each individual. But behavior of the market overall will inevitably change, because the incentives have changed.

[hotnfresh]

Individual action directed toward the problem itself is what you do to feel like you're making a change, often at cost far in excess of the benefit of that change (which is part of why this mechanism often fails, even when a large majority want that change). There's nothing wrong with it, but at a society level, you can't count on it to get much done.

Individual action directed toward affecting policy in organizations that can overcome coordination problems (largely government) is where you focus if you want to have a big effect, but maybe not get as much immediate satisfaction.

It's still individual action.

[ants_everywhere]

> Isn't individual action the only action?

Yes, in an important sense. But, you know, architectural layers something something.

At the end of the day maybe everything is logic gates, but there's a difference between `cat`ing /dev/urandom and computing a trajectory for a plane, say.

Organizations and corporations basically exist (if you squint hard enough) to achieve this sure of layering. And to your point, a lot of what organizations do is manage incentives for individuals so that the collective work gets done.

BTW thanks for marginalia!

[marginalia_nu]

I find this mindset debilitating. Every person on earth, the very people who might accomplish real change, they are all individuals. Yet every one of them can deflect responsibility onto collectives, collectives that in turn consiting of individuals who can do the same, resulting in inaction and indifference.

Someone else is always to blame, someone else is always more responsible, and that someone else isn't even a human being, it's a corporation, a political faction, an ideological movement. None of those entities are of course ever going to seize that responsibility, because there is no agency in any of them to do so.

[ants_everywhere]

Yes, I think we're actually talking about the same problem from different angles.

The problem you mention in the second paragraph is sometimes called "diffusion of responsibility" [0]. A related concept about the difficulties of individual and group action is "belling the cat" [1]. You may be familiar with these, I'm just throwing them out there in case anyone reading is also interested in this topic.

Framing in terms of agency, I guess I'd say I agree with you that each agent has a responsibility or an obligation to take action. But it's not clear to me how to ensure that the actions build on each other rather than canceling each other out in the aggregate. It may take a strong person with a sense of duty to get things started but eventually they will need help.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_responsibility [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belling_the_Cat

[carlosjobim]

If hackers pray five times per day to the European Union, they will one day step down from the sky regulate and ban all our dreams into being.

Jokes aside, you're completely right, but I think individuals should remember to limit their effort when it's without reimbursement. In order to not burn out and become bitter, etc.

[marginalia_nu]

> I think individuals should remember to limit their effort when it's without reimbursement. In order to not burn out and become bitter, etc.

You're projecting your will onto the world and making it more like how you think it should be. It's nice when other people share your vision and chip in to support the effort, but I don't think that can be a prerequisite. If it is, then you will never be true to your vision, and that is, if anything, recipe for crashing and burning.

[carlosjobim]

Some goals are so great that they can not be reached alone. Space flight for example, was a dream for many, but it required massive joint effort to finally achieve.

Even people seeking hyper-individualistic goals are paid, for example in sports. I don't mean that getting paid is a prerequisite, but if you're struggling alone you have to check after some time if it's really worth doing.

[raybb]

A quote I read today that reminds me of this:

‘Don't be distracted by the myth that “every little [bit] helps.” If everyone does a little, we'll achieve only a little. We must do a lot. What's required are big changes in demand and in supply’ --David MacKay

[StevePerkins]

There was absolutely nothing "collective" about the early web. 180-degrees the opposite. You're not going to recapture that ethos, either for the overall Internet or even for a smaller interested subculture within in, by making it NPR. It would be something else, and likely not any better than the corporate walled garden.

[js8]

I think socialism is the mechanism - one person one vote with the stake of ownership.

I am pretty liberal but it I believe it needs socialism (democracy in economic sphere) to avoid capture by corporations. (And vice versa, socialism needs liberalism to prevent capture by government. They can't survive without each other, being constantly threatened by authoritarianism.)

[pjc50]

I feel the non-profit/co-operative model has been really under-explored, other than the huge successes of Open Source and Wikipedia itself.

On the other hand, even that's vulnerable. The UK used to have customer-owned banks until shareholder banks offered to buy them out. https://www.thenews.coop/85589/sector/big-bang-demutualisati...

[js8]

Yes, the reason it is vulnerable IMHO, because within our mostly liberal system, there is too little support for coops in the law. We do not protect enough against people taking power from others. That's why I believe liberalism (which at least ideologically values this diversity) cannot survive without socialism.

[ants_everywhere]

> one person one vote with the stake of ownership.

I'm not great with the terminology of this stuff. Just to be clear on what you're suggesting, do you mean that each person has a stake of ownership as well as a single vote? So functionally something like a corporation with one kind of stock where no owner owns more than one share?

And do you mean to have restrictions on stock ownership? Like everyone in the country gets a share? Or only employees can own a share? Or anyone can buy a single share? Or something else?

I think there are interesting points to explore along the design space of how we distribute stock shares. I just don't know enough about it to have much intuition, and I'm trying to get a sense of how I could model it.

[js8]

What I am suggesting in practice would be similar to either consumer or worker cooperative. These are similar to publicly-traded companies, except the stakeholders are not some Wall Street randos, but people who actually use company products or employees of the company.

Of course, for this to be truly socialist, the system has to be democratic, i.e. each person involved has equal and non-transferrable vote.

What type a company should be is up to discussion. I believe infrastructure (natural monopolies) are better served by consumer (public) ownership, while companies that can compete on the free market are better served by worker ownership.

