I haven’t read the full article due to sign up paywall, but…
First, millions of small business owners and influencers who make a living on TikTok were left to beg their followers in TikTok’s last moments to follow them elsewhere in hopes of being able to continue their businesses on other corporate social media platforms. This had the effect of fracturing and destroying people’s audiences overnight, with one act of government.
How is decentralised social media going to help with this if the entire point of decentralisation is the opposite?
On decentralized media (Mastodon at the very least), you can move your account and your subscribers to any other instance whenever you want. You move with your audience, and they’ll barely notice any change, using the same app to keep following the same person automatically.
And this is why I’m still on .ml there’s not a way to move on Lemmy. Yet
Luckily, there’s normally little cost to switching Lemmy instances anyway. You can even probably take the same username and register on another instance, quickly rebuild your feed and that’s mostly it.
As everything is connected and there’s not much reason accumulating account age/karma/you name it, the loss is pretty minor.
I am so happy I have an account on here, even if some people can be quite abrasive
All we need is people at this point. Still way too many people on Reddit and they’ve gone downhill significantly since the push for monetization
I’m thinking of starting a friendica node for my city. I feel that a big problem with federated apps is that the audience isn’t local enough; it’s usually mostly tech-oriented people and doesn’t have enough local services.
It might be the only path forward.
I mean humanity survived thousands of years without any social media at all…
Gonna disagree here.
Humans have always had “social media”, but it’s not been directed by a cadre of oligarchs until recently.
I mean shit, humans have been sitting around the campfire telling stories to each other going all the fucking way back to forever. Sure, a campfire story isn’t a tweet, but for our monkey brains it’s essentially the same thing: how we interact with our social groups and learn what’s going on around us.
The problem is that the campfire stories couldn’t be manipulated into making your cavemen neighbors hate the other half, because half of them were totally pro rabbit fur while you’re pro squirrel fur.
You absolutely can do that and worse now, so while we’ve always had social media, we just simply never had anyone with enough control to make an entire society eat each other because of it’s influence.
There’s a big difference between sitting around a fire telling stories. And sending pseudonymous click-baity messages (I’m slightly exaggerating) across the globe.
As it’s not guaranteed anymore: Have you sit around a fire with friends? IME it’s so much more fulfilling and less prone to hate. Healthier (apart of the smoke). There’s so much more to communication than text messages.
There’s a big difference between sitting around a fire telling stories. And sending pseudonymous click-baity messages (I’m slightly exaggerating) across the globe.
Totally agree, except that regardless of how smart a person is…all our brains are pretty dumb and easy to fool. If reading stupid click-bait messages on the internet triggers the same connections as having a talk around the fire, then to our brains it’s literally the same. And it has all the same things, just more so. Is someone more likely to lie to you for their own ends on the internet? Probably, but your best friend would like to your face if their mental maths figured that lying would benefit them more than telling the truth. Not saying that society is doomed because we’re all inherently selfish and don’t care about the welfare of anyone past ourselves. But to say that social media doesn’t fill the same function as village gatherings, the town crier exclaiming news where you might not get word, or gathering around the fire with Oogtug and Feffaguh to tell eachother about your day…in the current era, when people are more socially isolated than ever? Nah. Doesn’t track for me.
all our brains are pretty dumb and easy to fool.
Absolutely, but I think that when we’re talking to actually smart people in person we at least subconsciously more likely believe the person that actually has to say something (i.e. really knows something we don’t). With social media a lot of these communication factors are missing, so if the text sounds smart, we may believe it. Sure you can fake and lie, etc. but I think (going back in time) we have a good instinct for people that may help us in any way i.e. through knowledge where to find food, find secure shelter etc. stuff that helps our survival, which in the end for humans is basically good factual knowledge that helps the survival of the species as a whole.
Today our attention spans are reduced to basically nothing to a large part because of social media promoting emotional (unfortunately mostly negative/anxiety/anger) short messages (and ads of course) that reinforce whatever we believe which likely strengthens bad connections in the brain.
Also the sheer mass of information is very likely not good for us. I.e. mostly nonfactual information, because well, there’s way more people that “have heard about something” than actually researched and gone down to the ground to get the truth (or at least a good model of it).
This all mixed, well doesn’t give me a positive outlook unfortunately…
I keep putting off replying to this, because it deserves a good, well thought reply. I’ve not got the mental space for it.
Suffice to say, I think what you said tracks with what I was stabbing at. And I agree. I’ll keep this as unread and maybe come back over the weekend if I can get my thoughts together.
You certainly could tell cavemen stories to manipulate them, back then.
The difference was you could only reach one campfire at a time. Nowadays the whole Internet is one campfire, metaphorically.
Lol chimpanzees kill each other in literal wars with torture, kidnapping, extortion, terrorism and more, and you think a caveman never thought of lying about the enemy group?
The previous post didn’t talk about inter-campfire relations. It talked about relations between people in one campfire. Relations with outsiders have always been fucky. It’s a miracle how the EU even came to be in the first place with how different everything/everyone is.
There was not a 8 billion people supply chain back then.
Yeah, which actually underlines my point even. We weren’t “designed” for connecting with everyone around the world. Evolutionary there were smaller groups, sometimes having contact with other groups.
