- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
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The revolution will not be televised
This isn’t a new problem. We’ve seen centralized cellular service get shut down during protests and populist political actions before, such as during the Arab Spring.
A similar issue is centralized media, owned or captured by plutocratic interests. It was a problem during the Pulitzer/Hearst era through the cold war when General Electric used its advertising footprint on the three major television networks to leverage against the broadcast of news stories it didn’t like.
Decentralization would be great if we could, say, get every thousandth household to host a Fediverse instance.
It does raise a question of whether it would be able to handle all the moderation problems that emerge at scale, especially when hostile actors backed by state or business interests can bankroll contributors with antagonistic input. This is going to get worse with agentic LLMs.
It also raises the question if the Fediverse will segregate itself into ideology silos. We already don’t like tankies and tend to defederate from instances that harbor them. Can we do that if we’re trying to create a unified social media network for the global public? We might have to error to the side of hosting content we don’t like (and focus moderation, instead, on content that causes harm).
If we can make it work, it will serve as a great example of anarchist/ libertarian social models working. If we can make it work.
Most big tech companies are the new oil and railroad robber barons and need to be dealt with yesterday. This is fucking out of control and they partially rule the country not the people. Break up big tech! Bring back the trust busters!
The new plutocratic class are exponentially richer than the oil and railroad robber barons, and are exponentially worse, though some like JP Morgan were monsters. (I really wonder how a bank unironically names itself after him.)
The aristocrats of the 21st century don’t even hide their world-domination / autocratic rule / global genocide intentions and fantasies.
Also their ill-gotten gains are not merely from ruthless anticompetitive business methods, but from financialization, which is rent-seeking jacked on crack cocaine. They didn’t actually produce anything but sinkholes in the global economy.
And they have way better technology to control and contain the masses when they dissent.
This may be our last chance to end the owner class. With water running out, it may be our last chance anyway.
The revolution will not be televised.
The revolution will not be hosted on AWS.
It’s always funny to see this comment and then read the replies that don’t get the reference
deleted by creator
But the apocalypse will be! On intergalactic TV!
Yeah, this is actually why the Fediverse will shine, there is no central node, and in the time it takes for the government to shut down a node, many more can be set up.
I think you’re far too optimistic. There very much are central nodes: DNS registrars, ISPs and data-centers. The prerequisites for participating have increased. Domestic Australian providers now require copies of government-issued IDs (copies which then make their way into America’s private-intelligence spinoffs like Palantir, because it’s these spinoffs that are selling verification services). The West is expanding its capability to surveil domestic and foreign populations. To participate on the open-internet is to identify yourself, provide documentation and have government- or private-databases verify your identity and to pay perpetual gratuity rents.
A thousand virtual-servers hosted on Microsoft’s or Amazon’s computers. That’s the reality. It already feels as if Cloudfare is MITMing everyone. The internet has become more centralized than it was and that’s a trend that will continue.
It seems to me absurd that the majority of a developed-nation’s citizens carry around pocket-computers that are connected to the internet 24/7/365 yet none of them are allowed to host a blog on their computers (pocket or otherwise). (The reality is your mobile-computer is forbidden by economic-rent-seekers from talking to another mobile-computer even though they may both be in the same room; they force your data to transit over their infrastructure and gate-keep it so that the other mobile-computer is forced also into paying rent so that it can retrieve your data from the economic-rent-seeking entity [that may be located in another country; so that message you sent to a friend may travel half-way across the world even though their computer is three meters apart from yours! What a farce!].) Consumers are behind CGNATs and are barred from hosting by default. I was optimistic about IPv6–everyone could have a unique public-IPv6-address. The market for static IPv4s should have collapsed. It’s still here. It’s still demanding perpetual rents.
I’m an advocate of OpenNIC–a domain should not require a perpetual rent be paid to a registrar. The foundation’s of the internet are centralised. To seek and agitate for de-centralisation is correct, but it’s counter-productive to redeploy the same centralised software that got us to this point we want to move away from. That software was designed for a bygone era and it’s been taken over by corporate interests. Capitalism is doing what it does best: consolidating! You’re not going to de-consolidate by taking their software. We need a new internet. We need GNUnet.
GNUnet’s still juvenile, but I do encourage users to deploy and play with it. We can get to a better internet that reflects all of us. Computers have become locked dumb-terminals for ad-networks and tech-oligarch mouth-pieces. They constrict the user absolutely whilst using your hardware, electricity and data connection to surveil the mobile-computer’s environment and your interactions with it. If you dislike that future you need to participate.
I2P is a mature project and is ready to deploy now. There’s two implementations: one in Java and one in C++.
You need to pay perpetual rents to host on the old-web: you need to pay rent to a DNS-registrar and you need to pay rent for a publicly-routable IP address; you’re also coerced into paying rents for compute-time in a data-center (it’s often cheaper than paying for a publicly-routable IP address which are priced for businesses). These are economic-burdens that exist purely for rent extraction. You can host your own Lemmy instance over I2P (and/or GNUnet) on your own machines on the data-connection you already pay for right now. The additional cost is $0.00 (excluding the increased compute-burden on your machines). If you data-connection already grants you a public routable address you can use OpenNIC for a free or self-administered domain that is accessible over the old-web. The software exists. Users need to deploy it, use it and agitate for it.