As I said elsewhere in the discussion, I think lot of Internet infrastructure should be publicly owned. (And on this infrastructure, businesses could be built.)

Personally, I would prefer an economic system where every company above certain size (say 20 employees) must be either publicly-owned or worker-owned, i.e. democratic in the above sense. Which makes me into a pretty traditional socialist. But that's tangential to the discussion about the Internet.

[ants_everywhere]

Got it, thanks that was very helpful

[hkt]

I'd second this: self hosting and so on is a poor substitute for democratic, socially owned infrastructure. That's the only way we can make social, rather than corporate, networks accessible to everyone in a sustainable way. At the moment the fediverse gets by on goodwill. That isn't sustainable.

[wildrhythms]

Socialism has nothing to do with 'government capture'; it only concerns itself with worker ownership over the means of production.

[senortumnus]

And government protections / mandates toward that end or masquerading as being toward that end

[velcrovan]

So what?

[suoduandao3]

The means of production these days is a laptop or a smartphone. A solar panel or a garden if one is in the physical portion of the economy.

We are kind of already at a point where working class individuals can own the means of production without ever needing to 'smesh capitalism'. I expect as a result we'll see a divergence between people who want to own the means of production and people who want to impoverish the current owners.

[js8]

I think this misunderstands what "ownership of means of production" really means in Marxism. The point is NOT that the capitalist owns the factory, which they then rent to workers, who can choose to do whatever they want with it. The ownership of means of production instead refers to full control over the production process, including the social structure of work that makes production possible. Marx's point is that it is this social structure, primarily, that should be collectively owned (that's why all the discussion about alienation).

It's kinda like "owning a home" doesn't imply just owning the walls, but implicitly also a place with privacy.

So in today's SW world, means of production is not a computer, but rather the datacenters of the cloud, proprietary APIs and control over browser standards. And control over habits of the users, who also participate in production, by generating "content". These things cannot be simply replicated by the workers.

[suoduandao3]

So if someone improves the logistic infrastructure involved in getting the products from the workers to the consumers none of the value they generated belongs to them? That actually explains a lot. Even today, places with food insecurity don't have supply but distribution problems, so it's a pretty hard problem to solve.

I wonder how many Marxists study logistics.

[js8]

I think you misunderstood my comment. In order for socialism to remain true to its intent of being democratic, it needs liberalism. By 'government capture' I mean the authorities in government taking control over an ostensibly democratic system (as frequently happened in the real-world attempts at socialism). You need to have an ability to rebuild these democratic systems elsewhere, which is provided by liberal freedoms.

[bdw5204]

I'd actually agree to a significant extent that people should own their employment (this is the original American Founding ideal of "free labor" that Jefferson and Lincoln both believed in) but I think you're better off not using the word "socialism" to describe that economic system. People associate that word with "communism" which is defined as a dictatorship where the government operates as a single monopoly under the pretense of representing the will of the people. The word "socialism" is also associated with corporate dominated market systems where the government provides a safety net and some labor rights for working people.

A system where workers are part owners of their companies is probably better described as "distributed ownership" to avoid confusing connotations. If the first thing you have to do is explain to people that you're not advocating a Nordic style welfare state or a USSR/CCP/North Korean style dystopian dictatorship, you're using problematic terminology.

If I'm misunderstanding you and you're advocating that all businesses should be controlled by a (democratic) government rather than by their employees then I'd be against that because most people are not going to have enough time, under any system, to become informed about stuff they have no direct stake in. I don't want politicians or voters responding to a media fear campaign telling businesses what products to produce and such a system would almost certainly devolve into incumbent politicians using the media to keep themselves in power and ensure their preferred successors win. I think it essential that decisions on whether to start new firms or what they are to produce should be mostly depoliticized except where there's a strong public interest that the government needs to regulate (like firms that want to pollute the environment or sell harmful highly addictive products).

An economy completely under the control of a democratic government would allow 50%+1 people who don't like Taylor Swift's music to ban her from singing and deprive 40% of the population who are fans of her music of their right to listen to her sing (or in the case of representative democracy, allow a majority to vote for a "lesser evil" party that includes outlawing Taylor Swift concerts as one of their package deal policies). A more extreme example of why democracy needs to be limited in scope would be how the democratic government of Athens voted, by majority popular vote, to execute Socrates because his constant challenging questions they didn't want to answer were annoying to them.

[js8]

No, the word socialism is correct, it describes pretty much what you call "distributed ownership", although a condition should be it's also democratic. I don't see why to avoid a well-defined term because of a connotation, that's a receiver's and not a sender's problem.

Regarding democracy, this kind of voting (although it's unequal) already exists with publicly traded companies. Interestingly, nobody is worried where billionaires will find the time or interest to vote in many companies they own; it's always the common people being the problem.

[unpopularopp]

>or Mastodon and post a bit.

Yet when I open the explore page on Mastodon I still see the same shit: politics. https://mastodon.social/explore

It's almost as if the whole point of Mastodon wasn't anything more than just to be another echo chamber. But hey no bad guys from "the other side" so guess we good.

HN is still the best. We need more HN not Twitter or Mastodon.

[ggpsv]

The whole point of Mastodon/Fediverse is that mastodon.social is not your sole option.

Unlike other platforms, you have a choice. You're in control of who to follow or block, and what to mute. There is no algorithmic timeline that surfaces unwanted content to you. You can hide the boosts (i.e retweets) of any account. You can simply default to follow accounts you're interested and rely entirely on your local timeline.