Today we can just connect with our bubbles (like here on lemmy) and get validated and reinforce our beliefs independently if they are right or wrong (mostly factually). As we see this doesn’t seems to be healthy for most people. In smaller circles (like scientific community) this helps, but in general… Well I don’t think I have to explain the situation on the world (and especially currently in the USA) currently…
This is the better path forward… That everyone just gets so sick of it that they drop it - I’ve actually seen a lot of that among my own friends over the last week (and we aren’t from America even). But the right wingers will never drop it because it’s their community and echo chamber, and that’s where the further dangers to democracy come into play when they’re all in the sandbox together without parents…
Distributed (and zero configuration needed), but with centralized development. Federated is not good enough - separate instances may lag behind in versions, or their admins do something wrong, and user identities and posts are tied to them.
Ideally when an instance goes down, all its posts and comments and users are replicated in the network and possible to get.
A distributed Usenet with rich text, hyperlinks, file attachments, cryptographic identities, pluggable naming\spam-checking\hatespeech-checking services (themselves part of that system).
It was a good system for its time, first large global thing for asynchronous electronic communication.
OK, if you are, you don’t pretend, and if you pretend, you aren’t. And if you talk about someone somewhere probably designing something, then you are not making that something closer. I’m tired of typing things in the interwebs people either already know and agree with, or won’t take seriously.
Decentralized is too complicated. Worker owned is a better path forward and is centralized so it’s easier to support and be understood by its users. Moderators are workers and should have equity.
This is early days; I have a feeling in a few short years there will be ownership and simplicity of distributed services and whatever evolves from them.
Karl Marx 2.0 right there
I think if we had co-ops running some of these systems it would definitely alleviate some issues
This is probably why the tech industry has been hardened against that sort of thing, and is, say, famously hard to unionize.
Communication is not for sale.
How is Lemmy (or whatever) ever gonna scale up to the size of Reddit though? If they can’t deal with trolls and bots and spam then what the hell are we gonna do?
on reddit majority of heavy lifting is done by community mods. hosting, however, is a pain, lemmy is centralized as fuck.
What do you do in real life? You tell them to fuck off.
deleted by creator
404media paywalled? It’s free to create an account
If it’s free, why does it say “This post is for paid members only”?
Not this article. It’s free. Paid subscribers can read it without ads, is that what you meant?
Some of their posts they do reserve for paid subscribers, but those are usually behind-the-scenes type things, not the journalism.
I wish I could subscribe but I’m not $100+ dollars a year rich. Still impressive that they are doing DIY tech journalism.
No it wasn’t free, I got that message and couldn’t read it.
Try again, I just read it for free. I’ll post it here just in case:
https://www.404media.co/decentralized-social-media-is-the-only-alternative-to-the-tech-oligarchy/
Decentralized Social Media Is the Only Alternative to the Tech Oligarchy Jason Koebler Jan 21, 2025 at 12:33 PM
The TikTok ban and Donald Trump’s rise to power show how fragile our social media accounts are. We must normalize and invest in decentralized social media.
If it wasn’t already obvious, the last 72 hours have made it crystal clear that it is urgent to build and mainstream alternative, decentralized social media platforms that are resistant to government censorship and control, are not owned by oligarchs and dominated by their algorithms, and in which users own their follower list and can port it elsewhere easily and without restriction.
Besides all of the “normal” problems with corporate social media—the surveillance capitalism, the AI spam, the opaque algorithms—let’s take stock of what has happened in the last few days.
First, millions of small business owners and influencers who make a living on TikTok were left to beg their followers in TikTok’s last moments to follow them elsewhere in hopes of being able to continue their businesses on other corporate social media platforms. This had the effect of fracturing and destroying people’s audiences overnight, with one act of government.
TikTok has since come back, but it is still unclear what the future of the platform is, and TikTok now exists at the whim of President Trump and is beholden to him to an unknown extent. TikTok’s status in the Untied States is still up in the air—it is still not available for download in the iOS App Store or the Google Play Store, and it could disappear at any moment if service providers like Oracle decide that Trump’s executive order and assurances that they will not be prosecuted or fined are not enough assurance to keep the app online.
Elon Musk, who had already turned X into a cesspool of hate and an overt tool to get President Trump elected, is now formally part of the Trump administration, meaning the platform is literally owned by a member of the Trump White House.
Meta has made an overt shift to the right, and Mark Zuckerberg has himself become a Trump booster. The platform is making its content moderation worse, has declared that immigrants and LGBTQ+ people are legitimate targets for hate speech, and has made many of these changes at the behest of the Trump White House and Stephen Miller, according to The New York Times.
Zuckerberg, Musk, TikTok CEO Shou Chew, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman were all in attendance at Trump’s inauguration Monday. There is now no major corporate-owned social media platform that is not aligned with Trump or beholden to him in some way, and nearly every American is on at least one of these platforms.
The TikTok ban highlights, as we’ve seen before, that businesses and accounts built on these centralized, corporate social media platforms are incredibly fragile and can be taken away at any moment, whether by government action, algorithm tweaks that destroy reach, a platform deciding that a specific account does not comply with its ever-changing rules and political systems, etc. We have made clear at 404 Media that one of the reasons we ask our readers for their email addresses is because we have seen media outlets that rely disproportionately on social media distribution die over and over again. Individual influencers and account holders are now seeing how fragile what they have built really is.
