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

Not sure if this is what the previous user was getting at, but I think we should put it a different way: it's not about whether or not the admins of a given site/instance refuse to host ads, but if they can meaningfully prevent ads from manifesting on their platform.

If there is money to extract from people, the advertisers will eventually arrive, invited or not.

On Reddit, for instance, I'd be willing to guess that the majority of ads were not formal ads, but rather astroturfed content from informal advertisers.

The only reason Lemmy is not seeing that (at least not so overtly) is because it's still small and obscure. But security through obscurity is not really a winning strategy in the long run.

[–] JubilantJaguar 2 points 4 days ago

That's fair but I think you're both worrying a bit too much. Astroturfing is a problem, sure, but it's a first-world problem compared to spyware-driven engagement-maximization algorithms.