There are many Mastodon servers that are more niche, or at least less akin to Twitter/Mastodon.social. I originally made my account in mastodon.social but I'm in the process of moving to another server where the server timeline aligns more with what I'm looking for (though I can migrate my followers/followings, yay!). This server is also run cooperatively, which further aligns the interests and motives of everyone involved.

I'd say we need HN AND more Mastodon servers.

[Semaphor]

I was on the (Lemmy) fediverse for a few months, selfhosted instance, a lot of comments and post, kept one niche community from Reddit alive over there. It’s pretty much worse than Reddit in most ways. Most small communities don’t exist, small-ish communities get all the assholes big subs have on reddit, because so many people browse all instead of subscribed and post on anything (literally. I had a meta community on my single user instance where I’d just log some descisions and had people vote & comment on those).

You have the power mods issue, only far worse, because they are vastly more powerful now that they control whole instances.

Then you have all the fascists who claim they are leftists but are actually just "anything Anti-USA is amazing". They also run major instances.

I ended up deleting my instance, returning to Reddit (and simply using it from desktop only, and regularly delete my content), and the quality of discourse is already so much better again. I did create an account on beehaw and treat it as unfederated (only subscribing to local communities), the people there can be a bit strange, and there’s not a huge amount of content, but at least they aren’t as bad as the rest of the Lemmy fediverse.

[afavour]

IMO these are tech solutions to social problems. As engineers it’s perhaps only natural that we gravitate towards them but I think there’s real danger of counter-productivity.

Lemmy and Mastodon are good examples of this. Federation is a PITA. I know people who tried to switch from Twitter to Mastodon and never succeeded, getting lost in the concept of different instances etc etc. Mastodon instances are relatively expensive to run because the day to day operation of federation is way more complex than a centralised solution would be.

There’s nothing wrong with centralised services and Wikipedia is a great example of one that works. You just need the right governance structure and an audience willing to chip in to cover costs. Federation is over complicated and often unnecessary.

[marcosdumay]

> Mastodon instances are relatively expensive to run

Compared to a theoretic distributed alternative, yes. But the largest instance of Mastodon, with something around 1% of the users of Twitter costs around $700 a month.

[derelicta]

What id like to see is a federated MySpace-like service. Users could host their blog on an instance of their choice, toy around its styling or its content directly as to learn about web techs (or keep it simple and remain with the default stylesheet!), and yet remain discoverable thanks to the federated nature of such service. If I had the time its honestly something id love working on.

[Grumbledour]

But discoverability seems the Achilles heel of federated services.

How would you solve that? How would I discover a blog in practice and how would this work from a technical standpoint?

I am asking not to poke holes, but because this is an interesting topic. Finding content seems the biggest problem to me in a more decentralized web and we need more good solutions and ideas here.

[dragontamer]

> How would you solve that?

Does it need to be solved? If we're talking about the magic and wonder of the early internet, then I raise you my 800-count Geocities counter and my Neopets storefront with probably got less views than that.

The early web was much, much, much smaller. There weren't slashdot effects that made you go viral. You just did things because you felt cool, and getting like 800 views lifetime or 1200 views was exciting.

Oh right. No one here is actually talking about early internet are they... because they want modern internet attention with a million tweets and half-a-million views by going viral.

> How would I discover a blog in practice and how would this work from a technical standpoint?

Things weren't discoverable back then. You surfed on hours on web-rings looking for like-minded folk. When you found them, they weren't active any more (not by modern day active anyway), but seeing their pages encouraged you to dig deeper.

-------------------

That's IMO, the wonder of the early internet that has been lost today. People didn't seek attention back then, because the internet was still niche.

But now that the internet has proven itself to be one of the best ways to project and capture attention, its become a better reflection of society. I don't think we're going back.

Wikipedia doesn't really have attention-seekers. Just moderators diligently doing their job. Community driven sites off of the advertising networks are likely closer to replicating the feel of early internet, by self-selecting away from attention seekers.

[sigilis]

You're commenting on a discovery engine right now. HN surfaces stuff you never searched for but find interesting all the time. Still, you can't expect for there to be the kind of traffic we see on the big sites today for all the little blogs and whatnot, but that means there would be different motivations behind these more personal spaces. It wouldn't be about driving more clicks, but about expressing oneself to, sharing with, or informing people. Not sure what the economic model for sharing your passion is, but maybe it doesn't always need one.

The constant drive to draw up all of human attention so that those people can be sold something or the other is probably still going to win out in terms of volume, but maybe there can be some more nice things in the world.

[Zak]

There's been some recent progress on that front.

Lemmy's surge in popularity over the summer is a big help. People share a lot of links to smaller websites and Fediverse accounts to Lemmy communities. If you're sharing things on a more blog-like system that uses ActivityPub, you can tag an appropriate Lemmy community in your post for increased exposure.

Mastodon has reversed its stance on full-text search, making it generally available in recent releases (though I think it still requires ElasticSearch, which smaller servers and self-hosters may not want to fuss with).

[kreeben]

Someone, say Google, will index them thus make them discoverable?

[derelicta]

I don't know either tbh. Discoverability in federated services is indeed their Achilles heel and I don't know nearly enough to suggest a solution to that.

[toyg]

We had that, when feeds and pingbacks were a thing. But the masses don't want to self-host, nor do they want to learn about web stuff. Hence Facebook.