The solution to this is decentralized, federated, portable social media in which users own their follower list and can port it elsewhere when the server they are posting on changes its rules, changes its politics, is threatened or attacked by the government, or otherwise becomes untenable. Mastodon’s ActivityPub and Bluesky’s AT.Protocol have provided the base technology layer to make this possible, and have laid important groundwork over the last few years to decorporatize and decentralize the social internet.
The problem with decentralized social media platforms thus far is that their user base is minuscule compared to platforms like TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram, meaning the cultural and political influence has lagged behind them. You also cannot directly monetize an audience on Bluesky or Mastodon—which, to be clear, is a feature, not a bug—but also means that the value proposition for an influencer who makes money through the TikTok creator program or a small business that makes money selling chewing gum on TikTok shop or a clothes brand that has figured out how to arbitrage Instagram ads to sell flannel shirts is not exactly clear. I am not advocating for decentralized social media to implement ads and creator payment programs. I’m just saying that many TikTok influencers were directing their collective hundreds of millions of fans to follow them to Instagram or YouTube, not a decentralized alternative.
This doesn’t mean that the fediverse or that a decentralized Instagram or TikTok competitor that runs on the AT.Protocol is doomed. But there is a lot of work to do. There is development work that needs to be done (and is being done) to make decentralized protocols easier to join and use and more interoperable with each other. And there is a massive education and recruitment challenge required to get the masses to not just try out decentralized platforms but to earnestly use them. Bluesky’s growing user base and rise as a legitimately impressive platform that one can post to without feeling like it’s going into the void is a massive step forward, and proof that it is possible to build thriving alternative platforms. The fact that Meta recently blocked links to a decentralized Instagram alternative shows that big tech sees these platforms, potentially, as a real threat.
And the far right has unfortunately shown that even small social media platforms can have an outsized impact on national politics and can be used to create political power. A legion of the worst people on Earth have spent years building admittedly resilient alternative social media sites after being deplatformed from or rage quitting sites like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. Places like Rumble, Gab, Truth Social, Odysee, and Patriots.Win are full of the worst America has to offer, but people on these websites have been successful in seeding (often false, often hateful) narratives that filter up the power chain and often end up getting repeated by Donald Trump or on more widely viewed right wing media like Fox News.
I bring up these platforms not to champion them but to highlight that being pushed out of or voluntarily leaving more mainstream platforms did not kill the ideas that were being shared by these people; in fact, their ideas now make up a core part of the current administration’s policies.
This is all to say that it is possible to build alternatives to Elon Musk’s X, Mark Zuckerberg’s Instagram, and whatever TikTok will become. It is happening, and it is necessary. The richest, most powerful people in the world have all aligned themselves and their platforms with Donald Trump. But their platforms’ relevance and importance doesn’t necessarily have to last forever. A different way is possible, if we build it.
Thanks for posting the text. I went to it again and this time instead of saying it was for paid subscribers only, it said I could view the article if I would sign up for a free account. I suppose they randomly pick one or the other approach, or maybe they try to get you to pay for a sub first, then try to get you to go for a free signup to at least get your email address.
I’ve never seen them use the “paid subscribers only” verbiage except on that bonus content stuff – maybe it is a bug that you saw that, or maybe the page accidentally loaded a different article somehow.
The “paid subscribers have ad free access” message looks like a paywall if you read it quickly, maybe something like that happened.
Either way most sites I don’t like giving an email address, but they have a respectable reason. They didn’t always require it, but scrapers kept reposting their work for ad profits, etc.. And for what it’s worth I don’t get any emails from them.
Guns are the only alternative to the tech oligarchy.
You think they can’t buy, manipulate, or just crush decentralized social media? If anything they can do it easily, divide and conquer. FOSS ain’t gonna free you, esp. when the largest contributors to FOSS projects are big corps.
so we just all buy guns and fend for ourselves? we need communities in order to fight fascism, we need to be able to organize and share valuable information with people. is technology the answer to the problem? no its not, but it is part of the answer, and to ignore that is shortsighted.
As to an answers beyond simply getting-armed-and-fostering-healthy-gun-culture-and-education-among-us:
“Practicing mutual aid is the surest means for giving each other and to all the greatest safety, the best guarantee of existence and progress, bodily, intellectually and morally.”
That’s Kropotkin
And then Modern Libs even observe, more verbosely:
“The structures of our state economies are going to matter in terms of protecting democracies, and by that I mean if you look at economies that were based in the kind of small producer economies like New England was vs states like the South and the American West that were always built on the idea of very high capital using extractive methods to get resources out of the land either cotton or mining or oil or water or agri business, those economies always depend on a few people with a lot of money, and then a whole bunch of people who are poor and doing the work for those Rich guys – and that I’m not sure is compatible in terms of governance without addressing the reality that you know if people have more of a foothold in their own communities, they are then more likely to support the kinds of legislation that Community [Education, Healthcare, …] and that may be the future of democracy, if not a national democracy”
Heather Cox Richardson, professor of American history On The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart on Trump’s Win and What’s Next https://youtu.be/D7cKOaBdFWo?t=2139 (time-stamped)
If a Conservative wants me dead, they’re going to have to work and sweat for it. I’m not doing the heavy lifting for them (A Quote I agree with)
Our resulting interactions may seem chaotic and illegible to authority, but it is through that seeming chaos that vastly complex, horizontal, and resilient practices of learning, cooperation, and reciprocity have historically arisen.
