That is the main issue. I am on mastodon but following someone on another instance of mastodon is not easy for "regular people". Until that is solved people will stick to items like twitter and meta.
AFAIK, most people on Bluesky are on the "main" instance, so that tends to end up being a centralized community which can suffer from the same issues.
For me, I found it too difficult to locate "my peeps" on other instances, so I switched to Bluesky.
I dropped Facebook when I realized that their app was snooping on who I called and who called me.
How does that work? People post on FB or IG, AND THEN phone you / write a letter? doubtful...
even OAI and Ant are better options
Kind of hurts/helps the point, but yeah generally, you should run your own website? Is this the return of the old web?
The problem with that is people are "lazy": they're typically not going to expend extra effort that's not needed to solve the problem in front of them. It's pervasive, and it's one of the big reasons "friction" reducing technology can be really problematic: it turns necessary behaviors into issues of self-discipline (e.g. exercise becomes forcing yourself to haul yourself to the gym regularly in your spare time, instead just walking everywhere because you have to in order to go about your day).
So, IMHO, if you want people to use "open, decentralized, and user controlled" in 2026, you have to ban the centralized alternatives. Otherwise you're yelling at clouds, as most people will pick the lowest friction alternative.
If you want people to adopt your thing, it's got to make their life easier, right now, full stop.
I used to use a multiprotocol client, Pidgin, to chat with people on a couple of different platforms. But of course now a lot of chat is on things like Facebook and Google Chat which are supported only by plugins. But even that is still not enough because I will have to have an account on each of the platforms.
Chat really needs to be like email or SMS; you ought not to need an account with the provider of the person you are sending messages to.
all the bullshitting about complaining about centralization, third party this and that, freedom of speech, can't take that shit seriously. somehow they uniquely find only violations of these from people in the "other" side of the aisle. it's just so exhausting and obviously bad faith engagement. and the right isn't really any better, they do the same thing, just flipped. i think it's about time we mostly just admit: libertarians are fools (that used to be me LOL), and nobody in western culture genuinely cares about "free speech". everything they support is free speech, everything they dislike is "hate speech" (notice how the narrative changed). it's all so obvious to anyone who zooms out and looks at the larger trends. just get over it and embrace authoritarianism. just be honest about who you are.
if the No Kings people truly want to be taken seriously, the best thing they can do is just admit they are wrong about their whole schtick. unfortunately the chances of that happening are exactly zero % since pride stands in the way.
watch and observe. literally nobody believes in free speech. people believe in policies and agendas, and "freedom" is just a tool used to push it. the right wing does this, especially in economics, all the time, where they want the rich to be "free" to fuck the poor. take a step back, observe the trends, and be honest with yourself, and it will be quite obvious that freedom itself is just a tool used in politics, nobody actually believes in it as an end to aspire to. this isn't 1980 anymore. milton friedman is long gone.
There’s a reason autocrats hate protests. It’s because they’d much rather that opposition become doubtful of whether other opposition exist out there.
the grift works though, in part because the changes they protest for usually take a toll on the system over time, until the system soft or hard collapses. then you get social unrest. that's exactly you're seeing in france now. i dont even feel bad for france.
But yes, a solution is for people to host their own content/sites. Or "protocols not platforms"
In a perfect world yes. In the reality we live in no.
Why is this the case?
1. Any site that is politically active and capable of upsetting people WILL BE ATTACKED. Can you afford a terabyte of data a second coming your way? Probably not. So you put it behind CF, but now you're vulnerable to their policies closing you down.
2. Any site that is politically active and capable of upsetting people WILL BE ATTACKED. What are you going to do against floods of child porn or death threats posted by users pretending to be on your side, but actually working for the opposition?
3. Any site that is politically active and capable of upsetting people WILL BE ATTACKED. You are now in charge of your website security. Are you any good at it? How are you going to pay for it to be secured? How do you trust the people doing the security?
4. Any site that is politically active and capable of upsetting people WILL BE ATTACKED. How do you plan on getting people to come to your site? If it's upsetting enough to the powers that be any messages containing links to your site will disappear from Meta/X/Google. You are going to have to find neat an interesting, and probably expensive ways to get your message out.
We have consolidated the internet down to a point where it is very very easy for a few small groups to control the general discussion, especially across large diverse groups of people.
Meta Takes Down No Kings Instagram During Protest Day
- TikTok is controlled by Larry Ellison
- CBS news is controlled by Ellison's son
- The Ellisons will soon own CNN as well
- Twitter is controlled by Musk
- Facebook, Instagram and Threads are under Zuck
- WaPo and Amazon Prime by Bezos
- Old time favourites like Fox and WSJ owned by Murdoch
The owners of this media are also very explicitly involved in pro-Trump editorial content. In short, the playing field is wildly lopsided and unreliable and no tech (decentralized social media, lol) solution will work. Ultimately people will have to elect politicians to explicitly break up and clamp down on this hive of scum and villainy, but people aren't there yet, mentally. Such a solution seems wildly inappropriate today, but my guess is that another 10 years of the last two years will change a lot of minds.