[derelicta]

Well you can selfhost if you feel like it in such situation, otherwise you can rely on the good will of good folks to do the tough job for you :)

[dschep]

You can kinda get that from microblog.pub. It federates via ActivityPub and is a single-user customizable micro&macro blog. https://docs.microblog.pub/user_guide.html#customization

[derelicta]

yeah but apparently its single-user only

[pjc50]

Discovery is the adversarial point which breaks so many idealistic systems. The ability to get discovered is worth real money, from outside the system. So as soon as there's a discovery mechanism with a substantial real audience, effort will be devoted to "hacking" it.

[shadowgovt]

Isn't that just "web pages crawled by a search engine?"

I think the technology you're looking for is the World Wide web.

[s3krit]

Sadly not federated, but Spacehey[1] exists! And it's actually quite popular among certain groups of people (the people that were there in the early-mid 00s that want to relive that world, and the younger group that want to live it for the first time). It's pretty cool.

[1] https://spacehey.com/home

[tusqasi]

I think that is not how we can rebuild the internet. The majority don't even know what is wrong with the internet in the place, not everyone reads hnews(That is nichest of the communities), and most users aren't even using twitter for alternatives to have an impact.

(I have zero idea about the actual numbers)

[marginalia_nu]

Does the majority need to be part of it? Since day one the web was always built by the oddball minorities. It's easy to forget how weird it was considered to spend any amount of time online in the pre-smartphone era.

[Grumbledour]

I noticed a kind of sickness that seems to have taken hold of many people working in tech over the last 15 years. The belief, that nothing can be done unless you got dozens of people, millions of funding and years of time. Or maybe it's just more younger people in this space, who don't remember that we used to build social networks in our free time in our garages?

Now, maybe it's mainly a hacker news problem, because you can find people out there who just build something without thinking to much about monetization and it seems many of them consciously avoid this site.

But the willingness to be an active part in making something better seems to have dwindled and people project a powerlessness to change the status quo, when indeed it was in the past always the technical people who were forerunners with this kind of stuff (and consequently are also at least partly to blame for the things we have now). But these days, you can't even convince many techies to stop using chrome, even if they admit to hating it.

I wonder how we get that back? How we can convince techies, that not only can they do it, but when they build it, they will come? Because they always do!

[marginalia_nu]

Yes I've been thinking about this a lot too. There are these unquestioned notions about what is possible, and they're more often than not self-fulfilling prophecies.

I think it's easier to convince someone they're wrong by showing than telling. This is fairly central to what I'm trying to do with my search engine project. Build something so profoundly contradictory to expectations about what is possible to make sticking to those notions completely untenable.

I think the SerenityOS gang does a fantastic job at this too, much better than I do arguably.

[tusqasi]

Think of the numbers of tik-tok, youtube, facebook, instagram, snapchat, and all those Social media users. All these users are "normal" people nowadays. Maybe the effects habits of the minorities on the trajectories of "The Internet" are diminished.

(Just thoughts. Not based on anything other my opinions)

[marginalia_nu]

There are still those weird spaces on the web where creative oddballs gather though.

Have you checked out the Gemini protocol for example? It's a weird space for weird people, in the best way.

[StevePerkins]

I don't think "the majority" matter, in the context of what parent commenter is talking about. I generally subscribe to the idea of Eternal September (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September), where "the majority" is the root cause of the problems.

The early web was not great because capitalism didn't exist and corporations were nicer back then, etc. The early web was great because it was a subculture, driven by a niche population that was more technically savvy and prone to create rather than just consume. Today's web is poor because it is now the mainstream culture, it is driven by a wide population of casual, unsophisticated users that are prone to consume content only and are therefore best served by walled gardens.

As the casual consumer web grew, the early maker web's signal got increasingly lost in the noise. There are still interesting blogs out there, but they are harder to find and attract less engagement because even those of us from the spirit of that original web now spend so much time on platforms like Reddit (and even HN) instead.

Even if you want to produce novel content, you really HAVE to engage with the entrenched closed platforms in order to reach any audience at all now. And therefore there's little way to discriminate, if you want to attract a community of early-web minded people while avoiding the mass normies. Most attempts that try this either fizzle out altogether, or inadvertently take a wrong turn into culture wars, instead attracting alt-right trolls who think the problem with the web is too many political progressives now.

I think it is a pointless goal to try to change the entire mainstream Internet. To somehow change 2020's normies into 1990's geeks. I think the only feasible goal, and only necessary goal, is to carve out space for that geek community to thrive as a subculture once again. Honestly, "the web" itself may be an inappropriate platform for this. It may only be possible with something new that requires some technical savvy and friction in order to access, to discourage all the phone users from venturing in.

[akudha]

I’d add - pay for services when you can afford it. For example, encourage smaller search engines like Kagi. Maybe pay for email, instead of using gmail. Pay for smaller/local news orgs that do original and honest reporting. And so on. And donate to archive.org etc, even if it is only 5$

When we pay for services, we can fight spam/ad invested sites, at least to some extent

[snorremd]

This is my approach. I've almost completely de-Googled my private life. For email I use Fastmail. I've migrated most my mail over there, but some remains on my old Google address. So many accounts to port.

For search I now mainly use Kagi. Sometimes I drop into Google if I can't find what I'm looking for on Kagi. The nice thing about Kagi is I can manually block or de-prioritize SEO spam domains so I get more relevant results. Takes a bit of time to build these lists, but it does work.