By Andrewism https://youtu.be/qkN_nQPpeSU
MASKING REALLY HELPS; Covid, RSV, Flu is a greater threat to marginalized communities. Can’t do organizing without prioritizing precautions.
Show up for your neighbors. The rest will come.
Guns work better when you can coordinate Resistance movements news to be coordinated. Running out with a gun like a mad man isn’t going to work.
Republican solutions to republican problems eh?
The only solution guns provide are dead people. You have fallen for the pathetic lie of the right.
Oh. Guns are even better for that.
On the right? They are a lightning rod for criticism and complaints. “All the jobs in our state were taken away and my daughter is dying of an easily curable disease. BUT THOSE FUCKING LIBERALS ARE TRYING TO TAKE AWAY MY SECOND AMENDMENT RIGHTS!!!”
On the left? they are a way to “meet in the middle” on a lot of legislature while also being a great way to villify and target groups. For example, anyone with even a passing understanding of history knows that the Civl Rights Movement was not MLK Jr giving one speech and fist bumping Rosa Parks on the bus. The threat of violence was definitely a factor (beyond that it gets murkier). And people LOVE to argue that Blacks picking up guns is how that was “won”.
You know what else came of that? “That kid is a gangbanger and has a gun. SHOOT HIM. Oh shit, uhm. Fuck it, we’ll just say the toy train looked like a gun”.
And we’ll see that continue. LGBTQ folk will decide they need a gun and you can bet the cops and the chuds will be glad to open fire at protestors because “THEY HAVE A GUN!!!”
And the absolute best part? “Both sides” are fucking delusional if they think their guns are going to accomplish anything against an oppressive government. Cops won’t go near a pistol if a kid’s life is on the line. But they’ll open fire like mel gibson if they think a business is in trouble. Let alone the military with tanks and drones and there will be a lot more “combat footage” to watch online.
And we’ll see that continue. LGBTQ folk will decide they need a gun and you can bet the cops and the chuds will be glad to open fire at protestors because “THEY HAVE A GUN!!!”
Exactly, the presence of a weapon just gives them a reason to pull the “THEY’RE COMIN RIGHT FOR US” bullshit from South Park Season Fucking One.
If there was ANY chance that The 2nd Amendment could pose ANY threat to a tyrannical government, it would have been destroyed decades ago.
Somebody almost killed Trump in July. A couple of inches was the difference between a Republican party in chaos just before the election and a party united behind their fascist hamberdler. The way this is going the 2A is going to be your only real defense against modern Nazism so you’d be better off hitting the range and getting proficient with a firearm than you are posting pics with #resist on Instagram.
In many ways, trump’s campaign was bolstered by the image of him standing “defiant” with a fist raised in the air and someone else’s blood all over him.
If trump HAD gotten got? Evil deep state assassination attempt by biden and here is your new candidate that the entire party would rally behind. And democrats would be even more reluctant to say or do anything out of “decorum”.
Because here is the thing: trump isn’t even the problem. He is an evil bastard but he is a symptom of the problem. Project 2025 is what those rapid fire EOs come from. And Project 2025 very much benefits from right wing fascists controlling basically all of social media.
And I will just, once again, ask: What do you think your guns are going to do against a military that is cracking down on you and your buddies as “terrorists”? Because if there was ANY chance of a civilian force posing ANY threat to a government, we would have banned guns back in the late 1700s.
You’re making a lot of unfounded assumptions about what would have happened if Trump were assassinated. No one else has been able to harness MAGA energy the way he has. It’s entirely possible the movement would splinter without its figurehead. We won’t know that until he’s gone. Although it seems less likely now that he presumably has 4 years to enact policy changes and put people in place to keep his agenda moving after his term is up.
There’s plenty of debate to be had on the topic of the effectiveness of guns in civil resistance. All of which can be found in more detail elsewhere than we’re going to be able to cover here. However, suffice it to say that your understanding of resistance in general and guerilla tactics specifically is severely lacking if you’re assuming that this situation would play out as an open confrontation between the US military and some sort of militia. Despite the fact that such a conflict would provide more room for maneuvering than you are giving it credit, that would not be the preferred method of engagement. Generals and other senior officers have to buy groceries and go to the DMV just like everyone else. You pick your targets when and where you can get them. More than anything else, it’s important to acknowledge that in the situation where it becomes necessary to think about these kinds of things in more detail, my guns afford me many more options than your knives (or whatever else you prefer to rely on) would. Unless, of course, you plan on giving up without a fight, in which case we clearly have such different outlooks that additional discussion will not help us find common ground.
Yeah…
Your mass assassinations plan doesn’t work when there is a camera on every corner and traffic light. L Dog was always going to get caught if he hadn’t fled the country within hours of blapping that exec. You are also apparently assuming everyone is Jason Bourne in your fantasy and are a highly trained guerilla fighting force that can blend in and out of everything.
You pick your targets when and where you can get them.
Yeah. The difference between being the chosen one in a young adult novel and actually accomplishing anything of value is what taking out your “target” accomplishes.
And… a great example of that is Palestine. For the sake of simplicity, let’s call what Hamas did “attacking a target”. What was the outcome of that? Israel had “justification” to engage in mass ethnic cleansing for over a year.
Unless, of course, you plan on giving up without a fight, in which case we clearly have such different outlooks that additional discussion will not help us find common ground.