I will be using solar-panels, batteries and arm CPUs running GNU/Linux to host content over I2P and GNUnet. The compute becomes free. The only cost that remains is the nominal amount required for a consumer-connection. Using software like I2P and GNUnet on your own hardware on your data-connection–that you’re using to read this–is the closest thing we have to “no-barrier” self-hosting or decentralising. The reality is that’s a significant information barrier and I am surprised that no-one has made a mobile-computer ‘app’ for self-hosting blogs/forums that runs a I2P-router in the background for non-technical users. I type that… but I know why it probably hasn’t been done (if it hasn’t): Google’s Android will kill any long-running background process… and Apple would not let you publish it.
edit: this was a duplicate
Google’s Android will kill any long-running background process… and Apple would not let you publish it.
tbh portable mobile phones are not the right place for running public services or an i2p router. an i2p router produces a constant traffic, and mobile data plans have a monthly traffic limit. you can’t afford having 4 TB traffic a month on mobile data. also its a waste to use wireless networks for it, because of the increased power consumption and because it is taking airtime from other devices, with wifi too but even more so on the cellular network.
I’m always available to be bashing google, but it makes sense to kill most long running things. smartphones only have a day long or more battery life because they kind of suspend themselves frequently. if you are running a blog on your phone, it will either get drained more quickly, or your blog won’t be accessible most of the time. but also it won’t kill all apps, you can make exceptions. likely depends on the brand, but on my phone I have several long running apps that are allowed to run freely. one of them the ntfy app, which is capable of receiving my notifications quickly, and I don’t have google services installed.
I think there are barriers to this.
- Getting people to know about the fediverse at all
- The UX of the sign-up is (or at least was if it’s changed in the last few months) confusing and bad – what is an instance? How do I pick one? What are the consequences? etc.
- If an instance gets taken down suddenly, depending upon how that looks, the user has to find another and sign up again, and then start over not necessarily under the same name (and a bad actor could purposefully start taking, for example, an successful organizer’s name on other instances to sow confusion or at least block them from being identified as quickly/easily).
If an instance gets taken down suddenly, depending upon how that looks, the user has to find another and sign up again, and then start over not necessarily under the same name (and a bad actor could purposefully start taking, for example, an successful organizer’s name on other instances to sow confusion or at least block them from being identified as quickly/easily).
that also applies to email. and centralized social media too.
If an instance gets taken down suddenly, depending upon how that looks, the user has to find another and sign up again, and then start over not necessarily under the same name (and a bad actor could purposefully start taking, for example, an successful organizer’s name on other instances to sow confusion or at least block them from being identified as quickly/easily).
that also applies to email. and centralized social media too.
We figured shit out in the 90s. People will figure it out now. People are figuring it out now. I come here more than anywhere else, and there is always new activity.
90s people are different from 2020s people entirely. Not a good way of looking at it.
Every older generation says that about every younger generations, this is nothing new.
I don’t know that the demographic that is primarily, if not only, reachable via meta/xitter is at all incentivized to do that, though. I know even less about “digital natives” whom I presume have different experience around that. Certainly, I hope they do, but that doesn’t change the fact that making it more visible and with a better UX would improve and accelerate adoption. I conversely find people opposing that because something about “normies” (a word I loathe, to be honest).
I conversely find people opposing that because something about “normies” (a word I loathe, to be honest).
Same, I don’t disagree with you there. I’m not trying to gatekeep anything, and I think that even a slightly more polished UX will make a vast improvement.
If governments start shutting down instances, phew… I suspect that will be a pretty bleak time to be alive. Or just bleaker, haha. 😑
Sneakernets, where people trade data on USB sticks and MicroSD cards (I remember back in the day reading about people smuggling data in and out of countries in fake coins with a MicroSD inside). Air-gapped LANs (not internet connected) that cover neighborhoods with people managing local web servers and services for the community. I have probably over 20 services running on a handful of physical servers, most of them old, most of them underpowered, but they could serve a small community on a local network easily.
I honestly think that’s where people will end up to escape the corporate internet.
I have thought about airgapped networks for a long time, there is nothing to stop peoplw from buying networking equipment and setting up a secondary network that is completely physically separated from the normal internet.
Used enterprise networking and server gear exists and is fairly cheap.
It doesn’t even need to be enterprise, honestly.
I run a rather significant local network with off the shelf consumer stuff and OpenWrt.
Hmm. What’s your scenario for the “corporate internet” killing off the Fediverse? Deliberate botnet attacks and/or overwhelming the instances with spam / junk bot accts?
I don’t think it’s necessarily escaping places like the Fediverse, but the internet as it exists… I don’t know if there’s a way to “heal” it or stop it from getting worse, honestly. So I very much feel like there’s opportunity for people to “disconnect” while also being somewhat connected. Local websites tailored to community needs as opposed to corporate ones.