I use primarily Firefox and Safari as browsers. I also support Mozilla via my Pocket subscription.

Edit:

I also have my own website where I post content without any ads or tracking. The content is even licensed under a CC attribute and share-alike license so people can re-post and remix my content as long as they give proper attribution.

[akudha]

Would you recommend fastmail? I am shopping for email service

[snorremd]

Yes. I've used them for a few years now and never had any serious issues. Their delivery rate seems good, I don't get much spam, and so far as I know I have not missed legitimate emails.

They have a fast web client where you can perform actions on your entire inbox. So far as I remember gmail only allowed you to do actions on the current page of mails. If you don't want to use their official clients you can always connect via standard IMAP and SMTP.

Also they support plus-addressing like gmail, but also subdomain addressing. I.e. instead of [e-mail] you can use [e-mail]. You can also set up nice email filters quite easily, and their server supports the JMAP protocol [1], which they made. So if you want to interface with your mailbox programmatically they have a more modern protocol to use.

The years I've used them I only remember them having actual noticeable downtime once. Other than that rock solid. Their first line support isn't super technical, but I've only tried to contact them once.

Edit: Essentially if you want good olf-fashioned mail, Fastmail is about as good as it gets. It does not have the smart inbox concepts that Google Mail and Hey do. And not so much in terms of other fancy stuff either. But it makes up for it by using open protocols for mail, calendar, and contact lists. So no danger of lock-in.

[1] https://jmap.io/index.html

[dbingham]

I think we're taking the wrong lesson here. Wikipedia is the "Last Good Place" on the internet - it's not decentralized or federated. It is governed by a non-profit and funded by donations.

There are good reasons the fediverse hasn't caught on yet and it comes down to user experience. We haven't figured out how to build a federated service that truly coheres as a single platform, network, or community across the whole network. (Yes, individual instances act as coherent communities, but the links to other instances are weak.) And we haven't figured out how to reduce the cognitive load of joining a federated platform to the point where it's accessible to the average user . I think this is a big part of why Mastodon is still touting usage in the single digit millions while Threads and Bluesky grew several orders of magnitude more as Twitter melted down.

Until we solve those problems - which by necessity includes solving the discovery problem - we're not going to be able to successfully decentralize the net. Those problems are a huge part of what lead the net to centralize into massive platforms in the first place, and we can't undo it with out resolving those factors.

And solving coherence and discovery in federation is a multi-trillion dollar, decades and a research team, Very Hard Problem (tm).

...but we know how to build centralized platforms that are democratically governed by non-profits. Wikipedia showed us how, and there's a lot that could be improved upon to do even better in terms of transparency and governance. And yes, democracy is hard. It just is. Community is hard. Society is hard. It requires deliberation and compromise. And it will never be perfect (as Wikipedia is far from perfect).

But it would sure as hell be better than what we've got.

The main piece that's missing is startup funding. Non-profit funders mostly don't understand software. We need non-profit funders who are willing to fund the development of platforms until they gain the sorts of critical mass that would allow them to fund their operations through donations.

[linuxdeveloper]

My pitch to the public: “Join the Fediverse and help build the weird new Internet.”

The Epsilon galaxy is a friendly outpost of services in the brave new decentralized digital universe, now known as the Fediverse. (I coined the term Fediverse “galaxy” to refer to a cluster of federated services/nodes run by a single entity, and it’s gained some traction on Mastodon).

My galaxy is completely bootstrapped, no VC investment: https://epsilon.lol

We even have our first paying customer (8 euro/ year)!

[isk517]

I'd also add try and give monetary support content creators that you enjoy. Consuming things for free then relying on ads to pay the people that make things is part of how we got to this point.

Also in response to your edit, isn't the entire point of Hacker News about discovery? One thing we could do right here on is have a weekly thread for people to post general places on the internet they find interesting (webpages, services, communities) but perhaps don't feel like they constitute a unique thread of their own.

[jmyeet]

I'm honestly shocked how often I still hear technical and educated people argue that the solution is federation.

You know what services we have that are federated? Phone (POTS), SMS and email. You know what services have a massive problem with spam, fraud, false positives on detection of the aforementioned, ID spoofing, etc? The exact same services.

People ignore the real reason Wikipedia is successful: ownership. It's also worth noting that Wikipedia isn't federated either.

We have the same issue with ISPs in the US. The best Internet is municipal broadband. The national ISPs are pretty much universally despised. Again, what's the difference? Ownership. With municipal broadband, the residents own the broadband. National ISPs exist to extract wealth from customers while doing the least possible and lobbying for legal protections against competition.

It's almost like the best results are achieved when the workers own the means of production. Someone should really look into that.

[abetusk]

In my opinion, a big part of the success of Wikipedia is that it offers its content under a libre/free license (CC-BY-SA). This specifically allows for commercial re-use and re-sale.

The license provides a wide umbrella so that many different people and entities can use the content without worry. Contributions provide a fly-wheel of improvement.

A lot of the current batch of internet companies provide walled gardens and eventually succumb to the trappings of monopolies. In some sense, I think it's survivorship bias. The only entities that stand the test of time are the ones that provide content under libre/free licensing.

While I don't disagree with your list, I think a missing component is access to the commons. Without a rich commons, our society suffers as content sinks into a copyright quagmire.

[marak830]

I do not discount anything you posted. At all.