I believe in fighting for change in ways that can actually protect others and accomplish things. Rather than fantasizing about living in a Call of Duty commercial and just painting an even bigger target on the backs of the groups I claim to be helping.
If you or the other “Buy a gun, it is the only thing you can do. I hear Fred’s on 4th street have great deals on assault rifles!” folk had ACTUALLY engaged in any activism whether peaceful or otherwise you would have long since had it explained to you: YOU DO NOT BRING A FUCKING GUN TO A PROTEST. Because the moment the other side sees it? They open fire. Because cops will give a bottle of water to the white kid with an assault rifle looking for some n*****s to kill. They’ll fucking murder anyone who looks even slightly brown if they have a bulge in their jacket pocket.
And… a great example of that is Palestine. For the sake of simplicity, let’s call what Hamas did “attacking a target”. What was the outcome of that? Israel had “justification” to engage in mass ethnic cleansing for over a year.
You put justification in quotes here, and I think you clearly understand why. Netenyanhu propped up hamas as the de facto government specifically in order to ensure a more militant party would give israel the necessary “justification” to attack the people there. So, even their governance, and that attack itself, is traceable to israel’s state violence. A minor note, but an important one, I think. And I think one which requires more thought than just like, pointing to that and then saying “See, I told you, violence doesn’t work, and is bad, and israel wants it!”, because israel’s obviously not an overly rational state which is actually functional, either for it’s people or for it’s goals.
More broadly though, it’s not necessary at all for people to have guns, in order for cops to kill them. Cops can invent any number of reasons to kill someone in their day to day. The gun is something you just see in the news media a lot because it’s incredibly common in america, and especially common in the hoods where cops go out and kill people in larger numbers. Again, we can see that as an extension of a context, created by the state, which has naturally created violence. Partially through the valuable, and illegal, property, mostly in the form of drugs, which must be protected through extralegal means, i.e. cartels and gangs, but also just naturally as a result of police violence in those places as an extension of that, which is an intentional decision to create by the ruling class. It’s a way to create CIA black budgets, it’s a way to incarcerate and vilify your political opponents at higher rates, etc. You can’t be intolerant to the idea of guns as a blanket case, in that context, because it’s a totally different kind of context, and is one which is created by the state.
I would maybe also make the point that a protest is incentive enough against killing people, because it would be widely known and televised as a massacre in the media. You know, just gunning people down in the street, en masse. That line is sort of, becoming less clear over time, as the government seems to be more and more willing to condone that, if not outright do that, but I don’t really think that if, say, everyone in the BLM riots was armed, the cops would just start randomly firing into the crowd. They’d be hopelessly outnumbered, for one, so that’s a pretty clear reason for the police not to just start sputtering off rounds like a bunch of idiots, but you’d also probably see a protracted national guard response over the course of the next several weeks, which nobody really wants to deal with, both in terms of the media response and just the basic type of shit that would happen.
You also have several extrapolations you can make from just that happening in the first place, even though it never would. Like, the kind of city which could get up to that, in america, would maybe reveal something incredibly uncomfortable to the ruling institutions about that particular city and its political disposition and potentially that could be extrapolated to the entire country. Most places don’t get to that point because they reach civil war before that, which is kind of more along the lines of what the preceding commenter is talking about. More along the lines of, say, IRA tactics.
Which is all to say, that this is something which is shaped entirely by the government’s intentional responses and the contexts that they create. When they decide to escalate, that should be seen, naturally, as being on them, and not on your average person. I think what the previous commenter is trying to say, with a good faith reading, is that we are probably due, in the next 4 years and perhaps beyond, for an escalation. I don’t think that’s really a morally great thing, or a good context, but I do think they’re potentially right based on how things shake out, and I think that people should probably come to terms with that even as we try to avoid it.
Edit: Also I forgot to note this, but this isn’t really a disagreement in core ideals, but just of tactics. Dual power isn’t so much a deliberate choice of tactic so much as it should just be a certainty, being that both sides of this debate are mutually beneficial to one another. If you have, or can place, a more reasonable politician in office, either through violence (highly unusual, but does happen occasionally if the dice reroll lands well enough), or through the political system itself, then that reasonable politician is just that, more reasonable. i.e. more likely to accomplish goals which are desirable to any violent guerillas. Likewise, the pressure that violent guerillas exert can be seen as a kind of abstract economic cost constantly being leveraged against unreasonable political powers, in favor of reasonable elements of that political system.
The main point against this, is that the united states is currently so unreasonable, politically, that it’s functionally impossible to bargain with in really any way. Any violence, under such a political system, one which refuses any attempt at change, is seen as kind of ultimately meaningless. But I think that’s maybe also part of a broader point about how people just generally feel, understandably, incredibly pessimistic about the future, and are sort of retreating back into a kind of survival mode. Especially, I think, because they’ve been made to feel totally responsible for the weight of the world, when ultimately the decision of the political power to retaliate and do mass violence is, as previously stated, both inevitable, and entirely their own decision, that they must be held responsible for, rather than the people.
That’s absurd. Large sharp dropped blades, poison, starvation, spears, looped ropes, fire… There are many alternatives available.
We could make a wiki filled with all the options.
But let’s prioritize the non-violent ones first.
We did prioritize non-violent ones, and this is where it got us. The ONLY option is violence.
