[deleted]
I can’t upvote this strongly enough. Social media is doing everything in the establishment’s favor - especially ingraining the habit of glancing at a news item and making an instant value judgement with minimal thought before scrolling along to the next item. It’s not just the endless scrolling and venting vs taking real action, it’s the encouragement of superficial thinking, which is solid gold for con men like Trump who depend on people jumping to stupid conclusions. People who get all their knowledge from memes are easier to fool than people who take time to think.
ininewcrow@lemmy.ca 4 months ago
The greatest thing that social media ever did for humanity was in its ability to allow all of us to talk to each other in an open platform.
Those private corporate platforms have slowly been eroded and controlled to only waste our time and designed to keep us all angry, afraid, anxious and confused.
Open decentralized social media is bringing us back to that era 20 years ago when social media was just starting and people just talked and openly discussed the issues of the day with one another. It doesn’t matter what kind of platform we have or can create, as long as it is decentralized and controlled by people, everyone will always find value in it because it allows us to talk to one another. The greatest thing I’ve ever found in taking part in the fediverse was in connecting to like minded people who want to talk about the important issues of the day without all the distractions of advertising and without having having to give up my privacy or security and have my identity sold to the highest bidder.
SouthEndSunset@lemm.ee 4 months ago
Same. I’ve learned a lot since I joined Lemmy.
I genuinely believe centralised social media was created to make you feel like you’re doing something.
heavydust@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
I was doing that just fine 30/40 years ago with BBS, newsgroups, and later with forums such as Lemmy. Social media put a name or a face on people, and was combined with the regular “eternal septembers,” but it didn’t bring anything useful to the conversation IMHO.
bobs_monkey@lemm.ee 4 months ago
It did break down the barriers for those less technical by bringing the conversation to a web browser that was certainly more accessible as opposed to a terminal, for better or worse. It’s not far off from the fediverse in that it does take some technical understanding to navigate, which does create a sort of barrier. Now, whether that is good or bad is a subject of debate, and I’m inclined to agree that the more accessible a platform is, the more watered down the conversations become.
Zorque@lemmy.world 4 months ago
You are the exception, not the rule. Just because you have an easy time with something does not mean everyone does. Everyone experiences interaction in a different way.
Just because it brings no value to your life does not mean that opinion is universal.
alvvayson@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 months ago
The next step, in my opinion, is strong privacy and decentralized organization that fully leverages constitutional rights.
I.e. a privacy preserving social media where labour unions, political parties and religious groups can federate with each other. Servers hosted on their premises and members register through an on-premise process.
A church in a foreign country could generate a thousand aliases and distribute them to their federated sister organizations in a privacy preserving way. Only the church knows which organizations got which aliases and they protect this information.
Your local labour union chapter picks up 20 of those aliases and distributes them to members. They are the only one who knows the person behind the alias.
An observer in this private fediverse trying to obtain the identity would first need to approach the church. The church can stall them and warn downstream through a canary.
The labour union chapter observes the canary and immediately wipes all information.
And if that fails, then full I2P and Tor, with nodes hosted on-premise of churches, political parties and labour unions.
bobs_monkey@lemm.ee 4 months ago
Hate to say it, but there’s the very real possibility those days are numbered.
As it sits, those of us that are savvy need to be actively using and promoting privacy-centric communications methodology to ensure we have a means to communicate safely and effectively as time goes on and those tights are further eroded. I don’t see the internet completely dying, given the technical nature of it, but peering and connectivity will likely be hampered in the coming months and years, so it is in our best interest to find and employ feasible solutions now to attempt getting out ahead of anything those muppets come up with.
Irelephant@lemm.ee 4 months ago
I love mastodon because its actual people I’m following, so I can see whats happening in their lives, in contrast to twitter, which just showed me constant outrage bait and shitposts.
ininewcrow@lemmy.ca 4 months ago
I’ve been lazy on Mastodon because I’ve been spending all my time on Lemmy … I really should do more there in the future … thanks for the reminder.
fuzzy_ad@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Unless the mods remove your posts.
samus12345@lemm.ee 4 months ago
Then start your own server and post whatever you want.