* I don't use any social media except here. * I have nothing to say so don't host * Duck duck go? * I tell everyone to move to firefox, help them set it up and most are convinced.

Just wish I knew a way to actually help.

[bad_alloc]

> I tell everyone to move to firefox, help them set it up and most are convinced.

That already helps significantly. :)

> I have nothing to say so don't host

A fair point, probably only a small % of people on the internet need to actualyl host something. There is some middle ground with federated hosting like write.as , so hosting is not always needed.

[yard2010]

Vivaldi on mobile with builtin tracker and ads blocker. I'm not affiliated just a big fan.

[xnx]

This will likely be an unpopular opinion, but TikTok has been a great place for me to learn about all kinds of unique and interesting things and hobbyist communities I'd never known about: homesteading, commercial plane transport, tether car racing, DIY halloween decorations, interpretive dance, and a lot more. Top comments tend to be funny (though often the same joke) and smart.

[datadeft]

Think about with you mother in mind. The issue with thinking we can fix it is that you think about another HN reader in mind.

Humanity's biggest issues are coming from concentration or centralisation. You can apply this pretty much to anything: wealth, population, corporations, etc. We create bubbles based on these.

The solution is decentralisation.

The question is how to get there?

[esafak]

Centralization is what made Wikipedia, Facebook, and other sites great before they deteriorated. You can go farther when united. Up or down.

[eloisant]

The problem is that too many people don't go to website other than their usual social media sites.

[endisneigh]

I find it very ironic that this is the top post given the centralized nature of this site.

[amelius]

The main thing that should happen is that there is a threshold of effort before people can post things.

Like before Eternal September, people had to learn stuff to do things on the internet.

[pessimizer]

That's just leaving the internet to the most insane. A tiny bit of effort to post cuts out 95% of participants, leaving mostly the obsessed, often with a specific axe to grind. Cutting by 95% again is distilling nuttiness.

The thing that should happen is carefully cultivating closed memberships, and real tools for formal group decision-making. Mods are just benevolent dictators, and the debate that happens around mods with absolute power is essentially theater. Wikipedia barely hides this with its votes that anybody can show up to, and its code of rules being a arbitrary wise-sounding series of koan-shaped aphorisms. Wikipedia has been vulnerable to anybody with a few bucks and an issue that they're willing to camp on.

The only reason one can't manipulate Wikipedia at will is because you may have some real life opposition who is also attacking the same articles you are. Instead of formalizing that competition between people of different opinions, Wikipedia has ultimately fallen into dictating who is correct based on the opinion of the highest ranked interested person, within an organization that survives on donations and on volunteer editors who get income from any number of sources. This can't stand up to the manipulation of someone invested in distorting the history of hard-shelled tacos, it certainly can't (and isn't) standing up to state-state level actors.

[lo_zamoyski]

A path to some desired state requires an incentive and a reduction of friction (like cost). Absent those things, you will get nowhere.

[chrsw]

I don't know if it can be fixed. Maybe we can slow the deterioration but we might be beyond the tipping point. The internet I joined 25 years ago is long gone and it's never coming back. It's partly a technological problem and a resource problem but it's also larger scale problem with our values.

[vasco]

Taking a much higher level of perspective on the issue, I don't know if people complain in the way that it matters. I mean sure they complain, but internet usage globally is up by a lot and it keeps going up, even as we discover some issues with over-use on our health. So yeah people complain but the internet, even as it is today, is I think by any metric the most loved technology available worldwide.

If the internet was getting way worse in practice wouldn't a bunch of people start using somethng else and new user rates decreasing? By all metrics the internet is the best it ever was and keeps being super useful for everyone.

[WesolyKubeczek]

I’ve been to fediverse. Many mastodongs are just the same entitled first world outrage vents as twitters, even more toxic at times because there are no moderators to shut them up.

[Zambyte]

You only see posts that you look for on the Fediverse. If you don't want to see those posts, stop looking for them.

Join a moderated instance. Follow people you want to see posts from. Unfollow people you don't want to see posts from anymore.

[unpopularopp]

>You only see posts that you look for on the Fediverse

>Follow people you want to see posts from. Unfollow people you don't want to see posts from anymore

But that's the same on Twitter or Reddit too. I only follow 20 people on Twitter and I only see their posts. I only read 10 reddit subs through RSS and I only see posts from those subs. To me there is no reason to switch to an alternative because what I want is not there.

[thih9]

Anecdotally, I'm happy with my mastodon instance and its level of moderation.

> Many mastodongs are just the same entitled first world outrage vents

Calling others "mastodongs" is not exactly the opposite of an entitled first world outrage vent. Have you tried to solve the problem yourself, e.g. finding an instance that suits you better?

[WesolyKubeczek]

There’s this directory of mastodon instances one is invited to browse to pick one, and after sifting through an insane amount of instances that are no longer up, instances that highly favor furry anime erotica, instances that are inclusive of LGBT+ people to the point of exlusion of everyone else at all, instances that are full of left wing activists so peaceful and welcoming that they have users with nicknames like “Let’s dismember Scott Adams” and user avatars with the sickle and the hammer, I’ve come to a conclusion that it’s not an environment I’m going to enjoy much.

Since “the federation” is actively nurturing the environment to be like that, my hopes are not high.

[serial_dev]

Mastodon will never make it (e.g my parents, non tech siblings at least know what it is).