I’m just talking about how we design the wiki. Gotta be tasteful and present ourselves in the best light.
That’s fair, it’s important in some ways to conceal the hand a bit. We have to make to make the rich as uncomfortable as we are though.
Oh, absolutely. With quicklinks to any old category the user may want to get to fast.
2a is there in case 1a don’t work
From the article:
literally
Look; if you’re a journalist, pretend you know other words. I’m so fucking done.
Elon Musk, who had already turned X into a cesspool of hate and an overt tool to get President Trump elected, is now formally part of the Trump administration, meaning the platform is literally owned by a member of the Trump White House.
The word is literally being used correctly.
Weird flex here…
404 at least does some investigative journalism beyond fake news headlines where person a “slams” person b
Word.
Unfortunately, Lemmy demonstrates pretty clearly that decentralized systems are just as vulnerable to propaganda and brain rot.
Except the propaganda was explicitly grown on reddit.
Humans are vulnerable to propaganda. Lemmy’s architecture is against censorship. This helps to push back against propaganda, but only so much. But at least not being censored is a big win IMO.
You can certainly be censored on Lemmy, depending on your instance. But you can also easily go to another instance and still talk to everybody you used to talk to on the old instance.
Same thing with propaganda. Your instance can remove it from their hosted communities, or allow it. And you can go to an instance that feels good.
Does this lead to echo chambers? Probably.
Yes you can go elsewhere, but you lose your identity, history, relationship and reputation.
None of that is imperative to me on a place like this.
You have almost 900 post, 9000 comments and you moderate 16 communities. You are a member of the delegate class whose intrinsic power comes from trapping users into their instances and communities by holding their account, history and relationships hostage.
You can prove me wrong and prove there is no friction to escaping your control by leaving the server sh.itjust.works
Consider yourself called out.
So long as it is humans posting this will be a problem. The benefit of a federated system is that you can’t compromise the person at the top and then everything collapses.
I just jumped on here today (from seeing this article on Reddit) but my understanding is that the advantage is that the CEO can’t decide he wants to suck authoritarian cock and destroy our ability to discuss and/or organize.
(Admittedly I joined the biggest server I could find so I kind of violated that idea as well).
Welcome! !newcommunities@lemmy.world can help to find communities
Welcome! Some people have gripes with dot world for being the biggest, etc. but generally you’ll be fine.
You can always search for communities here as well. .
There’s many apps and frontends and too. Some are preincluded into lemmy.world. If you like old reddit try old lemmy for example.
That’s the nature of the beast. You can’t have human users on a network without at least some slop.
But the decentralized network ensures that a “techno-baron” has no more say than you or I, which is exactly what the internet is supposed to do.
That’s decidedly better than a centralized system, especially now.
I think we have to build systems that use real-life interpersonal trust networks so that centralized entities cannot just outspend and bot their way to prominence.
Really? Just as? There are rogue groups and certainly rogue mods and individuals with axes to grind, but I’ve never dealt that there was anything on a system wide basis or anything that was driven by profit here. There’s some really wild hive-mind attitudes here too but, I don’t see how it could possibly be as attractive as centralized platforms for manipulation, profit, or thought control. Feel free to shine some light on my naivety if there’s something I’m missing here.
At least we can easily pack up and move camp in familiar territory (same apps/frontends, etc.)
I just wish we had a bit more political balance here… I’m not talking about fascists, but more people that don’t blame everything on capitalism would be kind of nice…
For real. I once had the misfortune to admit to having some Centrist ideas, and the down votes were immediate and generous. No discussion, just personal attacks.
And we wonder how things got to where they are.
Too late, capitalism is the problenz
Yes, it is. But it’s not the only problem… In fact, there are a thousand other problems I wish we could all discuss with at least half the fervor as this topic.
But no. This is the topic.
I’m sorry bud, but that’s how the rumour mill worked since humans could talk. The message your trying to bring is good, don’t get me wrong. You are trying to currently change human nature somewhat.
I wonder what else is to blame ?
Human nature? Greed? Racism? Biggotry?
There’s an upsetting number of topics… And now I’m depressed. Because life is depressing when you think about it too much, isn’t it?
So, capitalism then.
It sure is. It’s important to touch grass on a daily basis to stay sane. I personally go outside take a stroll and caress some leaves.
Regarding your initial point : I see “capitalism” as the family of systems that enable that kind of IT monopoly. Sure, human traits such as greed and bigotry are probably the source of evil but it seems to me they have to be tapped, and enabled. The fact that the conversation often ultimately turns back to capitalism is legitimate imho.
There are a few misconceptions in your comment:
While I do agree that there are other problems like racism and bigotry which existed before capitalism (based on an answer you gave in another comment) and while I do agree these also need to be addressed, I do disagree that capitalism isn’t a major source of problems of modernity.
Why?
Because the cornerstone of capitalism is to use money to generate more money in a feedback loop towards (nonexistent) “infinite money” (which is different from feudalism, roman empire or ancient Egypt which all had some sort of market without being capitalist economies).
SInce it is impossible to make infinity money, an inherent part of capitalism are the crises cycles of boom and bust.
It also makes the creation of services as an afterthought (because making money is more important) and it is also tied to the enshitfication we’re seeing today.