I mean, if “Big Tech Won’t Broadcast Your Dissent” and the costs of maintaining alternative communities rise, due to the cost of renting servers, it may just make more sense to make a local intranet with your buddies who all have their own Jellyfin servers too, and that becomes a community resource so nobody in the complex needs a streaming service. I mean I have RomM, which allows me to play tons and tons of old video game ROMs in a web browser, so that could become a community resource, too.
There could be community forums and community weblogs, allowing people to update each other on new developments in the community, and updates to community servers, scheduled maintenance times etc. Sneakernets could share local community updates among different local LANs in the area, and share files via traditional file transfer from one disk to another so other communities can get new entertainment, etc.
Especially with Microsoft demanding everyone have a TPM 2.0 chip for Windows 11 there is currently a lot of shunted hardware that could easily be turned into local server stacks and then the only cost is replacement parts if things go down and the regular cost of electricity and maybe a handful of uninterruptible power supplies, and that’s only really if you’re on a system that power loss could cause problematic data corruption.
TL;DR: Seizing the means of communication may be just as important as seizing the means of production. In this case we don’t “seize it” we make our own parallel systems.
Oh I forgot to include this:
https://loriemerson.net/2024/08/31/a-brief-history-of-barbed-wire-fence-telephone-networks/
This is piece on the history of Barbed Wire Phone networks which were an early way to roll out local phone access in remote areas without rolling out much infrastructure. It essentially would be an “always on” community line. No ringer, you just pick up your local receiver, and see if anyone’s on any of the other receivers to talk. So if you had 3+ receivers connected to the barbed wire network, all of those would be able to be part of a big community phone call.
This was actually was initially got me thinking about these ideas and in particular how especially dissenting protest groups must stop trying to communicate using the tools of their oppressors. Secured messaging isn’t enough, we need to have messaging entirely removed from the wider, corporate and government controlled internet. Build parallel communications systems and begin to use those instead.
Oh, I also forgot to include LoRa texting for remote areas as well:
The point being that all these rely on building out our own networks instead of relying on all the privately owned fiber, cable, dsl, and ethernet that exists between us and our destination on the internet. We can’t avoid passing through someone else’s property on the wider internet, which makes it more at risk of interception and possible decryption. Removing it from the wider internet and closing the loop tighter resolves this.
Every “hop” to a new server online between you and your destination is a place where your data has been replicated to be able to pass through. Parallel networks avoids this entirely.
How do air-gapped LANs that span neighborhoods work?
A lot of managed switches, a lot of ethernet cable, maybe some point-to-point WiFi connections for longer distances, and local DNS and DHCP servers that have failovers for redundancy. You technically don’t need a router because routers are for connecting different networks, and if it’s not connected to the internet, as long as you have local DHCP and DNS, you’re kind of golden for local services. You can even have internal TLS for local security. I do that with Caddy, it’s dead simple, and the certificates are locally generated for a 10 year period. I’m connected to the internet but I don’t expose any of these services to the internet, just my local network.
With a little more work, you could set up a VoIP server too so people could connect their phones that don’t have cellular service and use a VoIP app to be able to call anyone in the neighborhood by their VoIP number.
We are headed there, sadly.
I don’t know… as long as you have corporate social media, I’m thinking most people will remain there out of convenience, precedent, and buy-in. Which would leave places like the Fediverse small fry that probably wouldn’t be going after statistically. Also, the decentralised aspect means that you’d have to get much closer to a 1984 situation for this to be a serious concern, with instances currently spread out all over the world.
But yeah, I agree that “1984” is certainly on the near-horizon of strong possibileries.
the crimes of ice community alone makes the fediverse worth it for me.
I wish you were right.
The central node is world and ml.
Extremis or radicalised behaviour is increasingly normalised, sooner or later someone will cause harm and visibility and this utopia will end.
We are shrinking for months on end now too.
Cut off one head and two more shall rise to take its place
It’s our only way out.
Fediverse needs to work on onboarding if they want the job.
There should be “default” instances with no local posting. People can browse all and experience instances first before making their decision.
Plus the ability to transfer your account to a new instance without making a new one.
Or instances flag themselves as accepting new signups and then new users are round robined in.
Imagine being a fly between these people. Musk looks high as shit and wants a gummie from grumpeh, and grumpeh doesn’t know what’s going on but will try to end anybody that tells him children are off limits.
Edit: they’re all musk to me.
That sounds ungood
Your dissent will be live!
(Presuming the headline is a reference)
People are complaining about “ew bad onboarding” while it’s the best barrier holding up the flood of very, very irritating people.
People figured harder things before, we do not have to make everything easiest thing in the world - it makes fediverse a quality place actually. A lot of people who join, really want to be there and it’s great.
The problem is we ideally want the fediverse to grow to be the new normal in social media and not just a little club for cool kids.
I dunno, Mother Jones.
Good joke, but no. Your Google News may very well be wildly different than other people’s Google News.