My experience, too, wasn't positive, the only time there was meaningful activity there was when everyone said they hate Elon and Twitter, it's an echo chamber, no interesting voices, and that whole fediverse stuff is confusing even as a software developer, imagine how nontech people would feel (they _would_ if they ever heard about Mastodon).

It might just be me, but I also hate the name. "Follow me on Mastodon" sounds like something that will get the cops called on me.

It had its chance when Elon took over, but then people realized that federation will not make a good user experience and will not make a community. I see anyone who offers Mastodon as a solution to anything in 2023 as "too deep in their bubble".

Stop trying to make Mastodon happen, it's not going to happen.

[kalleboo]

I agree that Mastodon's technical limitations will never make it the mainstream choice, although something like Threads actually going through with their threat of implementing ActivityPub may make AP that through user-friendly centralized services that Mastodon servers can interact with (like with google actually supported xmpp)

But I disagree with some of your other comments

> The only time there was meaningful activity there was when everyone said they hate Elon and Twitter

The first few months after the "exodus" when Twitter was in chaos this was true, but after that I just muted the keywords "twitter" and "birdsite" and don't hear much about it anymore, even after the rebranding to X made it impossible to keyword filter people just don't talk about it. I hear more from IRL friends "they're removing likes!" (??? apparently?) than I've seen on Mastodon.

> it's an echo chamber, no interesting voices

For me I've found far more interesting voices on Mastodon than on Twitter now that I'm just seeing boosts by humans instead of whatever the algorithm deemed was viral. I was bored with Twitter before I switched since there wasn't anything going on but outrage (and I made a point of unfollowing Americans who retweeted political stuff to try to signal to the algorithm I want technical stuff) but now on Mastodon my feed is full of people making and doing things instead, it's far more interesting.

> It might just be me, but I also hate the name. "Follow me on Mastodon" sounds like something that will get the cops called on me.

The ridiculousness of "Twitter" and "tweeting" were literally daily jokes on late-night shows when Twitter was rising. Names mean nothing. And somehow "X" is still somehow even worse. It sounds like a porn site.

> will not make a community

If there's anything Mastodon has created, it's communities. I doubt it will create a "world's town square" like Twitter did, but it has created lots of interesting thriving communities. Similarly to how Usenet and IRC did, which both probably had far fewer users.

[ggpsv]

Mastodon doesn't need to "make" it or "happen". Mastodon is not out there trying to become _the thing_. It works exactly as expected for a segment of people. It may not be your cup of tea and that's fine! Good thing we can have both.

[ants_everywhere]

This is true. Just from a technical perspective I think toxicity isn't an entirely intractable problem. The combination of moderator + tooling + AI should eventually get to acceptable levels where you can scale moderation acceptably on average for most users most of the time.

But I do think there will be a cat and mouse game as tools to evade moderation also get more advanced and are perhaps only revealed when the moderation tools are needed most. That's where it's nice to have the resources of a large corporation to invest in being able to be proactive about threats.

[tentacleuno]

Agreed. Though I think an important point here is that moderation has the potential to be a lot more personal on Fediverse instances, as the ratio between moderators and users is a lot higher than traditional social media outlets (Facebook, Twitter).

Maybe AI has a place in moderation? I've always wondered why it isn't used more; if you give it an adequate training phase (a year?), it may be able to quickly identify and flag malicious content -- of course, you wouldn't want to ban whoever the AI tells you to, just use it as one of the signals for whether content could potentially be harmful.

[ants_everywhere]

Yes I think that's exactly right. In the ideal case you would want to moderate with a personal touch at the start and the use automation to scale that personality as needed.

I was thinking of AI in moderation mainly as signals. Like looking for synchronized activity or standard canned tactics and just surface them as signals or alerts to be looked at by humans. Basically make it easier to combat coordination and scale that is hard for any one moderater to see.

There is also the client side scanning stuff that Apple and others have experimented with. Basically try to warn users before they do something so that they're at least aware of the guidelines and leave it up to them whether they think they should proceed.

[tentacleuno]

> I was thinking of AI in moderation mainly as signals. Like looking for synchronized activity or standard canned tactics and just surface them as signals or alerts to be looked at by humans. Basically make it easier to combat coordination and scale that is hard for any one moderater to see.

100%. It would be great if that could become public, too -- perhaps moderators could contribute to the model, maybe even automatically, through the software.

Though I'm unsure as to how you would prevent bias from entering the model. I feel like AI isn't used much in solutions such as these because you can't read what its been trained upon (e.g. if a right-leaning instance uses it, it may be biased against left-leaning content), and how the final model reacts to content. (Maybe there's a way to achieve this, not an AI expert by any means.)

It seems like it would be less transparent than the (arguably not great) solution we have now: shared blocklists.

Anyway, on the whole it would be great if we could take advantage of technology to reduce the administrative work required to host a public Mastodon / AP instance -- if we could achieve it, such work would most likely give way to more instances.

[ants_everywhere]

> It would be great if that could become public, too

Absolutely, that would be awesome

> Though I'm unsure as to how you would prevent bias from entering the model.

My only thought here is that something like the Hacker News model works pretty well (at least in theory). You would focus on norms of communication rather than on the content being expressed.

You'd still get bias for things like one community may prefer things very deferential. Another might value frank communication. But presumably nobody likes screaming or brigading. I think you're less likely to get left/right style biases if you focus on the quality of the communication rather than its content.