I think you’re calling as “capitalism” a thing that is actually “technological innovation (under capitalism)”
We’re all aware of free/open source softwares
We’re all aware that it is possible to develop technological innovation outside of capitalist framework (and again: Capitalism = Using money to make more (infinite) money)
almost all of scientific researches advances are because of passion of the researches instead of the greed of capitalism.
Yes… Everyone “needs” money to survive. But I hope you do agree that nobody in the world needs billions of dollars to simply survive.
for God’s sake, a lot of people living in “third world” dream of earning 300 dollars a month to survive and consider that making 1000 dollars a month is a small luxury (I’m from brasil and 1000 dollars is around R$ 4000 or R$ 5000 while most people lives with R$3000 or less)
What I’m saying is that, past the required money for surviving and for having a few “luxuries”, there is no need for anyone having millions or billions of dollars every month and that it would be possible to keep scientific and technological grow under such conditions because curiosity and desire for changes are part of human nature.
if it was entirely impossible for humans to develop things without being paid before, then nothing around open/free software would exist.
Perhaps it is balanced you just want it to be more in line with your views?
I have never met anybody who said “yes, this community is perfectly balanced.” Everyone always thinks it needs to get more in line with their beliefs and values
If nearly everything currently wrong with the country weren’t due to capitalism run amok I could sympathize. But unfortunately it’s not the 1960s anymore.
(segregation was a legacy of capital interests pushing race theory to justify slavery)
Okay, buddy. It’s all capitalism. Good luck with your pamphlets! I actually like the idea of making Western nations question capitalism… This said, no. It’s not “nearly everything” wrong with the world.
Wake up, my friend. It’s 2025. Just because people in power are getting worse, doesn’t mean we can’t strive to be better.
Just because people in power are getting worse, doesn’t mean we can’t strive to be better.
Yep, let’s rake our forests and rinse our recycling to handle climate change!
If your house burns to the ground, no worries, you can just collect floatsom from the beach and build a new one!
Dude, some things cannot be solved via positive vibes and being a good neighbor, and if you want my honest opinion on it, I think pushing everyday people to be accountable for everything while the broligarchs are accountable for nothing is a big part of the problem.
In other words, you should strive to be better than an apologist for the system.
Most civilized countries know that there is more than one way to implement capitalism, and the current US way is a catastrophic shit show.
Wake up, my friend. It’s 2025. Just because people in power are getting worse, doesn’t mean we can’t strive to be better.
Except the entire capitalist system works against us striving to be better. It’s not like the American health care system sucks because the people in power suck. It sucks because to fix it you’d have to take capitalism out of the health care system because capitalism drives the profit motive within the health care system which makes it suck.
Same with transitioning from oil to renewables. Fucking Exxon knew half a century ago that climate change is a thing and will lead to catastrophic results. They were in prime position to shift from oil to renewables and reinvent the global energy system, but it was more profitable to run disinformation campaigns and actively work against the transition so they did that instead. Even now some of the oil CEO-s are like “we’re already so fucked there’s no reason to go for renewables so let us keep making that money”.
Same is now going on with electric vehicles. It’s much more profitable to sell ICE cars and fight the change instead of actually changing. I don’t remember if it was Mercedes or WV or some other manufacturer, anyway one of the big german car CEOs pretty much went “we can’t change to electric vehicles in time for the regulations. But you shouldn’t punish us with fines because we’re too big to fail.”
The list goes on. The reason people here are so anti-capitalist is because most of us see that even if we want to strive to be better we can’t because capitalism keeps dragging us down. It’s like that scene in “Don’t look up” where the world comes together to save itself and just as the crisis is about to be averted the capitalist tech bro fucks it all up because who cares if we’re risking our entire planet, there’s money to be made. Capitalism will try its best to undermine any effort that prevents maximizing profits.
Do you really think we’ll get to the 15 hour work week in 2030, like Keynes predicted? Definitely not under the capitalist system. We have empirical evidence that 32 hour work week improves productivity and we can’t even get that because the capital owners refuse to accept it. Literally something that could easily improve all our lives and we can’t get it done because of capitalism.
Nobody is against striving to be better but wanting to get rid of capitalism is striving to be better because capitalism is like a steel ball attached to your ankle. It’s just weighing down all your efforts to be better.
Not trying to get into a whole ugly thing, just curious what your pro-capitalism stance is. Because I would definitely fall into this big Lemmy category of seeing 90-905% of modern problems being rooted in capitalism. So I would (civilly!) disagree, no doubt. Doesn’t mean we can’t have a reasonable discussion!
I would also be interested in a defence of capitalism that doesn’t come down to “but the USSR” or similar.
Even Karl Marx noted capitalism’s dynamism and ability to cause change. In my own case, I went from poverty to modest wealth in a capitalist system, and I know many others who had similar experiences. I’m also aware that it empowers sociopaths, causes corruption, of its tendency to degenerate to oligopoly, and its failure to adequately address externalities.
And there are many, many variants of capitalism. The one now prevalent in the US is one of the more lethal strains. Improperly regulated capitalism such as that is a nightmare. Properly regulated, many of its negative features can be mitigated. I could stand living in a social democracy until a better alternative is piloted and proven.
Yeah I agree with this as well. It’s not a binary view: either for or against capitalism. You can disapprove of everything happening in the US right now and still be for some form of capitalism.
Most people I know think that the US has gone way too far with their strand of capitalism, and yet they almost range from the complete left-to-right in terms of Dutch politics. Only the very right wing people here think that the US is doing something good right now. The rest, from center-right (or even proper neoliberal) all the way to the commies see a system that is failing in some way.