Deplatforming people organizing a peaceful protest is very different. If you cannot understand how that is different, then I worry about your critical thinking skills.
The bit about "the worst people's accounts" just sounds like a refutation of everything else in the article. The problem was always that it was up to interpretation who "the worst people" are.
IDK why so many people want to die on this hill of not forcing social media companies to extend free-speech rights to their userbase. Facebook didn't accidentally wind up in this position where their TOS can effectively censor entire political movements on the Zuck's whim. They spent decades purposefully angling for this by acquiring competitors and encouraging people to use their platform for any and all communication. They own the audience.
>But there is a better solution: build tools that are open, decentralized, and user controlled. And then actually use them instead of just giving more power to Mark Zuckerberg to shut down a protest organization’s account in the middle of one of its big protests.
Not happening LOL. The decentralized platforms have been there for 10-20 years, hardly anybody uses them.
Back when the shoe was on the other foot, the right tried to make *several* alternative platforms and there was widespread collusion amongst all levels of infrastructure providers to push them off the internet. The same will happen to any platform which seeks to effect political change and attains enough critical mass that it could plausibly do so.
We got Internet moderation.
Watch out what you wish for.
It's the Right wing politicians too. Look at Texas and pornography laws or the IRL book bans.
The problem is the Oligarchy, the are thick from money, power, and hubris
What Facebook has is an opaque process run by AI with no way for most people to appeal.
In the case of major events, my brother usually lets me know, for example the death of an aunt. Everyone close to me knows I don't use FB, so if they want me to be aware of something in particular, they can text or call me.
I don't like (most of) the content on those sites. This is not surprising. The content is aimed at people who can't use Signal. Such a person is different from me in many ways.
But seriously, there's zero incentive for the folks building these clients to make them interoperable. In fact there may even be disincentive, since the more folks they have on their platform, the more valuable the platform is.
1. Too stupid to make a plan that could possibly work
2. Too lazy to execute on a plan that could possibly work
Knowing this is a useful signal. It tells me their judgment is terrible, and I should not listen to them ;)
Amazing.
TFA (and you) are just discounting the power of network effects. Tells me that your judgment is poor and I should not listen to you ;)
Instead, go to where people all are, real life in the real world. I go out and talk to people all the time. I listen to them before telling them. I'm more interested in getting people talking than I am in changing their minds (right now) and providing them with ideas they are unlikely to hear online. I see my "sapphire gals" (retired nokingers) becoming less extreme, not repeating the shallow talking points. I hear them asking new questions.
Talking and working with others in person is 100x better.
> 1. Too stupid to make a plan that could possibly work
> 2. Too lazy to execute on a plan that could possibly work
Your comment is a pretty good example of what not to do: society/technology makes good choices harder, so flog individuals about their lack of self-discipline when they don't do yet-another hard thing. People only have so much time and self-discipline, have some empathy.
The only thing the flogging does is give the flogger the chance to feel unjustifiably superior.
> Knowing this is a useful signal. It tells me their judgment is terrible, and I should not listen to them ;)
What you're doing is a generalized method to dismiss anything and anyone:
1. Find a thing.
2. Search for some aspect that isn't perfect. Viciously criticize that aspect.
3. Dismiss the whole thing on account of that aspect.
The only thing that using Instagram tells me about these activists is that they weren't setting out to solve some ideological communication technology problem. They had other priorities.
Right now they have it both ways. They have the users, money, and data and they speak through their moderation decisions while being legally immune from consequences.
I'm not exactly sure what the answer is, but we can place two constraints
1. Anyone can say anything online, free speech for individuals
2. Algorithms that act as "editors" are not free speech and should be regulated.
Perhaps the answer is to say that social media algorithms can only be chronological and M0% from your direct network.
Reposts and quotes seem to be one of the core features that enable virality and dog piling. We need to "slow the spread" - to borrow a phase from one of our least favorite times.
Another thing we need is a privacy preserving method for proving humanism online.
You do realize that will accomplish the exact opposite of what you're trying to achieve right?
Section 230 was a Trojan Horse.
If they want to be treated like an innocent carrier (i.e., telco), they must kill their algorithms.
No news media company writes or says the reports of the journalists they publish or broadcast, but they are nevertheless responsible for that content.
If social media wants to control the algorithmic feed for profit, they must be like any media, "fully responsible for their content", and must be held accountable for it.
There are also legal issues that kill decentralized/user-controlled systems. Copyright and child abuse are the most prominent, along with terrorism and drug trafficking. Who gets sued or prosecuted when the system is open, decentralized, and user-controlled? The users, and that's why peer-to-peer filesharing died, why so few people are willing to host a Tor exit node, etc. Before talking about banning centralized systems we need to talk about updating the legal system so that it does not force centralization, which is a much bigger project and much harder to get right.
NewJazz•47m ago
fallinghawks•5m ago