An approach like this would still miss important things. For example, you can say very toxic things in a civil voice. So you'd likely have to combine different orthogonal signals to have any sort of guarantee that your site isn't slowly drifting into a place where people know how to consistently violate the rules while evading detection.

[kalleboo]

At least on federated services there are no algorithms pushing them in your face. Create your own instance, invite like-minded people. You can't do that on centralized services.

The first time I heard about Mastodon was from conservative libertarian-type folk who disagreed with Twitter policy, several years ago. I disagree strongly with their politics but at least they decided to create something instead of just use it as victim politics like the mainstream politicians.

[ravenstine]

I can appreciate this kind of thinking as much as everyone else, but I think that the "fediverse" is too much of a distraction. Federation can be a great thing, but it's an adjunct to a solution, and not much of a large scale solution in and of itself.

What the web needs is new layers to make what your suggestions much more practical.

Creating a website was a nice idea back in 2003 when mostly geeks with skills were using the web. Today, most people don't want to put forth the effort of creating a website. Many geeks with skills that are still around today don't want to bother creating a website because few people will find it. If you make a website, at best only people who read websites will find it. A growing number of people today don't even know what a "website" is because they hardly live on the web proper. Free web hosting is generally bad news because the platform is far more likely to either shut down or provide zero support.

So back to the thing I said about new layers to the web...

If we're going to bring back websites, then we need to bring back the idea that sites will be hosted on many individual machines that aren't necessarily server infrastructure. With the bandwidth most ISPs and devices are capable of today, data isn't a limiting factor in terms of serving a standard website to even thousands of users. The web was meant to be closer to a peer-to-peer model, and it can be used peer-to-peer, but the layer just isn't there to make that model seamless. Most P2P protocols avoid fiddling with the actual network stack and do entirely their own thing; BitTorrent for the most part lives in their own client applications, as historically have many other P2P protocols. That was fine when geeks were using them, but this is insufficient for making the web itself P2P.

The closest implementation to what I am describing here is Yggdrasil:

https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/

Yggdrasil implements P2P mesh networks by behaving like a VPN, assigning an IPv6 address to peers based on public keys. There's no one network, so people are free to create their own networks, and the same address can be used between networks. Although it has some similarities with anonymity networks like Tor, it is not designed for anonymity, which I think is a good thing because Yggdrasil should focus specifically on the networking aspect. Although it's technically in alpha status, I've already been using it to network devices together in my home office. I even have it installed in my car's Android head unit so I can SSH into it and do Linuxy things with it.

The current issue I see with Yggdrasil is that it's not plug-n-play enough to become the de facto next generation layer of the web/internet. It still requires manually configuring a JSON file in order to join a network and so forth. Yggdrasil isn't difficult to install, but if the world wants to go with something like it as this next layer, we need to get it to a state where the user needs next to no knowledge to set it up.

With this hypothetical layer, groups of people can form their own networks and exchange addresses. This is perfect if you want to have an application similar to WhatsApp or Signal that is mostly private and scoped to groups of people, but allows users to cross into multiple groups.

In terms of websites, it's perfect because you get an IPv6 address that is publicly available to anyone on your network and with none of the hassle that's involved with getting a public IP address on the clearnet. It's all a matter of who is connected to the network.

If you want anonymity, this layer can still work through another layer like Tor, or even live entirely within something like I2P. A benefit to using I2P here is that its design makes DDoS attacks more difficult, at least in theory.

With such a layer, hosting sites can become much more trivial. For everyday people who are a little more technically savvy but don't want to be fussing with the command line, I picture simply downloading something like a Reddit clone that runs like any other app on Linux or MacOS and it runs with a neat little admin interface. Share the address (or the domain if a secondary DNS is used) and you're off to the races.

[__MatrixMan__]

I love your attitude, and I agree that we should be trying to fix this, but the problem is not a lack of signal, it's an increase in noise. Fixing the web means changing it in fundamental ways.

Suppose your webbable hobby is curating trustworthy product reviews. You're the hero that's going to fix the web AND capitalism. You can still do that, but you're going to help fewer people because you have to split your attention between you know, doing the thing, and doing the kind of marketing which helps people tell the difference between your thing and the ones that are secretly ads. Meanwhile, the bad guys can focus entirely on the latter. Sorry about the time you wanted to spend comparing blenders, your hobby is now competing with marketers... Or you have to make peace with either obscurity, or contributing to the thing you're trying to kill, because you know that the second you start making an impact somebody is going to rehost your site interleaved with misinformation.

Yes, let's fix this thing but the answer is protocols with different inherent priorities. We can't shout over the noise, we need to build something less noisy.

My personal view is that we should stop building trust around server names and implicitly trusting whatever those servers send us. In this model the non-content-generating work converges on systems to identify and remove malicious content (either from the server or from the browser screen).

Instead we should be addressing content, and sourcing it from whatever device has a copy and is most near. Our browser should know which people we trust and should make it easy for us to lean on that trust such that we can propagate only the trusted bits in the first place.

That is: stop identifying ads so that we can block them, start identifying trustworthy content so we can all participate in propagating it more efficiently and supporting it's creators.

Or to put it differently: there needs to be no way to spend money to promote content. No third parties injecting bits anywhere. If you notice that kind of shit, you apply annotations which distinguish the signal from the noise and then you propagate only the signal. If people abuse this power, you revoke trust in them and move on.

It'll require an awareness of information hygiene, which will be work to maintain, but all of the alternatives I can see involve tolerating life in a Skinner box