Yet on Lemmy this nuance seems completely lost sometimes. You’re either a part of the capitalists/liberals and therefore approve of the oligarchy and dystopian capitalism in the US, or you join the radical “destroy capitalism” views. It’s gotten better after the insane people from Hexbear left tho
Yeah, because I consider myself a pretty reasonable person. People have a big problem these days of never engaging with nuance, no matter how much you try to bring any conversation back to it. Things are definitely not as binary as people seem to only be able to conceive of them. The entire world and even the most seemingly clear cut issues have loads of grey area that people just can’t discuss because as soon as you say, “yes, I agree we need to ____! But we need to discuss the trickier parts” it turns into a witch hunt for anyone pointing out anything that might be considered a tricky part because it goes against the “I’m 100% on this side and it’s the only right opinion.”
It’s frustrating.
I don’t have much time and energy for long discussions, but I just wanna share my feelings.
I feel like people here see capitalism as a very black and white thing. Either it’s there and corrupting everything or it’s gone and everything is awesome. Personally I don’t think that’s the case. In my opinion there are some cases where the market can solve things more efficiently than a government institution, granted that this market is regulated and controlled by the government. I’m against unbounded capitalism like we see way too often nowadays.
But here in western Europe, while certainly not perfect, the situation is way better than in the US. The government controls companies, gives them a slap on the wrist if they get too greedy. And while it still poisons a lot that it touches, the competitive aspect of it also makes sure that many inefficiencies are cut. In my opinion even we are not regulating it enough, and I do consider myself left-wing. But completely abolishing capitalism doesn’t make sense to me either.
I think some things are better left to the government, stuff like healthcare, public transport, utilities like water or maybe even energy. Other things are better left private (but regulated): restaurants, barbers, supermarkets, most product development like phones, cameras, cars, computers, etc. There’s a huge grey area there that I don’t really have an opinion on.
But I don’t see how a society without capitalism can provide stuff like decent smartphones, game consoles, restaurants, festivals, etc. These more “luxury” goods rely on competition to innovate and provide decent experiences, and here capitalism works better in my view.
Human greed is not because of capitalism. Humans have been greedy from the very beginning.
The issue is greed, it’s the core problem in all these human systems, even democracy main issue is how greedy the politicians get.
You don’t solve greed by getting rid of capitalism, there seems not to be a solution for greed.
I mean, I mostly agree with this. You can boil any problem down to existence. And existence down to molecular processes.
But two things: discussing modern problems, it’s all built on systems. And the system we deal with is capitalism.
Human fallibility is the problem, ultimately. But there is no overcoming human fallibility. So building systems that place peoples well being above all else is an actionable solution. Whereas solving human fallibility isn’t.
And secondly, hierarchy in all its forms. Which I would argue is the problem boiled down past the system to look at its problematic parts. Does a system rely on or serve needs in a hierarchical manner? Then that’s the problem.
That’s as far as I think is logical to go. Digging down further to human nature is a problem for a utopian society to deal with, and that we are nowhere near to achieving. So, my point is we need to deal with the first layer of problems. And that would be capitalism. Abolishing hierarchy in all its forms comes second.
The first because the system rewards the worst parts of our nature. The second because it’s almost uniformly led to corruption. Those are the root problems, from my point of view. Human fallibility is, I’m afraid, baked into the cookie. But removing systems that reward those errors instead of eradicating them should be job one.
LOL. I’m not pro-capitalism, but thank you for proving my point.
I actually think, as one example, the US’s healthcare system should 100% be socialized.
Proving your point…about what? I was just curious to hear someone’s thoughts who went against the idea that most modern problems can be traced back to the roots of capitalism. But fuck me, right?
Public provision of services is not socialism, it’s just common sense. The first mass state pension system was rolled out by that crusty reactionary Bismarck. Every rightwing country still has fire departments and (mostly) public road systems too. Not doing it that way is just stupidity, not ideology.
What is socialism is when people doing the work have control of the means of production. Control, not a token share. One example is cooperatives. By this definition (which goes back to Karl Marx), neither the USSR nor Communist China were socialist, they were totalitarian state capitalist entitites. China still is, though less incompetent than under Mao. And this isn’t some revisionist point of view. Rosa Luxemburg and other contemporaries saw it happening at the onset.
That’s gonna be kind of an issue in a network where civil discourse and disagreement falls between calling people a Nazi/fascist at best and wishing them double death by murder rape at worst
Just picturing that, as you type this, you have a swastika tattoo on your forehead.
“Why is everyone so judgemental? I’m not one thing! A person contains magnitudes!!!”
It’s a Windows logo!11! /s
Uhh… What?
If you’re a Trump supporter, I respect that you may be confused… But Elon Seig Heiled yesterday, so…
Sorry this is a platform for people of you’re an ostrich then please go back to sticking your head in the sand
I’m not Dee Renolds, but you may think of me as such, if it makes the world feel safer for you.
Even ostriches aren’t actually stupid enough to do that.
[Entire world on fire] “I just wish everyone wasn’t so fixated on discussing the fire, how it started and who’s responsible…”
You have to realize how mesmerizingly obtuse your comment is?
Lol. Yes, I’m obtuse. You aren’t, but I am. Great argument.
