Unpopular Opinion

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Decentralized social media is better, but it won't solve the issues social media causes. (lemm.ee)

submitted 4 days ago by [email protected] to c/unpopularopinion

28 comments fedilink hide all child comments

As anyone who remembers the 90s/00s can remember, the internet was supposed to liberate us. Free access to information meant everyone would be educated and informed, and able to freely communicate and organize.

That's not what happened. Corporations turned it into a tool of oppression. Technology has never and will never save us from capitalism on its own. Since the early 1900s we've been capable of providing food, housing, and medical care to everyone but we don't. Technology cannot change that.

Social media is a particularly vile tool. It allows corporations to totally shape the reality of people who use it. To the point where people are so divided it's all but impossible to oppose the government.

Decentralized social media might be better, at least for now. But it's still removing the human element from our lives. Instead of talking to each other we create little echo chambers for ourselves. The Fediverse will not fix that.

The only real solution is to reject social media entirely. Which was happening, but now I fear decentralized social media is pulling people back in.

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[–] JubilantJaguar 5 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Yep but important to note here that decentralized social media based on video is always going to be a challenge because of the hosting and bandwidth costs of video.

[–] Valmond 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Is it though?

I mean it is probably impossible to replace youtube, but it's based on the idea that more subscribers = good, more views is a good thing without any kind of restrictions.

In my fantasy world, someone making a video about say oil painting (because I like that) and puts up a magnificent one hour video on their own PC.

In my fantasy world, it won't hit 100.000 views that week, but maybe 10.000 per year.

Totally serveable with a fix line.

Also, pooling bandwidth, like this incredible news channel (still in my fantasy world) that needs millions of downloads per day could be served by thousands of nice people sharing their bandwidth.

Well that's how I see it, what do you think?

[–] JubilantJaguar 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

It's an attractive vision. And yes, it's probably even technically possible, the BitTorrent algorithm was designed for exactly this purpose.

[–] Valmond 2 points 4 days ago

Thanks.

I'm working on a decentralised sharing algorithm and it starts to feel quite mature. Gotta do some announcements I guess :-)