2184
Decentralized Social Media Is the Only Alternative to the Tech Oligarchy
(www.404media.co)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2025
2184 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
60811 readers
3180 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
I have a feeling this place and other decentralized social medias will be banned in the near future. Look at what's happening to TIktok. You either bend the knee or you get axed. It's why the other social media giants bent the knee. They understand the writing on the wall. There's more going on behind the scenes that they don't share with us. I think we're sort of watching a quiet coup.
Isn’t decentralization a thing that makes that much harder? There isn’t the same “national security” concern. I’m not saying it won’t happen just that the mechanism is much more difficult to make work.
You're mixing multiple subjects here, one being the logistics of blocking a federated system like Lemmy, the other being whether the wrong person finds the content of such a system objectionable and labels it a "national security issue."
I'm being a tad pedantic here, but my reason for pointing this out is that I think #2 is not far fetched at all, but I'm unsure of how feasible #1 might be and would love if somebody who knows more than I do would chime in.
EDIT: Looks like some have already discussed #2 in the other comment thread started by Teknikal.
There is a big difference. If a platform belongs to a single entity, you can pressure that entity especially if its profit driven. If there are thousands interconnected platforms that only share an open protocol the most you can do is shutdown a single instance. That's why an open protocol creating decentralized instances is so much different than a centralized platform. It's like trying to ban email or censor speak: not that has never been tried, but that is a whole different cup of tea.
Not saying you are wrong if anything though I think Reddit is probably the next obvious victim after TikTok they'll simply point to the Chinese Tencent who own shares and the next thing you know Musk will be part owner.
Fediverse I think will probably be the last hit simply because it's small and because of the design can't be hit easily, wouldn't surprise me if they just targeted the biggest servers though.
Realistically if it is hit it'll be through some sweeping "social media safety" bill that makes the cost of administrating a social media site as a hobby prohibitively expensive and/or time consuming, maybe even as on the nose as requiring the software to receive a specific certification before it's allowed to open registration.
We've already seen the UK's online safety bill cause many admins of small forums and communities to shutter their communities as a result, and who knows how Australia's recent social media bill will affect Australian Fediverse servers & users
A decent amount of the larger servers are hosted outside the US, which might complicates matters. However, many also use Cloudflare (US based) as a proxy, which might make targeting the Fediverse easier.
Isn't it possible to just move the site under a different domain name, or have mirrored secondary servers in an entirely different location in case the primary one gets taken down?
Changing domains is essentially like starting a whole new instance. It can be done but communities and accounts start from scratch.
I'm not sure if duplicate servers are supported with AP, I suspect it will cause the posts to be shared twice.
I have been thinking about whether instances also being available on TOR could help, mostly due to Saudi Arabia banning lemmy.blahaj.zone. Commercial VPN's are apparently something problematic governments detect, so I doubt that accessing the TOR network is safe.
Yeah I think along the same lines can only hope if servers are compromised like this they get defederated immediately to make a point, ultimately though I think the design of the fediverse pretty much keeps it safe but some servers may unfortunately face consequences
I'm not really expecting any attempts to compromise the servers themselves, I think it's more likely to see more website blocks like Saudi Arabia did with lemmy.blahaj.zone did some time ago.
Is there some way of safely circumnavigating these types of blocks in countries under oppressive regimes? I know about VPNs and TOR, but are those methods actually safe?
I'm not sure. I think your best bet would be to use a commercial VPN to blend in with the crowd that want to watch Netflix and then connect to TOR, although that does give authorities an excuse to arrest you in many places, but it's not like they would really need it anyway.
I hope not. I just arrived!
Welcome! Any questions so far?
Dont worry, lemmings worry about some shutdown every other week. Been here since the API closures, and its quite nice (if you block the news communities)
Yeah I finally decided to actually commit to getting off reddit would be unfortunate.
Welcome!
then we will all get on WordPress or something and go back to rss feeds. they can't ban everything, the Internet is too big. people will find a way
they don't really have to ban everything. for example, the persistent chinese internet-goer has the ability to view things he's not supposed to see even though China bans large swathes of the internet.
but by making it as difficult as possible for most people and creating strict punishments for breaking the rules, you can effectively ban most things you want for majority of people
if posting on lemmy makes you an enemy of the state and the state is becoming increasingly harsh with its punishments... would you still be going on and posting regularly? i would certainly think twice.
Where else would we go? Perhaps it's my non-American privilege but I think in a time like that I couldn't be silent.